Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

5. E. g., the extensive writings of Jürgen Habermas, which seek to preserve and extend the emancipatory dimension and successes of the Enlightenment project while criticizing new forms of domination produced by it; Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003); Pamela Cheek, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment, Globalization, and the Placing of Sex (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003); What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. K. M. Baker and P. H. Reill (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001); Robert C. Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Post-Mortem Study (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001); Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (New York: Knopf, 2000); Anthony Cascardi, Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999); Geography and Enlightenment, ed. D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999); Marie Fleming, Emancipation and Illusion: Rationality and Gender in Habermas’s Theory of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997); Race and the Enlightenment, ed. E. C. Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Karlis Racevskis, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993).

1. “In the decade before the 1914 war there was a political and social movement in the world, and particularly in Europe and Britain, which seemed at the time wonderfully hopeful and exciting. It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilized” (Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964], 36).

2. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784) in Kant: Political Writings, rev. ed., ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 54–60.

3. Leonard Woolf, Barbarians Within and Without (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 65, hereafter cited as BWW. Roy Porter and others argue that Enlightenment thought began earlier in Britain than in France and Germany in reaction to the seventeenth century’s bloody civil wars. Citing J. G. A. Pocock, who writes that “the historiography of enlightenment in England remains that of a black hole,” Porter addresses this “blind spot” in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2000), xvii.

4. Bloomsbury’s boundaries are notoriously unfixed; I list here the figures central to my argument, though other associates (e. g., E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey) also come into play. Raymond Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Verso, 1980) also includes Freud, albeit playfully reduced to “Sigmund for sex” (166). See also S. P. Rosenbaum’s The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (New York: St. Martin’s P), vol. 1, Victorian Bloomsbury (1987) and vol. 2, Edwardian Bloomsbury (1994). “Civil War”: see Clive Bell, Peace at Once (Manchester and London: The National Labour Press Ltd., [1915]), 53; J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 5, hereafter cited as ECP; Leonard Woolf, BWW, 131. From the other side, Freud shifted from jingoistic patriotism in 1914 to pacifism as war casualties mounted; he publicly advocated the League of Nations and joined Einstein, Russell, and other international intellectuals in petitions for disarmament and peace (Gabriel Jackson, Civilization and Barbarity in Twentieth-Century Europe [New York: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 1999], 115). A group of continental intellectuals, including Einstein, rebutted a manifesto proclaiming German militarism the guardian of German culture with an antiwar “Counter-Manifesto” (October 1914) that called all “good Europeans” to unite to defend “international relations” and “a world-embracing civilization,” for “never has any previous war caused so complete an interruption of that cooperation which should obtain among civilized nations”; the “many sympathetic replies … revealed such diverse dogmatic stands that the task of reconciling these views seemed hopeless, and the project was abandoned” (Albert Einstein, The Fight Against War, ed. Alfred Lief [New York: John Day, 1933], 5–7).

5. As Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle observe, after 1914 “many were forced actually to think for the first time about the very concept of Europe. If ‘Europeanness,’ European civilization and European superiority were taken for granted around 1900, they never would be again in the same way” in face of “the appalling record of inhumanity over four years. … The new ideologies of communism and fascism … spawned of the European war … were to challenge and modify the ascendant liberal democracy. The war and its settlement cemented the supreme position of the nation in politics, allowing it to dominate the state at the expense of the interests of minorities. … The class system and gender relations in Europe were fundamentally altered: the Great War was truly a watershed for European civilization” (Ideas of Europe Since 1914: The Legacy of the First World War, ed. Spiering and Wintle [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], 4).

6. D 4:298 (9 April 1935), TG 95, P 6. In Woolf’s writings the word has many senses—light, ironic, playful, casual, commonplace, serious, inventive; as in amenities (electricity, omnibuses, telephones, gas fires and cookers, Mozart on the gramophone, ambulances—“one of the triumphs of civilisation” MD 151); city life (“the ease & speed of civilization”) v. the desire to “rusticate” (D 3:45, L 6:302); the civility whose “thin veils” Mr. Ramsay rends “wantonly” and “brutally” (TL 32); national or historical cultures, as in “no sign of our snug English civilisation,” Americans “alien to our civilisation,” Jacob’s and Timmy’s sense that “civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking” (PA 330, D 3:95, JR 76); human culture, e. g., The Waves’ vision of a future when “we are gone; our civilisation; the Nile; and all life,” “the canopy of civilisation is burnt out” (W 225, 296). Brian W. Shaffer, with different emphases, finds Bloomsbury’s “theory of civilization” “more an individual than a collective phenomenon, more a state of mind than a nation-state” (The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993], 17, 99, 80).

7. MD 36. See Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 219–57, esp. 220, 227, 228, 230. Febvre notes two major senses: the material, intellectual, moral, political, and social life of a group, irrespective of any value judgment; and Western civilization (“ours”) with its progress, failures, greatness, weakness, “a collective asset and an individual privilege” (220). He contrasts the “old concept of a superior civilization” of “the white peoples of Western Europe and Eastern America”—the “moral idea” of that civilization as a “something … nobler … than anything outside it—savagery, barbarity or semi-civilization”—the ethnocentric conception—with the “almost contradictory” ethnographic concept of a civilization as all the observable features of the collective material, intellectual, moral, political, and social life of one human group (247, 220).

The word originated in late eighteenth-century France and England to denote reason’s “triumph and spread” (228) against systemic violence within and beyond Europe. Boswell returned from a continental tour in 1766, the year the French word was first recorded, and in 1772 recommended the (rejected) dynamic form civilization for Johnson’s Dictionary, which identifies civility with “freedom” and opposes it to barbarity; “I thought civilisation, from to civilise, better in the sense opposed to barbarity than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses” (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson [New York: Modern Library, n.d.], 400 (re March 23, 1772). Condorcet’s 1781 usage opposes it to “war,” “conquest,” “slavery,” and “want,” within Europe and later throughout the world (Febvre 233). The American and French revolutions engaged its connotations of “progress in human enlightenment,” democratic institutions, science, and adjudication of disputes by reason (238). Gradually, its meaning shifted from an “ethnocentric” (racialized, imperialist) concept of a “superior” civilization destined for territorial expansion toward an ethnographic, value-neutral, scientific, relativistic concept of civilizations plural; by 1920 European imperialism had long manifested an irreconcilable clash between the ethnocentric and the “practical, radical, and in itself incontestable” ethnographic concepts, though the idea of a “general human civilization remain[ed] alive in people’s minds” (247–48). Bloomsbury registers a convergence of ethnocentric self-critique with ethnographic recognition of civilizations plural.

8. E. M. Forster, “Bloomsbury, An Early Note,” BGMC 79. Gerald Brenan saw Bloomsbury as a “splendid flower of English culture” attached to a “dying” class and mode of life; “They carried the arts of civilized life and friendship to a very high point, and their work reflects this civilization”; “two of them at least, Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes, possessed those rare imaginative gifts that are known as genius” (“Bloomsbury in Spain and England,” BGMC 355).

9. In Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), McDiarmid argues that these poets tended to “despair” of civilization’s prospects and maintain, with Auden, that “Poetry makes nothing happen”; such salvation as they imagined involved “communal identity based on inherited myths, legends, and religious truths” (x, xi, 123). “Saving civilization,” she observes, was a “roomy expression” that carried “greater self-consciousness and even embarrassment … with each generation”: “Yeats rarely uses the word without approbation, Eliot rarely without quotation marks, and Auden rarely without skepticism” (4, 10). Bloomsbury’s responses to the post-1914 crisis also contrast with D. H. Lawrence’s Spenglerian jeremiad against mechanization and his call for strong leaders to take nations toward the unity of “one vast European state” (Movements in European History, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 242).

10. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 49–50. Bürger’s analysis of Brecht’s art as “enter[ing] into a new relationship to reality” would also describe Woolf’s art; her last novel, Between the Acts, implicitly questions his premise that art inhabits “a realm … distinct from the praxis of life” and his pessimistic thesis that “Art as an institution prevents the contents of works that press for radical change … from having any practical effect” (91–92, 95). See also Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury (see n. 4, above), esp. 3–4, 24–28.

11. Bürger, Theory, 43. Edel calls Keynes a “suprapolitical” thinker (Bloomsbury: A House of Lions [Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1979], 47). See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 8 (citing Kant’s Geselligheit / “Sociability”), 141, cf. 40; hereafter cited as LK. Discussions of Kant’s influence on Bloomsbury have emphasized G. E. Moore and prewar Bloomsbury’s aesthetics without reference to the political; see, for example, Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury, part 3; and Andrew McNeillie, “Bloomsbury,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Raitt and Sue Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 1–22. Renato Poggioli observes that “avant-garde art can exist only in the type of society that is liberal-democratic from a political point of view, bourgeois-capitalistic from a socioeconomic point of view” (The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960], 106). Gene H. Bell-Villada extends these conditions to “a liberalizing capitalism,” “a libertarian-permissive socialism,” even, “in principle, absolute monarchies” such as Wilhelmine Germany, Hapsburg Vienna, and Czarist Russia (Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1720–1990 [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996], 157). Raymond Williams differentiates modernism (“the alternative, radically innovating experimental artists and writers” with “their own facilities of production, distribution and publicity”) from the avant-garde (“fully oppositional formations, determined … to attack … the whole social order”); whereas modernism “proposed a new kind of art for a new kind of social and perceptual world,” the avant-garde envisioned “a breakthrough to the future, its members not the bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity” (The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney [London: Verso, 1989], 50–51). Following Bürger, Andreas Huyssen differentiates historical avant-gardes from modernism, wherein “art and literature retained their traditional 19th century autonomy from everyday life” (After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986], 163). Astradur Eysteinsson rejects this rigid distinction and argues for a more supple and imaginative recognition of the interpenetrating features of modernism and the avant-garde (The Concept of Modernism [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990).

12. Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” 166.

13. Williams, 165–66, 156, 168. A version of his essay reads: “embarrassing, that is to say, to those many for whom ‘civilised individual’ is a mere flag to fly over a capitalist, imperialist, and militarist social order” (“The Significance of ‘Bloomsbury’ as a Social and Cultural Group,” in Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group, ed. D. Crabtree and A. P. Thirlwall [London: Macmillan, 1980], 63). Whereas Williams contrasts Bloomsbury’s “social conscience” to the “‘social consciousness’ of a self-organizing subordinate class” (156), Patrick Brantlinger finds that Bloomsbury embraced a democratic socialism close to Williams’s and held pacifist, anti-imperialist, internationalist, and feminist positions in some ways more radical than his (“‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’ Versus War and Empire,” in Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature, ed. Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson [New York: Macmillan, 1996], 150). In the decades since Williams tamed Edel’s Bloomsbury “lions” by positing consumer culture as their “legacy,” Bloomsburies bedecked in the logos of a global capitalist culture in which corporations dominate government and the public sphere have proliferated. E. g., Jennifer Wicke argues that “lifestyle is what Bloomsbury was selling” (“Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets,” Novel [fall 1994]: 6); and Jane Garrity allies Bloomsbury’s “calculated self-promotion and exposure” with British Vogue’s stylesetting designs on all “‘civilized corners of the globe’” (“Selling Culture to the ‘Civilized’: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of Modernity,” Modernism /Modernity 6:2 [1999]: 29–58).

14. Williams 166, 167; with this notion he forecloses the question: “We do not need to ask … whether Freud’s generalizations on aggression are compatible with single-minded work for the League of Nations, or whether his generalizations on art are compatible with Bell’s … or whether Keynes’s ideas of public intervention in the market are compatible with the deep assumption of society as a group of friends and relations” (167). The group’s indefinite and shifting boundaries as well as their multidisciplinary works can make its intellectual coherence hard to discern, not least because undue attention is paid to Clive Bell’s “elitist’s credo” Civilization (Edel, Bloomsbury 253), which Leonard judged “superficial” while its dedicatee, Virginia, complained that it reduced civilization to “‘a lunch party at No. 50 Gordon Square’” (D 3:184, 31 May 1928; Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968], 88).

15. RF 272, citing a letter by Fry: “I’m gradually getting hold of a new idea about the real meaning of civilisation, or what it ought to mean. It’s apropos of the question of the existence of individuals. It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race especially of course in America have lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees and ants. They just are lost to humanity, and the great question for the future is whether that will spread or will be repulsed … whether people are allowed a clear space round them or whether society impinges on that and squeezes them all into hexagons like a honeycomb.” Woolf adds, “‘The herd’ is the phrase that dominates the letters at this time. … The herd … is the adversary, swollen immensely in size and increased in brute power. The herd on the one side, the individual on the other—hatred of one, belief in the other. … A vast mass of emotional unreason seemed to him to be threatening not only England—that was to be expected; but France also. France, he lamented, had lost that ‘objectivity which has been the glory of its great thinkers.’ And this emotionalism, this irrationality could only be fought by science. We must try to understand our instincts, to analyse our emotions” (RF 232). Civilization is a key word for Fry and in Woolf’s biography.

16. Bloomsbury’s fight against the violence within European civilization resonates with contemporary global debates; see, for example, Onuma Yasuaki, “In Quest of Intercivilizational Human Rights: Universal vs. Relative Human Rights Viewed from an Asian Perspective,” in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. J. Bauer and D. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), expanded as “Towards an Intercivilizational Approach to Human Rights—for Universalization of Human Rights through Overcoming of Westcentric Notion of Human Rights” (English manuscript summary of his Jinken, kokka, bumei / Human Rights, States and Civilizations, Tokyo : Chikuma Sobo, 1998); and Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. A. An-Na’im (Philadelphia, 1992).

17. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 69, 92; hereafter cited as CD. At once English and European, Bloomsbury internationalism contravenes Hugh Kenner’s equation of high modernism with the specific internationalism of American and Irish expatriate art (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stein), in contrast to “provincial,” “regional” authors such as Faulkner, Williams, and Woolf (“The Making of the Modernist Canon,” Chicago Review 34 [spring 1984]: 49–61).

18. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), xxiii–xxiv; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern / Modernity / Modernism,” Modernism /Modernity 8:3 (2001): 507.

19. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 48.

20. Clive Bell, Play-Reading Book, King’s College, Cambridge, cited in HL 261. See also Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 84f; and Q. Bell on Bloomsbury’s Enlightenment discourse: “The hatred of Christian for Christian, of nation for nation, the blind unreasoning hatred that had hounded Oscar Wilde or killed Socrates … were all communal emotions that resulted from irrationality. The sleep of reason engenders … the monsters of violence. … The great interest of Bloomsbury lies in the consistency, the thoroughness and, despite almost impossible difficulties, the success with which this [the suppression of irrational forces] was done” (Bloomsbury, 105; cf. 78, 67). My own argument is that Bloomsbury believed not that reason could “cure” society’s irrationality but that rational institutions are its best hope of managing ineradicable aggression in face of the real, looming specter of totalitarianism; Freud’s vision of history as unending struggle between the immortal adversaries Love and Death corrects myths of Enlightenment as an achieved state and/or inevitable progress.

21. Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38 (1971): 417–46, cited by Beiner, LK 109–10. For Kant, Arendt notes, the role of critical thought is not diminished where it does not prevail; even war (“‘an unintended enterprise … stirred up by men’s unbridled passions’”), though always vetoed by moral-practical reason, provides “‘a motive for developing all talents serviceable for culture to the highest possible pitch’” and in “‘its very meaninglessness’” prepares “‘for an eventual cosmopolitan peace’”—with respect to which “‘we must simply act as if it could really come about,’” whether or not it is “‘really possible’” (LK 53–54).

22. Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), 33; TG 80. Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Bertrand Russell, and Lytton and James Strachey were conscientious objectors; Russell was imprisoned and deprived of his Cambridge lectureship in 1916. Leonard condemned the “senseless and useless war … which our government probably could have prevented and should never have become involved in” but was not a “complete pacifist”; once war began, he felt “the Germans must be resisted and I therefore could not be a Conscientious Objector”; he was excused from service because of his congenital tremor (Beginning Again 177). As an important Treasury official, Keynes was exempt from conscription; at seventeen he had been a pacifist in the Boer War (Edel, Bloomsbury 51). Peace at Once nearly lost Clive his family income and inheritance (Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler [New York: Pantheon, 1998], 167). Fry was descended from eight generations of Quakers (RF 11).

