The memory essay: life-writing and the essay form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion

Thesis

Despite increased critical interest in both life-writing and the essay form over recent decades, there has been a surprising paucity of attention to the overlap. Among the few studies that do exist, critics use non-standardised terms including autobiographical essay, personal essay, and familiar essay. In response, this thesis offers the first sustained study of the essay as a distinct life-writing form. It proposes a new critical term, the memory essay, to describe memoirs that take the form of essays, with reference to the distinction between autobiography and memoir. This new term highlights the essay’s affordances for representing memory, due to numerous affinities between the formal qualities of the essay and the mental qualities of memory.

I argue that the twentieth century saw the emergence of the memory essay as a prevalent life-writing form. While psychologists began to conceive of memory as episodic, associative, constructive, and place-based, writers widely questioned the autobiographical convention of linear, continuous narrative. I offer three case studies of Anglophone essayists from across the century—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), and Joan Didion (1934–2021)—who each turned to the essay for the purposes of life-writing, using its formal techniques to attempt a more accurate representation of memory. In each case, I use the term memory essay to read texts usually considered as essays alongside those typically viewed as memoirs, focalising my analysis around a dominant metaphor for memory in the writer’s work.

This thesis contributes to contemporary debates in life-writing studies, essay studies, and memory studies. It reveals the memory essay as a life-writing form that, while adapting itself to changing cultural perceptions of memory, is consistently governed by visuals and topographical places rather than temporality. I suggest that the memory essay offered women writers, in particular, a way into the life-writing canon.

Authors: Dallaway, J

• Alternative title: The memory essay
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-go2kz1mr4
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Elizabeth Bowen; Joan Didion; life-writing; literary memory studies; memory; Virginia Woolf; essay; memoir; literary essay
• Subjects: Memory in literature; Literature; English