Anger and Conciliation in Woolf's Feminism
Author(s): Alex Zwerdling
Source: Representations, No. 3 (Summer, 1983), pp. 68-89
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3043787
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ALEX ZWERDLING
Anger and Conciliation in
Woolf's Feminism
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S TWO DISCURSIVE books about women's lives A
Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are both attempts to find a
vehicle to accommodate her twin needs in writing those works: the urge to vent her
anger about the subjection of women, and the urge to conciliate the male audience she
could never entirely ignore. These needs are clearly antithetical and seem to call for
entirely different forms of expression, the first direct, passionate, personal and rough,
the second charming, ironic, detached, and controlled. One has a sense in reading
these works that impulse is at war with strategy and that this conflict accounts for a
certain uneasiness of tone present in both books, but especially in the later Three
Guineas.
It was her task to translate female impulse into feminist strategy. But that this
was exceptionally hard for her is shown by a long, revealing entry in her diary at the
time she was writing Three Guineas. She records meeting her friend E. M. Forster at
the London Library, that splendid private institution of which her father had once
been president. Forster, who is on the governing committee of the Library, tells her
that her name had been proposed for membership on the committee, only to encounter
violent group resistance: "they were all quite determined," Forster says. "No no no,
ladies are quite impossible. They wouldnt hear of it."1 Woolf's reaction (as recorded
in her diary) is explosive:
See how my hand trembles. I was so angry (also very tired) standing. And I saw the whole
slate smeared. I thought how perhaps M[organ] had mentioned my name, & they had said no
no no: ladies are impossible. And so I quieted down & said nothing & this morning in my bath
I made up a phrase in my book on Being Despised [the working title for what became Three
Guineas] which is to run-a friend of mine, who was offered ... one of those prizes-for her
sake the great exception was to be made ... said, And they actually thought I would take it.
They were, on my honour, surprised, even at my very modified & humble rejection. You didnt
tell them what you thought of them for daring to suggest that you should rub your nose in that
pail of offal? I remarked. Not for a hundred years, she observed.... [Y]es, these flares up are
very good for my book: for they simmer & become transparent: & I see how I can transmute
them into beautiful clear reasonable ironical prose. God damn Morgan for thinking I'd have
taken that.... For 2,000 years we have done things without being paid for doing them. You
can't bribe me now. Pail of offal? No; I said while very deeply appreciating the hon.... In
short one must tell lies, & apply every emollient in our power to the swollen skin of our
brothers so terribly inflamed vanity.
(D, IV, 297-98)
68 REPRESENTATIONS 3 * Summer 1983 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
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This passage perfectly illustrates, in their raw state, the contradictory impulses at
work in Woolf's feminism. On the one hand there is her blind rage at these men's
contempt for her sex. Her hand trembles, her sentence structure wobbles, she damns
even her friend Morgan Forster. Her mind rapidly constructs and rejects various
killing retorts. At the same time, her imagination is instantly put to work to transmute
this anger into "beautiful clear reasonable ironical prose"- that is, into something
very different from the barely coherent style of this entry. In part the impulse is
literary, in part concessive. The proffered honor is to be rejected in a "very modified
and humble" way. The sense of outrage cannot be expressed "for a hundred years."
In the meantime, one dissembles and applies emollients to men's vanity.
In the original entry, these two reactions are at war and almost seem to displace
each other in alternate sentences. Woolf consciously used her diary to record turbu-
lent feelings before she had mastered them. Three days later, her detachment has
decisively triumphed over her anger. She looks over the earlier passage and comments
drily, "This little piece of rant wont be very intelligible in a years time. Yet there are
some useful facts & phrases in it. I rather itch to be at that book" (D, IV, 298). The
later reaction dismisses the earlier one. Anger is treated as embarrassing and childish;
at best it only provides some interesting raw material for the artist to refine and
contain.
This deliberate inhibition of anger in Woolf's work has become the focus of
attention in recent commentary on her writings, particularly among feminist critics.
Adrienne Rich writes that in re-reading A Room of One's Own she "was astonished at
the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness" in the tone of that book.
"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 integri-
ty.5"2 And Elaine Showalter writes of both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson,
"how much better it would have been if they could have forgiven themselves, if they
could have faced the anger instead of denying it, could have translated the conscious-
ness of their own darkness into confrontation instead of struggling to transcend it."3
By refusing to express the anger she felt, according to Showalter, Woolf only succeeded in turning it against herself.
Behind these judgments lies the assumption that the inhibition of anger compromises the quality of art and that a more direct expression of Woolf's resentment might
well have made her a greater writer. This idea is most forcefully argued by Jane
Marcus in her essay "Art and Anger," which uses A Room of One's Own and Three
Guineas as primary examples. Marcus prefers the angry first drafts to the more
conciliatory published versions of Woolf's work and uses her essay to argue for the
superiority of uncompromising feminist militancy in women's writing. She sees no
conflict between art and anger and treats the whole issue as essentially unproblematic
once the decision to speak out has been made. In her words, "Anger is not anathema
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in art; it is a primary source of creative energy. Rage and savage indignation sear the
hearts of female poets and female critics. Why not spit it out as Woolf said, blow the
blessed horn as [Elizabeth] Robins said. Why wait until old age as they did, waiting
long to let out their full quota of anger. Out with it. No more burying our wrath,
turning it against ourselves."4 I hope it will gradually become clear in this essay just
why Woolf herself would have found it impossible (and during most of her career
undesirable) to follow this simple prescription.
For such critics, Woolf's calculated strategy is a form of self-betrayal, her attempt
to sound cool and Olympian seriously misguided. Her neoclassical aesthetic theory is
seen as an elaborate superstructure based on the unacknowledged need to repress her
own feelings. And her refusal to vent her anger is used to explain certain crucial
elements in her life and work- her madness and suicide on the one hand, her playful-
ness and persistent use of fantasy on the other. In the former, anger is turned inward;
in the latter, evaded. This approach to Woolf's feminism, despite its obvious impa-
tience with her reluctant commitment to the cause, has I think succeeded for the first
time in illuminating a central opposition in her work, and one which is worth tracing
in detail. The conflict between angry and conciliatory impulses was a constant of her
life, and she was steadily conscious of it as a conflict. But the resolutions and accommodations she devised changed over the years, in part as a response to her own shifts
of feeling, in part as a reaction to transformations in her culture; and some of the
answers that satisfied her near the beginning of her career no longer served her by the
end. In order to understand the evolution of Woolf's feminism, we will have to trace
the changes not only in her psyche but in some of the aesthetic and political forces of
her time.
It is worth recalling that the neoclassical assumptions behind Woolf's choices
were the staple of avant-garde literary practice in the first decades of the twentieth
century, and that they affected male and female writers equally. T. E. Hulme's
influential attack on the romantic sensibility was written about the time Woolf was
working on her first novel. In that essay, he defends the deliberate inhibition of
emotion, idealizes an art in which "there is always a holding back, a reservation" and
attacks the whole notion that a poem is not a poem "unless it is moaning or whining
about something or other."5 A similar ideal is celebrated in T. S. Eliot's well-known
formula (from the 1917 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent") that poetry "is
not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality," that "the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers
and the mind which creates."6 Fiction was to follow the same rules. Ford Madox
Ford insisted that "the object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of
the fact that the author exists,"7 an echo of the famous passage in Joyce's Portrait
about the artist's personality refining itself out of existence. The whole literary climate of Woolf's time, then, fostered the kind of detached, controlled, impersonal
aesthetic theory she adopted. It was a standard by which she regularly judged her
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fellow writers, male as well as female. Those guilty of "preaching," of "giving advice
on a system," like Lawrence or Huxley, seemed to her defective artists (D, IV, 126).
And though the literary fashion served her own psychological imperatives in writing,
this was at least as true for some of her male contemporaries, for example T. S. Eliot.
To question Woolf's aesthetic choices is to question some of the root assumptions of
modernism as well as the older literary tradition it attempted to revive. Woolf would
have had little sympathy with anyone who recommended that she get in closer touch
with her own anger. She was in close touch with it; to have put those feelings on more
prominent display would not, to her way of thinking, have produced better art; on the
contrary. And it would have constituted a betrayal of the particular literary tradition
stretching from Chaucer to Jane Austen that she admired and tried to carry on in her
own fashion.
But the decision to inhibit her anger in the feminist books was not only literary; it
was also political, and rooted in a very different tradition which Woolf also knew
well: that of nineteenth-century feminist writing. Woolf had read the classic texts
from Mary Wollstonecraft to her own time, and she was highly conscious of contributing to a movement that had, over a long period, worked out certain strategies of
persuasion. Both A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas refer to or quote from
such important figures in the nineteenth-century women's movement as Emily Davies, Anna Jemima Clough, Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Sophia Jex-Blake, and
others. In addition, Woolf had lived through and been involved in the successful
movement that gained women the vote: the arguments of important figures in the
suffrage agitation like Millicent Fawcett and the Pankhursts were certainly familiar
to her. The whole history of the women's movement was highly instructive for someone thinking about the uses of anger in political protest.
