'This fountain and spray of life': Virginia Woolf's polysemous influence on three generations of women novelists

Within English studies perhaps no other twentieth-century literary figure has had such a diverse and politically significant influence on the writing of those authors who succeed her as Virginia Woolf. Because of the breadth of Woolf studies in the last thirty years, much current scholarship on women's literature presumes Woolf's influence. However, no book-length study systematically assesses the nature and extent of her literary influence by investigating Woolf's particular effects on specific women writers. This study merges the traditions of feminist literary history and intertextuality studies, investigating intersections between Woolf and her heirs. I argue that Woolf's successors appropriate her texts through parody, pastiche, allusion, and imitation. Exploring selected writers of realism, fantasy, satire, political fiction, and metafiction, I focus on the diverse character of Woolf's influence on three generations of “contemporary” (post-war) British women writers, all of whom explicitly acknowledge Woolf's influence. Woolf's immediate successors, Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann, are treated in chapter one; Nadine Gordimer in chapter two; and A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble in chapter three. In conclusion I treat Woolf's influence on the texts of Jeanette Winterson. Claiming Woolf as her dominant muse, Winterson opens the way to further exploration of Woolf's influence on a new generation of British writers.