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Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 11, 2020 • ( 1 )

In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), she illustrated that a woman with Shakespeare’s faculties would have been denied the opportunities that Shakespeare enjoyed. Examining the careers and works of woman authors like Aphra Behn , Jane Austen , George Eliot and the Bronte sisters, Woolf argued that the patriarchal education system and reading practices condition (or “interpellate,” to use an Althusserian term) women to read from men’s point of view, and make them internalise the aesthetics and literary values created/ adopted by male authors and critics within the patriarchal system — wherein, these values, although male centered are assumed and promoted as universal.

It is in this polemical work, that Woolf suggested that language is gendered, thus inaugurating the language debate, and argued that the woman author, having no other language at her command, is forced to use the sexist/ masculine language. Dale Spender (in her Man Made Language ) as well as the French Feminists primarily investigated the gendered nature of language- Helene Cixous ( Ecriture Feminine ), Julia Kristeva ( chora , semiotic language ) and Luce lrigaray ( Écriture féminine ).

Woolf also realized the need for a narrative form to capture the fluid, incoherent female experiences that defy order and rationality; and hence her employment of the stream-of-consciousness technique in her novels, capturing the lives of Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay and so on. Inspired by the psychological theories of Carl Jung , Woolf also proposed the concept of the androgynous creative mind, which she fictionalised through Orlando , in an attempt to go beyond the male/female binary. She believed that the best artists were always a combination of the man and the woman or “woman-manly” or “man-womanly”.

Woolf was already connecting feminism to anti-fascism in A Room of One’s Own , which addresses in some detail the relations between politics and aesthetics. The book is based on lectures Woolf gave to women students at Cambridge, but its innovatory style makes it read in places like a novel, blurring boundaries between criticism and fiction. It is regarded as the first modern primer for feminist literary criticism, not least because it is also a source of many, often conflicting, theoretical positions. The title alone has had enormous impact as cultural shorthand for a modern feminist agenda. Woolf ’s room metaphor not only signifies the declaration of political and cultural space for women, private and public, but the intrusion of women into spaces previously considered the spheres of men. A Room of One’s Own is not so much about retreating into a private feminine space as about interruptions, trespassing and the breaching of boundaries (Kamuf, 1982: 17). It oscillates on many thresholds, performing numerous contradictory turns of argument (Allen, 1999). But it remains a readable and accessible work, partly because of its playful fictional style: the narrator adopts a number of fictional personae and sets out her argument as if it were a story. In this reader-friendly manner some complicated critical and theoretical issues are introduced. Many works of criticism, interpretation and theory have developed from Woolf’s original points in A Room of One’s Own , and many critics have pointed up the continuing relevance of the book, not least because of its open construction and resistance to intellectual closure (Stimpson, 1992: 164; Laura Marcus, 2000: 241). Its playful narrative strategies have divided feminist responses, most notably prompting Elaine Showalter’s disapproval (Showalter, 1977: 282). Toril Moi’s counter to Showalter’s critique forms the basis of her classic introduction to French feminist theory, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), in which Woolf’s textual playfulness is shown to anticipate the deconstructive and post-Lacanian theories of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

Virginia_Woolf/George Charles Beresford

Although much revised and expanded, the final version of A Room of One’s Own retains the original lectures’ sense of a woman speaking to women. A significant element of Woolf ’s experimental fictional narrative strategy is her use of shifting narrative personae to voice the argument. She anticipates recent theoretical concerns with the constitution of gender and subjectivity in language in her opening declaration that ‘ ‘‘I’’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being . . . (callme Mary Beton, Mary Seton,Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance)’ (Woolf, 1929: 5). And A Room of One’s Own is written in the voice of at least one of these Mary figures, who are to be found in the Scottish ballad ‘The Four Marys’. Much of the argument is ventriloquised through the voice of Woolf’s own version of ‘Mary Beton’. In the course of the book this Mary encounters new versions of the other Marys – Mary Seton has become a student at ‘Fernham’ college, and Mary Carmichael an aspiring novelist – and it has been suggested that Woolf ’s opening and closing remarks may be in the voice of Mary Hamilton (the narrator of the ballad). The multi-vocal, citational A Room of One’s Own is full of quotations from other texts too. The allusion to the Scottish ballad feeds a subtext in Woolf’s argument concerning the suppression of the role of motherhood – Mary Hamilton sings the ballad from the gallows where she is to be hanged for infanticide. (Marie Carmichael, furthermore, is the nom de plume of contraceptive activist Marie Stopes who published a novel, Love’s Creation , in 1928.)

The main argument of A Room of One’s Own , which was entitled ‘Women and Fiction’ in earlier drafts, is that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (1929: 4). This is a materialist argument that, paradoxically, seems to differ from Woolf’s apparent disdain for the ‘materialism’ of the Edwardian novelists recorded in her key essays on modernist aesthetics, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919; 1925) and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924). The narrator of A Room of One’s Own begins by telling of her experience of visiting an Oxbridge college where she was refused access to the library because of her gender. She compares in some detail the splendid opulence of her lunch at a men’s college with the austerity of her dinner at a more recently established women’s college (Fernham). This account is the foundation for the book’s main, materialist, argument: ‘intellectual freedom depends upon material things’ (1929: 141). The categorisation of middle-class women like herself with the working classes may seem problematic, but in A Room of One’s Own Woolf proposes that women be understood as a separate class altogether, equating their plight with the working classes because of their material poverty, even among the middle and upper classes (1929: 73–4).

Woolf’s image of the spider’s web, which she uses as her simile for the material basis of literary production, has become known in literary criticism as ‘Virginia’s web’. It is conceived in the passage where the narrator of A Room of One’s Own begins to consider the apparent dearth of literature by women in the Elizabethan period:

fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (1929: 62–3)

According to this analysis, literary materialism may be understood in several different ways. To begin with, the materiality of writing itself is acknowledged: it is physically made, and not divinely given or unearthly and transcendent. Woolf seems to be attempting to demystify the solitary, romantic figure of the (male) poet or author as mystically singled out, or divinely elected. But the idea that a piece of writing is a material object is also connected to a strand of modernist aesthetics concerned with the text as self-reflexive object, and to a more general sense of the concreteness of words, spoken or printed. Woolf’s spider’s web also suggests, furthermore, that writing is a bodily process, physically produced. The observation that writing is ‘the work of suffering human beings’ suggests that literature is produced as compensation for, or in protest against, existential pain and material lack. Finally, in proposing writing as ‘attached to grossly material things’, Woolf is delineating a model of literature as grounded in the ‘real world’, that is in the realms of historical, political and social experience. Such a position has been interpreted as broadly Marxist, but although Woolf ’s historical materialism may ‘gladden the heart of a contemporary Marxist feminist literary critic’, as Miche`le Barrett has noted, elsewhere Woolf, in typically contradictory fashion, ‘retains the notion that in the correct conditions art may be totally divorced from economic, political or ideological constraints’ (Barrett, 1979: 17, 23). Yet perhaps Woolf’s feminist ideal is in fact for women’s writing to attain, not total divorce from material constraints, but only the near-imperceptibility of the attachment of Shakespeare’s plays to the material world, which ‘seem to hang there complete by themselves’ but are nevertheless ‘still attached to life at all four corners’.

As well as underlining the material basis for women’s achieving the status of writing subjects, A Room of One’s Own also addresses the status of women as readers, and raises interesting questions about gender and subjectivity in connection with the gender semantics of the first person. After looking at the difference between men’s and women’s experiences of University, the narrator of A Room of One’s Own visits the British Museum where she researches ‘Women and Poverty’ under an edifice of patriarchal texts, concluding that women ‘have served all these centuries as looking glasses . . . reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size’ (Woolf, 1929: 45). Here Woolf touches upon the forced, subordinate complicity of women in the construction of the patriarchal subject. Later in the book, Woolf offers a more explicit model of this when she describes the difficulties for a woman reader encountering the first person pronoun in the novels of ‘Mr A’: ‘a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’ . . . Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I’ . . . In the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No it is a woman’ (1929: 130). For a man to write ‘I’ seems to involve the positioning of a woman in its shadow, as if women are not included as writers or users of the first person singular in language. This shadowing or eliding of the feminine in the representation and construction of subjectivity not only emphasizes the alienation experienced by women readers of male-authored texts, but also suggests the linguistic difficulties for women writers in trying to express feminine subjectivity when the language they have to work with seems to have already excluded them. When the word ‘I’ appears, the argument goes, it is always and already signifying a masculine self.

The narrator of A Room of One’s Own discovers that language, and specifically literary language, is not only capable of excluding women as its signified meaning, but also uses concepts of the feminine itself as signs. Considering both women in history and woman as sign, Woolf’s narrator points out that there is a significant discrepancy between women in the real world and ‘woman’ in the symbolic order (that is, as part of the order of signs in the aesthetic realm):

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (1929: 56)

Woolf here emphasizes not only the relatively sparse representation of women’s experience in historical records, but also the more complicated business of how the feminine is already caught up in the conventions of representation itself. How is it possible for women to be represented at all when ‘woman’, in poetry and fiction, is already a sign for something else? In these terms, ‘woman’ is a signifier in patriarchal discourse, functioning as part of the symbolic order, and what is signified by such signs is certainly not the lived, historical and material experience of real women. Woolf understands that this ‘odd monster’ derived from history and poetry, this ‘worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping suet’, has ‘no existence in fact’ (1929: 56).

Woolf converts this dual image to a positive emblem for feminist writing, by thinking ‘poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact – that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either – that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually’ (1929: 56–7). This dualistic model, combining prose and poetry, fact and imagination is also central to Woolf ’s modernist aesthetic, encapsulated in the term ‘granite and rainbow’, which renders in narrative both the exterior, objective and factual (‘granite’), and the interior, subjective experience and consciousness (‘rainbow’). The modernist technique of ‘Free Indirect Discourse’ practised and developed by Woolf allows for this play between the objective and subjective, between third person and first person narrative.