One can see the split between the concessive and the rebellious wings of the
movement in the opposition between the constitutional suffragists (led by Mrs. Faw-
cett) and the militant Suffragettes (led by the Pankhursts). The issue dividing them
was precisely the political utility of anger. From the first, the militant campaign was
an attempt to substitute direct, angry political confrontation for the conciliatory,
refined tactics of the earlier suffragists. The Pankhursts tested the effectiveness of
expressed, public outrage and were convinced it produced practical results. In Chris-
tabel Pankhurst's words, "where peaceful means had failed, one act of militancy
succeeded and never again was the cause ignored."8 The methods of Mrs. Fawcett's
constitutional group were entirely different low-key, patient, eschewing any kind of
confrontation with men in power- and this too constituted a political strategy. Their
tactics were based on winning general support from men as well as women, and they
knew that such a goal could be achieved only by cool calculation. Whatever one may
think of the relative merits of these two strategies, it is clear from her letters that
Woolf worked with the constitutional rather than the militant group9 and that she
supported the goal of uniting rather than dividing the society on such an issue. Unity,
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harmony, merging are consistently idealized in her work, and her political books are
no exception.
She could have found support for this impulse in the nineteenth-century history
of the women's movement. From the first the pioneers of feminism considered it
politically essential to win support from men. Their writings are often deliberately
shaped to avoid annoying the male reader. One of the most extraordinary examples
comes from a letter that Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, Cambridge,
wrote to a friend who had sent her a draft of an article on women's suffrage. Davies
writes:
In your paper there are two or three expressions I should like to have altered, e.g. I don't think
it quite does to call the arguments on the other side 'foolish.' Of course they are, but it does not
seem quite polite to say so. I should like to omit the paragraph about outlawry. You see, the
enemy [i.e., antifeminist men] always maintains that the disabilities imposed upon women are
not penal, but solely intended for their good, and I find nothing irritates men so much as to
attribute tyranny to them.... Men cannot stand indignation, and tho' of course I think it is
just, it seems to me better to suppress the manifestation of it.10
Davies's strategic silence was a carefully considered tactic. As one of her co-workers
wrote to her, "Half our mischief comes from screaming American advocates."1
Nineteenth-century England, however, had its own supply of "screaming advocates," most notably Sophia Jex-Blake, the pioneer of medical education for women,
whose case Woolf discusses at some length in Three Guineas (pp. 117-20). Unlike
her more conciliatory fellow workers in the movement, Jex-Blake was constitutional-
ly unable to contain her outrage: she had a very short fuse. When, after years of
patient effort, women medical students were finally admitted to Edinburgh Universi-
ty in 1869, the male students protested and tried to keep them out. There was a riot,
threats, insults, accusations and counteraccusations, a hearing in which Jex-Blake
vented her anger by directly attacking a number of individuals, including the assistant
to one of the professors, whose outrageous behavior could only be excused, she said, by
the possibility that he was drunk at the time. The accusation not surprisingly resulted
in a libel suit, which the young man won, and which cost Jex-Blake nearly ?1000 in
legal fees. Her lack of circumspection had led not only to this expensive defeat but to
the far more disastrous decision by the University authorities that the whole scheme of
admitting women to the medical school had been a mistake: in the following year they
were expelled without obtaining their degrees. It took nearly a decade for another
British university to try the experiment again. As Jex-Blake's biographer concludes,
her insistence on confronting rather than mollifying her male opponents was probably
counterproductive: "she might have shortened the battle if she had adopted a more
conciliatory attitude."512 She became a kind of object lesson in the dangers of militant
anger. As Ray Strachey puts it in her history of the women's movement, "She commit-
ted the error of allowing her indignation to be seen."513
In contrast to Sophia Jex-Blake and to the Pankhursts, most of the first feminists
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learned early that it was as important to reassure men as to awaken women. It was
men, after all, who made the laws, controlled the universities and professions, and
owned the property. Their cooperation was absolutely essential to the movement, at
least until the basic privileges of political power and financial independence were
won. The writings of the first feminists were filled with conciliatory gestures designed
to convince a male audience that "their" women would not be terrifyingly different
after emancipation. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, with her fierce sense of the need for
independence in women, could paint the standard picture of the model wife anxious to
"prepare herself and children, with only the luxury of cleanliness, to receive her
husband, who returning weary home in the evening found smiling babes and a clean
hearth."514 And over a century later, Millicent Fawcett was still telling her male
readers that "the free woman makes the best wife and the most careful mother."15 All
such assurances were designed to speak directly to men's fears that the feminist
movement would produce an alarming new kind of woman, indifferent to domestic
duty, competitive with men, "unsexed," "unfeminine," masterful rather than submis-
sive. Not so, the first feminists assure us: the liberated woman's primary loyalty
would continue to be to her family, her new skills and powers would make her
competent rather than combative, she would merely learn to become a better mistress
in her own domain. Even the militant Sophia Jex-Blake assumed as a matter of
course that domestic duties must take precedence over professional ones, that "women
are women before they are doctors," as she says, and that "If a woman becomes a
mother, I certainly think nothing outside her home can have, or ought to have, so
much claim upon her as her children."516
That last statement- which comes from a letter to a woman friend rather than
from a public document should make us aware that this whole conciliatory way of
thinking was not merely or consistently tactical: it also represented a vein of genuine
conservative feeling in the first feminists, so that it becomes impossible to separate
conviction from political calculation. Hindsight now makes us aware of how many
dangerous cracks in the relations between the sexes were being papered over in the
early writings of the movement. The stance, one might say, is radically concessive, and
the concessions are seldom understood or treated as significant. It never seems to occur
to such writers, for example, that a woman might have trouble choosing between
vocation and family responsibility, might feel thwarted by the need to give up a
profession after training herself to practice it. The problem is never taken seriously, is
never even seen as a problem. It makes us aware that every stage in a movement of
social change combines traditional and radical elements. The first audience will be
aware of the new departures but oblivious to the continuities. The later observers will
be conscious of the extraordinary concessiveness and residual conservatism of the
reformers- of how much they seemed to give away.
This split between rebellious and conciliatory methods illuminates some of the
tensions in Woolf's own work. If one looks at these issues carefully, it soon becomes
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evident that there is a complex tangle of forces at work, one that challenges the current
theory of her unconscious repression of anger. For one thing, such feeling is not
regularly denied either in Woolf's feminist books or in her novels: it is frequently
given its due. Some of the most vivid passages in her fiction derive their energy from
the decision to express rather than bury such intense emotion. Take, for instance, the
passage in Mrs. Dalloway in which Woolf annihilates the coercive psychiatrist Sir
William Bradshaw by analyzing his successful attempt to "convert" his wife into a
docile mate: "But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and
feasts most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years
ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been
no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his" (MD,
1 1 1). In Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, her heroine Rachel Vinrace responds to
a lover's kiss with a flash of aggressive fantasy. In her mind, "she only saw an old
woman slicing a man's head off with a knife" (VO, 413). And in a famous passage in
To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay's domination of his wife is described in a metaphor of
extraordinary violence: the young James Ramsay feels his mother's "strength flaring
up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which
smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy" (TL, 63). Such passages
are designed to record to give space and prominence to- the anger against men who
attempt to crush women's wills. And they do not mince words.
We also find such explosions in Woolf's essays and in the two feminist books, the
vehicles for a more unmediated expression of her own feelings. She says in her diary
that in preparing to write Three Guineas she had "collected enough powder to blow
up St. Pauls" (D, IV, 77). This hostile impulse is reflected in passages like the
description of men in public life, the arena in which the humane private man turns
into "a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the
floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings
are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially" (TG, 191). Such anger against tyrannical
men is also voiced in the more steadily ironic A Room of One's Own, always as a
response to male condescension toward women or men's attempts to control women's
lives. The target is the persistent coercive male voice, "now grumbling, now patronis-
ing, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that
voice which cannot let women alone" (AROO, 112).
Yet such direct attacks on the quality of masculinity- as I think Woolf would
have defined it are admittedly rare in both her fiction and her discursive prose. She
felt that they were too unguarded, too artless. Anger could be the root, but must not be
the flower. Far more typical of Woolf's method of expressing outrage is the following
passage from A Room of One's Own:
I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that
it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare.
He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that
cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How
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much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank
back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.
(AROO, 69-70)
Here Woolf transmutes her anger into the "clear reasonable ironical prose" she
speaks of in the London Library passage. The sense of detachment and control is
steadily maintained in the mock appreciation of the old gentleman's insight. The
techniques of persuasion are the familiar devices of such satire-the perspective of
wide-eyed innocence, the ironic praise, the reductio ad absurdum. The passage succeeds in destroying the opposition without seeming to lift a finger. Yet the combative
impulse that fuels the whole argument is felt as present, not so far beneath the surface
either.
Woolf certainly distrusted her own anger. She regularly connects violent emotion
of any kind with distortion and self-deception, again and again insisting that the
direct expression of anger is fatal to art. The works of Lady Winchilsea and the
Duchess of Newcastle "are disfigured and deformed by the same causes"-their
bitterness at being excluded from the literary world (AROO, 92). And even Charlotte
Bronte's books are spoiled by her indignation, "deformed and twisted" because "she
will write in a rage where she should write calmly" (AROO, 104). The metaphors
used in such passages reveal the conviction that art produced under the stress of anger
is somehow monstrous and unnatural-a misshapen premature birth rather than a
perfectly formed child.