23. Clive Bell, Peace at Once (Manchester and London: National Labour Press, [1915]), 5.

24. See Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1, Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 358.

25. See Leonard Woolf, International Government (1916), Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920), Economic Imperialism (1920), Imperialism and Civilization (1928), The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War (1933), Barbarians Within and Without (Barbarians at the Gate in the English edition) (1939), and The War for Peace (1940). On the contribution of Leonard’s International Government to the League of Nations, see Edel, Bloomsbury 240–41; Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), chap. 10; Laura Moss Gottlieb, “The War between the Woolfs,” Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jane Marcus [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987], 242; Brantlinger, 153f, who cites Duncan Wilson’s view of International Government as “a landmark in the study of international affairs” in Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1978), 67; and Wayne K. Chapman and Janet M. Manson, “Carte and Tierce: Leonard, Virginia Woolf, and War for Peace,” in Virginia Woolf and War, ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Syracuse UP, 1991), 58–78.

26. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), chap. 3.

27. Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904–1911 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 111, 113–14.

28. Leonard Woolf, Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (London: Allen and Unwin, [1920]), 24, 10, 9, 356; hereafter cited as ECA. See Natania Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), chap. 1. On rival European imperialisms as a cause of the war, see also Keegan, The First World War, chap. 7.

29. ECA 353, 69, 49. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), esp. 273.

30. L. Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization (1928), 28; he calls for “the end of imperialism, the end of conflict, and the beginning of a synthesis of civilizations” (135). “The ‘native’ is no longer to be regarded as the ‘live-stock’ on Europe’s African estate, as the market for the shoddy of our factories and our cheap gin, or as the ‘cheap labour’ by means of which the concessionaire may supply Europe with rubber and ivory and himself with a fortune, but as a human being with a right to his own land and his own life, … to be educated and to determine his own destiny, to be considered, in that fantastic scheme of human government which men have woven over the world, an end in himself rather than an instrument to other people’s ends” (Woolf, ECA 356–57, 359); “Imperialism was rechristened the white man’s burden, and imperialists who slaughtered Africans … said … that what they were really doing was civilising savages” (BWW 132).

31. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, rev. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), 2–3f, hereafter cited as FI; and Freud, CD, 23f. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press published The Future of an Illusion in 1928 and Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. For fuller discussion see my chapter 4.

32. For Freud as for Keynes, civilization encompasses all the knowledge and capacity by which humankind controls destructive natural forces and uses natural resources to satisfy its needs as well as the regulation of human relations, “especially the distribution of the available wealth”; since social relations organize power and wealth, these material and social economies are interdependent: human relations are “profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible,” and some individuals function as wealth for others through labor or sexual attachment (FI 3).

33. FI 81, 88. Freud frames religion as the “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity,” which protects against personal neurosis by writing neurosis large in the form of cultural myth (FI 70). See also my chapter 4.

34. FI 43–44 and 44 n; Freud argues that whereas a religious believer can only “despair” when its illusions collapse, those who live by “reason and experience … can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions,” for “our science is no illusion”; and our mental apparatus is “part of the world,” equal to the challenge of exploring it (FI 89, 91–92). Against “an artist’s joy in creating,” he wants to argue, “fate can do little,” though he acknowledges that art can no more than any other human endeavor provide an “impenetrable armour” against fate (CD 26–27). Cf. Fry: “If religions made no claim but what art does—of being a possible interpretation without any notion of objective validity all would be well … but religions all pretend to do what science tries to do—namely discover the one universally valid construction and hence … religions have always obstructed the effort towards more universal validity” and “have stood in the way of the disinterested study (science) and vision (art) of the universe. I don’t doubt they’ve had to because men couldn’t straight away get the disinterested attitude, but I think they ought to go, and that one can’t by reinterpreting … make them friends of man’s real happiness” (RF 271–72).

35. BWW 68, 150; in subverting the dictatorship of the proletariat by a dictatorship of party rulers, he writes, they are “destroying with one hand the civilization which they are attempting to build with the other” (160).

36. Freud, “On Transience,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth P, 1953–66), 14:307; hereafter SE. In light of Freud’s postwar account of aggression, it is surely de trop to insist that irony colors his thinking on civilization and freedom, as it is blind to ignore his stress on science and art as he pursues the question of how to rebuild civilization “on firmer ground” in face of ineradicable human aggression in his later works.

37. CD 58; Freud considers that the Golden Rule “cannot be recommended as reasonable” and “jokingly” recommends as closer to “psychological truths” Heinrich Heine’s fantasy of life’s simple pleasures: a “humble cottage,” “good food,” fresh milk, butter, flowers, “a few fine trees,” “and if God wants to make my happiness complete, … the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall … forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged” (CD 57 and n). Edel notes that Leonard demurred from Keynes’s representation of early Bloomsbury thought as “ingenuous utopianism” with “no respect for traditional wisdom, or the restraints of custom”; Leonard “had always taken a dim view of society” and “argued that the very nature of their discussions showed they knew the world for what it was” (Bloomsbury 54); cf. Quentin Bell, “Maynard Keynes and His Early Beliefs,” Bloomsbury Recalled 224. Joshua D. Esty argues that “My Early Beliefs” does not just “diagnose a youthful error” but “claims that rational individualism is historically obsolete” (“National Objects: Keynesian Economics and Modernist Culture in England,” Modernism /Modernity 7:1 [2000]: 3).

38. LK 17–18 citing Kant, Perpetual Peace; for fuller discussion see my chapter 9.

39. D 3:207 10 November, cf. 3:201, 27 October 1928, where, having given the lectures that became A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes, “I think I see reason spreading” and wishes she had the intellectual training to “deal with real things”; on Room’s allusions to the trial see my chapter 6. Woolf’s “fence” figure anticipates Hannah Arendt’s etymological linking of the law with the notion of a wall or boundary line that harbors and encloses political life (The Human Condition [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958], 65–66).

40. Shaffer, The Blinding Torch, n. 6 above.

41. Kathy J. Phillips, Virginia Woolf Against Empire (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994), 200; Phillips tends to identify civilization with imperialism.

42. See J. H. Willis, Jr., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917–41 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1992), 237, 396–99 and passim. Between the purchase of its first hand press in 1917 and Virginia’s death in 1941, the Press published Eliot’s Waste Land, Poems, and Homage to John Dryden, all of Virginia’s books except the first edition of Night and Day, Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude, five volumes of Rilke in translation, translations of Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoi, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Andreyev and Bunin, eight volumes of Freud, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, Henry Green’s Party Going, E. M. Forster’s What I Believe, and Roger Fry’s The Artist and Psycho-Analysis. In economics, politics, and social theory, it published Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, A Short View of Russia, and The End of Laissez-Faire, Kingsley Martin’s British Public and the General Strike, Kathleen Innes’s pamphlets on the League of Nations for young people, many works on disarmament, international arbitration, and world peace, including H. G. Wells’s Democracy under Revision, The Common Sense of World Peace, and The Open Conspiracy and Philip Noel-Baker’s Disarmament and the Coolidge Conference, eight pamphlets on Russia, communism, and Marxism, and Mussolini’s The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (“the only statement by Mussolini of the philosophic basis of fascism”), followed by Leonard’s attack on “the savage quackery of modern totalitarianism” in Quack, Quack! and The League in Abyssinia. Its anti-imperialist list included Leonard’s Imperialism and Civilization and After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology, Norman Leys’s Kenya, The Colour Bar in Africa, and Last Chance in Kenya, Lord Olivier’s The Anatomy of African Misery and White Capital and Coloured Labor, Denis Ireland’s Ulster Today and Tomorrow, Leonard Barnes’s The New Boer War and The Future of Colonies, C. L. R. James’s The Case for West Indian Self-Government, K. M. Pannikar’s Caste and Democracy, W. G. Ballinger’s Race and Economics in South Africa, and Parmenas Githendu Mockerie’s An African Speaks for His People. On women and civilization Hogarth published Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s Life as We Have Known It, Ray Strachey’s Our Freedom and Its Results, Jane Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, Willa Muir’s Women: An Inquiry, Viscountess Rhondda’s Leisured Women, G. S. Dutt’s A Woman of India: Being the Life of Faroj Nalini (Founder of the Women’s Institute Movement in India) and Woolf’s feminist classics, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

43. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” (n. 2 above): “The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only difficult but also highly dangerous. Now, this danger is not so very great, for they would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating and usually frightens them off” (54).

44. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974, 1982), 35.

45. Both Bloomsbury scholars and feminist theorists have been slow to take account of the Enlightenment terms of Woolf’s feminism. Williams’s “class fraction” analysis ignores Woolf’s observation that the class of educated men “possesses … practically all the capital, … land, … valuables, … and patronage in England” (TG 25); he finds “the delay in higher education for women of this class” a factor in “the specific character of the Bloomsbury Group” and a “persistent sexual asymmetry” “an important element in [its] composition,” its “effects … ironically and at times indignantly noted by Virginia Woolf” (161–62). (On Marxism’s elision of men and women as political subjects whose interests cut across economic class boundaries, see Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller [New York: Columbia UP, 1983], 63–73). Brantlinger reduces Three Guineas’ political argument to “an aestheticized anarchism in which personal relationships take precedence over politics, laws, and institutions,” one that refuses “to be political in the standard, common sense of the term … because politics refuses to include women and … means empire and war” (157, 163).

In Feminism as a Radical Humanism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), Pauline Johnson finds feminist thinkers in “bad faith” in respect to their Enlightenment inheritance: “contemporary feminism is itself dependent on … those ideals of civil and human rights which are inscribed in modern social institutions” and “is as much a specific articulation of the universalizing dimension of modern humanism as it is the inheritor and interpreter of the idea of self-determining individuality” (ix). Yet she charges Woolf with creating an “alternative vision” that separates “the polysemic artwork from the sphere of everyday social practices” and offers only “a compensatory, substitute gratification which siphons off and renders harmless the radical need for changed gender relations”; although Woolf posits an “ideal subjectivity” that “empowers her fiction with a strongly critical standpoint, the merely aesthetical character of this ideal means that her critique ultimately fails to project a practical imperative” (“From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic,” Radical Philosophy 45 [1987]: 29). For Rita Felski, Woolf and Stein represent “an artistic and intellectual—though not necessarily political—elite” (The Gender of Modernity [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995], 27–28) and, thus, a modernist “conception of the text as a privileged and subversive space” which “undermines truth and self-identity” and “has a potential tendency to limit direct political effects, precisely because it presupposes the separation of the polysemic artwork from the sphere of everyday social practices” (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989], 162–63).

46. Of the “explosion of genius” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, Noel Annan writes, “No one can appreciate the nineteenth century, or indeed our own times, unless he realizes that we live in the shadow of a Renaissance as brilliant and dominating as the Italian Renaissance” (Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian, [New York: Random House, 1984], 165). On “Stephen’s Rehabilitation of the Augustan Age” see Annan, chap. 8; René Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1931), cites Stephen’s essay “The Importation of German” (Studies of a Biographer, 2:38–75). See also Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury, chap. 10 (“Moore”). If Kant and Freud—himself a great Enlightenment figure who intended psychoanalysis to help free human beings from the trammels of the unconscious as of superstition—seem yoked by violence together, I would emphasize the continuity between Freud’s radical insights on postwar Europe’s future, Kant’s vision of Enlightenment as unending struggle, and both thinkers’ deep ambivalence toward civilization and their stress on rational systems and institutions rather than individuals in their political thought; in short, their pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The Freud Library in London and New York holds several titles by Kant.

47. S. P. Rosenbaum, “Wittgenstein in Bloomsbury,” in The British Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Wittgenstein Symposium, ed. Jaako Hintikka and Klaus Puhl (Vienna 1995), rpt. in Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary and Intellectual History (New York: St Martin’s P, 1998), 173. The word disinterested had of course long been in play in Britain, in the eighteenth-century writings of Alison, Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, and others and later in Matthew Arnold’s understanding of the critic’s obligation to make “a disinterested effort to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 3:282), aspects of which resonate in I. A. Richards’s systematic analytic method, T. S. Eliot’s emphasis on “impersonality,” and F. R. Leavis’s analytic “laboratory-method.” See also D. H. Lawrence’s 1914 letter to Edward Garnett on the obsolescence of the literary character’s “old stable ego” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 8 vols., ed. James T. Boulton [New York: Cambridge UP, 1979–2000], vol. 2, ed. G. J. Zytaruk and J. T. Boulton, 183).

48. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), §8, 49; hereafter cited as CJ by section and page. Cf. Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), §8, 100; hereafter cited as CPJ. “Subjective … universal validity”—on the face of it a contradiction in terms—is the key to art as a bridge between one mind and another, a point that challenges Pierre Bourdieu’s relegation of Kant to a “‘high’ aesthetic” and his claim that he (and not Kant) is at pains to “bestow worth on all others” (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984], 485). Kant distinguishes the “common sense” based in feeling, which provides a “subjective principle” of “universal validity” in aesthetic judgments, from “common understanding, which people sometimes call common sense (sensus communis)” (CJ §20, 75, CPJ 122).

49. As we shall see in considering Lily Briscoe’s abstract composition and The Waves in my chapters 5–6; and contra Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake, who attributes a failure of discipline to modernist art forms.

50. CJ Introduction IX, 32–34, §13 58–59; CPJ 35–38, 107–8; not to be confused with a lack of discipline in the art.

51. Clive Bell, Proust (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 85.

52. LK 42–43; CJ §19–22 74–77 (CPJ 121–24) and passim. Cf. Benjamin Constant: “Art for art, without aim, since any aim denatures art. But art attains an aim it does not have” (cited by Bell-Villada, Art for Art’s Sake, 26–27).

53. Virginia Woolf, “Women & Fiction” holograph manuscript, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. Rosenbaum transcribes nobody here; the handwriting is inconclusive.

54. Clive Bell, Art, ed. J. B. Bullen (1914; New York: Oxford, 1987), xi; note that Bell skips G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. For a comparison of Fry’s and Bell’s aesthetic writings, see Bullen’s introduction; for Bell’s critique of Moore, see Art 87f. For Bell’s argument that “good states of mind” arise from aesthetic contemplation see Art, chap. 3, esp. 114–117 in which he concludes that “there are no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, since there is no greater means to good than art” (117). Woolf thought of dedicating To the Lighthouse to Fry, who had “kept me on the right path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone” (L 3:385, 27 May 1927) and wrote that his “simple gospel” was “that all decency and good come from people’s gradually determining to enjoy themselves a little, especially to enjoy their intellectual curiosity and their love of art” (RF 291).

55. Fry, “An Essay on Aesthetics,” in Vision and Design, ed. J. B. Bullen (1920; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998), 21. Kant’s influence is felt in Fry’s remarks on form’s relation to the “aesthetic judgment proper”; his “Essay” distinguishes art from ordinary life by its presentation of “a life freed from the binding necessities of our actual existence”; speculates that “the fullness and completeness of the imaginative life may correspond to an existence more real and more important than any that we know of in mortal life” and “represent … what mankind feels to be the completest expression of its own nature, the freest use of its innate capacities”; and asserts that art’s proper beauty is “supersensual” and “satisfies fully the needs of the imaginative life” (15–16, 21, 22). Bell similarly emphasizes Kantian disinterestedness, or “detachment from the concerns of life,” in his “aesthetic hypothesis—that the essential quality in a work of art is significant form”: “the formal significance of any material thing is the significance of that thing considered as an end in itself. … Instead of recognizing its accidental and conditioned importance, we become aware of its essential reality … that which lies behind the appearance of all things—that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality. … Those who find the chief importance of art or of philosophy in its relation to conduct or its practical utility … will never get from anything the best that it can give” (Art 100, 68–70). The distinction, in other words, is not between art and everyday social practices but between aesthetic contemplation as an everyday social practice and the purposive, utilitarian concerns of everyday life.

56. A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 87–88.

57. Desmond MacCarthy, secretary for the First Post-Impressionist show, notes that his own share of the profits amounted to £460 but that Fry “did not make one penny” from it or later from the Omega Workshops (BGMC 79).

58. RF 153. E. g., an influential Times critic called it “a rejection of all that civilisation has done”; the artist Eric Gill found it a crux of “reaction and transition” (RF 154–55). The poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt saw “idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show”; one Dr. Hyslop diagnosed the paintings as “the work of madmen”; Gauguin and Van Gogh were “too much” even for Forster (Christopher Hassell, A Biography of Edward Marsh [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959], 168, cited by Hynes, 328). Virginia judged the paintings less good than books but (as a survivor of life with George Duckworth, perhaps?) was mystified that duchesses could take offense at such “modest” art, “innocent even of indecency” (RF 156–57; L 1:440, 27 November). To Fry the public’s “outbreak of militant Philistinism” proved that, for the ostensibly “cultivated classes” who had lapped up his lectures on “Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, and the rest,” art was “merely a social asset”; in sensibility and the capacity for disinterested aesthetic judgment, “one’s housemaid ‘by a mere haphazard gift of providence’ might surpass one” (RF 157–58, 161). See also Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968), 325–26, and Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), chaps. 7–8.