A Room of One’s Own can be confusing because it puts forward contradictory sets of arguments, not least Woolf’s much-cited passage on androgyny, which has been influential on later deconstructive theories of gender. Her narrator declares: ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex’ (1929: 136) and a model of writerly androgyny is put forward, derived from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work:

one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman . . . Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be accomplished. (1929: 136)

Shakespeare, the poet playwright, is Woolf ’s ideal androgynous writer. She lists others – all men – who have also achieved androgyny (Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, and Proust – the only contemporary). But if the ideal is for both women and men to achieve androgyny, elsewhere A Room of One’s Own puts the case for finding a language that is gendered – one appropriate for women to use when writing about women.

One of the most controversial of Woolf ’s speculations in A Room of One’s Own concerns the possibility of an inherent politics in aesthetic form, exemplified by the proposition that literary sentences are gendered. A Room of One’s Own culminates in the prophecy of a woman poet to equal or rival Shakespeare: ‘Shakespeare’s sister’. But in collectively preparing for her appearance, women writers need to develop aesthetic form in several respects. In predicting that the aspiring novelist Mary Carmichael ‘will be a poet . . . in another hundred years’ time’ (1929: 123), Mary Beton seems to be suggesting that prose must be explored and exploited in certain ways by women writers before they can be poets. She also finds fault with contemporary male writers, such as Mr A who is ‘protesting against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority’ (1929: 132). She sees this as the direct result of women’s political agitation for equality: ‘The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame’ (1929: 129). She raises further concerns about politics and aesthetics when she comments on the aspirations of the Italian Fascists for a poet worthy of fascism: ‘The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town’ (1929: 134). Yet if the extreme patriarchy of fascism cannot produce poetry because it denies a maternal line, Woolf argues that women cannot write poetry either until the historical canon of women’s writing has been uncovered and acknowledged. Nineteenth-century women writers experienced great difficulty because they lacked a female tradition: ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women’ (1929: 99). They therefore lacked literary tools suitable for expressing women’s experience. The dominant sentence at the start of the nineteenth century was ‘a man’s sentence . . . It was a sentence that was unsuited for women’s use’ (1929: 99–100).

Woolf ’s assertion here, through Mary Beton, that women must write in gendered sentence structure, that is develop a feminine syntax, and that ‘the book has somehow to be adapted to the body’ (1929: 101) seems to contradict the declaration that ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex’. She identifies the novel as ‘young enough’ to be of use to the woman writer: ‘No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself . . . and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder how a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts’ (1929: 116). Now the goal of A Room of One’s Own has shifted from women’s writing of fictional prose to poetry, the genre Woolf finds women least advanced in, while ‘poetic tragedy’ is Shakespeare’s virtuoso form and therefore the form to which ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ should aspire.Woolf ’s speculations on feminine syntax anticipate the more recent exploration of é criture féminine by French feminists such as Cixous. Woolf ’s interest in the body and bodies, in writing the body, and in the gender and positionality thereof, anticipates feminist investigations of the somatic, and has been understood as materialist, deconstructive and phenomenological (Doyle, 2001). Woolf’s interest in matters of the body also fuels the sustained critique, in A Room of One’s Own , of ‘reason’, or masculinist rationalism, as traditionally disembodied and antithetical to the (traditionally feminine) material and physical.

A Room of One’s Own is concerned not only with what form of literary language women writers use, but also with what they write about. Inevitably women themselves constitute a vital subject matter for women writers. Women writers will need new tools to represent women properly. The assertion of woman as both the writing subject and the object of writing is reinforced in several places: ‘above all, you must illumine your own soul’ (Woolf, 1929: 117), Mary Beton advises. The ‘obscure lives’ (1929: 116) of women must be recorded by women. The example supplied is Mary Carmichael’s novel which is described as exploring women’s relationships with each other. A Room of One’s Own was published shortly after the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and in the face of this Woolf flaunts a blatantly lesbian narrative: ‘if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been’ (1929: 109). Her refrain, ‘Chloe likes Olivia’, has become a critical slogan for lesbian writing. In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf makes ‘coded’ references to lesbian sexuality in her account of Chloe and Olivia’s shared ‘laboratory’ (Woolf, 1929: 109; Marcus, 1987: 152, 169), and she calls for women’s writing to explore lesbianism more openly and for the narrative tools to make this possible.

One of the most controversial and contradictory passages in A Room of One’s Own concerns Woolf’s positioning of black women. Commenting on the sexual and colonial appetites of men, the narrator concludes: ‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her’ (1929: 65). A number of feminist critics have questioned the relevance of Woolf’s feminist manifesto for the experience of black women (Walker, 1985: 2377), and have scrutinised this sentence in particular (Marcus, 2004: 24–58). In seeking to distance women from imperialist and colonial practices, Woolf disturbingly excludes black women here from the very category of women. This has become the crux of much contemporary feminist debate concerning the politics of identity. The category of women both unites and divides feminists: white middle-class feminists, it has been shown, cannot speak for the experience of all women; and reconciliation of universalism and difference remains a key issue. ‘Women – but are you not sick to death of the word?’ Woolf retorts in the closing pages of A Room of One’s Own , ‘I can assure you I am’ (Woolf, 1929: 145). The category of women is not chosen by women, it represents the space in patriarchy from which women must speak and which they struggle to redefine.

Another contradictory concept in A Room of One’s Own is ‘Shakespeare’s sister’, a figure who represents the possibility that there will one day be a woman writer to match the status of Shakespeare, who has come to personify literature itself. ‘Judith Shakespeare’ stands for the silenced woman writer or artist. But to seek to mimic the model of the individual masculine writing subject may also be considered part of a conservative feminist agenda. On the other hand, Woolf seems to defer the arrival of Shakespeare’s sister in a celebration of women’s collective literary achievement – ‘I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals’ (1929 148–9). Shakespeare’s sister is a messianic figure who ‘lives in you and in me’ (1929: 148) and who will draw ‘her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners’ (1929: 149), but has yet to appear. She may be the common writer to Woolf’s ‘common reader’ (a term she borrows from Samuel Johnson), but she has yet to ‘put on the body which she has so often laid down’ (1929: 149). A Room of One’s Own closes with this contradictory model of individual achievement and collective effort.

Barrett, Miche`le (1979), ‘Introduction’, in Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing, ed. Miche`le Barrett, London: Women’s Press. Goldman, Jane (1998), The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post- Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruber, Ruth (2005), Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, New York: Carroll & Graf. Harrison, Jane (1925), Reminiscences of a Student Life, London: Hogarth Press. Hartman, Geoffrey (1970), ‘Virginia’s Web’, in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Holtby, Winifred (1932), Virginia Woolf, London: Wishart. Kamuf, Peggy (1982), ‘Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One’s Own’, in Novel 16. Moi, Toril (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen. Showalter, Elaine (1977), A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte¨ to Lessing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stimpson, Catherine (1992), ‘Woolf’s Room, Our Project: The Building of Feminist Criticism’, in Virginia Woolf: Longman Critical Readers, ed. Rachel Bowlby, London: Longman. Woolf, Virginia (1929), A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth.

Main Source: Plain, Gill, and Susan Sellers. A History of Feminist Literary Criticism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Guide to the classics: A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s feminist call to arms

Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland

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Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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I sit at my kitchen table to write this essay, as hundreds of thousands of women have done before me. It is not my own room, but such things are still a luxury for most women today. The table will do. I am fortunate I can make a living “by my wits,” as Virginia Woolf puts it in her famous feminist treatise, A Room of One’s Own (1929).

That living enabled me to buy not only the room, but the house in which I sit at this table. It also enables me to pay for safe, reliable childcare so I can have time to write.

It is as true today, therefore, as it was almost a century ago when Woolf wrote it, that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” — indeed, write anything at all.

Still, Woolf’s argument, as powerful and influential as it was then — and continues to be — is limited by certain assumptions when considered from a contemporary feminist perspective.

Woolf’s book-length essay began as a series of lectures delivered to female students at the University of Cambridge in 1928. Its central feminist premise — that women writer’s voices have been silenced through history and they need to fight for economic equality to be fully heard — has become so culturally pervasive as to enter the popular lexicon.

Julia Gillard’s A Podcast of One’s Own , takes its lead from the essay, as does Anonymous Was a Woman , a prominent arts funding body based in New York.

Even the Bechdel-Wallace test , measuring the success of a narrative according to whether it features at least two named women conversing about something other than a man, can be seen to descend from the “Chloe liked Olivia” section of Woolf’s book. In this section, the hypothetical characters of Chloe and Olivia share a laboratory, care for their children, and have conversations about their work, rather than about a man.

Woolf’s identification of women as a poorly paid underclass still holds relevance today, given the gender pay gap. As does her emphasis on the hierarchy of value placed on men’s writing compared to women’s (which has led to the establishment of awards such as the Stella Prize ).

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Invisible women

In her book, Woolf surveys the history of literature, identifying a range of important and forgotten women writers, including novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes, and playwright Aphra Behn .

In doing so, she establishes a new model of literary heritage that acknowledges not only those women who succeeded, but those who were made invisible: either prevented from working due to their sex, or simply cast aside by the value systems of patriarchal culture.

Read more: Friday essay: George Eliot 200 years on - a scandalous life, a brilliant mind and a huge literary legacy

To illustrate her point, she creates Judith, an imaginary sister of the playwright Shakespeare.

What if such a woman had shared her brother’s talents and was as adventurous, “as agog to see the world” as he was? Would she have had the freedom, support and confidence to write plays? Tragically, she argues, such a woman would likely have been silenced — ultimately choosing suicide over an unfulfilled life of domestic servitude and abuse.

In her short, passionate book, Woolf examines women’s letter writing, showing how it can illustrate women’s aptitude for writing, yet also the way in which women were cramped and suppressed by social expectations.

She also makes clear that the lack of an identifiable matrilineal literary heritage works to impede women’s ability to write.

Indeed, the establishment of those major women writers in the 18th and 19th centuries (George Eliot, the Brontes et al), when “the middle-class woman began to write” is, Woolf argues, a moment in history “of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses”.

Male critics such as T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom have identified a (male) writer’s relation to his precursors as necessary for his own literary production. But how, Woolf asks, is a woman to write if she has no model to look back on or respond to? If we are women, she wrote, “we think back through our mothers”.

Read more: #ThanksforTyping: the women behind famous male writers

Her argument inspired later feminist revisionist work of literary critics like Elaine Showalter , Sandra K. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who sought to restore the reputation of forgotten women writers and turn critical attention to women’s writing as a field worthy of dedicated study.

