A Turkish Dialogue: Erich Auerbach, Mina Urgan and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

The only monograph on Virginia Woolf in Turkish was written by a woman no less exceptional than Woolf herself: Mina Urgan (1915–2000), a prominent literary critic, a public intellectual, an activist and academic. Urgan’s Virginia Woolf is not a paean to a literary genius but an exploration of Woolf’s complex work through her exceptional life. There is much in Urgan’s portrait of Woolf that can be traced back to her life, a trait that marks the writing of biography. The monograph provides clues to Urgan’s own life and to her thoughts on gender, mental stability and what makes good writing. Perhaps more unusually, it also includes a nod to Erich Auerbach, her teacher at Istanbul University, and one of the founding figures of comparative literature as a discipline. Taking the relationality of identity as a cue, this chapter introduces Mina Urgan’s biography of Virginia Woolf to suggest a dialogue between two women whose lives are shaped by the intellectual perseverance that Woolf commends in Three Guineas: ‘never cease from thinking - what is this "civilization" in which we find our selves? (Woolf 2000: 60).