Furthermore, anger terrified Woolf because it was so close to the state of madness
she herself had known more than once. Her mad phases involved the expression of
hostility toward those she loved most her husband, her sister the explosion of all
those sentiments regularly censored in civilized life. Vanessa Bell's description of the
1915 breakdown emphasizes this aggressive anger: "She says the most malicious &
cutting things she can think of to everyone & they are so clever that they always
hurt."517 No wonder Woolf feared the direct expression of rage in her work. Yet she
was equally conscious of how indispensable these explosions had been to her art, how
much they had taught her of her deepest feelings. Woolf's madness was an intensified
form of her imaginative life, and she knew it generated or released images, narratives,
and words that would eventually find their way into her books. She writes to Ethel
Smyth many years later that when she was mad she had made up "poems, stories,
profound and to me inspired phrases all day long as I lay in bed, and thus sketched, I
think, all that I now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose" (L, IV, 231). And
she has no doubts about the teaching power of insanity: "As an experience, madness is
terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the
things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets,
as sanity does: (L, IV, 180). These passages suggest Woolf's divided feelings about
such heightened states of awareness: they are fascinating but frightening, indispensable to art yet at war with art's control. The imagination recollects emotion in tran-
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quillity; the tranquillity is as essential as the emotion. One senses Woolf's perilous
balance in a diary entry about the composition of Three Guineas: "I must very nearly
verge on insanity I think, I get so deep in this book I don't know what I'm doing. Find
myself walking along the Strand talking aloud" (AWD, 268).
Woolf's feminist books may finally give the impression of composure and ironic
distance, but they were conceived and written in a much more turbulent state. Her
diary and early drafts show how great a distance she travelled between original
impulse and finished product. The process of composition is consistently a search for
greater control over intense feeling. Its necessary stages are described with insight by
Woolf herself in a diary entry written in 1924 (D, II, 321):
I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my
notes here, for, if one lets the mind run loose, it becomes egotistic: personal, which I detest; like
Robert Graves. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; & perhaps to loose it, one
must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that.
This was an aesthetic theory that served Woolf's purposes for the greater part of her
career. But as we shall see, by the end of her life her faith in it had begun to crumble.
The sharp distinction between what was permissible in private writing and what
was fit for public scrutiny is essential to an understanding of Woolf's work. A knowledge of these two languages makes the elements of conciliation more glaringly apparent than they could have been to her first readers, who of course did not have access to
her diary, her letters, her early drafts. The distinction affects the technique, the tone,
and the conclusions of her feminist books down to the minutest details. Take, for
example, the studied impersonality of both A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.
The first is written in the persona of a character she calls, "Mary Beton, Mary Seton,
Mary Carmichael ... any name you please" (AROO, 8). The second consistently uses
the pronoun "we" rather than "I." The effect is to play down the sense of personal
grievance in both works and to increase the feeling of detachment. These decisions
were conscious, as we know from an important letter Woolf wrote to Ethel Smyth,
whose own feminist polemics she found politically naive precisely because they were
so personal. Woolf urges her to "escape the individual" and try to make her protest
more general and objective. And she uses A Room of One's Own as an example:
I only say this because-well, I didn't write 'A room' without considerable feeling even you
will admit; I'm not cool on the subject. And I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious;
legendary. If I said, Look here am I uneducated, because my brothers used all the family funds
which is the fact-Well theyd have said; she has an axe to grind; and no one would have taken
me seriously, though I agree I should have had many more of the wrong kind of reader; who
will read you and go away and rejoice in the personalities, not because they are lively and easy
reading; but because they prove once more how vain, how personal, so they will say, rubbing
their hands with glee, women always are; I can hear them as I write.
(L, V, 194-95)
This heightened awareness of a possibly hostile audience strongly affects the tone
of A Room of One's Own. In place of anger we have irony; in place of sarcasm, charm.
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The choices are designed not only to win over the opposition but to reinforce the
image of the author's cool self-possession, clearly a very important matter for Woolf.
Her technique is both concessive and seductive. It affects the way in which the speaker
presents herself, for example: not as the prophetic voice of truth, but as inevitably
limited, tentative. She begins by assuring the reader that her vision of the controver-
sial issues discussed in the book is not to be taken as authoritative: "One can only give
one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the
limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncracies of the speaker" (AROO, 7). But the
idiosyncracies of Woolf's speaker are more calculated than beyond her control. In
reading the book, one is often aware of how the audience is being manipulated. Take,
for example, the passage about how contemporary female novelists depict the relationship between women. Woolf notes that in recent fiction, women are often presented as more involved with other women than with men. Yet her way of introducing this
controversial subject in A Room of One's Own is arch, playful, deliberately comic. It
seems to address the women at Cambridge for whom the original lectures were intended; but it is acutely conscious of the later audience of men standing behind them.
She is reading, she says, a new novel by a woman:
I turned the page and read . . . I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? ... We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read
were these-"Chloe liked Olivia. . ." Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of
our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
(AROO, 123)
The comic technique of this passage reduces its seriousness and makes what
might have been disturbing to men more tolerable. "Chloe liked Olivia": the name
Chloe recalls the innocence of pastoral; and the word "liked" hints at the possibility of
a romantic attachment between women without insisting on it. Woolf has managed to
say that contemporary women novelists are turning to an important human tie neglected in previous fiction the intimate friendship possible between women. Yet she
has said it without proclaiming it and by playing down its more controversial aspects.
Whether one regards such passages as delightfully witty or offensively coy, it is clear
that they represent Woolf's rhetorical strategy at its most strenuously ironic.
Though the irony of Three Guineas is more pointed and less genial, it is neverthe-
less pretty consistently there. In the later book, Woolf allows men to incriminate
themselves by quoting them at length. The work is full of unintentionally revealing
passages from the writings of benighted men that illustrate male coerciveness, smugness, or condescension in their attitudes toward women. Woolf lets them go on,
juxtaposes one passage against another to suggest a kind of masculine conspiracy, and
then deflates with an ironic sentence or two. The technique is extremely economical.
For example, she quotes at length from a document produced by the Church of
England that argues the unsuitability of women for the ministry on the grounds that
"it would be impossible for the male members of the average Anglican congregation to
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be present at a service at which a woman ministered without becoming unduly conscious of her sex." Woolf's one-sentence comment on the Church's elaborate argument for this position is a little classic of irony: "In the opinion of the Commissioners,
therefore, Christian women are more spiritually minded than Christian men-a
remarkable, but no doubt adequate, reason for excluding them from the priesthood"
(TG, 288-89).
Irony is aggression that pulls its punches. It can be a vigorous form of persuasion,
but it deliberately refuses to attack the real adversary. As often as not, its origin is the
power of the opposition. Woolf showed herself conscious of the dynamics of literary
irony in her brilliant essay on Gibbon. She argues that Gibbon's skeptical examination of Christianity was deeply offensive to his audience, and that his awareness of
their hostility made him use ironic discourse: "In such circumstances irony was the
obvious weapon; the pressure of public opinion forced him to be covert, not open. And
irony is a dangerous weapon; it easily becomes sidelong and furtive; the ironist seems
to be darting a poisoned tongue from a place of concealment" ("The Historian and
'The Gibbon,' " CE, I, 120). Woolf's imagery here suggests that she was more than a
little repelled by the sly, devious means that she, like Gibbon, found herself compelled
to use. It was not an ideal form of expression for her, perhaps, but it permitted her to
attack a powerful opponent.
This acute sense of her audience's potential hostility also encouraged Woolf to
adopt the strange scholarly apparatus of Three Guineas its reliance on facts and
figures, on recognized authorities, on the strenuous discipline of argument by citation
and footnote. She begins the section on the discrimination against women in the
professions, their relegation to the lower ranks of the hierarchy, by recourse to Whitaker's Almanack that "impersonal and impartial authority" who can hardly be
accused of having an axe to grind. The question of women's failure to rise to the
highest professional positions is so important, she says, that it must be examined "by
the white light of facts, not by the coloured light of biography" (TG, 83). And so the
argument proceeds (on the surface) by elaborate documentation of all its assertions
and by quotation from the works of men. The lid of the pressure cooker must be
clamped down tight over the fiercely bubbling feelings. Behind the impersonal technique lies the fear of letting her book demonstrate any of the characteristics men have
traditionally claimed to find in women: that they are illogical, hysterical, ignorant,
and subjective, rather than clear-sighted. In writing Three Guineas Woolf gritted her
teeth, determined to beat the enemy at his own game. She was delighted that the
Times Literary Supplement reviewer called her "the most brillant pamphleteer in
England" and that another critic commended her for being scrupulously fair and
puritanically self-denying (AWD, 294-95). This was precisely the effect she was
trying for; it must have pleased her to think she had mastered this alien discourse.
"Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women," Adrienne Rich writes of A
Room of One's Own, "but she is acutely conscious-as she always was-of being
overheard by men; by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter
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by her father, Leslie Stephen."118 Yet though it is true Woolf was consistently aware of
her male readers, her attitude toward them changed significantly in the course of her
career. She begins by feeling helpless and anxious about their possible contempt. One
of the reasons it took her so long to finish her first novel was that she had to contend
with the spectre of her father's disapproval. At work on the first draft of The Voyage
Out, she has a disturbing dream: "I dreamt last night that I was showing father the
manuscript of my novel; and he snorted, and dropped it on to a table, and I was very
melancholy, and read it this morning, and thought it bad" (L, I, 325). The dream
reveals an involuntary incorporation of the alien standard by which her work is to be
judged. At about the same time, she asks her brother-in-law Clive Bell, when she
sends him a draft of the first hundred pages of the novel, "whether you have anything
to say about that unfortunate work? I have a feeling at this moment that it is all a
mistake, and I believe you could tell me. At any rate I put myself in your hands with
great confidence" (L, I, 371). The self-deprecating humility of this plea makes pathetic reading, especially when we remember that the man she was addressing was
her intellectual inferior. But it is worth noting that even at this very early stage in her
career she is ready to defend herself against the specifically masculine criticisms her
work arouses. Clive Bell's comments on The Voyage Out are accepted with gratitude,
on the whole; but on one point she refuses to give way. He protests against the
"prejudice against men" the work reveals to him; and Woolf abruptly turns the tables:
"for psychological reasons which seem to me very interesting, a man, in the present
state of the world, is not a very good judge of his sex" (L, I, 383).
