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International audience ; The New Biography emerged in the 1920s and 1930s under the impulse of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. Although their appreciation of each other varied, these writers read and influenced each other's work; they formulated similar conceptualisations of biography, giving strength to Woolf's idea of a 'new school of biographies' (Woolf 1927, 475). In recent years, researchers such as Max Saunders and Laura Marcus have asserted the importance of the New Biography in understanding and reassessing the status of auto/biographical forms in modernist texts. This paper seeks to show that the New Biography developed a specific aesthetics of the biographical subject, contributing to the politics of the modernist self in the early twentieth century. I argue that this aesthetics is mainly motivated by the centrality of personality and the necessarily subjective perception of that personality. In these narratives, personality is the main plot device, driving the story forward, and providing a rationale for the life trajectory. It is a common practice to define the modernist self in terms of its de-centredness and its fragmented nature, and this clarifies why the New Biographers sought to find techniques that create oblique and blurred visualisations of their subjects. Visuality, in this paper, concerns perspective and the biographer's staging of the performance of perception, as mirrored in the eyes of secondary subjects, and in those of the biographer him/herself. Anchoring my study to the theories of historian and philosopher Frank Ankersmit on the assessment of truth in historical representations, I argue that this mirror effect is used by the New Biographers to highlight the constructedness of all visions of the subject. This subsequently subverts the reliability of the narrative, but also accounts for the artistic dimension of the biography, and intensifies the complex interconnections between literature and historiography. ; La nouvelle biographie s'est développée dans les ...

International audience ; Virginia Woolf reflects on the vulnerability of women's voices in her essay Three Guineas (1938). More specifically, in Three Guineas, Woolf uses the term 'influence', which, according to her, women lack because they have neither financial power nor education, rendering them inaudible. She argues that women remain 'outsider[s]' with 'no right to speak' (Woolf 2015, 116). By the end of the essay, the reader realises that Woolf has transformed this condition into a form of resistance by refusing to occupy a position in the male-dominated public sphere. In the 1920s, Woolf's awareness of the inaudibility of women's lives made her want to write a woman's life herself, leading to Orlando and then to Flush. Both these fantasised biographies portray women: Orlando (1928) is a fantastical biography of her close friend Vita Sackville-West, and Flush (1933) tells the story of Elizabeth Barret Browning's life through the biography of her dog. In contrast, Roger Fry is nonfictional. Why did Woolf choose to fictionalise her 'woman' biographies? This paper argues that, similarly to Woolf's unconventional choice in Three Guineas to remain an 'outsider' to better fight gender inequality and militarism, fiction can be considered a political tool in that it allows for an alternative mode of biographical representation. Not only does Woolf's use of fiction enable her to compensate for the lack of visibility of her feminine subjects, but she also develops a writing strategy capable of delivering an innovative, politicized representation of the women she depicted. ; Dans son essai, Trois guinées, Woolf analyse la vulnérabilité de la voix des femmes. Selon elle, c'est « l'influence » qui manque aux femmes : le fait qu'elles n'aient ni pouvoir, ni éducation les rend inaudibles. Les femmes demeurent exclues de la sphère publique, sans droit à la parole (Woolf 2015, 116). Cependant, le lecteur se rend compte que Woolf a transformé cette condition d'exclusion en une forme de résistance, en refusant elle-même ...

