Archiving the Unarchivable: The Role of Archives in the Biographical Writing of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey

The essay analyses the modern concepts of “archive” in connection to several text-types and discourses. By tracing Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf’s own biographical ventures into various archival materials, the analysis also interrogates the diverse modulations of modernist writing, and the affinity between “scattered” archival documentation and the fragmentary writing of biographical texts. In many ways, therefore, the archive holds a mirror to modernist writing and, concurrently, modernist writing sheds light on a more all-encompassing “archive discourse” and its implication with the biographical genre(s) and narratives. The main topic here addressed – drawing on the seminal theories by Derrida and Foucault on the epistemology of the archive – are the inclination to continuous revisions that those texts enact, the inability to complete themselves, and the potential open-endedness of the biographical story-telling as an inherently hybrid genre.