1Like her discussion on “Women and Fiction,” Virginia Woolf’s prismatic and relentless exploration of the “Craftsmanship” of the novelist in A Room of One’s Own comes to no conclusion and fails to “hand you a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantlepiece for ever” (Woolf 1993, 3). “Personality” is one of the key concepts that help her conceive and conceptualise her persona as a writer: “[w]hen Virginia Woolf is working out in the 1910s and 1920s what kind of novelist she wants to be and what she thinks modern fiction ought to be doing, she always talks about how to get at the essence of personality” (Lee 1997, 8). Later, that notion helps her theorise writing or, rather, categorise writers. In an essay entitled “Personalities” published posthumously in 1947, she opposes “these great artists who manage to infuse the whole of themselves into their works, yet contrive to universalise their identity” (Woolf 1967c, 275) and “the imperfect artists who never manage to say the whole thing in their books who wield the power of personality over us” (ibid., 276), arguing that however stylistically imperfect writers might be, literature makes a more powerful and pervasive impression on readers when “coloured” by “the writer’s character” (ibid., 277). The essay, however, offers no definition of the notion and leaves readers to ponder on its provocative final twist:

The legacy of a negligible novel is often an oddly vivid sense of the writer’s character, a fancy sketch of his circumstances, a disposition to like or dislike which works its way into the text and possibly falsifies its meaning. Or do we only read with all our faculties when we seize that impression too? (ibid.)

2Even though personality is referred to in painterly terms (“colour,” “vivid,” “fancy sketch”), what to “seize that impression” of a writer’s personality may mean, I argue, is best understood in light of Woolf’s essays about actresses and acting.

3The notion of impersonality in Woolf’s works and thought has been paid more attention to than that of personality, probably because it resonates with other Modernist writers’ views on literature, especially T. S. Eliot’s and James Joyce’s. Indeed, “[o]ne of the most commonly evoked critical labels that are used for a quick synthesis of modernism is unquestionably impersonality” (Bugliani 2018, §1). Modernism’s attitude to impersonality, however, has been termed “schizophrenic” with its “slide to subjectivism and […] anti-subjectivist thrust at the same time” (Taylor 1989, 456). Woolf’s attitude to the two concepts also proves complex. While Bernard, the novelist in The Waves, seems to achieve the “continual extinction of personality” (Eliot 1997, 44) which Eliot sets as the goal of any artist when he feels he is becoming “[a] man without a self,” he immediately wonders: “How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?” He immediately associates the loss of self with the loss of language: “But how to describe the world seen without a self? There are no words” (Woolf 2000, 191). The “self,” “personality” and “impersonality” may not function in the same way in poetry and fiction but what is of interest here is that these notions circulate in Modernist mindscapes and that Woolf connects them to a praxis to better modelise literature as both writing and reading. I would like to suggest that Woolf envisions the tension between personality and impersonality, which she explores in her fiction, from the perspective of a figure that she defines in “Life and the Novelist” as as much “a slave to life” (Woolf 1967b, 136), self and words as the novelist: the actress.

6It is important to note that the acting Woolf is observing is a mixed art form: first because it was redefining itself with the emergence of cinema; second because it is mediated by writing. Indeed, Woolf envisions acting through the memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry and the biography of Rachel. She is more interested in what actresses say about their art than in reviewing actual shows – even though she reviews one in “Twelfth Night at the Old Vic” (1933), in which she weighs the merits of reading Shakespeare versus seeing his plays on stage. Her analysis focuses on the actress’s work beforehand, on character building rather than rehearsing or performing in front of an audience. She pays attention to the mechanisms of self- and text-building through appropriation – artists absorbing things or texts – and disappropriation – artists becoming other through words –, two processes which are at stake in the art of acting as in the art of writing.