59. See n. 45 above.

60. On her father’s role in Virginia Woolf’s education and the importance of her reading in history to her literary experiments, see Katherine C. Hill, “Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution,” PMLA 96 (May 1981): 351–62. On Stephen’s ambivalence toward women’s education, see Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (New York: Norton, 1984), chap. 6.

61. Henry Sidgwick (who like Stephen resigned his Cambridge fellowship in protest against the condition that he sign the Thirty-Nine Articles) stipulated that the women’s college he founded, Newnham, should have no chapel.

62. Annan, Leslie Stephen 42; see 43–47. Annan notes the irregularity of Stephen’s being allowed to remain a fellow though not a tutor in those reformist days.

63. CR 39; D 3:271, 8 December 1929, 1:224, 7 December 1918. On Woolf’s passion for Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages: The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Over-land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 Yeeres (1600), see Alice Fox, Virginia Woolf and the English Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), chap. 2, and “Virginia Woolf at Work: The Elizabethan Voyage Out,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (spring 1981): 65–84. Joanna Lipking pointed out in conversation that some of these were slave voyages. In Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (New York: Manchester UP, 2003), Jane Garrity argues that modernist women writers reinscribe “the rhetoric of empire even as they resist it,” “trading on the familiar British trope of geographical expansionism and conquest”; though she does not analyze Hakluyt’s part in the discourse of imperialism that Woolf inherits and transforms, her book provides a useful point of departure for such a study (3).

64. “’Ginia is devouring books, almost faster than I like,” Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 103 (journal entry, 10 April 1897).

65. On Woolf’s self-fashioning after Shakespeare, see my “Virginia Woolf as Shakespeare’s Sister: Chapters in a Woman Writer’s Autobiography,” in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), 123–42.

66. Cf. Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Russell, Fry, and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 8f.

67. Bell, Bloomsbury, 24. On the social history of the Apostles’ cultivation of friendship and moral authority, see W. C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Leslie Stephen, Clive Bell, and Thoby were not members; Leonard Woolf, Keynes, Lytton and James Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry, Forster, MacCarthy, and Henry Lamb were, as well as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead. Clive Bell’s Midnight Society (himself, Leonard, Thoby, Lytton, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and A. J. Robertson) at Trinity was also important to forming the friendships that led to Bloomsbury.

68. MB 54; Bell, Bloomsbury, 40. In her late memoir Virginia notes “the influence on me of the Cambridge Apostles” (MB 80). On the Apostles’ 9–1 vote in favor of admitting women in 1894 (after Russell delivered a paper titled “Lövberg or Hedda?”), actually executed only in 1970, see Banfield, The Phantom Table, 20–21.

69. QB 1:98. The Three Graces Euphrosyne (Joy), Aglaia (Brilliance) and Thalia (Bloom), daughters of Zeus, inspire delightful conversation. Euphrosyne’s authors were Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Walter Lamb, Leonard Woolf, and some others (QB 1:98, 1:205). Individual poems are unattributed in the book, but see Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury (n. 4 above), chap. 3, esp. 63–64. A catalogued letter from Christabel MacLaren, Baroness Aberconway, identifying the authors of particular poems was discovered to be missing from the British Library copy in May 2003.

70. “Euphrosyne,” Cambridge Review 27 (2 November 1905): 49, cited by Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, 73.

71. QB 1.205–6 and n. Virginia teases, “they entered the College, young & ardent & conceited; pleased with themselves, but so well pleased with the world that their vanity might be forgiven them. They return not less impressed with their own abilities indeed, but that is the last illusion left to them.”

72. M xv; Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 29–31. The ship was earlier called Sarah Jane.

73. CDB 96, 95. Adrian Stephen, “The Dreadnought Hoax,” BGR 16–17. George Duckworth was aghast at Virginia’s recklessness of her reputation. See also QB 1:157–61, appendix E, passim; Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910, chap. 2; HL 278–83.

74. See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–1914 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 120–21; 139 women filed statements alleging acts of violence, twenty-nine “violence with indecency.” Tickner notes that WSPU militancy from 1905 combined with the 1906 Liberal landslide to infuse new energy into the suffrage campaign (begun in 1867); by 1910 it encompassed “‘all classes, … every rank and grade,’” and it had “‘organised the arts in its aid’” (xii, citing Cicely Hamilton, A Pageant of Great Women [1909]). See also Stansky, On or About December 1910, chap. 6 and passim; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), esp. 253, 265; and my “Modernism, Genetic Texts, and Literary Authority in Woolf’s Portraits of the Artist as the Audience,” The Romanic Review, ed. A. Compagnon and A. Grésillon, 86:3 (1996): 513–26.

75. Long afterward, at work on Roger Fry, Woolf planned a “break in the book. A change of method” on reaching “the Post I[mpressionist]s. & ourselves” (D 5:160, 7 August 1938). Elizabeth Heine writes that “Fry’s influence begins about the time of the first Post-Impressionist show … and may have been strongest … in the winter of 1912–13, when Leonard Woolf acted as secretary for the second Post-Impressionist exhibition and the idea of the Omega Workshop was coming to fruition” (“Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of The Voyage Out,” in The Voyage Out, ed. Heine, introduced by Angelica Garnett [London: Hogarth, 1990], 424), hereafter cited as VO Heine.

76. L 1:438. DeSalvo writes that by the end of December she was calling her novel The Voyage Out “at least part of the time” (M xvii, xx, citing “[Dec 25] and Dec 30 1910, Berg Collection,” which may refer to “Vanessa Bell folder 18” cited two notes earlier).

77. As Woolf would later note, “Killing the angel in the house” was part of a woman writer’s job description yet had to be accomplished without rousing the censor (DM 238). Based on physical evidence (type of paper used for Draft B, letters of 14 November 1910 and 25 May 1911, and the early chapters of Draft C), DeSalvo posits that Extant Draft B, reconstructed, transcribed, and published by her as Melymbrosia, “was begun early in 1909,” finished about March 1910, and revised “from late October to December 1910 and after”; and Draft C begun “in the later part of 1910 and … 1911” (M xix, xli, xxi). But, since “the next easily datable manuscript was the Holograph, volume I,” dated 1912 in Woolf’s hand, Draft B and most of Draft C could conceivably have been composed “any time between 1909 and 1912” (M xvi); e. g., chap. 21 of Melymbrosia is dated 1912. DeSalvo speculates that the greater part of Draft B / DeSalvo’s Melymbrosia belongs to the period 1909–earlier 1910 and Drafts C and D to later 1910–1913, with The Voyage Out (finished in 1913, published in 1915) typeset from Draft D of 1913. Elizabeth Heine, however, finds Melymbrosia “misleading in much of its biographical dating of the drafts” (450). She dates the completion of DeSalvo’s Melymbrosia draft from just before the Woolfs’ wedding in August 1912 (“my novel is at last dying. O how sad when it’s done!”; “the Novels are finished,” L 1:506–07, [July] and 3 August 1912) and argues that the late 1912–1913 revision was “profound, a re-seeing, a re-creation” (VO Heine 426). See DeSalvo, “Sorting, Sequencing, and Dating the Drafts of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 (1979): 271–93; and Heine, “The Earlier Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf’s First Novel,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 (1979): 294–316, and “Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of The Voyage Out,” VO Heine (n. 74 above), 399–463.

78. The 1971–75 British television series Upstairs /Downstairs scripts a happier outcome of the servant Sarah’s pregnancy by young Master Bellamy.

79. Other post-1910 pages also resound with the “smashing” and “crashing” of Edwardian decorum as the hotel “seeth[es] with scandals”—an affair between Evelyn and Mr. Perrott (“but that was told me in confidence”); Sinclair’s suicide threats; trouble between the engaged couple Susan and Arthur over “a young female … from Manchester”; rumors that Mrs. Paley “tortures her maid in private” (VO 306–7). Woolf also expanded a passage about an alleged prostitute “hoofed out” of the hotel by elderly males, whose moral outrage somehow exempts members of their own sex and class seen wandering the corridors at night (VO 307, cf. M 220).

80. VO 216. The date of this passage is uncertain because the corresponding page of Melymbrosia appears to be missing (see M 153).

81. Critics differ in interpreting manuscript evidence of Woolf’s fight against convention, fear of ridicule, anger, repression, censorship, and self-censorship; see, e. g., Brenda R. Silver, “Textual Criticism as Feminist Practice: Or, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Part II,” in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. George Bornstein (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991), 193–222; DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage, who sees the revised novel as “a voyage away from the bluntness, the candor, the openness, and even the subtlety with which Woolf had handled her material in” Melymbrosia (66); and Celia Marshik, “Publication and ‘Public Women’: Prostitution and Censorship in Three Novels by Virginia Woolf,” Modern Fiction Studies 45 (Winter 1999): 853–86. In 1920, reading it for the first time since 1913, Woolf gave her first novel a mixed review: “such a harlequinade … an assortment of patches—here simple & severe—here frivolous & shallow—here like God’s truth—here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. … Yet I see how people prefer it to N[ight]. & D[ay].—I dont say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle” (D 2:17, 4 February).

82. After Rossetti’s “Jenny,” it is difficult to see what Euphrosyne’s young authors felt to be unprintable. In one amateurish dramatic monologue, “At the Other Bar,” the speaker recounts meeting a woman he has ruined in a brothel (Euphrosyne [Cambridge: Elijah Johnson, 1905], 23–36).

83. Edel writes that the comic poets represented Aspasia as Pericles’ political adviser and that he recognized his son by her as legitimate (Bloomsbury 174). Leonard does not cast himself as Pericles in “Aspasia”; see Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together, 64. Woolf read Landor’s Pericles and Aspasia (1903) in 1906.

84. Monk’s House Papers, Leonard Woolf Papers IID 7A; see George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 61 & n.

85. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (1977; Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985).

86. A contemporary reviewer of Room predicted that “Future historians will place Mrs. Woolf’s little book beside Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Rights of Women and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. It does for the intellectual and spiritual liberation of women what those works did for the political emancipation” but “outshines them both in genius” (Spectator 143 [28 December 1929]: 985). Cf. Monique Wittig: “each new class that fights for power must … represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of the society”; it “must give the form of universality to its thought,” “present it as the only reasonable” and “universally valid” position (“The Mark of Gender” 69, citing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology).

87. TG 155–56, citing Josephine Butler. That bonfire was utopian even in Bloomsbury: Woolf’s “own friends … sent [her] to Coventry” for Three Guineas (D 5:189, 22 November 1938). Clive thought it her “least admirable production” (Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Russell Noble [1971; Athens: Ohio UP, 1994], 72). Bell reports—as “hearsay”—Keynes’s “angry and contemptuous” dismissal of its “silly argument”; “what really seemed wrong,” opines Bell, “was the attempt to involve a discussion of women’s rights with the far more agonising and immediate question of what we were to do in order to meet the ever-growing menace of Fascism and war” (QB 1:205).

88. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1999); Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 992, 991.

89. Freud does acknowledge (recalling Woolf’s 1920 letter on Bennett and MacCarthy) that no one can tell what women would be like if educated: “women in general are said to suffer from … a lesser intelligence than men. The fact itself is disputable and its interpretation doubtful. … So long as a person’s early years are influenced” by “sexual,” “religious,” and “loyal” “inhibition[s] of thought … we cannot really tell what in fact [s]he is like” (FI 79).

90. RO 5. Here as in my chapter 8, I read Woolf’s figure of the veil as referring not to Islamic or any other non-Western tradition but to Western women’s exclusion from/subordination in the modern public sphere, formulated in such ancient dicta as St. Paul’s instruction that women veil themselves in public and Pericles’ rule that women be neither heard from nor “talked of” in public. Nineteenth-century European women authors’ strategic self-“veiling” in masculine pseudonyms is a latter-day symptom.

91. These three Marys, like Mary Hamilton, are all servants to the queen (possibly Mary Stuart); Mary Hamilton is led to the gallows after she bears the king’s child and casts it into the sea. See “Mary Hamilton: Versions A and B,” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 91–95.

92. There exists no document with a signature spelled “Shakespeare.”

93. That Woolf remains visible behind her “veil” anticipates Wittig’s observation that women must not “suppress our individual selves” to “become a class,” for “no individual can be reduced to her/his oppression” and “one can become someone in spite of oppression”—“constitute oneself as a subject as opposed to an object of oppression.” Moreover, “There is no possible fight for someone deprived of an identity,” for “although I can fight only with others, first I fight for myself” (“One Is Not Born a Woman,” Feminist Issues [Winter 1981]: 50–51). Wittig criticizes Marxism’s erasure of individuality, its failure to account for men and women as both classes and subjects; her essay suggests a reading of Room’s ideal of androgyny as a strategy to align women with the universal without denying sexual difference.

94. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1949; New York: Random House, 1989), 267.

95. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 231–43; Jane Marcus, “A Very Fine Negress,” Modern Language Association, Toronto, 1997, 6–7, 5, 3. Stephen, Marcus observes, “did indeed want to make an English citizen, woman or man (legally) of the wronged slave”; he indicted the English colonists’ invention of “a cause of slavery, additional to all those which lawgivers, civil or barbarous, have elsewhere recognized, or rapacious avarice explored; namely the having a black skin without a deed of manumission. They have thus contrived to effect, what human despotism never attempted or imagined before. They have attached slavery in the abstract to a large portion of the human species; so that it is no longer a particular private relation, requiring the correlative of a master, but a quality inherent to the blood of that unfortunate race, and redounding to the benefit of the first man-stealer who reduces it into possession” (James Stephen, The Slavery of the British West India Colonies Delineated [1824–30], cited in Marcus). See also Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2004).

96. Jane Marcus, “Registering Objections: Grounding Feminist Alibis,” in Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet and Joan Templeton (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 188.

97. See Wayne Chapman, “Leonard and Virginia Woolf Working Together,” Virginia Woolf Miscellanies: Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace UP, 1992), 210.

98. “That dog is mine, said those poor children; that’s my place in the sun: behold the origin and image of the usurpation of the whole world” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées [London: J. M. Dent, 1908], no. 295 [85]; see ECA viii).

99. Wittig parallels race and woman as social constructs: “Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist … in its modern meaning. … what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation,’ which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore they are women. …)” (“One Is Not Born a Woman,” 48–49, citing Guillaumin, “Race et nature: Système des marques, idée de groupe naturel et rapport sociaux,” Pluriel 11 [1977]).

100. As of 1997 A Room of One’s Own had been translated into at least twenty-four languages; see B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997).

1. The Voyage Out in its several draft versions was in progress from 1907-8 and in proofs by May 1913; its publication was delayed until 1915, after Woolf had recovered from a severe breakdown and suicide attempt, and it caused another breakdown. Woolf’s use of the phrase “Great War” thus precedes World War I. DeSalvo’s Melymbrosia (the novel’s first title) is a reconstruction of the extant draft B, begun about 1910 and revised in 1912 (see my chapter 1, 21–24 and nn 72–82). On Woolf’s manuscript revisions see Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), chaps. 2–4; on her revisions of the first American and second English editions, chap. 5. As I note in chapter 1, I agree with DeSalvo that Woolf muted much important material in transforming Melymbrosia into The Voyage Out (not least because her “boldness terrifie[d her],” L 1:383) and argue that she devised dialogic strategies to shift the burden of meaning at certain moments to the reader. Hence discarded passages often illuminate Woolf’s first novel project as a whole. I therefore approach the novel as a multidimensional work through its genetic text, using a palimpsestic (or variorum, or hologrammatical) method, and cite the American text of The Voyage Out when possible and Melymbrosia, the 1915 English text (VO/E), or VO Heine (chapter 1, note 75) when necessary. See also Elizabeth Heine, “The Earlier Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf’s First Novel,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (spring 1981): 294–316, and Beverly Ann Schlack, “The Novelist’s Voyage from Manuscripts to Text: Revisions of Literary Allusions in The Voyage Out, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (spring 1981): 317–27.

