Introduction: Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter

The introduction opens with a brief interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s first short story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917), which positions Woolf’s investment in materiality as significant to her narrative experiments and suggests that Woolf thinks not only about objects, things and matter but that she thinks with them. This opening induction frames the chapter and the book as a whole, as the contributors’ close attention to Woolf’s materiality and her materials (both fictional and literal) echoes Woolf’s concentration on the mark and the creative potential it affords for thinking otherwise. The introduction also concisely overviews the theoretical approaches to objects, things and matter – object-oriented ontology, thing theory and new materialism; identifies patterns in past scholarship on Woolf and materiality; and summarizes the chapters included in each of the volume’s three parts: Approaches to Objects, Things and Matter in Woolf; Object Experiments with Woolf; and A Collection of Woolfian Things.