The Woolf Girl: A Mother–Daughter Story with Virginia Woolf and Lidia Yuknavitch

This chapter uses the theoretical lens of Girls’ Studies and contemporary approaches to biofiction to analyse the intergenerational dynamic within and between the work of Virginia Woolf and Lidia Yuknavitch. Dwelling on the metaphor of Woolf as the foremother of contemporary women and femme writers, this chapter reads Woolf’s autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past” in conversation with Yuknavitch’s memoir A Chronology of Water and Woolf’s Three Guineas with Yuknavitch’s novel The Small Backs of Children. Yuknavitch’s experimental work in autobiography and fiction continues Woolf’s unfinished project of representing the intersections of bodies, violence and creativity, especially as experienced by children and adolescents.