All too often in history, Woolf asserts, “Woman” is simply the object of the literary text — either the adored, voiceless beauty to whom the sonnet is dedicated or reflecting back the glow of man himself.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

A Room of One’s Own returns that authority to both the woman writer and the imagined female reader whom she addresses.

Stream of consciousness

A Room of One’s Own also demonstrates several aspects of Woolf’s modernism. The early sections demonstrate her virtuoso stream of consciousness technique. She ruminates on women’s position in, and relation to, fiction while wandering through the university campus, driving through country lanes, and dawdling over a leisurely, solo lunch.

Critically, she employs telling patriarchal interruptions to that flow of thought.

A beadle waves his arms in exasperation as she walks on a private patch of grass. A less-than-satisfactory dinner is served to the women’s college. A “deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman” turns her away from the library. These interruptions show the frequent disruption to the work of a woman without a room.

This is the lesson also imparted in Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse where artist Lily Briscoe must shed the overbearing influence of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, a couple who symbolise Victorian culture, if she is to “have her vision”. The flights and flow of modernist technique are not possible without the time and space to write and think for herself.

A Room of One’s Own has been crucial to the feminist movement and women’s literary studies. But it is not without problems. Woolf admits her good fortune in inheriting £500 a year from an aunt.

Indeed her purse now “breed(s) ten-shilling notes automatically”.

Part of the purpose of the essay is to encourage women to make their living through writing.

But Woolf seems to lack an awareness of her own privilege and how much harder it is for most women to fund their own artistic freedom. It is easy for her to advise against “doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning”.

In her book, Woolf also criticises the “awkward break” in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), in which Bronte’s own voice interrupts the narrator’s in a passionate protest against the treatment of women.

Here, Woolf shows little tolerance for emotion, which has historically often been dismissed as hysteria when it comes to women discussing politics.

A Room of One’s Own ends with an injunction to work for the coming of Shakespeare’s sister, that woman forgotten by history. “So to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile”.

Such a woman author must have her vision, even if her work will be “stored in attics” rather than publicly exhibited.

The room and the money are the ideal, we come to see, but even without them the woman writer must write, must think, in anticipation of a future for her daughter-artists to come.

An adaptation of A Room of One’s Own is currently at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre.

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• Women's writing

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A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s best-known work of non-fiction. Although she would write numerous other essays, including a little-known sequel to A Room of One’s Own , it is this 1929 essay – originally delivered as several lectures at the University of Cambridge – which remains Woolf’s most famous statement about the relationship between gender and writing.

Is A Room of One’s Own a ‘feminist manifesto’ or a work of literary criticism? In a sense, it’s a bit of both, as we will see. Before we offer an analysis of Woolf’s argument, however, it might be worth breaking down what her argument actually is . You can read the essay in full here .

A Room of One’s Own : summary

Woolf’s essay is split into six chapters. She begins by making what she describes as a ‘minor point’, which explains the title of her essay: ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ She goes on to specify that an inheritance of five hundred pounds a year – which would give a woman financial independence – is more important than women getting the vote (women had only attained completely equal suffrage to men in 1928, the same year that Woolf delivered her lectures).

Woolf adopts a fictional persona named ‘Mary Beton’, and addresses her audience (and readers) using this identity. This name has its roots in an old Scottish ballad usually known as either ‘Mary Hamilton’ or ‘The Four Marys’ and concerns Mary Hamilton, a lady-in-waiting to a Queen of Scotland. Mary falls pregnant by the King, but kills the baby and is later sentenced to be executed for her crime. ‘Mary Beton’ is one of the other three Marys in the ballad.

Woolf considers the ways in which women have been shut out from social and political institutions throughout history, illustrating her argument by observing that she, as a woman, would not be able to gain access to a manuscript kept within an all-male college at ‘Oxbridge’ (a rhetorical hybrid of Oxford and Cambridge; Woolf originally delivered A Room of One’s Own to the students of one of the colleges for women which had recently been founded at Cambridge, but these female students were still forbidden to go to certain spaces within all-male colleges at the university).

Next, Woolf turns her attention to what men have said about women in writing, and gets the distinct impression that men – who have a vested interest in retaining the upper hand when it comes to literature and education – portray women in certain ways in order to keep them as, effectively, second-class citizens.

Woolf’s next move is to consider what women themselves have written. It is at this point in A Room of One’s Own that Woolf invents a (fictional) sister to Shakespeare, whom Woolf (perhaps recalling the name of Shakespeare’s own daughter) calls ‘Judith Shakespeare’. (Incidentally, Woolf’s invention of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ inspired a song by The Smiths of that name and the name of a female pop duo .)

Woolf invites us to imagine that this imaginary sister of William Shakespeare was born with the same genius, the same potential to become a great writer as her brother. But she is shut off from the opportunities her brother enjoys: grammar-school education, the chance to become an actor in London, the opportunity to earn a living in the Elizabethan theatre.

Instead, ‘Judith Shakespeare’ would find the doors to these institutions closed in her face, purely because she was born a woman. Woolf’s point is made in response to people who claim that a woman writer as great as Shakespeare has never been born; this claim misses the important fact that great writers are made as well as born, and few women in Shakespeare’s time enjoyed the opportunities men like Shakespeare had.

Woolf’s ‘Judith’ is seduced by an actor-manager in the London playhouses, she falls pregnant, and takes her own life in poverty and misery.

Woolf then returns to a survey of what women’s writing does exist, considering such authors as Jane Austen and Emily Brontë (both of whom she admires), as well as Aphra Behn, the first professional female author in England, whom Woolf argues should be praised by all women for showing that the professional woman writer could become a reality.

Behn, writing in the seventeenth century, was an important breakthrough for all women ‘for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ Earlier women writers were too constrained by their insecurity – as women writing in a male-dominated literary world – and this leads to a ‘flaw’ in their work.

But nineteenth-century novelists like Austen and George Eliot were ‘trained’ in social observation, and this enabled them to write novels about the world she knew:

Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels.

But even this led to limitations: Emily Brontë’s genius was better-suited to poetic plays than to novels, while George Eliot would have made full use of her talents as a biographer and historian rather than as a novelist. So even here, women had to bend their talents into a socially acceptable form, and at the time this meant writing novels.

Woolf contrasts these nineteenth-century women novelists with women novelists of today (i.e., the 1920s). She discusses a recent novel, Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael. (Both the novel and the writer are fictional, invented by Woolf for the purpose of her argument.) In this novel, she finds some quietly revolutionary details, including the depiction of friendship between women , where novels had previously viewed women only in relation to men (e.g., as wives, daughters, friends, or mothers).

Woolf concludes by arguing that in fact, the ideal writer should be neither narrowly ‘male’ or ‘female’ but instead should strive to be emotionally and psychologically androgynous in their approach to gender. In other words, writers should write with an understanding of both masculinity and femininity, rather than writing ‘merely’ as a woman or as a man. This will allow writers to encompass the full range of human emotion and experience.

A Room of One’s Own : analysis

Woolf’s essay, although a work of non-fiction, shows the same creative flair we find in her fiction: her adoption of the Mary Beton persona, her beginning her essay mid-flow with the word ‘But’, and her imaginative weaving of anecdote and narrative into her ‘argument’ all, in one sense, enact the two-sided or ‘androgynous’ approach to writing which, she concludes, all authors should strive for.

A Room of One’s Own is both rational, linear argument and meandering storytelling; both deadly serious and whimsically funny; both radically provocative and, in some respects, quietly conservative.

Throughout, Woolf pays particular attention to not just the social constraints on women’s lives but the material ones. This is why the line which provides her essay with its title – ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – is central to her thesis.

‘Judith Shakespeare’, William Shakespeare’s imagined sister, would never have become a great writer because the financial arrangements for women were not focused on educating them so that they could become breadwinners for their families, but on preparing them for marriage and motherhood. Their lives were structured around marriage as the most important economic and material event in their lives, for it was by becoming a man’s wife that a woman would attain financial security.

Such a woman, at least until the late nineteenth century when the Married Women’s Property Act came into English law, would usually have neither ‘a room of her own’ (because the rooms in which she would spend her time, such as the kitchen, bedroom, and nursery, were designed for domestic activities) nor money (because the wife’s wealth and property would, technically, belong to her husband).

Because of this strong focus on the material limitations on women, which in turn prevent them from gaining the experience, the education, or the means required to become great writers, A Room of One’s Own is often described as a ‘feminist’ work. This label is largely accurate, although it should be noted that Woolf’s opinion about women’s writing diverges somewhat from that of many other feminist writers and critics.

In particular, Woolf’s suggestion that writers should strive to be ‘androgynous’ has attracted criticism from later feminist critics because it denies the idea that ‘women’s writing’ and ‘women’s experience’ are distinct and separate from men’s. If women truly are treated as inferior subjects in a patriarchal society, then surely their experience of that society is markedly different from men’s, and they need what Elaine Showalter called ‘a literature of their own’ as well as a room of their own?

Later feminist thinkers, such as the French theorist Hélène Cixous, have suggested there is a feminine writing ( écriture feminine ) which stands as an alternative to a more ‘masculine’ kind of writing: where male writing is about constructing a reality out of solid, materialist details, feminine writing (and much modernist writing, including Woolf’s fiction, is ‘feminine’ in this way) is about the ‘spiritual’ or psychological aspects of everyday living, the daydreams and gaps, the seemingly ‘unimportant’ moments we experience in our day-to-day lives. It is also more meandering, less teleological or concerned with an end-point (marriage, death, resolution), than traditional male writing.

Given how much of Woolf’s fiction is written in this way and might therefore be described as écriture feminine , one wonders how far her argument in A Room of One’s Own is borne out by her own fiction.

Perhaps the answer lies in the novel Woolf had published shortly before she began writing A Room of One’s Own : her 1928 novel Orlando , in which the heroine changes gender throughout the novel as she journeys through three centuries of history. Indeed, if one wished to analyse one work of fiction by Woolf alongside A Room of One’s Own , Orlando might be the ideal choice.

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Presented by the family of Eleanor Chilton Agar ’22 Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College

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Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer

She was a great observer of everyday life..