International audience ; The New Biography emerged in the 1920s and 1930s under the impulse of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. Although their appreciation of each other varied, these writers read and influenced each other's work; they formulated similar conceptualisations of biography, giving strength to Woolf's idea of a 'new school of biographies' (Woolf 1927, 475). In recent years, researchers such as Max Saunders and Laura Marcus have asserted the importance of the New Biography in understanding and reassessing the status of auto/biographical forms in modernist texts. This paper seeks to show that the New Biography developed a specific aesthetics of the biographical subject, contributing to the politics of the modernist self in the early twentieth century. I argue that this aesthetics is mainly motivated by the centrality of personality and the necessarily subjective perception of that personality. In these narratives, personality is the main plot device, driving the story forward, and providing a rationale for the life trajectory. It is a common practice to define the modernist self in terms of its de-centredness and its fragmented nature, and this clarifies why the New Biographers sought to find techniques that create oblique and blurred visualisations of their subjects. Visuality, in this paper, concerns perspective and the biographer's staging of the performance of perception, as mirrored in the eyes of secondary subjects, and in those of the biographer him/herself. Anchoring my study to the theories of historian and philosopher Frank Ankersmit on the assessment of truth in historical representations, I argue that this mirror effect is used by the New Biographers to highlight the constructedness of all visions of the subject. This subsequently subverts the reliability of the narrative, but also accounts for the artistic dimension of the biography, and intensifies the complex interconnections between literature and historiography. ; La nouvelle biographie s'est développée dans les années 1920 et 1930 sous la plume de Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey et Harold Nicolson. Ces auteurs se connaissaient, partageaient les mêmes principes et se sont influencés dans leur pratique de la biographie. Ceci m'amène à reprendre l'idée de « nouvelle école » que Woolf développe dans son essai « The New Biography » et à considérer que Woolf, Strachey et Nicolson appartiennent à une association distincte de biographes. L'objet de cette étude est de révéler la politique du sujet développée par les nouveaux biographes et de mieux comprendre la contribution de la nouvelle biographie à l'élaboration d'une esthétique du sujet moderniste. Cette esthétique est dominée par deux aspects ; premièrement, la représentation de la personnalité, l'élément central dans les récits de la nouvelle biographie, et deuxièmement par la mise en évidence dans le récit de la subjectivité du biographe. Cet article cherche à déterminer les méthodes utilisées par les nouveaux biographes pour créer cette dynamique du sujet biographique, notamment l'effet de la perspective oblique ainsi que la représentation de la subjectivité du biographe dans la narration. Il en résulte une esthétique unique du sujet moderniste, ainsi qu'une contribution pertinente au débat toujours d'actualité autour de la nature et de la valeur de la représentation dans les récits historiques.

International audience ; Virginia Woolf reflects on the vulnerability of women's voices in her essay Three Guineas (1938). More specifically, in Three Guineas, Woolf uses the term 'influence', which, according to her, women lack because they have neither financial power nor education, rendering them inaudible. She argues that women remain 'outsider[s]' with 'no right to speak' (Woolf 2015, 116). By the end of the essay, the reader realises that Woolf has transformed this condition into a form of resistance by refusing to occupy a position in the male-dominated public sphere. In the 1920s, Woolf's awareness of the inaudibility of women's lives made her want to write a woman's life herself, leading to Orlando and then to Flush. Both these fantasised biographies portray women: Orlando (1928) is a fantastical biography of her close friend Vita Sackville-West, and Flush (1933) tells the story of Elizabeth Barret Browning's life through the biography of her dog. In contrast, Roger Fry is nonfictional. Why did Woolf choose to fictionalise her 'woman' biographies? This paper argues that, similarly to Woolf's unconventional choice in Three Guineas to remain an 'outsider' to better fight gender inequality and militarism, fiction can be considered a political tool in that it allows for an alternative mode of biographical representation. Not only does Woolf's use of fiction enable her to compensate for the lack of visibility of her feminine subjects, but she also develops a writing strategy capable of delivering an innovative, politicized representation of the women she depicted. ; Dans son essai, Trois guinées, Woolf analyse la vulnérabilité de la voix des femmes. Selon elle, c'est « l'influence » qui manque aux femmes : le fait qu'elles n'aient ni pouvoir, ni éducation les rend inaudibles. Les femmes demeurent exclues de la sphère publique, sans droit à la parole (Woolf 2015, 116). Cependant, le lecteur se rend compte que Woolf a transformé cette condition d'exclusion en une forme de résistance, en refusant elle-même d'investir cette sphère publique dominée par la voix patriarcale. Dans les années 20, consciente de l'invisibilité récurrente des femmes, Woolf veut écrire une biographie de femme ; ce sera Orlando (1928), la biographie fantastique de son amie Vita Sackville-West, suivie, quelques années plus tard, par Flush, qui décrit la vie de Elizabeth Barret Browning à travers son chien. Au contraire, sa biographie de Roger Fry ne sera pas fictionnelle. Pourquoi Woolf choisit-elle de fictionnaliser ses biographies de femmes ? Cet article avance l'argument que, tout comme le choix assez peu conventionnel de rester à la marge pour mieux combattre l'inégalité des sexes et le militarisme, Woolf utilise la fiction en biographie comme outil politique, car cela lui permet de créer un mode de représentation alternatif. La fiction permet à Woolf de compenser le manque de visibilité de ses sujets féminins. En même temps, elle développe une stratégie capable de produire une représentation innovante et politique de ces femmes dont elle dresse le portrait.