Woolf never stops being sensitive to masculine criticism of her feminist writings.
At the same time, however, she becomes increasingly dismissive about men's disap-
proval and steadily more willing to meet it. In writing Three Guineas, she faces the
fact that she will need real courage to attack the entrenched positions that are the
book's targets. When the men in her circle discuss the futility of pacifism, the inevitability of war, she becomes firmly convinced of the need to examine their attitudes from
her own detached point of view.19 What had begun as a helpless fear of male authority
had gradually turned into a skeptical and highly critical perspective on it. But of
course she could not afford to ignore masculine culture, the realities of power being
what they were. If men were determined to fight, her own life would inevitably be
affected. There seemed no alternative to addressing men in their own language and to
taking their assumptions and methods of persuasion as her own starting point. The
strategy of A Room of One's Own-that of speaking to an audience of women while
remaining conscious of the male readers behind them-seemed finally too coy and
indirect.
The result was Three Guineas, a book in which Woolf considers her male audience more carefully, more calculatedly, than in any other work. An obsessive strategic
thinking went into its composition and accounts for the striking absence of expressive
freedom, the forced alienation from self, in its style and tone. Her perspective on
masculine culture is thoroughly critical. But her rhetorical choices are determined by
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the need to avoid offending the males in her audience so seriously that they will stop
reading the book. So she invents the well-meaning male correspondent who writes
asking her how war might be prevented-a symbolic figure designed to represent the
confused, liberal, established men with feminist sympathies who are the audience she
most needs to reach. The working titles for the book-"On Being Despised," "Men
Are Like That"-are rejected in favor of something less instantly offensive to such
readers, the more neutral "Three Guineas."
Woolf's wish to avoid alienating the men in her audience was not entirely a
matter of strategy, however. As in the first feminists, there is a strong conservative
streak in her temperament that makes her reluctant to give up the ideal of women and
men working in harmony for the same goals. Her bottled-up anger, her persistent
concessiveness, are also expressions of her wish and need to look at "the aggressor" as
simply another human being, educated from childhood to pursue destructive (and
self-destructive) goals. She is usually careful to separate the learned qualities of
"masculinity" from the biological fact of maleness. And she consistently idealizes a
future world in which the sexes are no longer at cross purposes.
This goal accounts for several important passages in her feminist books, most
notably the often-discussed section on androgyny in A Room of One's Own and the
attack on the term "feminism" in Three Guineas. The discussion of androgyny begins
with Woolf's vision of a man and a young woman approaching a taxicab from oppo-
site sides of the street, entering it, and driving off together. This deliberately trivial
incident is then raised to symbolic significance to suggest the restored unity of the
sexes. The image, and the androgynous ideal it crystallizes, is so important for Woolf
that she uses a variant of it as the final incident in her novel The Years. In both books,
it is intended as a kind of truce in the sex war that is tearing the race apart. At the
same time, the ideal had a therapeutic purpose for Woolf herself. As Elaine Showalter
has suggested, "Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with
her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and
ambition."20 A similar motive is at work in Woolf's attack on the word "feminism" in
Three Guineas. The word, with its supposed insistence on "the rights of women," has
done much harm, she says, by pitting the sexes against each other. Once the word is
destroyed, "the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women
working together for the same cause" (TG, 184-85).
This charitable notion works not only to conciliate male readers but to soothe
Woolf's own resentment. The cooperative ideal is based on the belief that men are
capable of reform, that their aggression is as much a product of false training as is
women's submission. In the original version of the essay "Professions for Women,"
Woolf assures her audience of women "that there are men who have triumphed over
all the difficulties of their very lopsided education, of their very specialized and arduous careers, men of civilisation, not only of education, men with whom a woman can
live in perfect freedom, without any fear. Men too can be emancipated."2' Such
sentiments characterize Woolf at her most optimistic. Although it is very tempting
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(especially for a male critic) to present them as conclusive and authoritative, they do
not seem to me to have succeeded in convincing Woolf herself. The contrary visionthat "Men Are Like That" and not willing or able to change-is at least as powerful
in her later career and seems to me to dominate her last works. When she compares
the nineteenth-century conflicts in the women's movement with contemporary ones,
she sees little significant change: "there is the same waste of strength, waste of temper,
waste of time, and waste of money. Almost the same daughters ask almost the same
brothers for almost the same privileges. Almost the same gentlemen intone almost the
same refusals for almost the same reasons. It seems as if there were no progress in the
human race, but only repetition" (TG, 120).
Despite Woolf's frequently reiterated hope for a revolution in the relation be-
tween the sexes, she seems to have been more deeply convinced of the unlikeliness of
such a transformation. This pessimism is perhaps the deepest reason for the quite
extraordinary concessions she is sometimes willing to make. For example, in A Room
of One's Own she bases her whole theory of what women's novels will be like in the
future on the assumption that women will never have long stretches of time free to
work: "one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than
those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of study and uninter-
rupted work. For interruptions there will always be" (AROO, 117; italics added).
The passage seems to present a particular domestic arrangement as a kind of destiny.
And it is at war with the more sanguine vision of liberated women who "have the
habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what [they] think" (AROO, 171)
with which the book concludes.
The disparity between visionary ideal and felt reality only exacerbated Woolf's
bitterness. That her anger could not be publicly acknowledged-was strategically
unwise as well as offensive to the idealist in herself-made it more internally pressing. And as we will see, the public events of the 1930s-the triumph of fascism and
the growing sense of the inevitability of war-struck Woolf as proof that the forces of
aggressive masculinity were waxing rather than waning. As she brooded about them,
the book on women's professions she was writing at the time changed shape. Eventually it became Three Guineas, a meditation on the causal link between masculine
domination and war. Its mood is far more bitter than A Room of One's Own. By the
late 1930s, the makeup of her geniality was washing off. She can no longer keep the
savagery out of her voice, even though she tries to quarantine it in the lengthy and
extraordinary notes to Three Guineas. In these notes, the indignation she has largely
forced herself to keep out of the text bursts forth in a kind of mock-scholarly form, for
example in the attack on that patron saint of male supremacists, Paul: "He was of the
virile or dominant type, so familiar at present in Germany, for whose gratification a
subject race or sex is essential" (TG, 298).
Such expressions of anger in the notes to Three Guineas are mild compared to
some of the passages Woolf originally intended to include in the book, for example
this attack on the egotism of the masculine man from an earlier draft:
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His mania for distinction is passing the bounds of sanity. "I" is developed till it obscures the
sun and the stars. I lies over the trees; cerces [curses?] the new born babe to its deformity. He
has become an egomaniac; always writing about I; an egotist on such a scale that to assuage the
pangs of his egotism he must keep a whole sex devoted to his service. The recreation of heroes.
Women's place is the home. She must devote herself to the recreation of heroes. What is that
but the cry of a goose's swollen liver? the demand of the inflamed 'I' for pity, sympathy in its
sufferings caused by a red and swollen egotism?22
The elimination of this passage in the final version of the book is an example of Woolf
revising anger out and is perhaps based on her realization that the imagery of the
"goose's swollen liver," of men's "red and swollen egotism"-with its suggestion of
tumescence-comes too close to an attack on biological maleness itself.
Though such passages do not find their way into the published work, Woolf's
diary in the 1930s and early 1940s reveals that these sentiments were not successfully
censored in her own thoughts. The first target is Hitler and the Nazis, about whom
she writes in 1934, immediately after the carnage of the bloody "Night of the Long
Knives": "These brutal bullies go about in hoods & masks, like little boys dressed up,
acting this idiotic, meaningless, brutal, bloody, pandemonium" (D, IV, 223). But
soon her awareness of autocratic impulses shifts from the public to the private sphere,
and we find her, in 1935, attacking even Leonard Woolf in a passage that has no
precedents in the earlier diary. The cook enters in tears because of the way Leonard
has treated her. And Woolf reflects that he is "very hard on people; especially on the
servant class. No sympathy with them; exacting; despotic.... His extreme rigidity of
mind surprises me.... His desire, I suppose, to dominate. Love of power. And then
he writes against it" (D, IV, 326).
It is the stress, in Three Guineas, on the connection between fascist brutality and
ordinary, garden-variety impulses of authority in the men of her own country that
offended so many of Woolf's first readers. She was pointing to a temperamental link
between men who thought of each other as irreconcilable enemies-hardly an idea
calculated to win male converts to the women's cause. By the time she came to write
Three Guineas, her expressive needs were at odds with the tactical requirements of
such a book, and this helps to account for its wide palette of tones-from good humor
to rage, from enforced objectivity to biting subjective response. In the mid-1930s, the
form of the feminist book designed in part for an audience of men had become an
inadequate vehicle for her needs as a writer.
