Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy

Revisiting Virginia Woolfs most experimental novels, Elsa Hgberg explores how Woolfs writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Hgbergs readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolfs introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism. Engaging contemporary theory particularly the more recent works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva it reads Woolf as a writer and ethical thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to critical debates around intimacy, affect, violence and vulnerability in our own time.