Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’: Catching the Phantom

Biography, fiction and biofiction: from ‘bastard’ to ‘hybrid’

Visions and designs

Postmodernist truthful (mis)representations

From truthful fictions to travesties of truth

Goals and perspectives

Chapter 1: Bioplay(giarism)s

The ‘little cut-and-paste job’

‘The play’s the thing’

Virginia’s feminist companions

The last song of the nightingale

Virginia and Vita: a year in love

Chapter 2: Detecting Woolf

In the shadow of WWI: Virginia as a feminist sleuth

Who killed Virginia Woolf? The Cambridge Five!

Chapter 3: Virginia’s Daughters

Virginia’s long shadow

Virginia’s biological progeny

Chapter 4: Vanessa and Virginia

A tale of two sisters

Vanessa and her sister: ‘twinned always’

Vanessa and Virginia: ‘psychically Siamese’

Vanessa and Virginia: a biofictional spin-off

Chapter 5: Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms

Riding the ‘Dark Mare’ at ‘sixty’s gate’

Adeline and Virginia

Mandril and the marmoset

Chapter 6: Biofictive Mirrors: Clarissa Woolf / Virginia Dalloway

A cameo appearance

Mrs Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Brown: death, birth and survival

Chapter 7: Bloomsberries Reimagined

Lytton and Virginia

Variable geometries: squares, circles and triangles

Bloomsbury legacies

Conclusion: Posthumous Lives: ‘I Am Made and Remade Continually’

Biographical Woolfs and fictional Virginias

A summing-up of Woolf’s afterlives

Biofiction as critical interpretation

Virginia Woolf legend: keeping the myth alive

About the Author

Monica Latham is a Professor of British literature at the English Department of the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She obtained a PhD in 2003 from Université de Nancy, France. Her thesis analysed the genesis of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, and was entitled ‘De Melymbrosia (1908) à The Voyage Out (1915): l’invention allotropique du projet woolfien d’écriture’. Since then, Latham has published over sixty articles on modernist and postmodernist authors in many international journals and academic publications. She is the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015). She is the co-editor of the series ‘Book Practices and Textual Itineraries’, ‘Biofiction Studies’ and ‘Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks’.