Virginia Woolf and the Pyrocene: Fire ecologies in The Waves and The Years

This article explores how Woolf’s writing reflects on and reimagines hu- manity’s relationship with fire. Drawing on the work of environmental historian Ste- phen J. Pyne—who in coining the term ‘Pyrocene’ places human-fire alliance at the center of the Anthropocene narrative—it argues that flame is embedded in Woolf’s modernist ecological aesthetic. My primary focus is on The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937), where fire is variously associated with storytelling and communality, reverie and ritual, bodily experience and extreme weather. In doing so, the article considers Woolf’s allusions to the fiery worlds of Dante’s Inferno, Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and James Frazer’s anthropological studies, as well as news- paper reports of a record-breaking heatwave and its impact on people, animals, and the environment. I suggest that to read Woolf and/in the Pyrocene is to attend to the capacious and transformative but also ambiguous and contradictory significance of her modernist fire ecologies. Rather than simply representing phases of the Pyrocene, Woolf presents her readers with pyro-scenes in which the creative potential of flame and language combine to ignite fire-centric stories.