Julia Dallaway

Provisional thesis title: The Memory Essay: Life-Writing and the Essay Form in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joan Didion

Supervisor: Professor Kate McLoughlin

Doctoral research: My research considers the literary forms that writers choose in order to represent their own memories. Although (auto)biographical texts have traditionally presented lives in the form of a "life story" or "life narrative", research across the fields of philosophy (e.g. Galen Strawson), historiography (e.g. Hayden White), and life-writing studies (e.g. Hermione Lee) warns of how the pursuit of narrative coherence in life-writing tends to end up producing inauthentic and reductive representations. In light of these concerns, I present the literary essay (from the French verb essayer, "to attempt") as an alternative life-writing form that—being characteristically tentative, associative, and partial—might allow a person's memories to be depicted with more realistic complexity. In particular, my thesis pays attention to twentieth-century women writers who turn to the essay form for the purpose of life-writing, including Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), and Joan Didion (1934–2021).

I have presented my research at national and international conferences, including the International Auto/Biography Association Europe Conference (University of Warsaw), the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Lamar University, Texas), the British Association for Modernist Studies Conference (University of Leeds), the Elizabeth Bowen Society Conference (University of Bedfordshire), the Oxford English Graduate Conference and the Modern and Contemporary Literature Graduate Forum (both Oxford's Faculty of English), and the Franks Society Talks (Worcester College, Oxford).

Regarding publications, I have essays forthcoming in the edited collections Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press) and Tramp Press: Ireland's Maverick Publisher (Bucknell University Press). I also write book reviews, including for Critical Quarterly and the Oxonian Review. For links to my creative work, see my personal website.

I have experience of teaching Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910–Present) and FHS Paper 6 (Writing Lives), and have supervised undergraduate dissertations. I have also taught Introduction to Contemporary English Literature as part of the Visiting Student Programme at Worcester College. (Unfortunately, I am unable to accept dissertation supervisees or visiting students for the academic year 2024-25.)

In 2021, I was on the judging panel for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

You can find me on Twitter @DallawayJulia.

Publications:

• '"How Mysterious, Our Instincts": The Psychoanalytic Feminism of Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat'. In Tramp Press: Ireland's Maverick Publisher, edited by Mary Burke and Tara Harney-Mahajan. Bucknell University Press, forthcoming.
• '"Floating Incidents": The Ethics of the Essay as Life-Writing Form in "A Sketch of the Past"'. In Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Amy C. Smith. Clemson University Press, forthcoming 2024.
• 'The Art of Precarity'. Review of The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin, by Nonia Williams. Critical Quarterly vol. 66, no. 2 (July 2024): 126–32.

Research interests: life-writing, the essay form, women's writing, narratology, modernism, feminist theory, literature and philosophy, literature and religion, mysticism, cultural history