Virginia Woolf, in one of the more lively and often-seen photos of her from the 1930s.

HIP / Art Resource, NY

Virginia Woolf, that great lover of language, would surely be amused to know that, some seven decades after her death, she endures most vividly in popular culture as a pun—within the title of Edward Albee’s celebrated drama,  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  In Albee’s play, a troubled college professor and his equally pained wife taunt each other by singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?,” substituting the iconic British writer’s name for that of the fairy-tale villain.

The Woolf reference seems to have no larger meaning, but, perhaps inadvertently, it gives a note of authenticity to the play’s campus setting. Woolf’s experimental novels are much discussed within academia, and her pioneering feminism has given her a special place in women’s studies programs across the country.

It’s a reputation that runs the risk of pigeonholing Woolf as a “women’s writer” and, as a frequent subject of literary theory, the author of books meant to be studied rather than enjoyed. But, in her prose, Woolf is one of the great pleasure-givers of modern literature, and her appeal transcends gender. Just ask Michael Cunningham, author of  The Hours , the popular and critically acclaimed novel inspired by Woolf’s classic fictional work,  Mrs. Dalloway .

“I read  Mrs. Dalloway  for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school,” Cunningham told readers of the  Guardian  newspaper in 2011. “I was a bit of a slacker, not at all the sort of kid who’d pick up a book like that on my own (it was not, I assure you, part of the curriculum at my slacker-ish school in Los Angeles). I read it in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who was reading it at the time. I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was.”

Cunningham didn’t really understand all of the themes of  Dalloway  when he first read it, and he didn’t, alas, get the girl who had inspired him to pick up Woolf’s novel. But he fell in love with Woolf’s style. “I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences,” Cunningham recalled. “I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.”

Woolf’s example helped drive Cunningham to become a writer himself. His novel  The Hours  essentially retells  Dalloway  as a story within a story, alternating between a variation of Woolf’s original narrative and a fictional speculation on Woolf herself. Cunningham’s 1998 novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, then was adapted into a 2002 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf.

“I feel certain she’d have disliked the book—she was a ferocious critic,” Cunningham said of Woolf, who died in 1941. “She’d probably have had reservations about the film as well, though I like to think that it would have pleased her to see herself played by a beautiful Hollywood movie star.”

Kidman created a buzz for the movie by donning a false nose to mute her matinee-perfect face, evoking Woolf as a woman whom family friend Nigel Nicolson once described as “always beautiful but never pretty.”

Woolf, a seminal figure in feminist thought, would probably not have been surprised that a big-screen treatment of her life would spark so much talk about how she  looked  rather than what she  did . But she was also keenly intent on grounding her literary themes within the world of sensation and physicality, so maybe there’s some value, while considering her ideas, in also remembering what it was like to see and hear her.

We know her best in profile. Many pictures of Woolf show her glancing off to the side, like the figure on a coin. The most notable exception is a 1939 photograph by Gisele Freund in which Woolf peers directly into the camera. Woolf hated the photograph—perhaps because, on some level, she knew how deftly Freund had captured her subject. “I loathe being hoisted about on top of a stick for anyone to stare at,” lamented Woolf, who complained that Freund had broken her promise not to circulate the picture.

The most striking aspect of the photo is the intensity of Woolf’s gaze. In both her conversation and her writing, Woolf had a genius for not only looking at a subject, but looking  through  it, teasing out inferences and implications at multiple levels. It’s perhaps why the sea figures so prominently in her fiction, as a metaphor for a world in which the bright currents we see at the surface of reality reveal, upon closer inspection, a depth that goes downward for miles.

Take, for example, Woolf’s widely anthologized essay, “The Death of the Moth,” in which she notices a moth’s last moments of life, then records the experience as a window into the fragility of all existence. “The insignificant little creature now knew death,” Woolf reports.

As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. . . . The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. Oh yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

Woolf takes an equally miniaturist tack in “The Mark on the Wall,” a sketch in which the narrator studies a mark on the wall ultimately revealed as a snail. Although the premise sounds militantly boring—the literary equivalent of watching paint dry—the mark on the wall works as a locus of concentration, like a hypnotist’s watch, allowing the narrator to consider everything from Shakespeare to World War I. In its subtle tracking of how the mind free-associates and its ample use of interior monolog, the sketch serves as a keynote of sorts for the modernist literary movement that Woolf worked so tirelessly to advance.

Woolf’s penetrating sensibility took some getting used to, since she expected those around her to look at the world just as unblinkingly. She didn’t seem to have much patience for small talk. Renowned scholar Hermione Lee wrote an exhaustive 1997 biography of Woolf, yet confesses some anxiety about the prospect, were it possible, of greeting Woolf in person. “I think I would have been afraid of meeting her,” Lee wrote. “I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.”

Nicolson, the son of Woolf’s close friend and onetime lover, Vita Sackville-West, had fond memories of hunting butterflies with Woolf when he was a boy—an outing that allowed Woolf to indulge a pastime she’d enjoyed in childhood. “Virginia could tolerate children for short periods, but fled from babies,” he recalled. Nicolson also remembered Woolf’s distaste for bland generalities, even when uttered by youngsters. She once asked the young Nicolson for a detailed report on his morning, including the quality of the sun that had awakened him, and whether he had first put on his right or left sock while dressing.

“It was a lesson in observation, but it was also a hint,” he wrote many years later. “‘Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.’ It was advice that I was to remember all my life.”

Thanks to a commentary Woolf did for the BBC, we don’t have to guess what she sounded like. In the 1937 recording, widely available online, Woolf reflects on how the English language pollinates and blooms into new forms. “Royal words mate with commoners,” she tells listeners in a subversive reference to the recent abdication of King Edward VIII, who had forfeited his throne to marry American Wallis Simpson. Woolf’s voice is plummy and patrician, like an English version of Eleanor Roosevelt. Not surprising, perhaps, given Woolf’s origin in one of England’s most prominent families.

She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a celebrated essayist, editor, and public intellectual, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen. Julia was, according to Woolf biographer Panthea Reid, “revered for her beauty and wit, her self-sacrifice in nursing the ill, and her bravery in facing early widowhood.” Here’s how Woolf scholar Mark Hussey describes the blended household of Virginia’s childhood:

Her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, both previously widowed, began their marriage in 1878 with four young children: Laura (1870–1945), the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his first wife, Harriet Thackery (1840–1875); and George (1868–1934), Gerald (1870–1937), and Stella Duckworth (1869–1897), the children of Julia Prinsep (1846–1895) and Herbert Duckworth (1833–1870).

Together, Leslie and Julia had four more children: Virginia, Vanessa (1879–1961), and brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948). They all lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London.

Although Virginia’s brothers and half-brothers got university educations, Woolf was taught mostly at home—a slight that informed her thinking about how society treated women. Woolf’s family background, though, brought her within the highest circles of British cultural life.

“Woolf’s parents knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well,” Hussey notes, “counting among their close friends novelists such as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering photographer who made portraits of the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and of the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, among many others.”

Woolf also had free range over her father’s mammoth library and made the most of it. Reading was her passion—and an act, like any passion, to be engaged actively, not sampled passively. In an essay about her father, Woolf recalled his habit of reciting poetry as he walked or climbed the stairs, and the lesson she took from it seems inescapable. Early on, she learned to pair literature with vitality and movement, and that sensibility runs throughout her lively critical essays, gathered in numerous volumes, including her seminal 1925 collection,  The Common Reader . The title takes its cue from Woolf’s appeal to the kind of reader who, like her, was essentially self-educated rather than a professional scholar.

In a 1931 essay, “The Love of Reading,” Woolf describes what it’s like to encounter a literary masterpiece:

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that.

As Woolf saw it, reading was a mythic act, not simply a cozy fireside pastime. John Sparrow, reviewing Woolf’s work in the  Spectator , connected her view of reading with her broader literary life: “She writes vividly because she reads vividly.”

The Stephen family’s summers in coastal Cornwall also shaped Woolf indelibly, exposing her to the ocean as a source of literary inspiration—and creating memories she would fictionalize for her acclaimed novel,  To the Lighthouse .

Darker experiences shadowed Woolf’s youth. In writings not widely known until after her death, she described being sexually abused by her older stepbrothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Scholars have often discussed how this trauma might have complicated her mental health, which challenged her through much of her life. She had periodic nervous breakdowns, and depression ultimately claimed her life.

“Virginia was a manic-depressive, but at that time the illness had not yet been identified and so could not be treated,” notes biographer Reid. “For her, a normal mood of excitement or depression would become inexplicably magnified so that she could no longer find her sane, balanced self.”

The writing desk became her refuge. “The only way I keep afloat is by working,” Woolf confessed. “Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.”

Woolf’s mother died in 1895, and her father died in 1904. After her father’s death, Virginia and the other Stephen siblings, now grown, moved to London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood. “It was a district of London,” noted Nicolson, “that in spite of the elegance of its Georgian squares was considered . . . to be faintly decadent, the resort of raffish divorcées and indolent students, loose in its morals and behavior.”

Bloomsbury’s bohemian sensibility suited Woolf, who joined with other intellectuals in her newfound community to form the Bloomsbury Group, an informal social circle that included Woolf’s sister Vanessa, an artist; Vanessa’s husband, the art critic Clive Bell; artist Roger Fry; economist John Maynard Keynes; and writers Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster. Through Bloomsbury, Virginia also met writer Leonard Woolf, and they married in 1912.

The Bloomsbury Group had no clear philosophy, although its members shared an enthusiasm for leftish politics and a general willingness to experiment with new kinds of visual and literary art.

The Voyage Out , Woolf’s debut novel published in 1915, follows a fairly conventional form, but its plot—a female protagonist exploring her inner life through an epic voyage—suggested that what women saw and felt and heard and experienced was worthy of fiction, independent of their connection to men. In a series of lectures published in 1929 as  A Room of One’s Own , Woolf pointed to the special challenges that women faced in finding the basic necessities for writing—a small income and a quiet place to think.  A Room of One’s Own  is a formative feminist document, but critic Robert Kanigel argues that men are cheating themselves if they don’t embrace the book, too. “Woolf’s is not a Spartan, clippity-clop style such as the one Ernest Hemingway was perfecting in Paris at about the same time,” Kanigel observes. “This is leisurely, ruminative, with long paragraphs that march up and down the page, long trains of thought, and rich digressions almost hypnotic in their effect. And once trapped within the sweet, sticky filament of her web of words, one is left with no wish whatever to be set free.”