Memorialists Sarah Bernhardt’s and Ellen Terry’s personalities are thus twice remote, or mediated, since Woolf does not see them act but reads their recollections and reflections about impersonating. This brings their art closer to that of the writer (they write even if they are not writers by profession) and turns acting into a transmodal object of thought instrumental to her understanding the writer’s experience. Woolf not only expresses admiration for Terry’s style, which she finds “far more expressive than the tappings of the professional typewriter” (Woolf 1967a, 68), she also underlines the limits of Bernhardt’s “dramatic genius,” which produces effects that “are strange and brilliant, and others pass beyond this limit and become grotesque and even painful” (1986a, 166-167). She notes that Bernhardt “built up for herself the reputation of a ‘personality’” (ibid., 165), which she expresses with the physical image of the invasion of the reader’s room: “It is possible, as you read the volume, to feel your chair sink beneath you into undulating crimson vapours, of a strange perfume, which presently rise and enclose you entirely” (ibid., 169). The reader’s fantasy of finding themselves in the same room as the writer, just as one at once is and is not in the same space as actors in a playhouse, is staged in a similar way in “Personalities.” Woolf asserts that the “promise of intimacy” made by “impersonal” writers such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen, who have “been distilled in their books” entirely, is not one that implies “ransacking their drawers” (Woolf 1967c, 275), thus imagining the reader in their drawing room while stating that there’s no point being there. The shared imagery between “Personalities” and Woolf’s essays on actresses points to the way Woolf theatricalises literature to observe and understand it through the unexpected sister art of acting – without theorising it, however, as this would imply offering readers “a nugget of pure truth” (Woolf 1993, 3).

7This article analyses the way celebrated nineteenth-century actresses shape Woolf’s reflection on literature as a form of attention to the past from different perspectives: writing with the body, reading with gesture, creating from anecdote, and becoming other.

Writing and reading with the body: “a prose that takes the mould of their minds entire” (Woolf 1994b, 167)

8The Modernist personality/impersonality duality in relation to art and creativity is mostly associated with T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (first published in 1919). Here, he declares that “[t]he progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (Eliot 1997, 44), so that literature may become more akin to science: “[i]t is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science” (ibid.). This statement itself is immediately clarified – or is it obscured? – by a chemical image: “I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide” (ibid.). Art and personality are similarly discussed in reference to science in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in a mock serious discussion between Stephen and Lynch which brings together literary theory and references to physics and mathematics:

[…] The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing out and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. […] The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. (Joyce 1916, 252)

9Woolf’s depiction of literature in “Personalities” resonates with Eliot’s and Joyce’s scientific “suggestive analog[ies]”; however, references to chemistry articulate personality and writing to the basic Kantian principles of judgment of liking and disliking (see Ludwigs 2014) rather than to a scientific approach. The first paragraph discusses J. A. Symonds’s expression of his dislike for Keats’s personality in chemical terms: “‘I must have Keats’s ‘Love Letters’ out; though I confess there is something in the personality of Keats, some sort of semi-physical aroma wafted from it, which I cannot endure” (Woolf 1967c, 273). Woolf begs to differ, enthusiastically envisaging a personal relationship with the poet: “[f]or most people will exclaim that if ever there was a lovable human being, one whom one could wish to live with, walk with, go on foreign travels with, it was Keats” (ibid.). In the fourth and final paragraph, Woolf takes up the theme of friendship with the author, comparing whether there is “something attractive to us” (ibid., 276) in Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy or Sterne. Finally, the essay questions the critics’ belief that “we should be impersonal when we write, and therefore impersonal when we read” (ibid., 274). Quite typically, it closes – or rather is left open – on an interrogative sentence: “Or do we only read with all our faculties when we seize this impression too?” (ibid., 277), challenging Eliot’s and Joyce’s definitions of impersonality to suggest a more fruitful, and physical, rapport between personality and literature.