2. On Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out, see Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), chap. 4 (“The Vaginal Passage”); Rosemary Pitt, “The Exploration of Self in Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out,” Conradiana 10:2 (spring 1978): 141–54; Shirley Neuman, “Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf, and the Spectre of Domination,” in Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 57–76; and Mark A. Wollaeger, “The Woolfs in the Jungle: Intertextuality, Sexuality, and the Emergence of Female Modernism in The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle, and Heart of Darkness,” Modern Language Quarterly 64:1 (March 2003): 33–69.

3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3d ed. (1899; Norton, 1988), 20, 10. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), esp. chap. 9.

4. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1989), 212. Kirkê charts Odysseus’s course past the “cavemouth” that is “the den of Skylla, where she yaps / abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry, / though she is huge and monstrous. / … Her legs—/ and there are twelve—are like great tentacles, / unjointed, and upon her serpent necks / are borne six heads like nightmares of ferocity / with triple serried rows of fangs and deep / gullets of black death. … / And no ship’s company can claim / to have passed her without loss and grief; she takes, / from every ship, one man for every gullet” (212).

5. Juliet McLaughlan, “The ‘Value’ and ‘Significance’ of Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 15 (1983): 21.

6. Heart of Darkness, 51, 75–76, Conrad’s ellipsis. On the lie and the Intended see also Bruce R. Stark, “Kurtz’s Intended: The Heart of Heart of Darkness,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 16 (1974): 535–55; Garrett Stewart, “Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness,” PMLA 95 (1980): 319–31; Nina P. Straus, “The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Novel 20:2 (winter 1987): 123–37; Johanna M. Smith, “Too Beautiful Altogether: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness,” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Cast Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1989), 179–95; and Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), chap. 7.

7. Heine quotes this passage from chap. 24 in the Later Typescript in VO Heine 445. In this conversation Terence speculates that Helen and St. John might have “founded a new society—a Society for the Protection of Prostitutes” and Rachel answers, “I don’t think Helen will ever protect prostitutes” (444–45); in The Voyage Out Helen is incensed at the scapegoating of the prostitute in the hotel.

8. M 8, VO 22–23. In The Voyage Out the Euphrosyne takes “dry goods to the Amazon and rubber home again” (38). On the name Euphrosyne see my chapter 1.

9. M 71. The passage recalls Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagans, who, Brooke wrote, “don’t copulate without marriage, but we do meet in cafés, talk on buses, go unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage”; she “went to stay with Rupert Brooke at Grantchester, where she supplied a word for one of his poems and bathed naked with him by moonlight in the Granta”; “he, one may surmise, considered both these acts … sympathetic gestures; it was decent of her to help him to a simile and decent too not to be too prudish about stripping in mixed company” (QB 1:174 and n). Apparently Virginia’s sensibility outdistanced her nephew’s “not … too prudish” idea of her.

10. Here I cite Woolf’s 1915 English text; see The Voyage Out, ed. Lorna Sage (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 50; hereafter cited in the text as VO/E.

11. VO 51. The text silently mocks the sententious Richard when he picks up Helen’s Moore and reads a sentence to the effect that the Cambridge ethicist Henry Sidgwick is the only philosopher to have stated that “‘Good … is indefinable’” (VO 78, 74); as Richard mouths platitudes about scholars passing torches, the text inscribes the name of this activist reformer who not only wrote about ethics but (like Leslie Stephen) resigned his Cambridge fellowship to protest the criterion of religious faith and founded within that male bastion a women’s college, Newnham, to pass learning’s torch from woman to woman. On Sidgwick’s reformist leadership see W. C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

Perhaps following Clive Bell’s suggestion that “to draw such sharp & marked contrasts between the subtle, sensitive, tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, & perspicacious women, & the obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude, tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain, tyrannical, stupid men, is not only rather absurd, but rather bad art, I think,” Woolf makes Dalloway’s finest legislative achievement a shortened workday for Lancashire women weavers, of which he owns being “prouder … than I should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain!” (QB 1:209, VO 65).

12. L 1:345, 9 August 1908. Casting about for a name for her heroine (Rose, Cynthia, Rachel), Woolf rejected a suggestion of Clive Bell’s in terms that suggest her ambitions for her heroine: “Belinda is perhaps a little too dainty for my woman, and what I conceive of as her destiny. But I talk grandly, feeling in my heart some doubt that she ever will have a destiny” (L 1.345, 9 August 1908). In an earlier study I question whether Woolf as yet foresaw Rachel’s death (“it seems doubtful that she would have spoken of Rachel’s death by jungle fever as a destiny that would tempt her to ‘talk grandly’”) (“Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5 [spring 1986]: 66–67).

13. VO 190, M 178, VO 192, 136, 248. In Melymbrosia Evelyn is the child of the clergyman’s daughter and “the handsome young son at the big house,” who has provided them a good allowance, reluctantly married someone else, and died in the war (M 140).

14. On the dance scene’s Austenian provenance, see QB 1:210 and Wollaeger, “The Woolfs in the Jungle,” 40f.

15. Here my argument overlaps with my earlier study, “Out of the Chrysalis.”

16. Maria E. Budden, Always Happy!! Anecdotes of Felix and his Sister Serena. A tale. Written for her Children, by a Mother, 4th ed. (London, 1820), 90; cited in Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 45.

17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), §25–28 (88, 94, 104, 98); cf. Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 131–48.

18. VO 258. For a concise calendar of Woolf’s illnesses as The Voyage Out approached publication, see Bell’s chronology; she attempted suicide on the evening of 9 September 1913, after seeing two doctors (QB 1:197-201, 2:227–29).

19. VO 327, 329; M 21. In her delirium Rachel tries to remember the song to Sabrina—the drowned virgin of Spenser’s Faerie Queene whom Milton brings back to “life” as a water-goddess with power to save the Lady from sexual danger—from Milton’s Comus: A Mask, which Terence is reading aloud when she falls ill. For fuller discussion, see my “Out of the Chrysalis,” 83–85; and Lisa Low, “‘Listen and Save’: Woolf’s Allusion to Comus in Her Revolutionary First Novel,” in Sally Greene, ed., Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1999), 117–35. Milton’s only surviving manuscript, held by the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, has “Lycidas” and Comus. Virginia might conceivably have looked at this manuscript in her brother Thoby Stephen’s company during his years at Trinity; it is the manuscript in the “famous library” that the speaker of A Room of One’s Own is barred from examining because women were not then admitted to the library unless accompanied by a fellow or “furnished with a letter of introduction” (RO 8).

20. M 154. Here I depart from critics who argue that Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out “reinstate ‘the patriarchal maternal,’ a maternal principle not yet strong enough to commit to an expression of its difference” (Wollaeger, “The Woolfs in the Jungle,” 64–65, citing DeKoven, Rich and Strange, 138). On “male” and “female modernism” see Wollaeger, 64–69.

21. In his role as aspiring—and surviving—novelist, Karen R. Lawrence suggests, Terence functions as a kind of double for Rachel; see “Woolf’s Voyages Out,” in Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), 178.

22. VO 357, BGR 417–18. Woolf urges readers to read a book “as if one were writing it” in terms that recall Terence’s ideal reader (BGR 415). This essay, “The Love of Reading,” is an abridged version of “How Should One Read a Book?” made by Woolf for a booklist printed by the Hampshire Book Shop, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1932. Other versions were published in the Yale Review and CR2 (BGR 415).

1. “More than eight million men died as an immediate consequence of the fighting, and many millions more perished in the upheavals which followed the conflict, especially in eastern Europe and Russia. The permanently disabled and seriously wounded numbered a further 22 million. … Bereavement was almost universal” (Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle, Ideas of Europe Since 1914: The Legacy of the First World War, ed. Spiering and Wintle [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], 4).

2. Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), 63–64.

3. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford, 1985), 131 and chap. 2 passim. My analysis draws on Scarry’s discussion of “civilization and its deconstruction” or “decivilization” (145f) and on René Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, reciprocal violence, and scapegoating in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977), and The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986).

4. Michael Norman, These Good Men: Friendships Forged from War (New York: Crown, 1989), 141; see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 1975), esp. chap. 3.

5. Rudyard Kipling, “Common Form,” from Epitaphs of the War, in The Norton Book of Modern War, ed. Paul Fussell (New York: Norton, 1991), 194–95.

6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936) in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–84.

7. Letter to Pound, in Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; New York: New Directions, 1960), 59. Fussell notes that soldiers of the Latin countries turned to Dante; the Protestant English, to Pilgrim’s Progress (The Great War, 139).

8. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 110.

9. VW:CH 99, 101, 103, 107, 108.

10. Aspects of the early reception persist: Michael Rosenthal dismisses Jacob’s Room as juvenilia (Virginia Woolf [New York: Columbia UP, 1979]). Alex Zwerdling judges it a minor work of “the sketchbook artist”: “Only on the small canvas … rather than on the grand frescoes of the heroic imagination, could Woolf allow herself to sketch—in a deliberately halting and fragmented style and a conspicuously impure tone—her vision of a permanently inscrutable young man” (Virginia Woolf and the Real World [Berkeley: U of California P, 1986], 63, 83). William R. Handley writes that the novel “represents an imaginative space in which Woolf would rewrite the story of modern civilization” but finds her efforts to “know” Jacob “problematic and even futile” (“War and the Politics of Narration in Jacob’s Room,” in Virginia Woolf and War, ed. Mark Hussey [Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991], 115, 110). Conversely, The Voyage Out’s early reception shows how the noise of a story can drown out a novel’s critical energies. Not only do the characters within the novel “warm” themselves at Rachel’s death; critics tended to do the same, at the expense of her radical quest for civilization’s hidden “truth.”

11. Thus Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1981): “After the peculiar heterogeneity of the moment of Conrad, a high modernism is set in place. … The perfected poetic apparatus of high modernism represses History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject. At that point, however, the political, no longer visible in the high modernist texts, any more than in the everyday world of appearance of bourgeois life, and relentlessly driven underground by accumulated reification, has at last become a genuine Unconscious” (280).

12. MB 153; cf. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf, 74.

13. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic, 1992), 61.

14. See, for example, Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1958) and Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974), 67–87.

15. Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984).

16. MD 22, 24, 148. Images of moths/psyches and falling trees recur in Woolf’s works, notably in Jacob’s Room’s Cambridge chapel scene, Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa remembers her sister Sylvia, “killed by a falling tree,” the short story “The Introduction,” and the essay “Reading” (JR 32, MD 78).

17. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam, 1977), 197.

18. Herman finds these qualities already visible in the issues that three-year-old boys negotiate in play with war toys (Trauma and Recovery 64).

19. Edward L. Bishop, “The Subject in Jacob’s Room,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992): 166. For Bishop the narrator exemplifies “female subjectivity” as defined by Teresa de Lauretis: “at once inside and outside the ideology of gender … at once ‘woman’ and ‘women’” (163). I see her as enacting a more radical evasion of gender, beyond “woman” and “women.”

20. Barry Morgenstern, “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Jacob’s Room,” Modern Fiction Studies 18 (1972): 351–61.

21. Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino, eds., Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1997), 1.

22. D 2:13–14, 26 January 1920; Clive Bell, Proust (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 85; cf. my chapter 1.

23. Bishop writes that the narrator “is of course in a room of her own, but she maintains a consciousness of the interpellated nature of that space … that Jacob and those educated like him at Cambridge lack” (“The Subject,” 163).

24. JR 121. See Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine,’” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 133–46.

25. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1949; New York: Random House/Vintage, 1989); and Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” Feminist Issues 1 (winter 1981): 47–54.

26. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 459 (bk. 19). Cf. my “The Daughter’s Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History,” Signs 11 (1986): 621–44.

27. JR 25, 138. Celia Marshik analyzes the depiction of Florinda and other characters in light of censorship issues and social purity campaigns in “Publication and ‘Public Women’: Prostitution and Censorship in Three Novels by Virginia Woolf,” Modern Fiction Studies 45:4 (winter 1999): 853–86.

28. JR 122. Vara Neverow points out that Jacob may in fact have fathered a child, since Florinda is pregnant when he dies, though that question is undecidable given Jacob’s sighting of Florinda “on another man’s arm” (JR 94).

29. E. L. Bishop, “The Shaping of Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions,” Twentieth Century Literature 32 (1986): 130, citing the manuscript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 3: 63; see Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft, transcribed and ed. Edward L. Bishop (New York: Pace UP, 1998), 275–76.

30. D 2:179, 23 June 1922. Zwerdling’s generic classification—“satiric elegy”—foregrounds important features, but my reading diverges from his view that “the hesitation of her style and the impurity of her tone are manifestations of the impacted satiric impulse” (Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 83).

31. See n. 10 above.

32. Woolf read the first four books of the Odyssey during her 1906 tour of Greece; the rest in 1908. See Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), XXXIV. B.4–5. Woolf asks Violet Dickinson whether she is reading the Iliad, remembers their 1906 visit to Mycenae (L 1:253, 28? November 1908), and refers to Pope’s translation in an essay on Lady Elizabeth Holland (Books and Portraits, ed. Mary Lyon [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977], 190); Edward Pargiter has read it with far more care than Hamlet or Paradise Lost (P 63); but she does not mention reading it herself.

33. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1989), 201.

34. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 24.

35. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 262; “Conversely,” he comments, “what our manipulated contemporaries dismiss as unintelligible secretly makes very good sense to them indeed” (262).

1. Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), chap. 3.

2. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press took over publication of the International Psycho-Analytic Library in 1924, after which it published English translations of all Freud’s works. The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929/30) resonate with Bloomsbury’s internationalist stance toward the war.

3. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 2, 1; hereafter EE. On the roots of elegiac conventions in “specific social and literary practices,” see “Interpreting the Genre,” 1–37. See also Maria diBattista, “Virginia Woolf’s Memento Mori,” in Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), chap. 2; J. Hillis Miller, Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead,” in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), chap. 7 (hereafter “RRD”); Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–64 (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1990), 150–67; and Caroline Webb, “Life after Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway,” Modern Fiction Studies 40:2 (summer 1994): 279–98.

4. EE 8f. I agree that there is “substantial overlap in men’s and women’s mourning” and that a woman’s mourning recapitulates the loss of the mother and “her internalization and identification with the idealized parent figure”; but Woolf translates psychoanalytic theory’s androcentric terms to the ontological loss and sexual wounding inherent in being, distinct from the systemic, socially inflicted losses women suffer through “male culture’s establishment of an almost exclusive relation between masculinity and the figures of authority” (EE 13, 15, 321).

5. EE 34–35. Sacks interprets this ancient strategy of elegy as, first, a symbolic recapitulation of “the ‘splitting’ and self suppression that accompanied the self’s first experiences of loss and substitution, its discovery of signs both for lost objects and for the self”; second, a “dramatizing strategy” that calls attention through ritual and ceremony to the mourners’ “‘work’ as survivors”; third, the “confrontational structure required for the very recognition of loss,” which furthers mourning’s “necessarily dialectical movement”; fourth, the “poetry contest” whereby survivors channel grief into skill in contending over the communal inheritance from the dead (EE 35–36).

6. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), 3.

7. Leonard Woolf, Barbarians Within and Without (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 131; hereafter BWW; Clive Bell, Peace at Once (Manchester and London: National Labour Press, [1915]), 53; J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 5, hereafter ECP; Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 9; cf. Albert Einstein, The Fight against War, ed. Alfred Lief (New York: John Day, 1933), 5–7.

8. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), x–xii, citing Czech political philosopher Thomas Masuryk.

9. Mussolini came to power in 1922; Hitler was arrested and imprisoned after the “beer hall putsch” of November 1923.

10. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919: Being Reminiscences of the Paris Peace Talks (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 293. Nicolson’s diary tracks the “horrible” Treaty negotiations through the signing ceremony, which sent him “[t]o bed, sick of life” (370–71). See also John Maynard Keynes, “Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy,” Two Memoirs (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 11–71.

11. In her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) Woolf elaborates: “In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only poets who spoke to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of Wilfr[e]d Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be direct without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being sentimental” (CR 34). Jahan Ramazani pursues Owen’s description of his war elegies as “to this generation in no sense consolatory” in a study that begins by positing “the modern elegy’s repudiation of the traditional elegy” and ends in acknowledging “the persistence of the traditional elegy within the modern” (Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994], 69, 361). On Woolf’s response to the death of her childhood friend Brooke in April, 1915, and his subsequent “canonisation” see Karen L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999), chap. 1.