During the Woolfs’ marriage, Virginia had flirtations with women and an affair with Sackville-West, a fellow author in her social circle. Even so, Leonard and Virginia remained close, buying a small printing press and starting a publishing house, Hogarth Press, in 1917. Leonard thought it might be a soothing diversion for Virginia—perhaps the first and only case of anyone entering book publishing to advance their sanity.

If Virginia Woolf had never published a single word of her own, her role in Hogarth would have secured her a place in literary history. Thanks to the Woolfs’ tiny press, the world got its first look at the early work of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Forster. The press also published Virginia’s work, of course, including novels of increasingly daring scope. In  To the Lighthouse , a family summers along the coast, the lighthouse on the horizon suggesting an assuringly fixed universe. But, as the novel unfolds over a decade, we see the subtle working of time and how it shapes the perceptions of various characters.

A young Eudora Welty picked up  To the Lighthouse  and found her own world changed. “Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude,” Welty recalled.

The Woolfs divided their time between London, a city that Virginia loved and often wrote about, and Monk’s House, a modest country home in Sussex the couple was able to buy as Virginia’s career bloomed. Even as she welcomed literary experiment, Woolf grew wistful about the future of the traditional letter, which she saw being eclipsed by the speed of news-gathering and the telephone. Almost as if to disprove her own point, Woolf wrote as many as six letters a day.

“Virginia Woolf was a compulsive letter writer,” said English critic V. S. Pritchett. “She did not much care for the solitude she needed but lived for news, gossip, and the expectancy of talk.”

Her letters, published in several volumes, shimmer with brilliant detail. In a letter written during World War II, for example, Woolf interrupts her message to Benedict Nicolson to go outside and watch the German bombers flying over her house. “The raiders began emitting long trails of smoke,” she reports. “I wondered if a bomb was going to fall on top of me. . . . Then I dipped into your letter again.”

The war proved too much for her. Distraught by its destruction, sensing another nervous breakdown, and worried about the burden it would impose on Leonard, Virginia stuffed her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near Monk’s House on March 28, 1941.

But Cunningham says it would be a mistake to define Woolf by her death. “She did, of course, have her darker interludes,” he concedes. “But when not sunk in her periodic depressions, [she] was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.”

Her influence on subsequent generations of writers has been deep. You can see flashes of her vivid sensitivity in the work of Annie Dillard, a bit of her wry critical eye in the recent essays of Rebecca Solnit. Novelist and essayist Daphne Merkin says that despite her edges, Woolf should be remembered as “luminous and tender and generous, the person you would most like to see coming down the path.” Woolf’s legacy marks Merkin’s work, too, although there’s never been anyone else quite like Virginia Woolf.

“The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly,” novelist Katherine Anne Porter said of Woolf. “She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.”

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

NEH has funded numerous projects related to Virginia Woolf, including  four  separate  r esearch  fellowships  since 1995 and  three education seminars for schoolteachers  on Woolf’s major novels. In 2010, Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, received $175,000 to support  WoolfOnline , which documents the biographical, textual, and publication history of To the Lighthouse.

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31 Feminist Theory

Jean Mills is Associate Professor of English Literature at John Jay College/CUNY. She is the author of Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (2014) and is currently at work on her second book Literary Approaches to Peace. She recently edited and wrote the Introduction and Afterword for the late Jane Marcus’s unfinished manuscript, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger (2020).

• Published: 11 August 2021
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This chapter examines Virginia Woolf’s foundational role in the development of feminist theory, placing her theoretical positions on women’s lives and life-writing, privacy, the body, and self-expression in dialogue with a diverse and actively changing continuum of feminist thought. Focusing on the return of rage to the forefront of feminist discourse and social media’s effect upon feminist politics, the chapter chronicles the changing critical responses to Woolf’s feminisms, in relation to her positions on feminist identities and feminist community. The chapter also investigates the ways in which women of colour feminists disclosed Woolf’s racialized self and racist thinking to assess the place of Woolf’s feminism in contemporary political thought. From issues seeking to reconcile and value difference and diversity with the uses of ambivalence and calls for unity and integration, the chapter places the concepts and vocabulary of feminist theory within the context of Virginia Woolf’s work and example.

Whether as an icon, an invocation, or in the replication of her own work, Virginia Woolf has guided or been central to key conversations in feminist theory. In the discourses of women’s sexual liberation, Black and Latinx feminisms, lesbian feminism, trans feminism, and feminist pacifism, Virginia Woolf’s theoretical positions outlined in both her fiction and non-fiction work continue to shape feminist thought in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, and the potential for peace. With a focus on Woolf’s inquiries into feminist identity, the limits and possibilities of feminist community, and the uses of feminist anger, this chapter delineates the arc of her influence on feminist theory as it also investigates the relevance and efficacy of her ideas in a twenty-first-century digital landscape across which much of feminist theory is now mediated and produced.

The historical trajectory of Virginia Woolf’s influence has been evident in feminist thinking generated in work by Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Carolyn Heilbrun, Adrienne Rich, and Sara Ahmed, as representative examples, from the 1940s to today. In documenting women’s cultural, sexual, social, and historical experiences in her classic, The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir relied on Woolf’s fictional portrayal of Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own (1929) to point to the disparities between ‘the meager and restricted life’ of a woman and Shakespeare’s ‘life of learning and adventure’. 1 In addition to her use of Woolf’s essay, Beauvoir deployed narrative examples from Woolf’s fiction, as well—Jinny in The Waves (1931) for her discussion of adolescent girls whose ‘dreams of the future hide its futility’, 2 and Woolf’s heroines in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), to investigate the condition of women in relation to religion and revelation. In her analysis of women’s character and sense of identity in relation to spirituality within the context of patriarchal society, Beauvoir writes:

There is a justification, a supreme compensation, which society is ever wont to bestow upon woman: that is, religion. There must be religion for woman as there must be one for the common people, and for exactly the same reasons. When a sex or a class is condemned to immanence, it is necessary to offer it the mirage of some form of transcendence. 3

Revelations and spiritual ownership for women, as for many of Woolf’s protagonists in her novels, according to Beauvoir, ‘are those in which they discover their accord with a static and self-sufficient reality: those luminous moments of happiness [ … ] of supreme recompense’, are joy experienced not ‘in the free surge of liberty’ as men often experience religion, but in ‘a quiet sense of smiling plenitude’. 4 Man, Beauvoir writes, ‘enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over woman, it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being’. 5 While Beauvoir sees religion and a woman’s turn towards religion as filling ‘a profound need’, she also argues that it is ‘much less an instrument of constraint than an instrument of deception’, 6 and she frames her discussion with allusions to Woolf’s fiction. In Mrs Dalloway , Clarissa loathes not so much Miss Kilman, her daughter’s tutor, herself, but Miss Kilman’s unquestioning devotion to God, ‘it being [Clarissa’s] experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes)’ ( MD 10). She views Miss Kilman’s attentions towards her daughter, Elizabeth, with jealousy and suspicion, accusing her of deceptively trying to convert her young mind to her religious beliefs. Highly critical of the institution of religion, Woolf nonetheless often explored the nature of her characters’ spirituality. Indeed, much of the spiritual joy experienced in Mrs Dalloway occurs between same-sex unions—the adolescent kiss between Clarissa and Sally Seton, for example, which she describes as ‘the revelation, the religious feeling!’ ( MD 32) or the bond between the traumatized war veteran Septimus Smith and his friend Evans. Written in the language of the spiritual ecstatic, these scenes offer examples of radical trespass and violations of patriarchal hierarchies, which helped guide Beauvoir in constructing her feminist positions on women and religion in The Second Sex .

In terms of feminist identity, Virginia Woolf has also been central to the work of Doris Lessing and her inquiries into sexual liberation and to Carolyn Heilbrun’s investigations into the implications of androgyny. Useful comparisons have been made between Lessing’s character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook (1962) and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse , each independent creative women whose struggles to maintain independence and establish a sense of identity in a male-dominated world are key themes to their respective narratives. In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1964) , Carolyn Heilbrun characterized androgyny as ‘a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes and the human impulses expressed by men and women are not rigidly assigned’, 7 a position that built upon Woolf’s exploration of the mind as potentially androgynous, possessive of ‘no single state of being’ in A Room of One’s Own ( ARO 73). Heilbrun also deployed Woolf’s biography as a means to rethink the genres of biography, memoir, and life-writing as a feminist methodology in Writing a Woman’s Life (1988). She drew upon Woolf’s writing career to demonstrate the pressure women writers experience to conform to a literary and cultural climate dominated by men, and the ways in which women writers, such as Woolf, rejected gendered scripts of women’s roles under patriarchy to develop and shape narratives more true to women’s lived experiences.

More recently, Sara Ahmed, whose work builds on decades of women of colour feminist research, also found Woolf’s fiction to be instructive in how one acquires a ‘feminist consciousness’. 8 Like Beauvoir, Ahmed uses the narrative arc of Mrs Dalloway herself as one example of a feminist path—one often filled with false starts, disappointments, obstacles, and changes in purpose and momentum. She counts Mrs Dalloway as a ‘feminist classic’ and a key component of her feminist ‘killjoy survival kit’. 9 Indeed, Ahmed’s blog The Feminist Killjoy resonates with Woolf’s Angel in the House, in A Room of One’s Own , whom Woolf argued women had metaphorically to kill in order to carve out the space and time to write. Like Woolf, Ahmed questions gendered prescriptions and expectations assigned to the trajectories of women’s lives. In The Promise of Happiness , she cautions that the processional path of women’s narratives from girlhood to adulthood must include ‘refusing to follow other people’s goods, or [ … ] refusing to make others happy’. 10 Ahmed’s plea insists that our negative feelings, be they rage, anger, or unhappiness, be deployed repeatedly by ‘the feminist killjoy’, to achieve feminist aims, maintain and sustain vigilance over women’s rights, and lead a feminist life.