Although this change represents an internal, psychological evolution, it was deeply influenced by the political and aesthetic developments of the 1930s. The triumph of
fascism in Italy and Germany spelled the end of the "clever hopes .. . / Of a low
dishonest decade," as Auden puts it in "September 1, 1939." Those hopes for pro-
gress, for world peace, for "men and women working together. for the same cause"
had sustained Woolf and the Bloomsbury group for nearly twenty years. But as the
coming war became first thinkable, then perhaps necessary, and finally inevitable, the
whole conciliatory habit of mind grew to seem unacceptable, because the slow march
82 REPRESENTATIONS
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of progress it was designed to serve was exposed as a fiction. For the worlds Mussolini
and Hitler created were consciously primitivist and regressive. They appealed not to
modern notions of gradual reform but to ancient models of heroic greatness-in the
Teutonic myths, in the image of Imperial Rome. And an essential part of the atavistic
program of both fascist regimes was a return to absolute sexual divisions. Woolf's
outraged quotations in the cancelled Three Guineas passage-"The recreation of
heroes. Women's place is the home. She must devote herself to the recreation of
heroes"-were not exaggerated. The militarist ethos was firmly established in both
Italy and Germany by the middle of the decade, as Woolf saw for herself in her 1935
journey to those countries. In the previous year, Mussolini had declared that "war is
the phenomenon which accompanies the development of humanity," and that "War is
to man as maternity is to woman."23 He made certain that the martial spirit was
inculcated early: "Even in elementary schools, children were drilled with miniature
rifles and machine guns, and this was welcomed as a properly formative influence on
national character."24
Hitler's version of this separation of sexual spheres was more extreme but not
different in kind. His twin cults of the army and of motherhood revived the ancient
division of labor and virtually eliminated the common ground that a century of feminism had won. By ordinance women were not permitted to occupy the higher posi-
tions in the Nazi Party.25 Woman's world, as Hitler defined it in a 1934 speech, "is
her husband, her family, her children, and her house." For it is not true, he goes on,
that men's and women's spheres can overlap; the sexes' mutual respect "demands that
neither sex should try to do that which belongs to the other's sphere."26 The compensation women were offered for this loss of power was to be a new breed of menvirile, bold, hard as steel-to make possible and then to honor their sacred maternal
mission. And to produce this new kind of man, the spirit of the armed forces was
indispensable. Military training became the instrument of national regeneration-
psychological as well as political. That is why Hitler could say in Mein Kampf:
"What the German people owes to the army may be simply summed up in one single
word, namely: everything."27
This martial myth was contagious, and Woolf was horrified to see how easily the
disease could cross the English Channel. She was less worried by the minority of her
countrymen who declared themselves sympathetic to Mussolini or Hitler or Franco
than by the emergence of a comparable militarism in men whose minds and spirits she
respected. Perhaps the most striking example was her own nephew, Julian Bell.
Julian was her sister's firstborn, a gifted and promising young writer who had been
brought up in a pacifist household and been conditioned to think of war as an unmiti-
gated disaster. In 1935, he edited an anthology of essays called We Did Not Fight:
1914-18 Experiences of War Resisters designed to make the case for conscientious
objection vivid in the minds of the young men who might well have to decide whether
to fight in the next war. Bell's introduction to this volume praises the "magnificent
tradition of personal integrity and intellectual courage" shown by those in his parents'
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generation who resisted the call to arms. But there was an ominous undercurrent in
his essay that suggested a new direction in "pacifism." His own generation will not be
satisfied simply to say no, Bell argues. It will "hit back as hard and shrewdly as
possible, to bring down, by hook or by crook, any government and any governing class
that dares to make war." In other words, the antidote to war would be revolution. In
Bell's paradoxical formula: "the war-resistance movements of my generation will in
the end succeed in putting down war-by force if necessary."28 There is pride and
authority in this statement rather than tragic resignation. Its author had caught the
bacillus, though he was not yet aware of it.
By 1936, Bell had decided to fight in the Spanish civil war, where he was killed at
the age of twenty-nine. But before he left England, he wrote a long open letter to E.
M. Forster justifying not only his decision to fight but war itself. He wanted to
explain why he and others of his generation were no longer pacifists. It is not merely
that resistance to fascism must inevitably evoke a military response to military provocation. There was something attractive in the soldier's life, some vital current that
only war's barbaric power could release. And Bell ends up confessing "to something
of the barbarian" in himself: "the barbarian, however cultivated, retains his lust for
activity, for doing things, not experiencing things as they happen. And though that
lust can be sublimated into art, science and philosophy, it is at heart, I believe, the
barbaric lust for action of which war is the type. It is this that makes me feel . . . that
the soldier is admirable."29 In Woolf's memoir of Julian Bell, written a few days after
his death, she tries to grasp his point of view but finally throws up her hands: "What
made him do it? I suppose its a fever in the blood of the younger generation which we
can't possibly understand. I have never known anyone of my generation have that
feeling about a war."30
Bell's was by no means a unique reaction, and it was not strictly limited to his
own generation. Even a noncombatant like Auden could write of "The conscious
acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder" in the original version of his poem
"Spain 1937."31 And Yeats argued-in his prose work A Vision (1937)-that war
was necessary to revitalize an effete civilization: "Love war because of its horror, that
belief may be changed, civilisation renewed."32 His testamentary poem "Under Ben
Bulben," written in 1938, addressed to the next generation, and deliberately designed
to be the final statement in his Collected Poems, includes the lines
You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
'Send war in our time, 0 Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.33
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Such passages were the immediate products of contemporary politics, but they
were also made possible by a transformation of the aesthetic principles of early mod-
ern literature. The impersonal and putatively apolitical methods of the first great
writers of the century were gradually discredited in the atmosphere of crisis preceding
the second world war. In 1934, a baffled T. S. Eliot could record the disparity
between his own working assumptions and those of the new age in these words: "I
suffer, like most of my generation, in not having been brought up to think about
politics and economics.... It seemed that politics could be left to an inferior class of
people, actuated by vanity and love of power, who liked politics."34 For the younger
generation, such attitudes were at best naive, at worst troglodytic. Artists could no
longer afford to play the role of Joyce's God of the creation-"invisible, refined out of
existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." They became participants in an increasingly politicized, polarized, and acrimonious literary culture. The steady growth
of this engagement is traced in Samuel Hynes's history of the 1930s, The Auden
Generation. In the last years of the decade, Hynes shows, literary works typically
record a polarization of society into Far Left and Far Right, with the mediating
values of more neutral observers "cast out by both sides, tossed into the middle of the
conflict, to be trampled down because they are irrelevant."35 As George Orwell was to
assert in a retrospective essay on his career, "Every line of serious work that I have
written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and
for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."36
In short, the contemplative neutrality of the observer-artist came to be seen as a
luxury of another era, no longer honorable in a world on the brink of disaster. This
new aesthetic dispensation directly affected the public evaluation of Woolf's work.
The receptive or respectful or enthusiastic response that generally greeted her new
works in the 1920s gradually gave way to what Woolf in her diary called a series of
"severe swingeings": "Bloomsbury is ridiculed; & I am dismissed with it" (D, IV,
288-89). These attacks-in influential journals like Scrutiny and in books like
Wyndham Lewis's Men Without Art (1934)-were essentially political in nature.
They accused Woolf and Bloomsbury of practicing an etiolated aestheticism, rooted in
Walter Pater and made possible by their parasitic leisure-class status. Q. D. Leavis
gave her savage review of Three Guineas the sarcastic title "Caterpillars of the Com-
monwealth Unite!"37 And Wyndham Lewis's attack on Woolf was rooted in masculine ressentiment against Bloomsbury's "feminizing" of culture: "It has been with a
considerable shaking in my shoes, and a feeling of treading upon a carpet of eggs, that
I have taken the cow by the horns in this chapter, and broached the subject of the part
that the feminine mind has played-and minds as well, deeply feminized, not techni-
cally on the distaff side-in the erection of our present criteria. For fifteen years I
have subsisted in this to me suffocating atmosphere."38 By the mid-1930s, the atmosphere had changed, and a new aesthetic-political style-activist, partisan, and agressive-had taken its place.
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Woolf's response to this new intellectual climate was complex. We have already
seen that the conciliatory habits of mind she had perfected over many years came to
seem suspect and were replaced by a greater willingness to attack. But though she
could imitate the new style she did not really want to adopt it. The old inhibitions had
been weakened but were not dissolved. She struggled to find a form that would allow
her to express her feelings without turning her into a self-righteous polemicist. And
she had already begun some years earlier to question the whole aesthetic tradition that
dictated authorial reticence. In the late 1920s she first entertained the notion that a
less shaped and controlled vehicle might be qualitatively superior to the more finished
works of art she had idealized. This radical idea never became a settled conviction, but
one finds her increasingly willing to consider it. Her own diary becomes not merely
useful as a quarry but intrinsically interesting to her. In an entry written in 1926, she
envisions a work that might properly be called "the greatest book in the world. This is
what the book would be that was made entirely solely & with integrity of one's
thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became 'works of art'? Catch
them hot & sudden as they rise in the mind" (D, III, 102). The passage suggests that
something important is left out of works of art-especially the most perfect ones. Her
new responsiveness to more chaotic forms is suggested in her 1927 review of Katherine Mansfield's Journal, which she says presents us with:
the spectacle of a mind-a terribly sensitive mind-receiving one after another the haphazard
impressions of eight years of life.... Nothing could be more fragmentary; nothing more
private. We feel that we are watching a mind which is alone with itself; a mind which has so
little thought of an audience that it will make use of a shorthand of its own now and then, or, as
the mind in its loneliness tends to do, divide into two and talk to itself.
("A Terribly Sensitive Mind," CE, I, 356)
These observations, so different in their assumptions from the neoclassic aesthetic
Woolf had espoused, served to legitimize a more directly expressive kind of writing
than the sort she had so carefully mastered. She showed a new and unapologetic
interest in the diary, the letter to an intimate friend, the autobiographical memoir
intended for the drawer. She worked in all these genres in her last years, and as they
have been published, they have come to seem as important and powerful as some of
her more familiar works. By 1939, for instance, she was writing her autobiography.
