My Own Ghost Met Me: Woolf’s 1930s Photographs, Death and Freud’s Acropolis

In this book chapter, originally presented as a plenary paper at the 14th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf ‘Back to Bloomsbury’. June 23rd to 26th held at the Institute of English Studies University of London, Professor Humm discusses Virginia Woolf’s 1930s photographs in relation to visits to the Acropolis made by both Woolf in the 1930s and 1906, and by Freud in 1904. Freud revisits the Acropolis in his mind in the 1930s in a long letter to Rolland. The chapter argues that Woolf’s obsession with death in this period and Freud’s analysis of his own fears in the letter have much in common; and that her photographs were for Woolf, as Freud’s letter was for him, a technology of memory, which Woolf uses to counter fears of death and loss of identity