In one of her more comedic and fantastical novels, the mock-biography, Orlando: A Biography , Woolf upends many of the assumptions about gender performance and expectations, across four centuries of historical context. She connects the relationship between women’s experiences in the home and the pressure to marry and bear children with the reach, both domestically and abroad, of state power. Woolf notes that England of the nineteenth century rises out of the damp, as the muffin and crumpet were invented and coffee replaced the drinking of port after dinner, but ‘[t]he sexes drew further and further apart’ ( O 209). Her biographer/narrator reports that, ‘The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus the British Empire came into existence’ ( O 209). Orlando, who has by this point in the novel transitioned into a woman, feels, but balks at, the social pressure to conform, repeat, and find a husband. She envisions ‘ “Life! A Lover!” not “Life! A Husband!” ’ ( O 222), challenging the predetermined progression of a woman’s life, which Ahmed and others have argued feminists need to re-examine and disrupt.

The novel, which depicts a gender transformation, while not a trans novel, has nevertheless been a notable part of new developments in feminist and trans theory for the ways in which it illustrates ideas of gender fluidity and outlines anti-patriarchal positions in favour of multiple perspectives. Though not a trans-authored text, nor a text with a trans protagonist, the novel can and has been read through a transgender theoretical lens. Pamela Caughie’s comparison between Woolf’s fantastical parodic novel and the real-life memoir of transsexual Elnar Wegener offers a pointed analysis of literature’s capabilities in an era of scientific experimentation to shape our understanding of feminist identities. She writes that, ‘By focusing on the nexus of scientific experimentation with the real and aesthetic experimentation with representation as reciprocal cultural forms, I uphold the power of literature, not just the promise of science, to reshape notions of gender and identity in the modernist era.’ 11 Enjoying a resurgence in attention, in 2019 the novel was also the focus of an edition of the fine art photography journal Aperture , entitled Orlando , and guest edited by Tilda Swinton, who played the lead in Sally Potter’s film version of the novel in 1992. The edition included ‘Inspired by Virginia Woolf’, which featured trans artists and trans subjects in conversation with the novel. Orlando continues to generate and guide discourses on notions of selfhood.

In the ever-changing evolution of feminist thought, Virginia Woolf’s exploration of feminist identity has raised questions about her own positionality and feminist politics in relation to class and race. Critics such as Jane Marcus have argued in favour of Woolf’s working-class credentials reading her depictions of charwomen in her novels such as Mrs McNab in To the Lighthouse and Crosby in The Years (1937), as not speaking for the working class, but in concert with them, and as blistering critiques of the ruling classes that created them. In a generative analysis, Marcus writes:

[T]he voices of the charwomen, the cooks and maids, the violet sellers and the caretaker’s children in The Years , [ … ] act as chorus in all her novels. We hear it in the ‘ee um fah um so/foo swee too eem oo’ of the tube station ancient singer in Mrs Dalloway to the pidgin Greek of the janitor’s children in The Years : ‘Etho passo tanno hai,/Fai donk to tu do,/Mai to, kai to, lai to see/To dom to tuh do.’ If women’s language, then lesbian language, is being made out of ‘words that are hardly syllabled yet’, every Woolf text suggests that other oppressed voices of race and class, of difference and colonial subjectivity, are beginning to syllable themselves, like the Kreemo, Glaxo, Toffe or KEY spelled by the mysterious sky-writing airplane in Mrs Dalloway . 12

Although highly critical of her own class, Woolf and her relationship to the servants she grew up with in the late Victorian age and the ones she reluctantly managed in her own intellectual middle-class British household have been the focus of studies, which have found Woolf’s positions on class to be problematic and indicative of the ways in which one’s politics can sometimes be at odds with one’s personal biases and blind spots. Despite these limitations, Alison Light points to the fact that Woolf ‘was highly unusual in examining many of her reactions and feelings, probing her sore spots, especially in her diaries’ 13 about her interactions and experiences with Britain’s servant class. As Adrienne Rich has claimed, when Woolf was writing about women’s poverty and lack of funding and support in A Room of One’s Own , she was ‘aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children’. 14 But nearly five decades after its publication, in the early 1970s when Rich was writing, she noted that very little had changed to help fund and support women’s creative and intellectual lives. Rich added to Woolf’s inquiry into women and fiction, ‘thinking also of women whom she left out [ … ] women who are washing other people’s dishes and caring for other people’s children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children’. 15 Ultimately, Virginia Woolf’s personal and public relationship to class has been both reclaimed and challenged by feminist scholarship, which has noted the ways she exposed the vagaries and cruelties of the British class system, while also being complicit in its advantages and privileges as a result of her class status.

In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf promoted women’s contributions to cultural and literary production, theorizing a tradition of women writers who ‘think back through our mothers’, an idea that feminist thinkers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison found useful, but also, as women of colour scholars, and authors, exclusionary and in need of updating. It became important to many women of colour feminists to distance themselves from Woolf and push beyond her limitations, especially on issues of race. Indeed, Woolf’s omissions or audiences she refused to claim to speak for, sometimes justifiably, as she was often very clear about her own position as both an othered British subject and a white woman of privilege, but at other times, as a result of her own personal and historical racial and class biases, have created ellipses of their own, gaps in the text, to unpack and speak across. Alice Walker, for example, examined African American women’s experiences and contributions, invoking and extending Woolf’s argument that ‘Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’, including women of colour creatives under the difficult aegis of anonymity ( ARO 38). Walker’s path-breaking work outlined her ‘womanist theory’ as ‘A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.’ 16 She was writing in response to a white, liberal feminist movement, which marginalized women of colour in its own bid for equality and freedom of expression. In 2007, characterizing the history of feminist thought, Gill Plain and Susan Sellers pointed out that within the women’s movement there was ‘a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist’, and that too often ‘white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age’. 17 This myopic view of the circumference of feminist thinking has been questioned, challenged, rethought, and expanded upon by decades of Black, Latinx, lesbian, trans, and multicultural scholarship, which insists on feminism’s plurality and continues to invigorate and extend feminist theoretical discourse. In addition to Alice Walker, African American critics and authors such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Tuzyline Allan have found Woolf’s work useful in disclosing her limitations regarding race and the racialized self.

This work delivered incisive critiques of both Woolf and the feminist movement in their own contemporary moments, while also demonstrating Woolf’s work as generative. By the late 1990s, African American women’s writing had begun to enjoy wider audiences, but, as Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl noted in 2009, African women’s writing was being eclipsed and ‘left out of histories and commentaries on African literature’. 18 Many African women writers, such as Beba Cameroonian author Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, following Walker’s example, according to Warhol-Down and Price Herndl, ‘have hesitated to self-identify as “feminist” because of the Western roots of feminist theory and practice’. 19 Some prefer ‘womanist’ or other spellings of the word, as they use a feminist methodology to adapt to their own purposes. This rethinking of feminist identity resonates with Woolf’s own negotiation of the term ‘feminist’, when, in Three Guineas (1938), she ironically asks if we perhaps shouldn’t ‘write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper’, because, with access to the professions achieved, there was no longer a need to fear that men and women wouldn’t work together for justice, equality, and freedom for all ( TG 179). The scene, however, is meant as a foil to her argument pointing to the ways in which other words such as ‘tyrant’ and ‘dictator’ remain current and alive, as well as the similarities between both the patriarchal state and the fascist state, a comparison that continues to make us uncomfortable today.

The questions and positions Virginia Woolf theorized about women’s privacy as well as the nature of feminist community and women’s relationship to the public sphere anticipate and sometimes reflect parallel development of similar questions feminist theorists face today in negotiating a relationship to social media. Indeed, any apprehension of her positions in relation to twenty-first-century feminist theory must inevitably involve a reckoning between feminist theory and social media, as conversations on feminist community are created, shaped, and reconsidered within its framework.

The fact that the discourse is both relentlessly replenished online and insatiably disseminated in a variety of social media platforms raises questions about both the content of the feminist conversation as well as the nature and efficacy of the methodology. As Urmila Seshagiri wrote in 2017, ‘Feminism is repetitive because patriarchy is undead.’ 20 She was pointing to a curious disjunction between a subject area that recognizes that women, feminists, and feminist women fundamentally shaped modernism and modernity and a body of scholarship responding to that subject, which continues to neglect women’s roles, experiences, and contributions. She was also writing within the political context of a rise in misogynistic rhetoric, an uptick in the commission of hate crimes, and policy initiatives aimed at rolling back women’s rights across the globe. Noting protest signs, such as ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit’, displayed at the Women’s March in Washington, DC in January 2017, Seshagiri was also remarking upon a deep-seated frustration at having to repeat rationales to theoretical debates for women’s equity and equal treatment, many considered to have been won and translated into real policy decades earlier.

Since the political watershed of 2016 outlined a world leaning globally and with enthusiasm towards right-wing populist ideologies, resurgent nationalisms, and anti-feminist thought, feminist theory has increasingly been shaped and directed across a digital landscape of visual and verbal play in response. Indeed, the hashtag and the links and memes, GIFs, and images, which social media generate create their own kinds of feminist community, and, in my view, have become in and of themselves artefacts and indicators of a contemporary feminist zeitgeist. The spirit of the age, which Woolf satirized so incisively in Orlando as being much more varied and complex than the masculinist prescriptives of her father’s late Victorian age, in our own times finds us awash in an open-ended, infinite, and intersectional web of multiple interpretations and voices, similar to those ‘many thousand’ selves Woolf described in the final passages of the novel, as Orlando travels through centuries to her own contemporary time, and ‘now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected’ ( O 282, 295). The infinitude is both exhilarating and overwhelming, as Orlando, as a woman, must decide whether to submit to or resist its directives. Remarkably, Woolf’s embrace and interrogation of illegibility and ambivalence (sometimes in and of themselves as forms of resistance) throughout her work makes her somewhat of a twenty-first-century literary poster child for a digital generation, which very much sees itself as ‘a society for asking questions’ ( CSF 125) about which Woolf once fantasized for women in her 1921 short story ‘A Society’, which advocated for women’s reproductive freedom, access to education and the professions, and the inclusion of women’s voices and experiences in literary and cultural production.