10Woolf’s pseudoscientific phrasing is in keeping with the Modernist transfer to literature of scientific theories and methods, those of physics, in particular: “What I want to do now is saturate every atom” (Woolf 1980b, 209), she famously wrote on 28 November 1928, while working on The Waves, in which she depersonalises discourse. Precisely, in Quantum Poetics. Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism, Daniel Albright argues that Modernism developed two contrary models inspired by physics to renew the conception of poetry, “the particle model and the wave model,” the former promoting “a ‘scientific’ view, in which isolated huddled bits are more important, more real, than the relations and interactions among them” and the latter “a ‘poetic’ view in which the cosmos is a plenum, a twanging web: every event modifies the infinitely elastic whole […] and every object is merely a thickening of the general vibrancy” (Albright 1997, 17). The figure of the actress plays a specific role in Woolf’s flirt with scientific discourse to “research into the fundamental operations of the imagination” (ibid., 1), with its focus on the body. It not only exemplifies but materialises, fleshes up, albeit in a metaphorical way, the Modernist conception of the pre-text as “not words, but omni-sensuous entities at once verbal, pictorial, and musical” (ibid., 4) and its interest in the “new – sometimes disturbing – relations between the poet and the audience” (ibid., 1) entailed by the two models (the atom and the wave) and the material imagery of circulation that conveys them.

11In Woolf’s essays on actresses, personality is expressed in sensory terms, as the “kind of contact” (Woolf 1967c, 275) readers have had for generations with Shakespeare, or an “impression” (ibid., 277) that stamps the mark of the writer onto the text where it is brought into contact with the reader. Such perceptible imprint of the artist’s personality onto his art is redolent of Stephen’s description of the first step of writing, before “it impersonalizes itself”: “The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing out and round the persons and the action like a vital sea” (Joyce 1916, 252). Joyce’s image is echoed in the olfactory imagery that conveys Symonds’s physical reaction to Keats’s poetry and which Woolf chooses to quote: a “semi-physical aroma,” an “undefinable flavour of personality,” a “suggestion of physical quality, odour of the man in his unconscious and spontaneous self-determination, which attracts or repels powerfully and is at the very root of love or dislike” (Woolf 1967c, 273). The essay takes up Symonds’s chemical reaction or gut feeling towards Keats – note that he uses “love” rather than the more neutral “like” – to build up a sensuous, almost biological rapport between writers and what they write as well as between readers and writers through texts.

13A cloth-like, skin-like envelop connects the actress – at any rate an actress with a personality – to her role. This organic imagery is echoed in the image of the novelist’s mind, literalised in the mind of the novel, in Woolf’s essay “‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’” written in 1925. In this essay – as in “Personalities” –, Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy epitomise writers with personalities. Woolf writes that they “have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire” (Woolf 1994b, 167), the material image likening the inner with the outer, their “minds” with their faces, and equating their writing with a cast of their skull. In so far as actresses “mould” characters and dramatic texts with their bodies, their art is a “linguistic experience in the flesh” (Bernard 2015, §2) not unlike Woolf’s own writing experiments, which are metabolised through the metaphor of acting.

Writing and reading with gesture: “every comma was consumed. Even her eyelashes acted” (Woolf 1967, 67)

14Such body metaphors make the notion of personality, which might be considered abstract or flimsy, tangible. Reading Keats gives “a sense of the physical presence of the writer, with all that it implies” (Woolf 1967c, 273) – the implications remain unstated – through a combination of the painterly and the theatrical. Even though “we are ready supplied with a picture of Keats” (ibid.), the essay hints that we spontaneously tend to animate it:

He was vigorous but gentle in all his movements, wearing neat black shoes, trousers strapped under his insteps, and a coat that was a little shabby at the seams. His eyes were of a warm yet searching brown, his hands were broad, and the fingers, unlike those of most artists, square at the tip. So we could go on making it up, page after page, whether accurately or not does not for our present purpose very much matter. (ibid.)

15Two features are of particular interest: first, the picturesque “searching” eyes, the “vigorous but gentle” “movements,” the “trousers strapped under his instep” together with the fingers “square at the tip” suggest motion and action, conveying theatricalised presence rather than painterly representation. Second, the circumstantial complement “page after page” is ambiguous: it may be a time complement referring to reading Keats’s poetry or a mode complement suggesting writing Keats a body in the essay – the very essay we’re reading –, blurring the distinction between writing and reading through gesture.