12. D 3:32, 18 June 1925. I differentiate the Clarissas by publication date; Woolf composed The Voyage Out between 1908 and 1913, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” in 1922, Mrs. Dalloway in 1923–24. In a draft of The Voyage Out, Clarissa answers Richard’s view that “One has to make allowances” for “poets and artists in general”: “Think of Shelley. I feel that there’s almost everything one wants in Adonais” (M 30–31). As she approached The Hours, Woolf expressed dissatisfaction with the 1923 Clarissa (“Mrs Dalloway doesn’t seem to me to be complete as she is,” L 3:45, 4 June 1923). The ur-Orlando takes a last swipe at her: “‘There’s that tiresome Mrs. Dalloway!’ recognizing a lady she very much disliked looking in at a glove shop window” (Orlando: A Biography, ed. Andrew McNeillie [Oxford: Blackwell, 1998], Appendix A: 170 3Pr 1E 1A).

13. Elegies often figure the mother’s symbolic loss (whether understood ontologically as differentiation contingent on birth or in sexual terms as oedipal prohibition) as her literal death; a guest brings tears to Clarissa’s eyes by telling her that she looks “so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey hat” (MD 267). Sacks discusses Amy Clampitt’s redressing of the elegy’s “multiple exclusion or occlusion of figures representing the mother” in “Procession at Candlemas” (EE 325).

14. As Sacks remarks, “Adonais,” completed the year before Shelley enacted its closing lines, drives the genre “to the brink of … ruin” (165). On 18 May 1933 Woolf described “sitting, by an open window, by a balcony, by the bay in which Shelley was drowned, wasn’t he, 113 [actually 111] years ago, on a hot day like this … Mary Shelley and Mary Williams walked up and down the balcony of the house next door [Casa Magni] waiting while Shelley’s body rolled round with pearls—it is the best death bed place I’ve ever seen” (L 5:186–87).

15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais,” in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and G. M. Matthews (New York: Oxford UP, 1970), 470, stanza 1, lines 4–9.

16. H 266. For some critics—e.g., Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (New York: Manchester UP, 1998), 165f, and Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994), 189f—Clarissa’s class privilege and snobbery overwhelm any elegiac sensibility; in Ouditt’s words she is “a trivial woman who represents a dying age” and lacks “political vision and fortitude” (189).

17. L 1:134–35, 212, March 1904, 10 November 1905; MB 191; HL 214.

18. On 14 April 1922 Woolf told T. S. Eliot that she expected to finish this story in three to six weeks (L 2:521). In August she told Ottoline Morrell that she had finished two Mrs. Dalloway stories (teasingly referred to as “my Garsington novel”) (L 2:543); on 28 August she planned to finish “Mrs Dalloway” on “Sat. 2nd Sept” and then to work on “the next chapter of Mrs. D. … the Prime Minister?” until “say Oct. 12th” (D 2:196). A plan dated 6 October lists eight titles: “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” “The Prime Minister,” “Ancestors,” “A dialogue,” “The old ladies,” “Country house?,” “Cut flowers,” and “The Party” (H 411; cf. MDP). “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” appeared in the Dial in July 1923; Woolf sent it and another story to Eliot on 4 June for the Criterion, but he published neither.

19. D 2:207–8, 14 October. Jacqueline E. M. Latham, “The Model for Clarissa Dalloway—Kitty Maxse,” Notes and Queries 214 (July 1969): 262–63, finds no condolence letter from Woolf among the five hundred-odd in the Maxse papers at Chichester; she prints a letter from Virginia to Kitty, probably of summer 1905 when the Maxses visited the Stephen children at Carbis Bay in Cornwall (QB 1:195).

20. Virginia Woolf, “Introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Mrs. Dalloway (1928),” in Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Morris Beja (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), Appendix C, 198, hereafter “I.”

21. Daniel Ferrer makes this point but questions the importance of Kitty’s death to the novel’s genesis in Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 154 n. 25.

22. For other interpretations of Woolf’s remark in “I”, see Edward Mendelson, “The Death of Clarissa Dalloway: Two Readings,” in Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: MLA, 1986), 272–80; and Miller, “RRD,” 176–201 passim. Mendelson makes (and rebuts) the case that Clarissa dies, citing her fear of death, the heart condition that makes her sleep alone in a narrow, coffinlike bed, Peter’s vision of her “falling where she stood, in her drawing-room” on hearing St. Margaret’s bells toll “for death that surprised in the midst of life” (“No! No! … She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future”), and her sudden vanishing from her party (MD 75). Miller frames Woolf’s storytelling as “the repetition of the past” in the characters’ memories and that of the narrator, who “remembers all” and “resurrect[s] the past”: an “invisible mind … more powerful than their own,” she “rescues them from the past,” “registers with infinite delicacy their every thought and steals their every secret,” and “speaks for them all,” “‘after’ anything [they] think or feel”; thus “narration is repetition as the raising of the dead” (176–79) and Clarissa’s return to her party, her “resurrection from the dead” (“RRD” 201).

23. For Lytton Strachey this compound Kitty /Woolf registered as a “discrepancy in Clarissa herself; he thinks she is disagreeable and limited, but that I alternately laugh at her, & cover her, very remarkably, with myself. … I think there is some truth in it. For I remember the night at Rodmell when I decided to give it up, because I found Clarissa in some way tinselly. Then I invented her memories. But I think some distaste for her persisted. Yet, again, that was true to my feeling for Kitty” (D 3:32, 18 June 1925, my emphasis). Woolf lent Clarissa her girlhood passion for Madge Vaughan (“I see myself now standing in the night nursery at Hyde Park Gate … saying … ‘At this moment she is actually under this roof’” (D 2:122, 2 June 1921, cf. MD 51) and experience of “Constantinople” (a code word for lesbian love), and otherwise freed her from fact (e. g., Kitty had no children).

24. Woolf depicts Julia Stephen’s antifeminism in Mrs. Ramsay and recalls her stern rebuke when Kitty broke her first engagement in “22 Hyde Park Gate” (MB 165).

25. MB 93. In Jacob’s Room someone sings “Who Is Silvia?”: “She excels each mortal thing / Upon the dull earth dwelling. / To her let us garlands bring” (88). Virginia’s beloved half sister, Stella Duckworth, died in 1897.

26. H 411. Sacks relates the elegy’s cut and broken branches and flowers to the “vegetation god, whose death and rebirth governed the phases of the rites” and “allowed the devotees or survivors to … intensify their grief or gratitude regarding an otherwise manifold and ungraspable world of nature”; the withering vegetation also symbolically “reverses man’s submission to nature,” which becomes no longer “the cause of human grief but rather the mourner or even the effect of a human-divine loss” (EE 20–21). On Jane Harrison’s influence on Woolf’s vegetation imagery, see Beverly Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State UP, 1979), 52–53 and passim.

27. Miller aligns Imogen’s return from “death” with Clarissa’s return “from her solitary confrontation with death during her party” (“RRD” 200).

28. Posthumous derives from Latin posthumus: “erroneously (by association with humus earth, ground, as if referring to burial) for postumus last, superl. of posterus” (OED). As Sacks points out, Guiderius / Polydore and Arviragus / Cadwal first sang “Fear no more,” their dirge for Imogen / Fidele, for their dead mother, Euriphile (EE 18).

29. Building on Elizabeth Abel’s reading of Mrs. Dalloway as a “progression from a pastoral female world to an urban culture governed by men” (Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989], 42), Joseph Allen Boone relates this passage to Nancy Chodorow’s theories of female psychological development (Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Making of Modernism [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998], 187).

30. The narrator brings to daylight various treasures of Clarissa’s psychic cave: e. g., kissing Peter in her drawing room stirs “the brandishing of silver-flashing plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast”; when Elizabeth barges in, Big Ben strikes the half hour “with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that”; time is a roving, protean figure with multiple personalities: “Love—but here … the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little things besides” (MD 46–47, 69, 71).

31. Wussow transcribes “beauty” here; it seems likely that Woolf meant to write “belief.” Her scribble is inconclusive (holograph manuscript, British Library).

32. H 388, cf. MD 185. In citing The Hours I make some silent elisions and corrections and do not differentiate its temporal layers.

33. Keynes had lived in the communal household at 38 Brunswick Square with Virginia, Adrian, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. Before Versailles Woolf wrote rather satirically of his “prophecies” about Lloyd George and England’s economic future (L 2:208, 1 January 1918); later she recorded his resignation from the Peace talks (D 1:280, 288; 10 June, 8 July 1919). In 1921 she praised his Memoir Club piece “Dr Melchior” (L 2:456, 3 February).

34. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 399; he adds that Keynes’s “case on reparations remains unshakeable” (400).

35. MD 125. The historical model for Miss Kilman was the classical scholar Louise Ernestine Matthaei (1880–1969), fellow and director of studies at Newnham from 1909, who was forced out in 1916 “under a cloud”; she explained to Leonard, “my father was a German. I find it makes a good deal of difference—it is a distinct hindrance commercially” (D 1:135–36 and n. 14, 9 April 1918). Woolf recorded Leonard’s intention to hire her on the International Review at a salary of £200–250 (D 1:143, 21 April 1918). The belligerent Miss Kilman has nothing of Matthaei’s “limp, apologetic attitude,” her “odious” reluctance “to declare her opinions—as if a dog used to excessive beating, dreaded even the raising of a hand,” but shares her “unattractive” person, blotchy complexion, “inconceivably stiff & ugly” dress, and “quick mind” (D 1:136).

36. MD 124. Masami Usui notes Miss Kilman’s association with Quaker peace activism and relates her to international struggles for women’s rights in “The Female Victims of War,” in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Syracuse UP, 1991), esp. 158–63; cf. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 133. Her work “for the Friends” apparently supplements her traditionally hierarchical Protestant denomination, with its “Reverend Whittaker.”

37. MD 129. This wistful thought coexists with her passion for Elizabeth. Tylee, 165f, and Eileen Barrett (“Unmasking Lesbian Passion: The Inverted World of Mrs. Dalloway,” in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, ed. Barrett and Patricia Cramer [New York: New York UP, 1997], 159–62), read Miss Kilman as a narrative and psychic locus of Clarissa’s displaced and disavowed lesbian desire; cf. Abel, Virginia Woolf 20–44 and Boone, Libidinal Currents 172–203.

38. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 58; hereafter CD.

39. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, rev. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), 3; hereafter FI.

40. Forms of recompense include: protection against natural forces; material wealth and comfort, which accrue to individuals and classes in greater and lesser degrees; the “mental wealth” of cultural identity, political ideals, communal pride, art, religious ideas, and science; and such personal satisfactions as drugs, love, “cultivat[ing] one’s garden,” beauty, work, and the “pleasure principle” by which individuals adapt to their environment so as to gain from it all possible gratification (FI 16, CD 23f). For Freud as for Keynes, civilization encompasses, on the one hand, all the knowledge and capacity by which humankind controls destructive natural forces and uses natural resources to satisfy its needs, and, on the other, the regulation of human relations, “especially the distribution of the available wealth”; these material and social economies are inseparable, since human relations “are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible” (FI 3). Through social relations that organize power and wealth, some individuals function as wealth for others through labor or sexual attachment, in Freud’s view making class oppression a threat to civilization’s stability.

41. Freud considers this unconscious guilt—a hidden reservoir of unacknowledged aggressive desire—“the most important problem in the development of civilization” (CD 81).

42. ECP 295–96. Cf. Freud on how “the narcissism of minor differences” (Spaniards v. Portuguese, North Germans v. South Germans, English v. Scots, Christians v. Jews) makes “intelligible” the fact that “the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for antisemitism as its complement” and that “the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois” (CD 61–62).

43. MD 81. Miller (“RRD” 189–90) identifies the song “Allerseelen” by Hermann von Gilm and Richard Strauss as the source of the beggarwoman’s age-old “fertilising” song (“ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo”), which encompasses “the pageant of the universe” and makes the earth seem “green and flowery” as it issues from the archetype of all graves: “a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses, … soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streaming away in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and down towards Euston, leaving a damp stain” (MD 81). Woolf’s draft translation breaks off: “Lay by my side a bunch of purple heather / The last red aster of a” (H 98).

44. MD 39. Tate points out that Richard Dalloway, M. P., may that very day be orchestrating the Armenians’ dire fate at Britain’s hands (147–70).

45. On Septimus, war trauma, and shell shock, see Elaine Showalter (who aligns him with Sassoon), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Penguin, 1985), chap. 7; Sue Thomas, “Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith and Contemporary Perceptions of Shell Shock,” English Language Notes 25:2 (1987): 49–57; Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 49, 52; Ouditt, who sees Septimus as homosexual and attributes his death to “a civilian metonym of war, the logical corollary to the brutal imposition of a fixed gender identity” (Fighting Forces 197); and Karen DeMeester, “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” Modern Fiction Studies 44:3 (1998): 649–73.

46. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1973), 288–89; cf. x–xi.

47. MD 12, cf. H 271 (MS dated 20 October 1924). See Paul Davies, Other Worlds: … Space, Superspace, and the Quantum Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 43.

48. On the emergence of this advertising technology in England, see John K. Young, “Publishing Women: Modernism, Gender, and Authorship” (Ph.D. Diss., Northwestern University, June 1998), chap. 4, and “Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” The Explicator 55 (1999): 99–101. On Bloomsbury, marketing, and Keynes’s theory of markets as inherently chaotic, see Jennifer Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28:1 (fall 1994): 5–23.

49. FI 80. Freud’s remarks on such “treasure” follow closely on his observation that no one can tell what women are like as long as sexual and religious inhibitions of thought are inculcated from childhood (FI 79). Although certain affinities between Freud’s postwar works and Woolf’s suggest that he may have read her, his library in the Freud Museum, London, has none of her books.

50. Letter to John Middleton Murry (10 November 1919), speaking of Woolf’s Night and Day, in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 3 vols., ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 3:82.

51. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford UP, 1975), esp. 174f.

52. Cf. Gilles Deleuze’s and Claire Parnet’s idea that to have a style means “to stammer in one’s own language”—a difficult feat “because there has to be a need for such stammering” (Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [New York: Columbia UP, 1987], 4).

53. René Girard argues that the scapegoat mechanism, fueled by mimetic desire, shapes “the dynamics of all mythological and religious beginnings,” which religions conceal “by suppressing or disguising collective murders and minimizing or eliminating the stereotypes of persecution in a hundred different ways” (The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero [Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUP, 1986], 165).

54. Blaise Pascal, quoted in Foucault, ix.

55. L 3:180, 1 May 1925, to Gwen Raverat about Septimus; Woolf adds, “You can’t think what a raging furnace it still is to me—madness and doctors and being forced. But let’s change the subject.” In a letter of 28 July 1910 to Vanessa / “Dark Devil,” Woolf begs to be liberated from the home for female lunatics at Twickenham, where her family has installed her to undergo Dr. George Savage’s version of S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure; she pays ritual homage to Vanessa and displays ostentatious good temper and reasonableness while trying to get across that the rest cure is driving her insane (L 1:430–31).

56. For example, on 22 September 1904: “You will be glad to hear that your Sparroy feels herself a recovered bird” (L 1:142). See Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities P, 1982), chap. 13 (“The Birds Talking Greek”).

57. See Strachey, introduction, CD 6.

58. MD 5–6, 103; H 156–57. For Woolf’s portraits of George Duckworth see MB, passim.

59. H 87. In Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa recalls that he did it “to punish her for saying that women should have votes” (181). On prostitution and class see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992).

60. In 1915 Woolf recorded seeing “a long line of imbeciles,” “every one … a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare”; her response, “It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed,” suggests disavowal of a suicidal self that she identifies with them, echoed in Septimus’s memory of “a maimed file of lunatics” who “ambled and nodded and grinned past him. … And would he go mad?” (D 1:13, 9 January 1915; MD 90).

61. A. Bullock, Hitler (London: 1952), 79, cited by Keegan, 3.

62. MD 137. Cf. Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness, 166.

1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), 323. Avrom Fleishman finds “the romance theme of a quest to restore a lost garden … played out in a comic conflict” that leads to “a restoration of family unity in the absence of … the mother” (Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975], 121). See also Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: Norton, 1970), 3–23; Paul Zweig, The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974); and Dana A. Heller, The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990).

2. On the function of pronouns in inculcating gender, and the ontological power of the pronoun “one,” see Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), and my chapters 1 and 6.

3. “Femininity,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth P, 1953–66; New York: Macmillan, 1953–74), 22:113, 124ff; hereafter cited as SE; cf. “Female Sexuality,” SE 21: 223–31.

4. Thus “There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words”; “There can be nothing human that pre-exists or exists outside the law represented by the father; there is only either its denial (psychosis) or the fortunes and misfortunes (‘normality’ and ‘neurosis’) of its terms” (Juliet Mitchell in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose [New York: Norton, 1977], 23, original emphasis; cf. Rose, 55; Lacan in Mitchell and Rose, 144). That the father merely “represents” social law only highlights this rhetorical masculinization of “human” subjectivity; that “man” too exists only as excluded by the “nature” of things/words hardly mitigates Lacan’s polemical exploitation of gender. Citing Winnicott, Ogden, Benjamin, Bach, Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, Suzanne Juhasz argues that no third person’s intervention but rather “the necessary presence of aggression within the relationship” fosters the “development of daughter’s and mother’s subjectivity”; “the space of the symbolic exists within the mother-infant relationship, rather than having to be constructed beyond it” (“Towards Recognition: Writing and the Daughter-Mother Relationship,” American Imago 57:7 [2000]: 169).

5. Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” 66.

6. TL 51, MB 72. Passages of Woolf’s 1939–40 memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” revisit the autobiographical material of To the Lighthouse.

7. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), 5.

8. Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997), 57.

9. On Ulysses’ quest romance see my Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), chap. 2.

10. For example, Margaret Homans acutely analyzes Lacan’s gender-bound rhetoric but implicates Lily in a “masculine” model of subjectivity and art that requires the mother’s death: at best Lily “adopt[s] some of the son’s strategies” even if she “at least refuses to victimize the mother actively”; at worst she risks “excluding and killing the mother for the sake of representation’s projects.” For Homans the novel’s only alternative to masculine representation is Cam’s dreamy echo of her mother’s nonreferential murmuring, which “reproduces” the pre-oedipal mother/daughter relation in language the symbolic order devalues (Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986], 286–87; on Lacan, see 5–16). Patricia Moran counters that Mrs. Ramsay “devalues women’s desires and talk” (Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf [Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1996], 141). Elizabeth Abel departs from the matricidal reading but keeps its gendered terms: Cam “thinks back through her father” in a story of “narrative imprisonment” while Lily “escape[s]” through a painting that preserves the mother/child bond James must sacrifice (Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989], 67). Abel compares James’s and Cam’s “Freudian/Lacanian” developmental narratives (chap. 3) with Lily’s “Kleinian challenge” (chap. 4) and finds in Lily’s picture “the dual unity, mother and daughter, that has been the subject of Lily’s narrative” (47, 83). See also Maud Ellmann on Lily’s “matricidal painting” and the novel’s oedipal economy in “The Woolf Woman,” Critical Quarterly 35:3 (1993): 94. My reading agrees with Helen Storm Corsa that Lily’s “grief over the loss of the mother” long precedes Mrs. Ramsay’s death (“To the Lighthouse: Death, Mourning, and Transfiguration,” Literature and Psychology 21 [1971]: 123–24); even if we understand “Killing” as “the last outpost of mourning” (Brenda Wineapple, “Mourning Becomes Biography,” American Imago 54:4 [1997]: 449), Lily’s painting no more causes Mrs. Ramsay’s death than do Mrs. McNab’s labors. See Su Reid, To the Lighthouse (London: Macmillan, 1991), for a review of feminist and other debates.

11. Woolf uses this phrase in response to Vita Sackville-West’s poems: “I was trying to get at something about the thing itself before its been made into anything: the emotion, the idea. … [O]ne ought to stand outside with one’s hands folded, until the thing has made itself visible; … there are odder, deeper, more angular thoughts in your mind than you have yet let come out” (L 3:321, 2 February 1927).

12. Terry Eagleton’s paraphrase of Lacan in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 185.

13. D 3:18–19, 14 May 1925; six weeks later Woolf wrote, “I am making up ‘To the Lighthouse’—the sea is to be heard all through it” and proposed to substitute “Elegy” for “novel” (D 3:34, 27 June).

14. MB 128. The Hyde Park Gate News of 12 September 1892 (the family gazette, written and published by the Stephen children, chiefly Virginia, from 1891–94) posted this item: “On Saturday morning Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia Stephen to accompany them to the lighthouse as Freeman the boatman said that there was a perfect tide and wind for going there. Master Adrian Stephen was much disappointed at not being allowed to go” (QB 1:32). See also Jean MacGibbon, There’s the Lighthouse: A Biography of Adrian Stephen (London: James and James, 1997).

15. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 47; hereafter cited as MBk. Woolf told Vanessa that she had “specially refrained” from reading her mother’s letters or “father’s life” (F. W. Maitland’s 1906 The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen) while writing To the Lighthouse (L 3:379, 22 May 1927); but she certainly had read The Mausoleum Book—written “for Julia’s children” after her death in 1895—even if her memories made “direct reference to the documents … superfluous” (xxix).

16. Julia later wrote (still refusing his proposal) that she loved Leslie “with my whole heart—only it seems such a poor dead heart” (MBk 53). The next January she accepted; they married on 26 March 1878 and, he wrote, “my own darling did come to life again” (MBk 58).

17. “Grief,” Stephen wrote, “is of all things not to be wasted” (MBk 71). Elsewhere he described Julia as having suffered “one of those terrible blows which shatter the very foundations of life … and seem to leave for the only reality a perpetual and gnawing pain. … Yet the greatest test of true nobility of character is its power of turning even the bitterest grief to account … by slow degrees it undergoes a transmutation into more steady and profound love of whatsoever may still be left” (“Forgotten Benefactors,” in Social Rights and Duties [1896], cited in MBk xiv–xv).

18. TL 43, TLhd 25. Gillian Beer notes that Stephen summarized Hume’s view that “The belief that anything exists outside our mind when not actually perceived is a ‘fiction’” in his 1876 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (“Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground [Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996], 36). Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays appeared in 1893. On the table debate in British empiricist philosophy see Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Russell, Fry, and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). Betokening the question of the world’s existence independent of human perception, “our familiar table,” Russell writes, is “a problem full of surprising possibilities”—not least that there may be “no table at all,” merely a sensory illusion that vanishes with the perceiver (The Problems of Philosophy, 16, cited in Banfield 50, 43).

19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, cited in Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 8. Annas and Barnes contrast the ancient skeptics’ “practical doubt,” which attacked not knowledge but belief, with modern skepticism, which “leaves all our beliefs intact: provided only that we do not claim to know anything”; “it does not affect our behaviour or mode of life, and it is to that extent unserious” (9, 7–8).

20. TLhd 315, 109, TL 43. As publication day neared Woolf worried, “People will say I am irreverent” (D 3:133, 1 May 1927). Michael Lackey notes that “there has been no extended analysis of Woolf’s atheism, even though the topic appears in every novel and almost every short story” (“Atheism and Sadism: Nietzsche and Woolf on Post-God Discourse,” Philosophy and Literature 24:2 [2000]: 359).

21. TLhd 69, 63–64. Cf. Genesis 1–3. According to Annan, Leslie “worshipped” Julia as “a living image before whom he could pour out the flood of devotion that could find no outlet in religion”; Leslie himself wrote, “To see her as she was is to me to feel all that is holy … in human affection”; after her death George Meredith wrote Leslie that he had never “reverenced a woman more” (MBk xviii, 33, 74). Although the final text drops the Genesis allusion, Mrs. Ramsay retains an aura of divinity, as does Woolf’s later portrait of Julia: “there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood … from the very first … the creator of that crowded merry world which spun so gaily in the centre of my childhood. … it was herself. This was proved on May 5th 1895. For after that day there was nothing left of it” (MB 81, 84).

22. TLhd 56–8, TL 64. Mrs. Ramsay’s sadness is sometimes misread as “depression,” e. g., Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” New Literary History 26:4 (1995): 736.

23. TLhd 85. For excellent Lacanian studies of Lily’s struggle to lay the mother’s ghost, see Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (New York: Routledge, 1990), chap. 3, and André Viola, “Fluidity Versus Muscularity: Lily’s Dilemma in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” Journal of Modern Literature 24:2 (2000/2001): 271–89.

24. Whereas the beautiful Prue dies in childbirth, Rose excels in domestic arts, and willful Cam submits to her father and brother, Nancy is the paragon infidel—a “wild creature” who “scamper[s] about the country all day long,” hides in her attic from “the horror of family life,” and incorrigibly mocks Tansley. Her Constantinople fantasy in response to Minta’s touch and her bafflement as to what Minta and people in general “want” anticipate Orlando’s lesbian sexuality. Like Rhoda in The Waves she contemplates “nothingness” in anemone pools; and she fails to carry on her mother’s ministry, forgetting what one sends to the lighthouse (TL 58, 73, 76). Neither did the “Cathedral space of childhood” circumscribe Virginia: “I enclosed that world in another made by my own temperament; … from the beginning I had many adventures outside that world … and kept much back” (MB 84). Minta Doyle (based on Kitty Maxse, who “got engaged at St Ives,” D 2:206, 8 October 1922) pursues “a wilder life” in her open marriage.

25. TL 6. Mrs. Ramsay herself envisions state-sponsored motherhood, anticipating Three Guineas; is unpleasantly reminded of herself in the Grimm tale’s fisherman’s wife; feels herself “nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions”; admits being “driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children”; and finds Rose’s “deep,” “buried,” “quite speechless feeling” for her “quite out of proportion to anything she actually was” (TL 32, 60, 81).

26. To the Lighthouse culminates a series including the Odyssey, Genesis, the Divine Comedy, Henry IV, Part 2, Don Quixote, the Decameron; see “The Brown Stocking,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), 534–35. The subtitle translates literally as “Represented Reality.”

27. As Katë Hamburger points out, “subjective” and “objective” require each other to be meaningful; she argues that through free indirect discourse or “narrated monologue” (Woolf’s “oratio obliqua”) fiction achieves a realism that historical discourse “by its nature cannot attain” (The Logic of Literature, rev. ed., trans. Marilynn J. Rose [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973], 171–2; D 3:106, 5 September 1926). The narrator’s “interpreting voice” binds “almost imperceptibly” with the characters’ reproduced “conscious or unconscious thoughts,” blending their “interior” voices with the narrator’s “exterior,” “objectifying interpretive acts” (ibid.). For J. Hillis Miller, Woolf’s narrator lacks intrinsic characteristics, merely narrating what the characters know from the vantage point of their future (“Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe: The Rhythm of Creativity in To the Lighthouse,” Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature [New York, 1990]). On Auerbach, see also my chapter 9.

Many critics relate Woolf’s multiperspectival stream of consciousness to Nancy Chodorow’s psychoanalytic work on female development; e. g., Abel, Virginia Woolf, 71f; Joan Lidoff, “Virginia Woolf’s Feminine Sentence: The Mother-Daughter World of To the Lighthouse,” Literature and Psychology 32 (1986): 43–57; Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1986), chap. 5.

28. TLhd 29. By September 5 Woolf had “made a very quick & flourishing attack” in which no Lily appears (D 3:39). Sophie mutates into “Kind old Mrs. Beckwith,” whose sentimentality (“always saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud and they ought to be so happy”) gets on the children’s nerves (TL 148, 203, cf. 142, 192). Diane Filby Gillespie discusses Woolf’s 1904–15 sketches, drawings, and copies in The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988), esp. 21–33.

29. Clive Bell, Art (1914; London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 278. Bloomsbury’s aesthetic formalism resonates with other London movements such as Vorticism.

30. TL 17–18. This moment marks a divide between Victorian father and modernist daughter that Tennyson’s 1854 poem’s broader reception also registers; see Jerome J. McGann, “Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism,” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 173–203. The poem commemorates the military debacle of the Light Cavalry Brigade in the Crimean War, when soldiers obeyed an order to rush toward certain death: though “All the world wonder’d” at the commanders’ incompetence no less than the soldiers’ blind devotion to duty, the poem exalts the heroic ethos, urging, “Honor the charge they made!”

31. For Abel this scene signals that “Lily discovers less a neutral language of form than abstractions that universalize masculinity”; she sees the triangle as a “cover-up” for “underlying issues of boundaries repressed by the Freudian domain,” and Lily’s memory as a pre-oedipal “unpainted scene” that displaces James with “a relation of the mother that is the female child’s enduring legacy” (Virginia Woolf 73, 75–76, original emphasis). I argue that Lily’s abstract triangle does not merely supplement the son’s sexualized oedipal triangle with the daughter’s ontological difference but universalizes that ontological difference by uncovering a stratum of loss inherent in being that preexists the oedipal triangle; thus it is if anything a universalizing feminine abstraction, though more accurately described as neutral. That both sexes suffer the mother’s loss and must extend desire beyond the mother-child dyad to the world challenges the privileging of sexual difference in Freudian and Lacanian developmental narratives.

32. TLhd 108. Woolf later wrote that “rage alternated with love” in her family life; reading Freud she found “that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and is called ambivalence” (MB 108). See Jane Lilienfeld, “The Deceptiveness of Beauty: Mother Love and Mother Hate in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 23 (1977): 345–76, and, on the maternal fusion Lily partly desires, Nancy Chodorow, “Family Structure and Feminine Personality” in Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974), 43–66.

33. TL 50–51, my emphasis. If Woolf’s novel and Lily’s painting are essentially the same work, that “art” or “device” is exemplified by the narrative voice that merges “almost imperceptibly” (“like waters poured into one jar”) with those of the characters. See n. 27.

34. TL 51. Lily’s fantasy also points to an oedipally configured lesbian desire. Woolf began To the Lighthouse and her affair with Sackville-West the same year; see Louise A. DeSalvo, “Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf,” Signs 8 (1982): 195–214, and Suzanne Raitt, Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford, 1993).

35. Wilhelm Wörringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (1908; New York: International Universities P, 1953), 16–17.

36. See T. E. Hulme, “Modern Art and Its Philosophy” and “Romanticism and Classicism,” in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read, foreword by J. Epstein (London, 1924), and Further Speculations, ed. S. L. Hynes (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1955). Fry knew the work of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at twenty-three in World War I; Gaudier, who frequented Hulme’s salon and participated in Fry’s Omega Workshop, had studied in Germany and had almost certainly read Wörringer. His work (like Woolf’s) shows stronger affinity with Wörringer’s organic / abstract continuum than with Hulme’s rigidly geometric emphasis. On Woolf’s abandoned plan to dedicate the novel to Fry, see L 3:385, 27 May 1927; D 3:127 (“Roger it is clear did not like Time Passes”), 3:129. See also Christopher Reed, “Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf’s Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics,” Twentieth Century Literature 38 (spring 1992): 20–43; and Cheryl Mares, “Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painter’s Perspective,” in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993), 58–89.

37. TLhd 80–81, cf. TL 44. Cf. Thomas Hardy’s portrait of Leslie Stephen in his sonnet “The Schreckhorn. With Thought of L. S. (June 1897).” An avid Alpine climber, Stephen was the first European to “conquer” the formidable Great Schreckhorn peak in 1861 (“frequently flattened out against the rock like a beast of ill-repute nailed to a barn”). In 1897, gazing at the Schreckhorn, Stephen’s friend Hardy suddenly felt “a vivid sense of him, as if his personality informed the mountain—gaunt and difficult, like himself. His frequent conversations on his experiences in the Alps recurred to me, experiences always related with modesty in respect of his own achievements, and with high commendation of the achievements of others, which were really no greater than his own. As I lay awake that night, the more I thought of the mountain, the more permeated with him it seemed … as if the Great Schreckhorn were Stephen in person”:

Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim,

Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams

Upon my nearing vision, less it seems

A looming Alp-height than a guise of him

Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,

Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,

Of semblance to his own personality

In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life’s dull coils unwind,

Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,

And the eternal essence of his mind

Enter this silent adamantine shape,

And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows

When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

Hardy did not send Stephen this poem, fearing “he might not care for it” (Frederick William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen [1906; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908], 277–78).

38. TL 110–11. The poem is “Luriana, Lurilee,” by Charles Elton (1839–1900), a relative by marriage of the Stracheys, published only in 1943; Philippa Strachey evidently sent it to Woolf, perhaps for consideration by Hogarth (see L 3:443, 21 December 1927). Elizabeth French Boyd notes that Woolf heard Leonard and Lytton Strachey recite it from memory (“‘Luriana, Lurilee,’” Notes and Queries 208 [1963]: 380–81).

39. This photograph is reproduced in MBk 90–91. Mrs. Ramsay’s desire for composure and stability, projected onto the “stillness, and … superb upward rise … of the elm branches,” mirrors Lily’s for symbolic creation (TL 113). Jane Marcus contrasts Mrs. Ramsay’s rapturous loss of self in the sonnet with Mr. Ramsay’s self-interested reading of Scott in Art and Anger (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988), 242–46. Richard Maxwell provides a searching evaluation of Scott’s achievement and reception in “Inundations of Time: A Definition of Scott’s Originality,” ELH 68:2 (2001): 419–68.

40. Woolf recalled her joy in watching her mother read the Hyde Park Gate News: “How excited I used to be when … she liked something I had written! Never shall I forget my extremity of pleasure—it was like being a violin and being played upon” (MB 95).

41. TLhd 192. Prue’s model, Stella Duckworth, died of peritonitis after her marriage in 1897.

42. RF 172, TL 174; cf.: “It might contain all characters boiled down; & childhood; & then this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent break of unity in my design. That passage … seven years passed … interests me very much. A new problem like that breaks fresh ground in ones mind; prevents the regular ruts” (D 3:36, 20 July 1925).

43. D 3:76, 18 April 1926. This narrator and the visionary seeker prefigure The Waves’ faceless Rhoda. My view of this eyeless, featureless, but not quite effaced narrator agrees with Miller that language has “an ineffaceable tendency … to project faces and bodies”; “Wherever there is language there will be personality” (“Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe,” 163–65); and with Randi Koppen that art is never “void of life because it is connected in so many ways with the experiencing body” (“Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” New Literary History 32:2 [2001]: 388).

44. Cf. Wörringer’s argument that abstract art is impelled by, and mitigates, “great inner unrest at outward phenomena,” “spiritual dread” of vast space and time (16–17).

45. TL 128. Susan Dick notes that the bracketed events—the deaths, Prue’s marriage, Mr. Carmichael’s poems, his and Lily’s return to the house—were late additions in the third version of “Time Passes” (“The Restless Searcher: A Discussion of the Evolution of ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse,” English Studies in Canada 3 [1979]: 311–329). See TLhd 198–238.

46. Object relations psychology posits the mother as the emerging subject’s first mirror, in whom the child sees itself reflected whole and coherent while its inner experience remains unbounded, incoherent, unintegrated. In these terms, the still unrealized self whose place is marked by the salt cellar/tree temporarily dissolves into the liminal daughter-subject of “Time Passes,” and its destroyed and remade world mirrors her disintegration and re-creation. See Susan Squier, “Mirroring and Mothering: Reflections on the Mirror Encounter Metaphor in Virginia Woolf’s Works,” Twentieth Century Literature 27 (fall 1981): 272–88; Lidoff, esp. 49–51; Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1–7; and Abel, who invokes Winnicott’s “intermediate zone in which subject and object are only partly distinct,” where “we play, we make our symbols, we conduct our cultural lives” (Virginia Woolf 70).

47. TL 129. Jack F. Stewart sees the light as “Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit” in “Light in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 23 (1977), 377–89, esp. 384–86; Gayatri C. Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), finds “a discourse of madness within this autobiographical roman à clef” (316).

48. TL 130–31. Mary Lou Emery, “‘Robbed of Meaning’: The Work at the Center of To the Lighthouse,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992): 217–34, deplores the text’s “theft and exclusion” of Mrs. McNab necessary to Lily’s “‘birth’ as an artist and … Woolf’s achievement of aesthetic unity” and argues that Lily’s painting “marks over and supplants” Mrs. McNab’s work (228, 231). Yet Mrs. McNab, far from being “dehumanized” and “excluded,” arguably affirms the essential ordering power of human effort, art, and memory perhaps even more profoundly than does Mrs. Ramsay or Lily; indeed her Marie Lloyd imitation acts out the consolation she finds in art. Woolf saw Lloyd’s charwoman turn at the Bedford Music Hall in 1921: “a mass of corruption—long front teeth—a crapulous way of saying ‘desire,’ & yet a born artist—scarcely able to walk, waddling, aged, unblushing. She is beaten nightly by her husband. I felt that the audience was much closer to drink & beating & prison than any of us” (D 2:107, 8 April). On class tensions in readings of Woolf, see Mary M. Childers, “Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down: Reflections on the Class of Women,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992): 61–79.

49. The draft reads: “The voice of the principle of life, & its power to persist; … & its courage, & its assiduity, & its determination, denied one entrance, to [try] another—& its humour, & its sorrow, so that Mrs. McNab seemed to have turned her old sprightly dance song into an elegy which … long living had robbed of all bitterness. … it seemed as if a channel were tunnelled in the heart of obscurity, & … there issued peace, enough, when the grind & grit returned … to make her lean her heart against the thorn & if she was infinitely mournful, & dirgelike in her sidelong glance there was, account for it as one may, the forgiveness of an understanding mind”; “Leaning her bony breast on the hard thorn she crooned out her forgiveness” (TLhd 211, 213, 215). This “principle of life” that denied one embodiment (Mrs. Ramsay) finds another (Mrs. McNab) confirms Mrs. McNab as figurative mother and mirror; the Philomela allusion projects the daughter’s suffering into the “elegy” that celebrates her survival.

50. TL 142–43. Lily’s awakening recalls Woolf’s two “earliest” memories, being held in her mother’s lap on the train to St. Ives; and listening to the waves and the breeze moving the blind cord across the floor, thinking, “it is almost impossible that I should be here” and “feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive”; she continues with a painterly vision of these “first impressions” (MB 65–66).

51. Woolf listed “Ancestors” in the plan for short stories about Mrs. Dalloway’s party of October 1922 and again in “Notes for Stories,” dated 14 March 1925, which has a plan for “The Introduction.” She composed “Ancestors” during 18–22 May 1925. “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart” (first titled “The Conversation”) follow in the manuscript book; on 14 June she noted, “I’ve written 6 little stories … & have thought out, perhaps too clearly, To the Lighthouse” (D 3:29).

52. TL 171, 50–51. Phyllis Rose argues that Woolf fashions herself her mother’s heir and rejects Victorian femininity by transforming her mother into an artist (Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf [New York: Oxford, 1978], 169).

53. TL 177. On the psychic dangers of Lily’s “triumph” over the lost mother, see Viola.

54. TL 195–96, TLhd 334. Since “her dark days of widowhood,” Leslie wrote, Julia had felt “set apart to relieve pain and sorrow,” her constant acts of kindness “a kind of religious practice.” After her death he established a fund in her name to endow a nurse at St. Ives (MBk 82–83, 103). The draft dwells on Lily’s defense of art against Mrs. Ramsay, who “so infinitely prefer[s] life” and is compelled “to help desperate people”: “Could [Lily] have painted that picture it would have done more to help the eternal dying woman … There is something better than helping dying women. Something … beyond human relations altogether … & loving and not loving one another, all this little trivial baseness of … marrying & giving in marriage, pales beside it. … Yet so terrible a doctrine could not be confessed. Tansley would have shot her. Mrs. Ramsay would never have understood. … Yet a society which makes no provision for the soul … the mind … swings its way out of turmoil here … reaching some more acute reality where it can rest” (TLhd 278–79). Cf. the Shakespeare scene; the liturgical language of Lily’s defense of art in the final text; the ur-Mr. Carmichael who like Lily has “no needs. … She painted; he wrote”; and the essay “How Should One Read a Book?” (TLhd 276, E 4:388–400).

55. TL 201. Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew correspond to Julia, Stella, and Thoby Stephen; the “some one,” “her companion,” suggests Herbert Duckworth (1833–1870), whose “sweetness of temper” Leslie remarked (TL 181, MBk 35).

56. Ferrer reads this vision as a hallucination that effects a shift from storytelling to an unconscious discourse as Lily “tunnel[s] her way into the past” by painting (Virginia Woolf 41f). Lily’s prolonged oscillation between anguished mourning, in which the past overwhelms the present, and life “here” and now puzzled Woolf: “The novel is now easily within sight of the end, but this, mysteriously, comes no nearer. I am doing Lily on the lawn: but whether its her last lap, I don’t know” (D 3:106, 3 September 1926). Cf. Freud’s insight into mourning’s interminability: “Although … the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable. … No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. … [T]his is how it should be, … the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish” (The Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern [New York: Basic Books, 1960], 386).

57. TL 205. Of the seven “Greek slave years” between Stella’s death in 1897 and Leslie’s in February 1904, Woolf wrote, “Nessa and I were fully exposed without protection to the full blast of that strange character” (MB 106–7). Leslie comments on Stella’s care of him after his wife’s death (MBk 104n). Mark Spilka judges Lily’s grief incomplete and inexplicable, “borrowed” from Woolf’s “own buried fund of confused childhood feelings” (Virginia Woolf’s Quarrel with Grieving [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1980], 95–97).

58. TL 148–49. Jean-Jacques Mayoux, “Sur un livre de Virginia Woolf,” Revue anglo-américaine 5 (1928): 438, and Ruth Z. Temple, “Never Say ‘I’: To the Lighthouse as Vision and Confession,” in Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Claire Sprague (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 94, touch on the “ironical antiphony” of Cam’s and Lily’s thoughts.

59. TL 185, 169. Cf. Abel, Virginia Woolf, 58, and see her chap. 3 on James’s oedipal / crushed-foot narrative.

60. TL 189, MB 65; see n. 53 above; cf. TLhd 348, where Lily is astonished not at her own existence but at Mrs. Ramsay’s: “the thought of her became slowly lit up—a miracle, an ecstasy—that she should exist, that she had lived.”

61. TL 205, D 3:271, 8 December 1929; cf. my chapter 1.

62. TL 189. See n. 10 above on readings of Cam’s relation to representation. In emphasizing Cam/Virginia’s autobiographical continuity with Lily/Woolf, I locate the key to their different stances in their unequal access to the freedom necessary to create, not in pre-oedipal and oedipal relations to the mother.

63. TL 31–32. James’s experience of this moment in the draft recalls Woolf’s remark that her writing life began upon Leslie’s death: “It seemed to him that one was now about to start on things for oneself. One had sixty, perhaps seventy years of living before one” (TLhd 349).

64. See Banfield, The Phantom Table, chap. 5 (“The Dualism of Death”).

65. TL 192, 208. Lily echoes Christ’s words at his death, Consummatum est (John 19:28)—the close of the Catholic Mass. “I’m casting about for an end,” Woolf wrote. “The problem is how to bring Lily & Mr R. together & make a combination of interest at the end. … I had meant to end with R. climbing onto the rock. If so, what becomes [of] Lily and her picture? Should there be a final page about her & Carmichael looking at the picture & summing up R.’s character?” (D 3:206, 5 September 1926). Reading the finished novel, she found much of it “lovely,” “Soft & pliable & I think deep, and never a word wrong for a page at a time”; “Lily on the lawn … I do not much like. But I like the end” (D 3:132, 21 March 1927).

66. Woolf replied, “But what do you think I did know about mother? It can’t have been much”; and: “I’m in a terrible state of pleasure that you should think Mrs Ramsay so like mother. At the same time, it is a psychological mystery why she should be: how a child could know about her; except that she has always haunted me, partly, I suppose, her beauty; and then dying at that moment, I suppose she cut a great figure on one’s mind when it was just awake, and had not any experience of life—Only then one would suppose that one had made up a sham—an ideal” (L 3:379, 383; 22 and 25 May 1927). Conceived not as an “objective” likeness but as a collage of insights from many remembered and imagined perspectives, Woolf’s cubist portrait captures, among other things, her mother’s radical otherness, apparent to the adult as it cannot be to a child.

67. L 3:573. Readers often accept Mrs. Ramsay’s indulgent dismissal and Lily’s own expectation that her picture will be hung in the attic; see Carolyn Heilbrun on early commentators, “To the Lighthouse: The New Story of Mother and Daughter,” ADE Bulletin 87 (1987): 12–14. Contemporary reviews by Louis Kronenberger, Rachel A. Taylor, Arnold Bennett, Orlo Williams, Conrad Aiken and Edwin Muir overlook the centrality and drama of Lily’s story; Jean O. Love accepts “Lily’s acknowledgment that her painting has no value as a work of art” (Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf [Berkeley: U of California P, 1970], 178); Lucio Ruotolo describes the painting as an “‘attempt’” with “an empty center,” “destined to rest unnoticed and unappreciated in someone’s attic” (The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986], 141).

1. D 3:229, 28 May 1929; Wh I:1 and verso.

2. RO 84. To summarize this trajectory: while still at work on To the Lighthouse, Woolf glimpsed a new form, “prose yet poetry; a novel & a play” (D 3:128, 21 February 1927). A few weeks later she conceived Orlando as “an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books” (D 3:131, 14 March 1927). By October she was writing Orlando, published the month she delivered the lectures that led to A Room of One’s Own (20 and 26 October 1928); she wrote Room the next spring and then began The Waves. I assimilate freestanding earlier works and ancillary writings as well as the holograph drafts to The Waves’ genetic text to trace the emergence of what I call the [woman] in The Waves from relative confinement in the social category of “woman” toward gender’s vanishing point in the practice of creative freedom, even as sex remains in the picture as a bodily attribute.

3. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: Self-Portraiture and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 65. Woolf’s remarks that the “impulse toward autobiography may be spent” now that women are “beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression,” and that “one must strain off what was personal and accidental,” are consistent with The Waves’ transformed concept of autobiography (RO 83, 25).

4. D 3:113, 30 September 1926. Although Woolf does not remark on it, the “purple triangular shape” of “The Window” and the “odd-shaped triangular shadow” of “The Lighthouse” seem to prefigure this abstract fin. In the “Time Passes” draft of May 1926, a “black snout” erupts through the “purple, foaming sea,” an allegory of the inexorable life/death force breaking the watery “mirror of sublime reflection”; later James recalls his father’s belief that “they were all sinking in a waste of waters” (TLhd 222, 227, 352; appendix D 61). A diary entry of 15 October 1923 describes the “wet windy night” when Woolf went to meet Leonard at the train and, not finding him, was stunned to physical rigidity by fear: “as I walked back across the field I said Now I am meeting it; now the old devil has once more got his spine through the waves. … Reality, so I thought, was unveiled. And there was something noble in feeling like this; tragic, not at all petty”; when Leonard finally appeared she felt physical “lightness & relief & safety. & yet there was too something terrible behind it—the fact of this pain, I suppose … & it became connected with the deaths of the miners. … But I have not got it all in, by any means” (D 2:270, my emphasis).

5. D 3:153, 4 September 1927. Woolf cites Shelley’s “CCXXVI: Invocation,” included in one of her favorite anthologies, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. Francis T. Palgrave (London: Macmillan, 1875); the poem’s speaker fears desertion by the Spirit of Delight, who is “love and life,” unless he sets his “mournful ditty / To a merry measure” and professes love of all things loved by the Spirit. The allusion glosses the fin as both desolation at the ebbing of “love and life” and the persistent life force that keeps summoning Delight.

6. “One” and the informal alternative “you” of course carry class connotations. Gillian Beer finds that Woolf’s decision to abandon the draft’s efforts at working-class speech limits The Waves’ aspirations as “the life of anybody,” though this judgment perhaps applies a nineteenth-century notion of resemblance that the novel eludes (“The Waves: ‘The Life of Anybody,’” in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground [Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996], 89–90).

7. Woolf read Shakespeare intensively while at work on The Waves and measured her writing against his; see my “Virginia Woolf as Shakespeare’s Sister: Chapters in a Woman Writer’s Autobiography,” in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), 123–42.

8. In The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction, Mark Hussey titles his chapter on The Waves “Aesthetic Failure” and describes the novel as “a store-house of typical ideas, but not much more than this. It is a kind of warehouse in which are found the materials from which novels such as To the Lighthouse or Between the Acts may be created” (82). On the novel’s reception see Beer.

9. E.g., for Pauline Johnson, “the merely aesthetical character” of the “ideal subjectivity” Woolf’s fiction posits, despite its “strongly critical standpoint,” “ultimately fails to project a practical imperative” (“From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic,” Radical Philosophy 45 [1987], 29). For Rita Felski, Woolf (like Stein) represents “an artistic and intellectual—though not necessarily political—elite” (The Gender of Modernity [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995], 27–28); and the modernist “conception of the text as a privileged and subversive space which undermines truth and self-identity” potentially limits “direct political effects,” by presupposing “the separation of the polysemic artwork from the sphere of everyday social practices. In other words, prevailing conceptions of literature which make it possible to identify the literary text as a site of resistance to ideology by virtue of its formal specificity simultaneously render problematic attempts to harness such an understanding of literary signification to the necessarily more determinate interest of an oppositional politics” (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989], 162–63). Cf. my chapter 1, n. 45.

10. E.g., on gender see Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1987), chap. 6; on “the submerged mind of empire” (J. M. Coetzee’s phrase, cited by Marcus, 136) see Jane Marcus, “Britannia Rules The Waves,” in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Champaign-Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992), 136–162; and Patrick McGee, “The Politics of Modernist Form: Who Rules The Waves?” Modern Fiction Studies 38:3 (autumn 1992): 631–49.

11. I use politics here in Jacques Rancière’s sense of “disagreement”; see Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), vii–20. On the political vicissitudes of identity, see Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” An Essay by Charles Taylor (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 25–73; and Susan Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. J. Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999).

12. These rights can be construed as negative freedoms from arbitrary and discriminatory social and political limits to autonomy, such as bars to education, work, enfranchisement, and property ownership.

13. Woolf probably did not read Kant’s Third Critique but did read G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, Roger Fry’s historical and practical art criticism, and Clive Bell’s Art; and through Leonard encountered the Kantian lingo of the Cambridge Apostles (e. g., “Apostles” versus “phenomenons,” D 5:212, 30 March 1939). I argue not that Woolf derived her discourse and practice of aesthetic freedom directly from Kant but that Kant’s theoretical link between art and freedom illuminates her writings and, conversely, that her work illuminates Bloomsbury’s Kantian aesthetics. Moore wrote his dissertation on Kant, the philosopher whom, in his early writings, he “criticizes most strenuously, and yet, takes most seriously”; Baldwin adds, “no serious thinker now could agree with the totality of Moore’s position” (Principia Ethica [1903], ed. Thomas Baldwin [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993], xxxvi–xxxvii). Lytton Strachey descried in Moore’s last two chapters an “indiscriminate heap of … the utterly mangled remains of Aristotle, Jesus, Mr Bradley, Kant, Herbert Spencer, Sidgwick, & McTaggart,” in Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 36. When Moore visited the Woolfs in 1940, Woolf found “less force & mass to him than I remembered. Less drive behind his integrity, unalloyed, but a little weakened … & not quite such a solid philosophic frame … so that our reverence is now … retrospective” (D 5:286, 20 May 1940). On the link between Bloomsbury aesthetics and Kant see also my chapters 1 and 9.

14. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), §49 157–58; hereafter cited as CJ by section and page; cf. Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 192, 81, hereafter cited as CPJ. Kant’s noumenal realm, of which we can know nothing, differs in its abstractness from the Platonic realm of ideal Forms. This abstractness allies Kant’s critical aesthetics with Woolf’s abstract art in that each is concerned neither with represented phenomena nor with visible forms abstracted from appearances but with an inaccessible reality behind appearances that is linked to freedom.

15. Kant uses Mensch/er here.

16. Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1983); see also Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women: New Language in New Times (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1977), esp. chap. 3.

17. CS 123. Orlando’s Preface thanks MacCarthy along with dozens of others dead and alive, including Eliot, Woolf’s niece and nephews, her servant Nelly Boxall, Defoe, Sterne, and Pater (O viii). Room cites MacCarthy’s opinion that “female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex,” from Life and Letters, August 1928 (RO 78 and n. 3); cf. WF xxx–xxxviii. For an afterimage of the famous talk of this “babbling … nightingale” (D 5:82) who could lunch till 8, see D 5:279–80, 20 April 1940.

18. See Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991).

19. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 201.

20. On Orlando’s autobiographical dimensions, see my “Virginia Woolf as Shakespeare’s Sister.”

21. O 83. Conjuring the memory of Shakespeare’s face, Orlando wonders, “but who the devil was he? … Not a Nobleman; not one of us”—betraying, the biographer notes, the “effect noble birth has upon the mind and incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer”; even the backbiting poetaster Nick Greene provides such lively relief from the aristocracy’s prosaic materialism that Orlando is struck by “how active and valiant … in body; how slothful and timid in mind” English lords tend to be (O 79–80, 92).

22. Orlando’s biographer assumes the masculine gender at the outset: “Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records. … Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet” (O 14–15); but his gender seems as fluid as Orlando’s, while bodily sex is disavowed altogether (“let us, who enjoy the immunity of all biographers and historians from any sex whatever …” O 220); among other things, his masculinity parodies the internalized censorship apparatus Woolf remarks in Room and elsewhere.

23. Sandra M. Gilbert, “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature,” Critical Inquiry 7 (winter 1980): 391–417, sidesteps the relation of sex to gender by arguing that Orlando is “no more than a transvestite … not because sexually defining costumes are false and selves are true but because costumes are selves and thus easily, fluidly, interchangeable” (405).

24. O 252, 258. Cf. Woolf’s comic reversal of Rochester’s fall from his horse and his rescue by Jane Eyre in Orlando’s rescue by Shelmerdine, as well as their similarly unorthodox marriage: “She was married, true; but if one’s husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts” (O 247–50, 263–64).

25. RO 114, O 104. See “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays,” ed. Brenda R. Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25 (fall/winter 1979): 356–441, where, in “Notes for Reading at Random,” Woolf ponders the paradox of Shakespeare’s impersonality: “the person is consumed: S[hakespeare] never breaks the envelope. We dont want to know about him: Completely expressed” (375). On Woolf’s construction of Shakespeare as a model of anonymous and androgynous poetic power, see Maria diBattista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Epic of Anon (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), 134f, and Karen Lawrence, “‘Shikespower’: Shakespeare’s Legacy for Virginia Woolf and James Joyce,” MLA paper, Chicago, 1985.

26. O 91, 55–57. Woolf returns to this point in “Anon”: “To the Elizabethans the expressive power of words after their long inadequacy must have been overwhelming. … There at the Globe or at the Rose men and women whose only reading had been the Bible or some old chronicle came out into the light of the present moment” and “heard their aspirations, their profanities, their ribaldries spoken for them in poetry. And there was something illicit in their pleasure. The preacher and the magistrate were always denouncing their emotion. That too must have given it intensity” (395–96).

27. O 104–5. Cf. the Shakespeare of “Anon,” who sheds personal wants, grievances, anxieties to merge his imagination with the common life so that his plays, though “written by one hand,” are “in part the work of the audience” who enabled the playwright’s “great strides” and “vast audacities beyond the reach of the solitary writer” (395).

28. RO 114; John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 4, line 299.

29. Cf. the seed of The Jessamy Brides and Orlando: “The Ladies are to have Constantinople in view. Dreams of golden domes. My own lyric vein to be satirised. Everything mocked” (D 3:131, 14 March 1927). See Louise A. DeSalvo, “Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf,” Signs 8 (1982): 195–214, and Suzanne Raitt, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Vita lived in Constantinople in 1913–14 while her husband Harold Nicolson was ambassador; traveling in Turkey with her ambassador husband in the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote that “the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon” the women dancers without thinking of “something not to be spoken of” (Letters). On Woolf’s “orientalizing” of lesbian sexuality see Karen R. Lawrence, “Orlando’s Voyage Out,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 (1992): 253–77.

30. In Kant’s theory, “pure a priori imagination,” unlike reason, operates by a “hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty” (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allan W. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998], §180–181, 273–74).

31. O 318. Orlando’s estate is based on the Sackville-Wests’ ancestral estate Knole in Kent, granted by Elizabeth I to Thomas Sackville in 1566. Knole inspired Shakespeare fantasies in both Vita and Woolf. Vita’s Knole and the Sackvilles (1922; Tonbridge, Kent: Ernest Benn, 1984), which Woolf reread as she began Orlando, notes that sketchy evidence that Shakespeare visited Knole gave the young Vita “wild dreams that some light might be thrown on the Shakespearean problem by a discovery of letters or documents at Knole. What more fascinating or chimerical a speculation for a literary-minded child breathing and absorbing the atmosphere of that house? I used to tell myself stories of finding Shakespeare’s manuscripts up in the attics, perhaps hidden away under the flooring somewhere” (57–58). Visiting Knole in 1924, Virginia remarked “chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on” (D 2:306, July 5).

32. O 323, 325. From observing Pope, Orlando learns that genius (“now stamped out in the British Isles”) is no steady flame that makes “everything plain” at risk of “scorching” its beholders “to death” but resembles the intermittent beams of a “lighthouse,” only “more capricious,” sometimes “laps[ing] into darkness for a year or forever,” so that “To steer by its beams is … impossible” (O 207–8). The one positive lesson Orlando gleans from the eighteenth-century poets is that “the most important part of style” is “the natural run of the voice in speaking” (O 212).

33. RO 5. “Mary Hamilton” is also known as “The Four Maries.” See Jane Marcus’s “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own,” in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 163–87; and Alice Fox, “Literary Allusion as Feminist Criticism in A Room of One’s Own,” Philological Quarterly 63 (spring 1984): 145–61. Mary Carmichael also recalls Lily Briscoe’s silent mentor, the poet Augustus Carmichael.

34. Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th ed., ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 1996), 93.

35. Woolf also echoes the ballad’s “me” in a letter of 27 April 1928 complaining that she telephoned Vita to find her “gone nutting in the woods with Mary Campbell, or Mary Carmichael, or Mary Seton, but not me—damn you” (L 3:487).

36. Marcus, “Sapphistry,” 211 n. 10.

37. MB 201; Leonard, Adrian Stephen, John Maynard Keynes, and Duncan Grant shared 38 Brunswick Square with Virginia before her marriage. Woolf’s childlessness was a decision made by Leonard and her doctors and a cause of deep regret.

38. RO 37. If genius and freedom have no gender, education and creative labor do in 1928 England, as the historicization of genius in Room’s opening anecdotes emphasizes; cf. RO, 53–54, and see my “Modernism, Genetic Texts, and Literary Authority in Woolf’s Portraits of the Artist as the Audience,” The Romanic Review 86:3 (1996): 513–26.

39. RO 66, 64. Woolf’s inheritance enabled her to become the prodigiously productive professional writer and publisher she was; for a year-by-year record of the Woolfs’ income and earnings see Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (New York: HBJ, 1967), 142.

40. D 3:206 n. 11 (10 November 1928); RO 80. Marcus, “Sapphistry,” links the ballad “Mary Hamilton” to the 1928 trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness; Celia Marshik discusses Orlando in light of British censorship law and Woolf’s involvement in that trial in “Publication and ‘Public Women’: Prostitution and Censorship in Three Novels by Virginia Woolf,” Modern Fiction Studies 45:4 (winter 1999): 853–86.

41. Luce Irigaray, “When the Goods Get Together” (“Les Marchandises entre Elles”), trans. Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), 107–110.

42. RO 84, 92, 14. For Mary Jacobus, that women’s different perspectives undermine established fictions “makes ‘the difference of view’ a question rather than an answer” (“The Difference of View,” Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism [New York: Columbia UP, 1986], 27–40).

43. RO 113, 77. Woolf’s 1927 essay “The Narrow Bridge of Art” is a manifesto for The Waves: “the lyric cry of ecstasy or despair, which is so intense, so personal, and so limited, is not enough. The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist—it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create,” and the lyric “is no more fitted to” it “than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock” (GR 12). New forms will appear, among them a novel “we shall scarcely know how to christen,” in prose displaying “something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose,” “dramatic, and yet not a play,” giving “the outline rather than the detail” and the mind’s relation “to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude”; its writer will “have need of all his courage” (18–19, 23).

44. Elaine Showalter famously deplores Room’s “flight” from femaleness in “Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny,” A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton UP, 1977), 263–97. But far from denying continuing obstructions to women writers, Woolf’s concept of androgyny urges women to claim freedom despite masculine culture’s bogeys and to flee not “femaleness” but credulousness and impotent anger. In dismissing Woolf’s androgyny as lifelessly “utopian,” Showalter ignores the dialectic between realism and utopianism in Woolf’s work—characteristic of feminist theory and practice—which challenges social “reality” to incorporate possibilities that must otherwise remain literally utopian. On androgyny as an alternative to gender, see Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); and essays by Heilbrun and others in Women’s Studies 2, no. 2 (1974). For Jacobus, Woolf’s androgyny is “a harmonizing gesture, a simultaneous enactment of desire and repression by which the split is closed with an essentially Utopian vision of undivided consciousness” (Reading Woman 39). I argue that this state of mind requires less the repression of gender than a conscious, hard-won disbelief in it, which The Waves exemplifies.

45. D 3:295, 1 March 1930; the commission was for a biography of Boswell. See n. 39 above.

46. RO 84. Similarly, when Woolf urges Mary Carmichael to record the lives of ordinary women talking with “the swing of Shakespeare’s words,” she evokes her own project, “the Lives of the Obscure,” conceived “to tell the whole history of England in one obscure life after another” (RO 89, D 3:37, 20 July 1925).

47. RO 90; D 3:229, 28 May 1929. The moth recurs from The Voyage Out on as a naturalized Psyche, a bodiless self or soul evoking what Room calls “reality,” beyond “the world of men and women.” See my chapters 2 and 3; Harvena Richter, “Hunting the Moth: Virginia Woolf and the Creative Imagination,” in Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, ed. Ralph Freedman (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980), 13–28; and my “Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5 (spring 1986): 63–90.

48. Wittig, “The Mark of Gender”; see also her novel Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (Boston: Beacon, 1971, 1985).

49. Wh I:9, cf. 6, my emphases. In citing the holograph drafts I silently omit deleted and extraneous words and make minor editorial corrections.

50. “Odd, that they (the Times) shd. praise my characters when I meant to have none,” Woolf wrote when reviews appeared (D 4:47, 8 October 1931).

51. As several critics point out, The Waves preserves gender stereotypes—and privileges male culture-makers—in its six characters: the coquette Jinny, the earth mother Susan, the mystic Rhoda, versus the writers Bernard, Neville, and Louis; e. g., Eileen B. Sypher, “The Waves: A Utopia of Androgyny,” in Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1983), sees Bernard as “a male center [chosen] to repress [Woolf’s] own voice” and concludes, “However much she valued it, Woolf could not in The Waves fully confront female authoring, female creativity” (210). Locating the narrative voice in the voice of the interludes that frames the children’s voices, I argue that Woolf abstracts a reality all six voices share, to which gender is accidental, irrelevant. The novel privileges voice over writing; further, no hierarchy of gender exists among the six voices: each shares in the narration until the autobiographical Bernard takes over—not to privilege a male voice (his gender is immaterial) but to dramatize the immateriality of the (historically female) thinker’s sex to the “one” who is the novel’s ultimate speaker. My reading thus aligns The Waves with something like Maurice Blanchot’s concept of “the Neutral”; see The Infinite Conversation (L’Entretien infini, 1969), trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) and n. 63 below.

52. W 35. Doris Eder, “Louis Unmasked: T. S. Eliot in The Waves,” Virginia Woolf Quarterly 2 (1975): 13–27.

53. Stephen J. Miko, “Reflections on The Waves: Virginia Woolf at the Limits of Her Art,” Criticism 30 (winter 1988): 66.

54. For a lucid treatment of quantum physics and the descriptions of the cosmos generated by it, see Paul Davies, Other Worlds: A Portrait of Nature in Rebellion: Space, Superspace, and the Quantum Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980); on affinities between quantum physics and eastern mysticism, see Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1979). On intersections among quantum physics, twentieth-century abstract art, and postmodern philosophy, see my “Quantum Physics/Postmodern Metaphysics: The Nature of Jacques Derrida,” Western Humanities Review 39 (winter 1985): 287–313. Judith Ann Killen, “Virginia Woolf in the Light of Modern Physics” (Ph.D. Diss., U of Louisville, 1984), reconstructs Woolf’s reading on science during the thirties, relates it to The Waves, and analyzes Woolf’s adaptation of scientific theory to new aesthetic techniques. See also Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, chap. 6; and Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). Marcus, 242 n. 6, and McGee, 643–44, touch on this connection.

55. Quantum theory demonstrates that the language of classical logic cannot comprehend events at the subatomic level and therefore cannot be considered a system the truths of which would hold in face of any contingency, as philosophers since David Hume have asserted; see R. I. G. Hughes, “Quantum Logic,” Scientific American 245 (October 1981): 199–213.

56. Henry Stapp, “S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory,” Physical Review, D3, 1971, 1303, quoted in Zukav, 93, 96.

57. Davies, Other Worlds, 103–4. One month and sixty-six pages into the draft, Woolf wrote, “There is something there (as I felt about Mrs. Dalloway) but I can’t get at it squarely. … I am in an odd state; feel a cleavage; here’s my interesting thing; & there’s no quite solid table on which to put it. It might come in a flash … some solvent. I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time and the sea—but Lord, the difficulty of digging oneself in there, with conviction” (D 3:264, 5 November 1929).

58. Davies, Other Worlds, 138.

59. W 64. