How to Undo Things and Selves with Words: Understanding Literature as Praxis in Virginia Woolf’s Essays on Actresses by Caroline Marie

“…It argues that Woolf theatricalises literature to understand it through the art of acting, in particular the building up of characters. Actresses embodying nineteenth-century acting, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhard and Rachel, as well as Woolf’s contemporary Lydia Lopokova, whose performance is reviewed in “Twelfth Night at the Old Vic” (1933), mediate Woolf’s reflection on literature from different perspectives: writing with the body, reading with gestures, creating from anecdotes, and becoming other.…”
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