16Affect is foregrounded in the essay’s overall structure, which keeps going back to the reader’s direct interaction with the writer’s personality, for instance when the fourth paragraph takes up the first paragraph’s fantasy of the reader and writer socialising in a domestic space (with Keats) and expands it (comparing socialising with Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë and then with Thomas Hardy and Sterne). Furthermore, throughout the essay the logic of argument is repeatedly interrupted by the force – rather than the logic – of the flesh, to which it seems impossible for readers not to yield, so that the essay hinges on an inescapable countering of reason with flesh and affect. When the essay seems to come to the rational conclusion that “[i]t is the imperfect artists who never manage to say the whole thing in their books who wield the power of personality over us” (ibid., 275), the final paragraph immediately counters reason with emotion:

[t]his would be all very well if we could make it square with the facts, but unfortunately, with Keats as an example of the kind of writer whose personality affects us we can do no such thing. We must then go humbly and confess that our likings and dislikings for authors in their books are as varied and as little accountable as our liking for the people in the flesh. (ibid., 276)

17As I read it, the figure of the actress, the epitome of embodiment, of being other “people in the flesh,” personifies the ungraspable connection between art, creation and reception which together sketch a Woolfian regime of reading. The actress’s body gives shape to Woolf’s singular renascence or revivification of a direct connection between poet and reader associated with Antiquity that Modernism was so fascinated with, re-embodying, as it were, what male poets disembody.

18In “‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’,” as in “Personalities,” the “overpowering personality” (Woolf 1994b, 168) of writers is epitomised by Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and likewise conveyed through the theatricalisation of their presence: “as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt” (ibid.). This is evocative of Woolf’s characterization of Ellen Terry: “she filled the stage and all the other actors were put out, as electric lights are put out in the sun” (Woolf 1967a, 67). However, Virginia Woolf is not so much interested in performance in front of an audience as in the actress’s upstream work of appropriation of lines and roles.

19Woolf’s essays on actresses focus on character building rather than on the limelight, I argue, because it serves as a metaphor of writing as reading or reading as writing. While writing The Waves, she defined her poetics as the saturation of “every atom” “to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea” (Woolf 1980b, 209). Actresses, whose raw material is sensation, concentrate and revive it just as Woolf’s writing does language.

20Not only do actresses embody writing but they allegorise a collective reading as writing body. “The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt” defines acting as a “business” – a polysemous word that refers to a profession, a commercial activity as well as the physical manipulation of stage properties and sets in certain theatrical genres such as music hall – that has to do with capturing and concentrating to make things visible. First, the actress is said to fix her “impressions” of others’ minds into perceptible gestures, a phrasing which echoes both Woolf’s description of “personality” as “impression” (Woolf 1967c, 277) and her depiction of Brontë and Hardy’s ability to write “prose which takes the mould of their minds entire” (Woolf 1994b, 167), as she fixes it into “some gesture perceptible to the eye.” The actress sculpts her body into meaning the way a writer sculpts words into meaning: “It is her business to be able to concentrate all that she feels into some gesture perceptible to the eye” (Woolf 1986a, 166). The concentration process is an intersubjective, collective one as the actress seems to function as a transmitter or an echo chamber: she “receive[s] her impressions of what is going on in the minds of others” (ibid.). The second occurrence of the word “business” suggests that genius actresses do what all writers – or is it all human beings? the deictic “we” is ambiguous – do, only with more intensity: “Are we not each in truth the centre of innumerable rays which so strike upon one figure only, and is it not our business to flash them straight and completely back again, and never suffer a single shaft to blunt itself on the far side of us?” (ibid., 170) Sarah Bernhardt is described as a lense that metaphorises writing as reading “what is going on in the minds of others.” Her personality, her singularity, seems to give shape to, to translate, a collective thought, even though it remains illegible: “Sarah Bernhardt, at least, by reason of some such concentration, will sparkle for many generations a sinister and enigmatic message” (ibid.).

21Concentration and intensity are associated with acuteness of “point of view” (ibid., 166) as well as truth of gesture: the essay underlines Sarah Bernhardt’s “very literal mind,” the “hardness and limitation in her view” which implies that “something of her unmatched intensity on the stage comes from the capacity which she shows for keen and sceptical vision where character is concerned; she is under no illusions” (ibid., 168). This echoes Bernard proceeding “without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion” in The Waves (Woolf 2000, 191). It is ambiguous whether “the minds of others” Sarah Bernhardt builds up her roles from and her outlook on “character” refer to her fellow human beings or to dramatic characters. However it may be, the imagery of optical reflection and physical science defines character building as clear-sightedness and illegibility as well as an intersubjective process.

