Virginia Woolf Miscellany #104: Woolf and Failure

Mary Wilson

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

For this special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, you are invited to think about, analyze, expose, and otherwise wallow in failure.  While we can readily credit our later successes to lessons learned from earlier failures, we often experience failure in less linear and more cyclical ways.  Failure surfaces at different points in our lives and work, and fears of failing and the risks involved in achieving anything other than success recur in sometimes unexpected situations.  Failure is ordinary, not extraordinary—and when we recognize failure’s ordinariness, its significance in Woolf’s work may take on new meaning.

Failure circulates throughout Woolf’s work, and carries with it many meanings.  Fears of failing or of being a failure characterize many key characters’ psyches; narratives are built on incomplete, unrealized, or failed artistic projects. Failure is also central presence in many of Woolf’s essays; it has a particular role in her review work, but also forms the foundation of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”  That generation-defining essay is founded on Arnold Bennett’s assessment that Woolf failed to create real characters in Jacob’s Room, and contains within it Woolf’s assertion of her own failure to capture “Mrs. Brown” in telling her story.  That sanguine expression of failure in the essay jars against the fears of failing to achieve her artistic vision that Woolf records in her personal writings.  Even as Woolf explores her own worries and points out the failures of others—such as Charlotte Brontë’s anger marring Jane Eyre—she also exposes and questions the structures of expectation and the norms (both social and fictional) that determine failure and success.

And yet failure need not be a bummer—nor need this special issue.  As Jack Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure, “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2-3).  In what ways might Woolf’s work offer examples of this mode of failing or this way of understanding what failure offers?

Lastly, since each of us contends with failure in our own lives in and out of the classroom, this special issue also welcomes personal reflections on the experience of failure.  Where do our understandings of failure intersect with our work with Woolf?  How have our failures shaped us, and continue to shape our scholarship and teaching?

Possible approaches might include:

• Defining failure in or through Woolf
• Representations of failure in Woolf’s novels, short stories, and essays
• Failure in Woolf’s personal writings
• Failure as action (failing) or identity (being a failure)
• Reading Woolf’s work through theories of failure, such as Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure
  (2011) or Costica Bradatan's In Praise of Failure (2023)
• Woolfian aesthetics of failure
• Failures of imagination and/or execution
• Political, social, and ethical failures
• Failed identities
• Examinations of Woolf’s failed projects
• Woolf’s assessments of her own failures and those of others
• Woolf and other women writers: does Woolf’s success at infiltrating the canon mean others’ failure?
• Our own experiences of failure as students, scholars, and teachers of/with Woolf

Submissions should be no longer than 2500 words.  Please submit your essays to Mary Wilson, mwilson4_at_umassd.edu.