The long section of this unfinished book published in the collection Moments of Being
is distinctly private and was originally intended for the audience of old friends that
called itself the Memoir Club. The only rule observed by these writers was that of
absolute frankness. And so, in Woolf's "Sketch of the Past," she allows herself to
write about her childhood more personally than she had ever done, without pretending that "I" could easily be translated into "we." She also finds herself criticizing "the
Victorian game of manners ... founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness" that
86 REPRESENTATIONS
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she and her sister had learned at the family tea-table, the legacy of the Angel in the
House ideal as it affected her own writings. Such civilized qualities are "helpful in
making something seemly and human out of raw odds and ends. But the Victorian
manner is perhaps-I am not sure-a disadvantage in writing. When I re-read my
old Common Reader articles I detect it there. I lay the blame for their suavity, their
politeness, their sidelong approach, to my tea-table training" (MB, 129).
This final statement on art and restraint is very different from Woolf's earliest
aesthetic convictions. Though it is still guarded, it suggests that she has over the years
become increasingly aware of the concessions her writing involved and increasingly
unwilling to make them. For anger, as Kent says in King Lear, "hath a privilege." In
the 1939 Memoir she allows herself for the first time to voice her deep resentment
about her father's autocratic behavior: "Never have I felt such rage and frustration.
For not a word of my feeling could be expressed." But after forty years, the silence can
finally be broken, and Woolf lets him have it:
Even now I can find nothing to say of his behaviour save that it was brutal. If, instead of words,
he had used a whip the brutality would have been no greater.... He had so ignored, or refused
to face, or disguised his own feelings, that not only had he no conception of what he himself did
and said; he had no idea what other people felt. Hence the horror and the terror of these violent
displays of rage. These were sinister, blind, animal, savage.
(MB, 125-26)
Certainly there is not much "suavity" or "politeness," not much evidence of the
"sidelong approach" here. It is powerful writing, designed to satisfy an inner need for
Woolf at a certain moment in her life. But unlike her more controlled public works,
the passage releases intense emotions over which she has not achieved mastery. There
seemed, finally, no satisfactory way for her to reconcile the needs of art and self-
expression, of conciliation and anger, at least not in a single work. For someone with a
sensibility as complex as hers, the only solution seemed to be to write simultaneously
in different forms-the political tract, the diary, the novel of fact and of fantasy, the
essay, the memoir-and in different tones: charm, detachment, wit, anger, defiance.
Each gave voice to a part of her own nature and fulfilled a part of her own needs as a
writer. Her work in the 1930s seems significantly more fragmented, more divided
against itself, than the work of the previous decade. An essential confidence in herself
as a center of gravity and in her individual books as adequate expressive vehicles for
her vision had gradually been eroded, so that even a late masterpiece like Between the
Acts seemed unsatisfactory to her: she wrote it, she says, "with my brain half asleep"
(L, VI, 486). The image is telling. She had come in the end to feel that in order for her
to write at all, she was forced to anesthetize one part of her brain or another. The
problem of bringing the warring parts of herself together in a single work had at last
come to seem insoluble.
Anger and Conciliation in Woolf's Feminism 87
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Notes
1. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London, 1977-82), IV, 297; hereafter
cited as D. Other quotations from Woolf's published work refer unless otherwise noted to
the Hogarth Press (London) editions and use the following abbreviations:
AROO A Room of One's Own (1967)
AWD A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (1972)
CE Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols. (1967)
L The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols.
(1975-80)
MB Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: 1976)
MD Mrs. Dalloway (1968)
TG Three Guineas (1968)
TL To the Lighthouse (1967)
VO The Voyage Out (1971)
Quotations from the Woolf manuscripts in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of
English and American Literature, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden
Foundations) are published with the permission of the Collection and of Quentin Bell.
2. Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," in her On Lies,
Secrets, and Szlence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York, 1979), p. 37.
3. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to
Lessing (Princeton, 1977), p. 262.
4. Jane Marcus, "Art and Anger," Feminist Studies 4 (1978), 94.
5. T. E. Hulme, "Romanticism and Classicism," in his Speculations: Essays on Humanism
and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1924), pp. 120, 126.
6. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in his Selected Essays 1917-1932
(New York, 1932), pp. 10, 7-8.
7. Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London, 1924), p. 186.
8. Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, Lord PethickLawrence, ed. (London, 1959), p. 55.
9. See her letter to Janet Case, 1 Jan. 1910 (L, I, 421).
10. Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London, 1927), p. 108.
11. Ibid., p. 145.
12. Margaret Todd, The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake (London, 1918), p. 283.
13. Ray Strachey, "The Cause": A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain
(London, 1928), pp. 180-81.
14. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles W. Hagelman,
Jr. (New York, 1967), p. 215.
15. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement
(London [1912]), p. 41.
16. Todd, p. 503.
17. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf. A Biography (London, 1972), vol. II, p. 26.
18. Rich, p. 37.
88 REPRESENTATIONS
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19. See the entry dated 15 April 1937 in Woolf's manuscript diary in the Berg Collection.
This will be published in volume V of The Diary of Virginia Woolf.
20. Showalter, p. 264. Showalter's whole chapter on Woolf is an attack on the evasiveness of
Woolf's androgynous ideal. See also Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards Androgyny: Aspects of
Male and Female in Literature (London, 1973), pp. 115-67; and Marilyn Farwell, "Virginia Woolf and Androgyny," Contemporary Literature 16 (1975), 433-51.
21. Virginia Woolf, Typescript of Jan. 21, 1931 Speech before the London/National Society
for Women's Service, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, p. 21. The passage is
published in Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of 'The Years', ed.
Mitchell A. Leaska (New York, 1977), p. xxxxiv, with erroneous reading of "manipulated" for "emancipated."
22. Virginia Woolf, [Three Guineas] Later Typescript, Berg Collection, New York Public
Library, pp. 120-21.
23. Quoted in Herman Finer, Mussolini's Italy (London, 1935), p. 175.
24. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire (New York, 1976), pp. 190-91.
25. Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945
(New York, 1971), pp. 252-53.
26. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, trans. Norman H. Baynes (London, 1942), vol. I, 528-29.
27. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. John Chamberlain, et al. (New York, 1939), p. 384.
28. Julian Bell, "Introduction," We Did Not Fight: 1914-18 Experiences of War Resisters
(London, 1935), pp. xv, xix.
29. "War and Peace: A Letter to E. M. Forster," in Julian Bell: Essays, Poems and Letters,
ed. Quentin Bell (London, 1938), pp. 388-89.
30. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. II, 258.
31. W. H. Auden, Spain (London, 1937), p. 11. He later changed the line to "The conscious
acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder" [The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dra-
matic Writings, ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1977), p. 212].
32. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York, 1956), pp. 52-53.
33. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York, 1951), p. 342.
34. T. S. Eliot, "In Sincerity and Earnestness: New Britain As I See It," New Britazn 3
(1934), 274.
35. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s
(New York, 1977), p. 301.
36. George Orwell, "Why I Write," The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia
Orwell and Ian Angus (London, 1968), vol. I, p. 5.
37. Scrutiny 7 (1938), 203-14.
38. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (London, 1934), p. 170.
Anger and Conciliation in Woolf's Feminism 89
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The Transatlantic Virginia Woolf: Essaying an American Audience
On 22 December 1937, Lyn Newman wrote to Virginia Woolf from
Princeton, telling her she should come to America: "Virginia, you would
get a tremendous welcome, you are much read & appreciated" (qtd. in
Daugherty 154). The fan mail from the U.S. bears her out. For example,
a 23-year-old public school teacher wrote on 6 February 1935 that she
was "propped up in bed reading you again." Alluding to A Room of
One s Own and several novels and essays, the letter writer reveals her
wide Woolf reading, expresses hope that Woolf's next book will be out
soon, and asks "I wonder if your English public prizes you as much
as we Americans do?" (qtd. in Daugherty 138-40). In his preface to
the 1979 Virginia Woolf issue of Twentieth Century Literature, Lucio
Ruotoio quoted this question and thus captured that moment in reception
history when the Woolf revival in the United States was underway and
we Americans were wondering why the English weren't as excited as we
were.
Various explanations for the different reception histories have been
put forward,' but one possibility may lie not just in the attitudes of
different cultures and readers, but also in the different Virginia Woolfs
contemporary audiences read. Although Woolf's major works were
published nearly simultaneously in England and the United States from
1922 on, readers on the two sides of the Atlantic did not read identical
texts. American readers also experienced Woolf's thought through
significantly different sets of essays.
Of the essays now attributed to Virginia Woolf, readers on both sides
of the Atlantic had close to 90 of them in common, essays published in
the same versions at or near the same time in periodicals or in the two
Common Readers. English readers had a canon of approximately 640
essays, whereas American readers had only one-sixth ofthat, around 110.
But throughout her career, Woolf's essays in TLS were unsigned, and
through the end of 1928, most of her essays published elsewhere in the
U.K. were also unsigned. In contrast, all of Woolf's essays in the U.S.
carried her signature, including a couple of reprints of pieces written as
Virginia Stephen. American common readers, then, could match Woolf
with her thought much earlier.
Approximately 550 of Woolf's essays were published only in England
during her lifetime, and 19 essays appeared only in the U.S.- For
example, "Miss Onnerod," published in the Dial and then in the
American edition of the first Common Reader, was not published in the
English edition of the same book; English readers did not have easy
access to this essay until 1984, when Andrew McNeillie included it in
his annotated edition. When Isabel Forbes Milton wishes Woolf "had
to fetch lead pencils more often" in her letter, she's referring to "Street
Haunting," an essay American readers could read in 1927 but that
English readers would not see until the 1942 posthumous publication of
Death of the Moth (Daugherty 138). These nineteen essays, published
in nine different venues, may partially explain why Americans have
seen Woolf differently from the beginning: they introduced a more
"American," feminist/pacifist, and theoretical Woolf to a wide, varied,
and less class-bound audience, thus paving the way for the 1970s
renewal, the 1982 centennial celebration in West Virginia, and the
American view of Woolf as a "genuinely radical thinker and a feminist
iconoclast" (Briggs xxiii).