22Woolf understands this bodily appropriation as a form of reading, since it may serve some analytical purpose: “No emotion that could express itself in gesture or action was lost upon her eye, and even though such incidents had nothing to do with the matter in hand, her brain treasured them and could, if necessary, use them to explain something” (Woolf 1986a, 166). This equation of acting and reading is even more explicit in “Ellen Terry,” whose correspondence with George Bernard Shaw shows that her capability as a reader matches – or even exceeds – that of the professional playwright and critic:

She is as close and critical a student of Shakespeare as he is. She has studied every line, weighed the meaning of every word; experienced with every gesture. Each of those golden moments when she becomes bodyless, not herself, is the results of months of minute and careful study. (Woolf 1967a, 71)

23Terry comes very close to the ideal reader sketched in “Personalities,” one that transcends identity: “[p]erhaps one must read collectively, learned side by side with the unlearned, for generations as we have read Shakespeare, to work through to that kind of contact” (Woolf 1967c, 275). Even though the actress “is quick to tell Mr. Shaw that she does not work with her brain only. She is not in the least clever” (Woolf 1967a, 71), she treats her medium, “sensation,” just as a novelist would his, language: “this mutable woman, all instinct, sympathy, and sensation, is as painstaking a student and as careful of the dignity of her art as Flaubert himself” (ibid.). Indeed, her business is to combine and saturate sensation and language, as suggested in her son Edward Gordon Craig’s observation quoted by Woolf that “[w]hen the part was congenial, when she was Shakespeare’s Portia, Desdemona, Ophelia, every word, every comma was consumed. Even her eyelashes acted” (ibid., 67). She consumes words and punctuation alike and subsumes them into barely perceptible gestures, at once a “scholar” and “an ordinary reader” both building up and being built up by the collective “popular imagination” (Woolf 1967c, 274).

Writing with anecdotes: “the precision and vitality of coloured and animated photographs” (Woolf 1986a, 166)

25Actresses embody such poetics of the anecdotal interfused with the personal, or even the trivial, nothing like “unvulgarized” Greek literature. Woolf remarks that “[p]erhaps no woman now alive could tell us more strange things, of herself and of life, than Sarah Bernhardt” (Woolf 1986a, 164), probably because she had “built up for herself a reputation of a ‘personality’” (ibid., 165). Those gestures she observes and collects, Woolf explains, are “often something quite trivial, but for that reason, perhaps, almost startling in [their] effect” (ibid., 166). This eye for anecdote makes for difficult reading, as Bernhardt daisy chains literal anecdotes in her memoirs. Woolf complains that “[s]uch a multiplication of crude visible objects upon our senses wearies them considerably by the time the book is finished” (ibid., 169) but applauds her “curious gift which gives to so many passages in this biography the precision and vitality of coloured and animated photographs” (ibid., 166).

26The metaphor of picture postcards thematises the trivial and the anecdotal, not just as the sadly natural style of memoirs and biographies of actresses but as the very material actresses appropriate and mediatise. Rachel’s biography similarly threads disconnected colourful tableaus:

She scattered rings about the table. She used Musset’s swordstick to pick her teeth. Dipping her sleeves into the sauce, she confided to the company that she could not remember a time when she was ‘what the world calls innocent.’ She drank punch with a spoon already sticky with soup. With one supper for sample we can imagine the rest. (Woolf 1986b, 351-352)

27This dramatisation of anecdote and disconnectedness mimics poor biographical and autobiographical writing but it also points to the “mixed,” “vulgar,” “crude” material the art of acting subsumes. The image of the picture postcard also occurs when Woolf compares Ellen Terry’s roles with a painting in an art gallery: “We, who can only remember her as Lady Cecily on the little stage at the Court Theatre, only remember what, compared with her Ophelia or her Portia, is a picture postcard compared with the great Velasquez in the gallery” (Woolf 1967a, 67). However unfavourable, the comparison stresses that “[i]t is the fate of actors to leave only picture postcards behind them” (ibid.) because of “the transiency of great acting” (Woolf 1986b, 352). As suggested in the cinematographic montage of postures, “great acting” is a temporal paradox: it creates in the present a trace of a part written in the past even though that present itself is an ever-abolished moment. This resonates with the way readers respond to writers whose personality they like by setting them in their own present time, as the collective narrative voice in “Personalities” does with Keats: “[we] have the same liking or disliking for him personally that we have for a friend last seen half an hour ago in the corner of the omnibus that plies between Holborn and Ludgate Hill” (Woolf 1967c, 273). The image of the postcard suggests a poetics of “Here and Now,” after Woolf’s working title for The Years. Writers with a personality whose texts convey “a sense of the[ir] physical presence” (ibid.) are not precisely reborn – they do not undergo a renaissance – but through their metaphorical body, they become our contemporaries. We transpose them into today’s London just as actresses actualise contemporary parts.

Acting and writing as becoming other: “they forget the words, they improvise others of their own” (Woolf 1967a, 72)

She has only to float on to the stage and everything round her suffers, not a sea change, but a change into light, into gaiety; the birds sing, the sheep are garlanded, the air rings with melody and human beings dance towards each other on the tip of their toes possessed of an exquisite friendliness, sympathy, and delight. (Woolf 1966, 30)

29In doing so, they blur the boundaries between inside and outside, life and fiction, “sham” and reality (Woolf 1967a, 68), in keeping with the paradox of theatre’s artificial truth-making.

30As a child, Ellen Terry perceived that life was on stage rather than behind “curtained windows” (Woolf 1967a, 68): “‘It’s all such sham there,’ she wrote – meaning by ‘there’ what she called ‘life lived in houses’ – ‘sham – cold – hard – pretending. It’s not sham here in our theatre – here all is real, warm and kind – we live a lovely spiritual life here’” (ibid., 68-69). This clear-cut opposition and reversal is the central line of argument in “Rachel”: Woolf is reviewing her biography by a “Mr Gribble” who distinguishes between “her ‘stage life and her real life’” and believes that “[t]he personality asserts itself when the curtain falls” (Woolf 1986b, 352). Ironically, he does not discuss her art, which he believes to “leave little room for the expression of personality” (ibid.): “An actress, he says, does not create; she interprets” (ibid.). Woolf, in contrast, underlines the porosity between life on stage and life off stage:

Why should we draw these distinctions between real life and stage life? It is when we feel most that we live most; and we cannot believe that Rachel, married to a real man, bearing real children, and adding up real butcher’s bills, would have lived more truly than Rachel imagining the passions of women who never existed. (ibid.)

31Actresses open up an ambiguous space between life, sham, and dream, an indistinction that is also to be found in “The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt,” where Woolf wonders: “where after all does dream end, and where does life begin?” (Woolf 1986a, 169). That the figure of the actress serves Woolf’s feminist critique of the conventional social roles assigned to women is unquestionable, but it also shows that in “imagining the passions of women who never existed” actresses become others in the same way writers do, creating new imaginary yet real spaces in the process: “Did she [Rachel] mean more when she cried, ‘I have lived the life of others,’ than a poet or a novelist would have meant?” (Woolf 1986b, 352).

32This is not to claim that acting is like writing but to show that Virginia Woolf reflects on her own art through her vision of acting, or rather through her understanding of actresses’ understanding of acting (in their bodies). In Woolf’s essays, not only do actresses open other spaces but they become others. They are change itself. Woolf depicts Sarah Bernhardt in her autobiography as living “before us in many shapes and in many circumstances, the instrument of this passion and of that” (Woolf 1986a, 164), and Ellen Terry on stage as a “mutable woman, all instinct, sympathy, and sensation” (Woolf 1967a, 71). The actress’s mutability mirrors Woolf’s own experimentation with writing, at once “a work – a praxis – of unknowing, whilst remaining a complex work of empirical elaboration” (Bernard 2015, §9). Actresses, I argue, embody the praxis of unknowing and becoming foreign to oneself. If Woolf quotes the remark of Rachel’s biographer that she was “a shadow pursuing shadows” (Woolf 1986b, 351) even though she disbelieves that statement: “Was she so vicious and so melancholy?” (ibid.), it is probably because, although “Rachel’s experiment ended in something like ruin, if we consider that she dies of exhaustion at the age of thirty-seven, having kicked her body round the world, secured no permanent happiness, and outlived her success” (ibid., 353), she also epitomises the poetics of impurity Woolf was fascinated with: “Her life was so hurried, so mixed, there was so much trash in it, and such enormous ecstasy” (ibid.).

33This echoes Woolf’s reading of Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy when she observes that a novelist “is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material which begins by lending it reality and ends by cumbering it with rubbish” (Woolf 1994b, 165). Interestingly, although logically and chronologically discussing Brontë, Woolf ambiguously uses the masculine “he,” thereby anticipating her remarks on Hardy. Actresses embody the oxymoronic – if not the androgynous – nature of the stuff writing is made of. Rachel’s impure art as well as her mixed life incorporate what she was unaware of, her unfelt feelings. Highlighting that Rachel was barely literate and unable to “read a play through, and when she was famous, she could not answer her own invitations” (Woolf 1986b, 352), Woolf concludes that her life as well as her art were made of poor as well as great acting and conscious feelings as well as unfelt emotions: “[a] great deal that is not felt comes into the life; there is a great deal of pose and bad art” (ibid.) in a grammatical structure that both contrasts and confuses “art” and “the life.”

34Ellen Terry’s memoirs are likewise “a bundle of loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch for a portrait” (Woolf 1967a, 68), full of “very blank page[s]” (ibid., 69) and contradictions: “Two sketches face each other: Ellen Terry in blue cotton among the hens; Ellen Terry robed and crowned as Lady Macbeth on the stage of the Lyceum. The two sketches are contradictory yet they are both of the same woman” (ibid.). If Ellen Terry embraces this duality and insists on the triviality of her life, underlining her “bourgeois qualities” and “tr[ying] to persuade us that she was an ordinary woman enough; a better hand at pastry than most; with an eye for colour; a taste for furniture, and a positive passion for washing children’s heads” (ibid., 70) it is only because “[t]here was something in her that she did not understand” (ibid.), namely, as Woolf understands it, that such duality is precisely what actresses disrupt. Woolf sees through “the little sketch that she offers us to fill in the gap between the two Ellen Terrys – Ellen the mother, and Ellen the actress” (ibid.) because, to her, actresses expose the gaps between their different selves rather than cover them.

35Self-contradiction, or rather expressing one’s unknown self, brings acting close to writing:

There was a self she [Ellen Terry] did not know, a gap she could not fill. Did she not take Walt Whitman’s words for a motto? ‘Why, even I myself, I often think I know little or nothing of my real life. Only a few hints – a few diffused faint clues and indirections… I seek… to trace out here’? (Woolf 1967a, 68)

36Acting is an experience in alterity because actresses embody characters on stage: “[s]peaking or silent, she was Lady Cecily – or was it Ellen Terry?” (ibid., 67); like Rachel, they “live […] the lives of others” (Woolf 1986b, 352). They dis-incarnate invisible identities: “each part she [Sarah Bernhardt] plays deposits its own small contribution upon her unseen shape, until it is complete and distinct from its creations at the same time that it inspires them with life” (Woolf 1986a, 164). The organic image of the concretion of matter accumulating onto the “unseen shape” of the actress is evocative of the “prose which takes the mould of their minds entire” (Woolf 1994b, 167). Like the writer, the actress is at once a negative and an organising force.

38Acting therefore also involves ghosting language, a form of unwriting. At the end of “Ellen Terry,” the anecdote of her forgetting her lines as Lady Cecily no longer expresses memory loss or an uncongeniality with the part but the very essence of acting as “forgetting,” “improvising,” undoing or unwriting, making a new text from the past: “now and again Nature creates a new part, an original part. … They will not act the stock parts – they forget the words, they improvise others of their own” (ibid.).

39Acting is the model of a physical regime of reading as writing or writing as reading: “she [Ellen Terry] takes her part away from the books out into the woods. Rambling down grassy rides, she lives her part until she is it” (ibid., 71). This physicality implies a process of self-transformation Woolf likens to re-writing: “If a word jars or grates, she must re-think it, re-write it. Then when every phrase is her own, and every gesture spontaneous, out she comes out onto the stage and is Imogen, Ophelia, Desdemona” (ibid.). Such appropriation implies an expropriation, through language: “What remains is at best only a wavering, insubstantial phantom – a verbal life on the lips of the living” (ibid., 67), even though Woolf’s review closes on an identity-centred tautology: “Ellen Terry is remembered because she was Ellen Terry” (ibid., 72).

40The three actresses’ art as Woolf describes it very much resonates with her own literary explorations in the way they undo things with words, to misquote John Austin’s liminal essay on performativity. In “Rachel,” Woolf quotes Charlotte Brontë’s paradoxical description of the French actress’s performance in Villette: “‘instead of merely irritating Imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the time fevering the nerves because it was not done, disclosed power like a deep swollen winter river, thundering in cataract, and bearing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steel sweep of its descent’” (Woolf 1986b, 353). What is of interest to Woolf is the description of Rachel’s art in negative terms, not as action but as a tension between “what might be done” and what “was not done.” Acting is a gesture towards undoing, an unravelling of things, of words, an “unravelling of the self” (Bernard 2015, §15).

41It could even be argued that the craftsmanship of actresses is not merely to defamiliarise the literary texts they appropriate but, more radically, to preserve, or even to make perceptible, the essential otherness at the core of language. The three actresses Woolf dedicates essays to are alien to literature in different ways but all embody the pre-verbal phase of creation Daniel Albright shows is central to Modernist explorations. Rachel can barely read or write; Sarah Bernhardt’s “alien art of letters” (Woolf 1986a, 166) is hectic, “grotesque or painful” (ibid., 167); as for Ellen Terry, “[i]t never struck her, humble as she was, and obsessed by her lack of book learning, that she was, among other things, a writer” (Woolf 1967a, 68). Still, their art reminds us of the materiality of language as Woolf uses it as a metaphor of the materialisation of the alien in language through new concept words such as “unacted,” “not understand[ing]” (ibid., 71), or “unseen shape” (Woolf 1986a, 164).

42Understanding personality in reference to “The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhard” (1908), “Rachel” (1911) and “Ellen Terry” (1941) implies more than acknowledging the eccentricity of celebrated actresses or pointing at the true self/mask split discussed by Hermione Lee at the beginning of her literary biography of Woolf: “[t]he life-writer must explore and understand the gap between the outer self (‘the fictitious V.W. whom I carry like a mask about the world’) and the secret self” (Lee 1996, 6; quoting Woolf’s Diary 28 July 1940).

43When read together, what is striking is how similar the imagery and phrasing are throughout Woolf’s essays on actresses and acting, and how consistently she knots the actresses’ memories and reflections on their art to her own understanding of her own art. This tends to turn the English, French and Russian artists into a coherent whole, embodying Woolf’s belief that words are processed through the body too. The art of acting thus reflects and helps her reflect on her conception of literature as a praxis that explores and experiments with language until it becomes other, finds otherness at the core of language.

44For Woolf, writing is also a form of attention to the past, not just Greek or Elizabethan drama and literature, but the not so distant Victorian era. Her reflection on modern writing through the nineteenth-century art of acting took place at the turn of the century when the late nineteenth-century fiery debate on the comparative value of seeing Shakespeare’s plays performed or reading them silently as poetry – involving Charles Lamb among others in England and Maurice Maeterlinck in continental Europe for instance – was still ongoing. Furthermore, acting was evolving with the emergence of cinema, which was bringing the image of actresses, in particular their faces, closer to audiences, and doing away with words altogether. Jeffrey Brown underlines that when Woolf might have seen Ellen Terry in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, her career was on the wane because she was unable to adapt to twentieth-century drama and taste, influenced by Modernism and cinema, which may itself be understood as an expression of Modernist taste. This shift in acting theory and practice frames may account in part for the prominence of the notions of personality, intimacy and ghosting in Woolf’s reflection on acting and writing.