Currently, as memes and hashtags are born and replicated, some, such as #MeToo, for example, dedicated to narratives of sexual assault and sexual harassment, gain traction and evolve to become phenomena, marking profound shifts in any given conversation. As in the case of #MeToo, a transition in theoretical discourse sparked several political movements and activism devoted to issues raised in the conversation. The phrase was first coined in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke on the social media platform Myspace, and later popularized on Twitter in October 2017 by American actress Alyssa Milano, in response to a widely publicized case of sexual assault and harassment by film producer Harvey Weinstein. Interestingly, even though it’s possible to discover the first mention of #MeToo on social media as a proliferating digital artefact, #MeToo is unencumbered by the boundaries of provenance, authorship, or origins.

While the feminist community generated by the MeToo hashtag far exceeds the reach of a twentieth century understanding of ‘the public’, social media’s democratization of the conversation speaks to Virginia Woolf’s challenges to and explorations of cultural gatekeeping, hierarchies, and pretentiousness. These she identified as male-driven and male-dominated, and as basic principles connected to egotism that she personally loathed. She rejected ‘the loudspeaker’ voice of the academy, was conflicted by both a desire for and a lack of formal education, (‘I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’ ( ARO 19), and cautioned against using one’s influence, as women gained rights, the vote, and access to the professions, to re-enact the same power plays men in positions of authority often inflict upon women in the workplace. She wrote two collections of essays dedicated to everyday reading practices, entitled The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932), as well as two major essays based on talks (not lectures), A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas , whose conversational and collaborative rhetorical styles are intimately bound up with their arguments, which investigate the architecture and hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion integral to a patriarchal society and its treatment of women.

The internet’s unbridled posturing, its freedom, and lack of curatorial concision are also marked by gender, race, and class, which paradoxically replicate and often reify many of the same biases women bristled at and resisted for years. While the online conversation in feminist theory has in many ways been invigorated by social media’s reach and efficacy, in other ways, it has led to an extraordinary loss of privacy and personal control and a documented increase in unfiltered and shameless hostility and hatred towards women. On the one hand, forewarned is forearmed, and certainly 2016 with the help of social media served as an unveiling and public airing of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and personal invective on a scale that made locating one’s enemies easy. On the other hand, the pool of widespread and unapologetic extremism is so vast that a sense of urgency, which begins around an issue of gross, disturbing, even unprecedented injustice and wrong-doing, too often quickly deteriorates into a lack of social engagement and a debilitating sense of being overwhelmed by information, misinformation, and disinformation.

Virginia Woolf’s involvement in as well as her ambivalence about public political discourses has been noted by critics such as David Bradshaw and Clara Jones, among others, especially in relation to Woolf’s responses to political changes during the 1930s. The decade of the 1930s, that earlier global turn towards fascism and nationalism, Anna Snaith notes, ‘saw Woolf battling with her “repulsion from societies” and yet her abhorrence of political developments at home and abroad’. 21 While part of Snaith’s aim in ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’ is to outline Woolf’s anti-fascist positions and political support and involvement on behalf of women’s suffrage, refugees, and intellectual freedom, her investigation into the ways in which Woolf negotiated her responses to political causes also reveals a frustration on Woolf’s part—a frustration that resonates with today’s struggle to construct feminist community amidst relentless requests (whether via email or social media) to sign, donate, join, and protest. Snaith writes, ‘Her feeling of bombardment during the ’30s also involved awareness of the commodification of her signature. Desire for anonymity made her question public endorsement per se, regardless of the cause.’ 22 A desire for privacy, personal control, and a respite from the din of ceaseless public pressure concerned Woolf as she investigated its effects upon feminist thinking. She also recognized the ways in which capital, culture, and war combine to perpetuate patriarchy and its entrenched persecution of women, a system that Woolf sought to dismantle.

Three Guineas is relevant to anyone’s contemporary moment due to its subject matter, the need to prevent and end war. Yet it also remains current due to its inquiries into methodology. The essay outlining Woolf’s pacifism and patriarchy’s connection to women’s oppression in both the private and public spheres, is also, as Snaith points out, ‘a deliberation on the complexities and implications of various kinds of political and charitable support’. 23 In other words, in addition to its analysis of the complexities of pacifism and its usefulness and interconnectedness to feminist theory and activism, Three Guineas resonates with the challenges we face today as we grapple with the advantages and disadvantages of the political post-card versus the phone call to a representative, the online donation to Change.org, for example, versus a birthday fundraising appeal for a personal cause on Facebook. But within the panoply of these various media and the questions it raises about method, Three Guineas is, as Snaith claims, ‘an enactment of her preferred form of resistance: the text’. 24

Virginia Woolf used both her fiction and non-fiction work to question the nature of this vast public conversation, as she tried to identify and navigate her own role in relation to it. In the essay, she is very clear about her own positionality, as a white woman of a certain class, collectively ‘the daughters of educated men’, as she identifies herself in Three Guineas ( TG 180). In another characteristic interactive, collaborative stylistic signature, she begins as if in the middle of a conversation, theorizing a relationship between feminist interconnectedness in the public sphere and the need to maintain a specific, localized methodology in advancing a feminist agenda:

‘But,’ she may say, ‘ “the public”? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?’ ‘ “The public,” Madam,’ we may assure her, ‘is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said moreover to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching “the public”; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind.’ ( TG 176)

In an essay whose premise is framed around a response to a male correspondent asking her to sign a manifesto for peace, donate money, and join a society, her narrator investigates ‘some of the active ways in which you [ … ] can put your opinions into practice’ on behalf of a cause, while noting the challenges women face in particular in building coalitions in the public sphere ( TG 176). She points out how men and women are similarly appalled at the horrors of war. She returns again and again to the ‘photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses’ in the war-torn landscape of the Spanish Civil War, verbal images of destruction, the responsibility for which she lays at the feet of men in power ( TG 150). But our differences based on gender, she reminds us, are ‘profound and fundamental’, making a request of support and funds from a member of the patriarchy that oppresses, dismisses, and marginalizes women, difficult to satisfy ( TG 181).

In outlining and identifying the structure of patriarchy, she is also making suggestions, devising feminist strategies and theories about ways to subvert it. She writes that even ‘[t]he very word “society” sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not’, which complicates her relationship to the public request for funds ( TG 182). Her challenge to what seems a simple and obvious solicitation on behalf of peace becomes an intricate and deeply thought-out meditation on the consequences of systemic oppression, until ‘inevitably we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will’ ( TG 182).

We face similar challenges today as we struggle to engage with the internet as a tool both for constructing and maintaining a genealogy of feminist thought and for supporting feminist activism, only to realize that the echoes of the past continue to remind and sometimes to admonish us in the present. Not only do the size, scale, and scope of the internet work both for and against the advancement of feminist theory, but many of the issues and the movement’s aims, with few exceptions, have largely remained the same. Co-creating a feminist tradition of theory and activism with the past, while also pointing to the brutal, barbaric, and often life-threatening realities of the treatment of women under patriarchy, Woolf ultimately aligns the nineteenth-century fight for women’s rights by ‘those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls’ with the twentieth-century fight against fascism.

Woolf’s narrator in Three Guineas , albeit conditionally, agrees to sign the manifesto and to send money for the peace effort, but she refuses to join his society, recording a separate tradition of feminist community and activism and instructing future generations of women by theorizing potential pathways for organizing resistance. She writes, ‘we believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society; by working for our common ends—justice and equality and liberty for all men and women—outside your society, not within’ ( TG 183). She famously creates the Society of Outsiders, which has no hierarchies, no oaths, no offices, no secretaries, no meetings, and no conferences, but values ‘elasticity’ and ‘secrecy’ instead and insists on achieving peace, intellectual liberty, and justice ‘by the means that a different sex, a different tradition, a different education, and the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach’ ( TG 189). Instead, she calls on women to build their coalitions and advocacy efforts outside of the establishment, to maintain and practice indifference and disinterest, to offer her brothers ‘neither the white feather of cowardice nor the red feather of courage, but no feather at all’, to refuse to take part in patriotic displays and refuse to bear arms. In other words, she has been asked by her male correspondent to sign a peace manifesto, which she does, but only as she re-writes and posits, instead, one of her own. Woolf’s essays, but her entire body of work, in both the diaries and letters, her fiction, and journalism, as well, not only have created, but continue to create feminist communities of their own, as her arguments, investigations, images, and examples return to remind us of the need for sustained vigilance as well as new methods, new theories, and new ways of looking at the world.

As the methodologies of the internet work both for and against feminist aims, rage, too, is a multivalent sword. Feminist anger has acted both as an important tool for resistance and invigoration of a cause as well as a justification for committing acts of violence against women. In the wake of a widespread increase in right-wing ideologies, nationalism, fascism, racism, and anti-feminist thought, women’s rage has returned to the forefront of feminist theoretical discourse. As one leading feminist journal Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society states quite plainly in its most recent call for papers for a special issue devoted to the complexities of rage to be published in Summer 2021: ‘Feminists are raging’, and for good reason. In addition to running the online Feminist Public Intellectual Project, the journal will now be airing their site, Ask a Feminist, as a podcast with its first episode featuring recent titles fuelling the debate. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), for example, argues that ‘a society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens’ 25 and Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018) provides a manifesto and manual for activism and effective organization from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective seeking to counter a ‘mainstream narrative propped up by patriarchy and misogyny (straight-up hatred of women)’. 26

Virginia Woolf’s work, biography, and example have figured prominently in the feminist uses of anger and its efficacy as political currency. Anger, and the ways in which she navigated her anger both on the page and in her personal life, became a key focus for women reading her work both in English and in translation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, Adrienne Rich wrote about re-reading A Room of One’s Own and of recognizing, but also being struck by what she characterized as Woolf’s suppression of her anger in the text:

I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. 27

While Woolf was addressing women in her ‘talk’, Rich claimed that she felt acutely the implied male presence in the room, because the political climate had not changed to the point ‘when women can stop being haunted, not only by “convention and propriety” but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves’. 28 This suppression of women’s anger is further investigated by Jane Marcus, who sought to encourage women to ‘spit out’ their ‘rage and savage indignation’, 29 as Marcus wrote in an essay, which she anthologized ten years later in her collection of essays Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (1988), noting the typical prolepsis that often occurs in the development of women writers, as feminist literary criticism strives to catch up to feminist politics as goals were achieved within the movement. Marcus admits that some of the earlier essays in the collection seem ‘too polite and well-mannered, now that Woolf is the subject of so much critical debate’ and hardly worth ‘the uproar it caused at the 1975 MLA’. 30 With one of the aims accomplished, to reshape the male-driven critical response to her work in the 1940s and 1950s as the ‘lyrical British novelist’ Mrs Woolf, feminists now were ‘paying attention to Woolf’s politics’. 31 Marcus noted an adjustment in the tenor of the debate, which focused very much on women’s personal anger and the need for women to express their emotions. She wrote that her interest in Woolf’s anger ‘clearly grew out of my own anger and the anger of my generation of feminist critics, who were trying to change the subject without yet having developed a sophisticated methodology’, 32 marking the importance of women’s anger as a resource and rationale for devising approach, strategy, and action in response to oppression. She characterized the trajectory of change indicated in the form of address: ‘Now that the subject has been changed, we can record the history of that process.’ 33 The earlier criticism on Woolf ‘address[es] the establishment with a clenched fist [ … ] cursing the literary hegemonic fathers. The later essays address a discursive community of feminist readers.’ ‘Now’, she writes ‘we look forward to the work of the “daughters of anger” ’ 34 in a bid to secure the future of feminism in a more forthright posture, implying confidence and a freedom of expression of anger.

Virginia Woolf was perhaps more ambivalent, or at least more realistic about the complexities and uses of rage and the size and scope of the burden of resistance upon the shoulders of future generations of feminists. In the 1921 ‘A Society’, after the women’s collective (representative of the feminist movement) has been truncated by the guns and battle cries of World War I, the women reconvene at the end of the story to assess the accomplishments of the group, but now, against the backdrop of the ‘proper explosion of the fireworks’ ( CSF 136), for peace. Woolf also identified these ‘proper’ celebrations as complicit in the cycles of war and remembrance, issues that she saw as intersecting with the experiences of women and children, and as consequential relationships she questioned and hoped to break. In the final scene of the satire, Woolf’s narrator, Cassandra, aptly named for the prophetess who spoke the truth, which no one believed or could understand, says, referring to one of the member’s daughters, whom they hope to carry on the legacy of the collective, ‘It’s no good [ … ] Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself’ ( CSF 136). Castalia agrees, noting that, ‘that would be a change’. The women gather the papers and minutes of their society, and ‘though Ann was playing with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future—upon which she burst into tears’ ( CSF 136).

Succeeding generations of feminist scholars have both questioned or built upon this earlier characterization of Woolf’s rage as being ‘suppressed’. Recently, conceptions of Woolf’s anger and how we understand it in relation to her feminist theoretical positions and strategies for future activism have been challenged by investigations into affect theory. In ‘After Anger: Negative Affect and Feminist Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas ’, Margot Kotler argues that Woolf’s Society of Outsiders and her juxtaposing of image and text outline her ‘impersonal method’, which ‘provides a model for collective feminist politics that complicates the teleological narrative of feminism in which emotion operates as a site of truth’. 35 Kotler’s aim is not to dismiss or ignore our emotions, but to rethink the ‘personal is political’ as ‘the personal is factual’. 36 In an instructive essay that insists we read Woolf’s feminist uses of anger more strategically, Kotler writes that Woolf:

[ … ] demonstrates the danger of a feminist politics that uncritically exploits the personal and the emotional as a source of truth and makes them the first step of a political project that will end in its own obsolescence. Instead, Woolf maintains that feminists would be better served by both transforming personal emotions into collective negative feelings, as shown in her use of impersonal anger as a feminist methodology, and harnessing this attributed anger and unhappiness to launch collective critique, via unsympathetic and indifferent response, of the emotionally exploitative rhetoric and imagery of the fascist and patriarchal state. 37

Understood in this way, rage becomes not personally exhausting as an emotion, but as a key tool and resource ‘that supports a more sustainable feminist politics’, 38 one that is more useful and effective moving forward, because, as Kotler claims in the essay, for Woolf, there really is no such thing as ‘after anger’. 39 Woolf, in an earlier era, strove to carve out a way forward for future generations of women readers, writers, and thinkers through a commitment to art and language, and through the transformation of her anger into an effective political tool of feminist thought.

In the historical documentation of her influence on feminist identity and community and in the replenishment of her work across new digital methodologies, Virginia Woolf continues to be a major vitalizing force in feminist theory, as states and individuals continue to attempt to police and regulate women’s lives. In seeking to dismantle patriarchy and theorize a world we have yet to create, Virginia Woolf exposed the cruelty of hierarchies, while also noting the repetitive nature of oppression that continues to sing the same old song as in the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’, a refrain she used in Three Guineas to illustrate the same hypocrisies and injustices born on the backs of women’s unpaid labour. Challenges to feminist essentialism, female chauvinism, heterosexist assumptions overlooking lesbian and trans texts, and ableist bias have invigorated feminist theoretical discourse and activism on behalf of feminist causes. Both the embraces of and challenges to Virginia Woolf’s work, I would argue, have led to a more explicit acceptance of difference among women, and created a myriad of feminist approaches, which continue to enrich and diversify an ongoing feminist narrative and critical debate.

Selected Bibliography

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Caughie, Pamela , ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Elnar Wegener’s Man into Woman ’, in Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 ( 2013 ): 501–25.

Chemaly, Soraya , Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2018 ).

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Marcus, Jane , Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1988 ).

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Seshagiri, Urmila. ‘Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis’, in Modernism/Modernity , vol. 2, cycle 2 (7 August 2017), https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0022 .

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  Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 344.

  Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 585.

  Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 584.

  Carolyn Heilbrun , Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964) .

  Sara Ahmed , Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 47 .

  Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life , 235.

  Sara Ahmed , The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 60 .

  Pamela Caughie , ‘The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Elnar Wegener’s Man into Woman ’, Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2013), 501–25, at 502 .

  Jane Marcus , Introduction to Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), 11 .

  Alison Light , Mrs Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), xviii .

  Adrienne Rich , ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)’, in Adrienne Rich: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Essential Essays , ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 3–19, at 7 .

  Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’ , 7.

  Alice Walker , In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) .

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  Snaith, ‘Stray Guineas’ , 18–19.

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Writing with Virginia Woolf, not Afraid

• First Online: 22 February 2019

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• Elizabeth Mackinlay 2  

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I first read the work of British modernist writer Virginia Woolf more than a decade ago and it was life changing in terms of the way I began to approach my writing as an academic feminist. In this chapter, I write for, with and to the promise her writing holds for becoming critical and embodied as autoethnographer. In particular, Woolf’s unmistakenly feminist extended essay A room of one’s own first published in 1929, provides inspiration for finding and fighting for the freedom to think and write as women and to think and write as a woman in particular kinds of ways. Woolf’s stream of consciousness and fluid writing style is explored and played with in this chapter as an approach to autoethnographic writing that might draw attention to the luminous halo of life which lay just beyond the cotton wool of the everyday.

Yet it is clear that she could have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Woolf ( 1929/2001 , p. 69) A woman must have money and a room of her own if she it to write fiction. Woolf ( 1929/2001 , pp. 3–4) For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off. I want to embody all those innumerable little ideas & tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons. I think this will be great fun to write; & it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetical work which I want to come to next. Woolf ([Diary entry, 14 March, 1927], 1980 , p. 131)

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Woolf, V. (1980). The diary of Virginia Woolf, volume III: 1925–1930 (A. E. Bell, Ed.). London: Hogarth Press.

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Mackinlay, E. (2019). Writing with Virginia Woolf, not Afraid. In: Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04669-9_4

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Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Stephen

22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London

29 Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury, London

Hogarth House, Richmond

Asheham House, Sussex

52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London

37 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, London

Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex

Born in 1882 to Julia and Leslie Stephen, Adeline Virginia Stephen would become a prominent modernist and feminist writer and a central figure of the 'Bloomsbury Group'. From her early childhood, her parents had encouraged her to write. The deaths of her mother, Julia, in 1895 and her step-sister, Stella, in 1897 were followed by those of her father, Leslie, in 1904 and her brother, Thoby, in 1906. This decade of family deaths had a profound effect on Virginia. She was survived by an older sister, Vanessa, who would also become part of the Bloomsbury Group, and aher brother, Adrian.

Virginia spent part of her childhood in Talland House near St Ives, Cornwall, and the rest in Kensington, London. Her memories of St Ives and of sexual abuse by her half-brother, George Duckworth, are prominent in her writing about her childhood. In the years following the deaths of her father and brother, Virginia’s mental health began to decline and she sank into depression and attempted suicide in 1913.

After her father’s death, Virginia and her siblings moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury. In Bloomsbury, Thoby introduced his two sisters to a group of men he had met in Cambridge: Leonard Woolf , Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell , Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes . In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf . The couple embarked on a life of writing and publishing. Virginia published her first novel, The Voyage Out , in 1915. In 1917, she and Leonard set up the Hogarth Press  which published their own work as well as work by T. S. Eliot , Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes and Freud, among others, and that of Indian writers Ahmed Ali  and Rajani Palme Dutt . Virginia went on to publish a string of modernist novels.

After the Woolf’s Bloomsbury home was bombed in 1940, they retreated to their country home, Monk’s House, in Sussex. There, Virginia once again slipped into depression, and on 28 March 1941 she drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse.

Ahmed Ali , Mulk Raj Anand , Clive Bell , Vanessa Bell, Robert Bridges , George Duckworth, Rajani Palme Dutt , T. S. Eliot , E. M. Forster , Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes , Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West, Leonard Sidney Woolf .

The Voyage Out (London: Duckworth, 1915)

Night and Day (London: Duckworth, 1919)

J acob's Room (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1922)

The Common Reader (London: Hogarth, 1925)

Mrs Dalloway (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1925) 

To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1927)

Orlando: A Biography (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1928)

A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth, 1929)

On Being III (London: Hogarth, 1930)

The Waves (London: Hogarth, 1931)

The London Scene: Five Essays (London: Hogarth, [1931-2] 1982)

The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth, 1932

(with Leonard Woolf) The Hogarth Letters (London: Hogarth, 1933)

The Years (London: Hogarth, 1937)

Three Guineas (London: Hogarth, 1938)

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