Emmanuelle Favier, author of “Virginia” (Albin Michel, August 2019), a romanticized biography of the childhood and adolescence of Virginia Woolf, evokes with Charles Dantzig, novelist and essayist, the extraordinary destiny of this English writer now iconic.
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In a poetic text conceived as a novel, Emmanuelle Favier looks back on the early years of Virginia before she becomes Woolf and works to pinpoint what already, in the child, stammers from the immense writer who will be born years later. She is accompanied by Charles Dantzig, also in love with Virginia Woolf, to whom he grants a notice and several references in his Selfish Dictionary of World Literature.
The meeting with Virginia Woolf came late. I had a very masculine literary pantheon. I needed to be a novelist myself to meet this brilliant novelist and to go a long way with the young Virginia Stephens.
(Emmanuelle Favier)
Emmanuelle Favier is working on the first photos of Virginia Woolf from the National portrait Gallery and strives to bring them to life. Virginia is described with a rare sensitivity and obvious dispositions for writing, but the era appears as the main obstacle to the expression of her talent.
As a woman writer, we have, with Virginia Woolf, the image of a big sister who accompanies us on the path of writing. There is a closeness that one can find in his literature and the feeling that it is addressed to us, to our ear.
(Virginia Woolf)
The 19th century was a hairy century, a century of men who produced a lot of male literature and very little female literature. I cannot speak on behalf of women but she speaks particularly to women today because she has experienced violence with grace and showing that we can react.
(Charles Dantzig)
Virginia shows an acuity on the world around her, which constitutes violence but which, under the pen of Emmanuelle Favier, made her a potential writer from her early childhood.
How we surpass ourselves, we appropriate, we alchimize all these sufferings, these mournings, these incest. Writing appeared very early on as a survival mechanism. The fact that his father opened his library to him without authorizing him to teach him allowed him to develop a very personal style. It was a great frustration but, ultimately, she was saved from college.
(Emmanuelle Favier)
Emmanuelle Favier and Charles Dantzig both use the image of water, the aquatic metaphor, to describe the writing and suffering of Virginia Woolf.
When you enter Virginia Woolf, it is a dive into an aquatic world where time is abolished.
(Charles Dantzig)