Julia Briggs and Jane Marcus provide some explanations for the different
reception histories and point to others. This article is a shortened version of a talk
given at the "Virginia Woolf and Magazines and Journals of the 1920s and 1930s"
session at the 2003 MLA.
See the accompanying chronological list. My approximate numbers are based
on the Kjrkpatrick and Clarke bibliography, Kirkpatrick's Modem Fiction Siudies
list, and The Essays ofVii'ginia Woolf, t am grateful to Stuart N. Clarke, who sent
me the table of contents for the forthcoming volume (> oí Ûie Essays (20 tl).
The nineteen essays published only in the United States appeared in
nine periodicals: Atlantic Monthly, Bookman, Dial, Forum, Hearst's
International Combined with Cosmopolitan, the New Republic, the
New York Herald Tribune Books supplement to the Sunday edition,
Saturday Review of Literature, and the Yale Review. Representing a
wide variety of American periodicals at the time, these outlets gave
Virginia Woolf both a broad American readership and much more
money (Lee 551). They range from weekly to quarterly, from small
circulation to large, from still with us to defunct; physically, they range
in size from quarto to folio and from 24 pages to 250; politically, they
range from a supporter of consumerism and capitalism on the right to a
liberal critique of business and government on the left with a couple in
between that presented open debates on current issues. Though some are
more regional than others, all attempted to reach a national audience.
More important, they reached a variety of Americans. Tnte, Virginia
Woolf was not appearing in True Confessions, the magazine Paul F.
Lazarsfeld and Rowena Wyant chose to represent the lowest cultural
group in their 1937 study of "Magazines in 90 Cities—Who Reads
What?" but the Hearst Cosmopolitan might be called "lowbrow," Joan
Shelley Rubin sees the New York Herald Tribune Books supplement
as "middlebrow" (xvi), Atlantic Monthly and the Yale Review reached
"highbrow" audiences, but not exclusively, so that the Atlantic Monthly
was considered "merely middle-brow" by the New Republic (Tebbel
and Zuckerman 203) and both were sneered at by the Dial (Whittemore
45)! All nine periodicals assumed Virginia Woolf would be of interest to
their readers, and together, they allowed Woolf to reach many and varied
portions of the U.S. reading population.
In the nineteen essays published only in the United States, Woolf writes
as a reviewer (reviewing, for example, E. M. Forster's novels, Gladys B.
Stem's A Deputy Was King, Ernest Hemingway's Men Without Women,
and Harold Nicolson's Some People); as a familiar essayist ("Miss
Ormerod," "Street Hattnting," "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid");
and as a literary historian ("Poetry, Fiction and the Future," "Not One of
Us" on Shelley). But she also plays more unfamiliar roles, such as when
she comments on Walter Edwin Peck's scholarship in his biography of
Shelley or on R. W. Lewis's footnotes in his edition of Horace Walpole's
Correspondence ("Two Antiquaries"). Or when she responds as an
invited guest to select the books she liked during the winter for the
spring announcement number of the New York Herald Tribune Books
section ("Preferences of Four Critics"). But the Woolf who emerges in
three other roles—"American" critic, feminist/pacifist, and theorist—
sowed the seeds for her 1970s American renewal.
Woolf not only introduced the English to her American readers through
essays such as "Miss Onnerod" and "Street Haunting," but she also took
on the role of an "American" critic, interpreting America and American
literature, albeit from an outsider's perspective. Often perceptive—
Woolf understands that Walt Whitman, baseball, and the coining of
new words convey something essential about the democratic nature of
the upstatt United States—and sometimes delightfully wacky and even
prescient—in 1938, she sees us owning cars, traveling abreast in 60-70
lanes at 90 mph, and pushing springs to reveal "whole meal[s] ready to
be eaten" in a refrigerator ("America" 58)—Woolf gives us a picture
of ourselves in "American Fiction," "An Essay in Criticism," "The
American Language,'" "America, which I have never seen," and even in
"Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid." In the last she poignantly hopes
American men and women, because they have yet to have their sleep
"broken by machine-gun fire," will "rethink" her thoughts on peace into
something "serviceable" (Collected Essays 4: 116-11).
Woolf's visibility in the U.S. was enhanced in 1927 when hita
Van Doren, editor of the Sunday New York Herald Tribune Books
supplement, asked Woolf to be guest editor for October. As a result, she
had to "drive my pen through one article after another—Hemingway,
Morgan, Shelley; & now Biography" {Diary 3: 157-58). In "American
Fiction" in the Saturday Review of Literature, Woolf had compared
Sherwood Anderson to Chekhov and Sinclair Lewis to Wells and
Bennett; asserted that Ring Lardner "writes the best prose that has come
our way" (E4: 275) because he is neither overly proud of or overly
bitter about being American; expressed admiration for Walt Whitman,
and finally praised the new tradition and the new words being bom
in America, finding that American works make the familiar strange.
Having covered that vast ground in "American Fiction," she takes on
"the works of a man called Hemingway" {Letters 3: 416) in the New
York Herald Tribune, where she nails him and his "self-conscious
virility" in the novel Men Without Women. She frames all her remarks
about Hemingway within a commentary on the processes and prejudices
of criticism that undercuts every conclusion she comes to in the essay,
and she praises how "[e]ach word pulls its weight in the [Hemingway]
sentence." But just as she realizes baseball's importance to America,
she realizes bullfighting's importance to Hemingway. Thus, she uses one
of his own sentences to suggest that he "go[es] through every sort of
contortion so that the public thinks [he] is running every risk" but that he
doesn't always "[stand] up to the bull and [let] the horns—call them life,
truth, reality, whatever you like—pass him close" (E4: 454, 452, 455).
According to Michael Rejmolds, Hemingway's biographer, Hemingway
was so ñirious when he read the review "that he punched a lamp" in
Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company and "broke it" (E4; 456).
Other Americans also responded strongly to Woolf and found it easy to
write back to her. For example, an exchange among letter-writers in the
New Republic about American English, set off by a sentence about Henry
James in "On Not Knowing French," ran for quite some time. This
review of an André Maurois novel appeared on 13 Febniary 1929 (above
an eerily topical letter protesting a proposed "Alien Registration Bill");
a letter about Woolf's offending sentence from Harriot Cooke, a reply
from Woolf, and a comment on all of it by Edmund Wilson appeared on
24 April; additional letters were printed on 8 May, 22 May, 12 June, and
. 17 July. This relationship with American readers also made it possible
for Ann Watkins, a New York agent, to write to Woolf on 3 August 1937
asking her if she would like to do an article for Hearst's Cosmopolitan,
answering the question "what interests you most in this cosmopolitan
world of today?" Watkins describes the monthly series of answers and
even suggests Woolf's answer might be the United States. Woolf's
impressions, Watkins writes, "would be of great interest to your large
and appreciative reading public here," and on 28 October 1937, she calls
the article "a good start on what I hope may develop into a profitable
market for the occasional short piece that you may write" (Letters from
editors). ' Woolf's essay, where America "is a positive space, a place
of democracy and futurity, of largely enabling modernity" (McNeillie
42), follows a profile of Joseph Kennedy (as ambassador to the Court
of St. James) that includes a picture of the children. The essay seems
right at home next to JFK, forward-looking and fresh, and perhaps such
an associations hints at the later connections made between progressive
politics and Woolf's views.
American readers would have also seen the political nature of Woolf's
feminism and pacifism because of other essays in this set of nineteen:
the review of Hemingway already mentioned; the biographical profile
of Miss Eleanor Ormerod and her fight to get her insect studies accepted
by the male scientific establishment in the Dial; "Women and Fiction" in
the March 1929 Forum; "Women Must Weep—Or Unite Against War" in
the Atlantic Monthly for May and June 1938; and "Thoughts on Peace in
an Air Raid," appearing in the New Republic in October 1940, an essay
that says if we are have peace, we "must compensate the man for the loss
of his gun" ( 0 : 4 : 175, 173). The periodical contexts of these essays
make their political resonance unavoidable. "Women and Fiction" looks
Every effort has been made to locate the copyright holders for the letters to
Virginia Woolf used in this essay. I want to thank the Special Collections staff for
its help and the Library at the University of Sussex, as owner of these letters, for
its pemiission to publish these extracts.
right at home in March 1929 forum: William Allan Neilson, President
of Smith College, had argued there in February that women should be
educated like men, and Dr. W. Béran Wolfe argued in March that it was
time for co-education because the sexes' intellectual equality was now
beyond argument. Woolf's pacifist "Women Must Weep" debuted in an
Atlantic Monthly issue whose cover features Europe's map outlined in
white on a red background, with "Hitler Over Europe" stamped over the
titles and authors of articles inside. "Women and Fiction" and "Women
Must Weep" are drastically condensed and straightforward versions of ^
Room of One's Own and Tliree Guineas.* "Women and Fiction" appeared
in March 1929 ana A Room of One's Own was published in late October;
"Women Must Weep" appeared in May and June of 1938, and Three
Guineas was not published in the U.S. tmtil late August, whereas it had
appeared in England in early June. In contrast to the small audiences of
women who had heard the original talks in England, then, potentially
large audiences of women andm&n in the U.S. had inexpensive versions
of Woolf's feminist and pacifist arguments months before the booklength and more complex, literary arguments appeared.
It seems likely that "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid," the last essay
of Woolf's to appear in the U.S. during her lifetime, was inspired by
a foment of responses to Woolf's writing from American editors and
readers in the wake of Three Guineas. A letter from Phyllis Moir at
Forum on 17 November 1939 asked Woolf if she was ready "to boil
over" and write about women and peace (Letters from editors). Woolf
was thinking about doing so and asked to pick Shena Simon's brain
about "our next task," the "emancipation of man" (L6 379). On 14
May 1940 Motier Harris Fisher wrote a long letter about a symposium
to be held in New York in November about American women over the
past hundred years; accompanying the symposium would be a book
including contributions "from many obscure writers and from women
who are not writers at all." She invited Woolf to write on a topic ofher
own choosing for the book, but did suggest that "since small groups
of women in various parts of the United States have read your Three
Guineas, they would be interested in knowing whether its analysis of
a constructive attitude of women toward peace in time of peace still
seems valid in wartime" (Daugherty 175). In addition to the voluminous
correspondence from U.S. readers about Three Guineas, Woolf saved
two letters about "Women Must Weep." The first of these came from a
Quaker woman in McAUen, Texas, who wrote "you must keep up the
education" against the "blighting curse of Commercialism, Competition
and Greed" that is bred into "innocent babes," the second from a woman
in Brooklyn who was awake at 4 in the moming hoping Woolf would
"reach down among the daughters and men of uneducated folks" to "tell
us how we can help make the world a safe place to live in" (Daugherty
157-59). No matter the specific impetus, "Thoughts of Peace in an
Air Raid" seems to have been a response to American women who
felt strongly enough about Woolf's views to write to her about them;
she had hit a nerve. No wonder American feminist critics would later
quarrel with Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell's assessment of Woolf as
apolitical.
Finally, American readers saw Virginia Woolf practicing as a theorist in
these essays: "Poetry, Fiction and the Future";'' two pieces on biography,
one on Lytton Strachey and the other on Harold Nicolson; "Life and the
Novelist," a review about the balance between observation and craft; and
"Phases of Fiction," which appeared in three numbers of The Bookman
in 1929. This extended theoretical piece, covering six types of tiovelists,
is, as Anne Femald points out, "a theory of the novel based on the
pleasure of reading" (193) and Woolf's contribution to a conversation
about the art of fiction that Percy Lubbock, E. M. Forster, and others
were having at the time. Adding this essay and "Poetry, Fiction and the
See Naomi Black on the nature of the differences between "Women Must Weep"
and Three Guineas.
Although this essay grew out of a talk some Oxford undergraduates heard, it was
not published in the UK during Woolf's lifetime.
Articles. Letters III. Monks House Papers. SxMs 18. University of
Sussex.
McNeillie, Andrew. "Virginia Woolf's America." The Dublin Review 5
(Winter 2001-02): 42-55.
Marcus, Jane. "A Tale of Two Cultures." The Women's Review of Books
Jan. 1994: 11-13.
—. "Wrapped in the Stars and Stripes: Virginia Woolf in the U.S.A." The
South Carolina Review 29. \ (Fall 1996): 17-23.
Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle-Brow Culture. Chapel Hill:
U ofNorth Carolina P, 1992.
Seldes, Gilbert. "Form and the Novel." The Bookman Oct. 1929: 128-31.
Tebbel, John and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America,
1741-1990. NY: Oxford UP, 1991.
Whittemore, Reed. Little Magazines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1963.
Woolf, Virginia. "America, which I have never seen, interests me most
in this cosmopolitan world of today..." The Dublin Review 5 (Winter
2001-02): 56-60.
—. "American Fiction." Essays 4: 269-80.
—. The Diary of Virginia Woolf 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. (Vols. 2-5
assisted by Andrew McNeillie). NY: Harcourt, 1977-84.
—. "An Essay in Criticism." Essays 4: 449-56.
—. The Essays of Virginia Woolf Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vols. 1-4.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-1994.
—. The Essays of Virginia Woolf Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Vol. 5. London:
The Hogarth Press, 2009.
—. The Letters of Virginia Woolf Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann. 6 vols. NY: Harcourt, 1975-80.
—. "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid." Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard
Woolf. Vol. 4. NY: Harcourt, 1967. 173-77.175).
Future" to essays printed on both sides ofthe Atlantie, "Modem Fiction,"
"Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," and "How Should One Read a Book?,"
Americans could see Woolf carefully constructing a theory that not
only explains her own and others' modem fiction, but also understands, .
welcomes, and "places" other kinds of fiction.
The Bookman context highlights the theoretical nature of "Phases of
Fiction," juxtaposing it in April with a piece on Ellen Glasgow and the
South and a series about authors' works called "History of Their Books";
the May issue contains a "History of Their Books" entry on Fannie
Hurst, Rebecca West's London letter, and a piece on Sarah Ome Jewett;
June's issue features André Maurois discussing a biographer's difficulty
in weighing historical evidence, letters from Joseph Conrad and Stephen
Crane, and a review of Nella Larsen's Passing. Most telling, though, is
a piece in the October 1929 Bookman by Gilbert Seldes. He includes
Virginia Woolf's "Phases of Fiction" with his discussion of seven other
recent works on the novel in "Form and the Novel." For Seldes, Woolf
"has managed, with admirable skill, to discuss the problem of form
while she seemed to be discussing only the attitude of mind, the subject
matter, and the general tone" (130). In 1929, then, because of "Phases
of Fiction," an American critic has already seen the theory underlying
Woolf's work, something Hogarth Press did not see in 1979 when
preparing to publish Women and Writing. Michèle Barrett reports that
deleting the subheading "Virginia Woolf's Theory of Literature" from
her introduction was made "a condition'^ of granting her the rights for
the essays in the collection because, the person in charge insisted, Woolf
"did not have a 'theory' of her writing" (Barrett 15).
Perhaps the United States renewal of interest in Woolf during the 1970s
and 1980s simply began with the acceptance Woolf writes about on
" 19 December 1923: "publishing, writing; [...]; accepted in America,
neglected by all prize givers, very happy, very much on the go—that's
my state, at the moment of writing 6.14 P.M." (D2: 278). But perhaps
American readers ofthe 70s and 80s were ready to see Woolf's
democratic tendencies, feminist and pacifist politics, and theory as
• obvious because these nineteen essays had prepared the way when they
were published in a wide variety of American periodicals in the 1920s,
''1930s, and 1940.
Beth Daugherty
Otterhein College
Works Cited
Barrett, Michèle. Imagination in Theory: Ctilliire. Writing, Words, and
Things. NY: New York UP, 1999.
Black, Naomi. "'Women Must Weep": The Serialization of Three
Guineas." Editing Vuginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text.
London: Palgrave. 2002. 74-89.
Briggs, Julia. "The Story So Far...An Introduction to the Introductions."
Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works. London: Virago,
1994. vii-xxxiii.
Daugherty, Beth Rigel, ed. '"You see you kind of belong to us, and
what you do matters enormously": Letters from Readers to Virginia
Woolf." Woolf Studies Annual 12 (2006): 1-212.
Femald, Anne E. "Pleasure and Belief in 'Phases of Fiction'." Virginia
Woolf and the Essay. Ed. Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino.
NY: St. Martin's, 1997. 193-211.
Kirkpatrick, B. J. "Virginia Woolf: Unrecorded Tunes Literary
Supplement Reviews." Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (Spring 1992):
279-83.
—. and Stuart N. Clarke. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf 4th ed.
Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997.
Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Rowena Wyant. "Magazines in 90 Cities—Who
Reads What? Public Opinion Quarterly 1.4 (October 1937): 29-41.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Letters from editors about articles «& publications. Letters from agents,
editors, publishers. Correspondence of Various Persons re: Books,
Chronological List of Essays by Virginia Woolf
Published Only in U. S.(lifetime and posthumous publication noted)
Dec. 1924: "Miss Omnerod." D/a/466-74. CR 1 (annotated); £ 4.
1 Aug. 1925: "American Fiction." Saturday Review of Literature 1-3. M;
CE2:E4.
7 Nov. 1926: "Life and the Novelist." New York Herald Tribune Section
7, Books, 1, 6. G&R: CE 2; E 4.
14 Aug. 1927 and 21 Aug. 1927: "Poetry, Fiction and the Ftitui^e." Afeiv
York Herald Tribune Section 6, Books, 1, 6-7; Section 6, Books,
1, 6. Gt&R (as "The Narrow Bridge of Art"); CE2;E4.
Oct. 1927: "Street Haunting: A London Adventure." Yale Review 49-62
[reprinted in SF, 1930]. DM: CE 4: CDML; E 4.
9 Oct. 1927: "An Essay in Criticism." New York Herald Tribune Section
7, Books, 1,8. Gá/?;C£: 2; £ 4 .
23 Oct. 1927: "Not One of Us." New York Herald Tribune Section 7,
Books, 1,6. DM; Œ 4; £ 4 .
30 Oct. 1927: "The New Biography." New York Herald Tribune Section
7, Books, 1, 6. G&R; CE 4; E 4.
Nov. 1927: "The Novels of E. M. Forster." Atlantic Monthly 642-48.
DM; CE I; E4.
. .
15 Apr. 1928: "Preferences of Four Critics: Virginia Woolf, G. B. Stem,
Rebecca West, Ellen Glasgow." New York Herald Tribune Section
12, Books, 1-2. £ 4 .
11
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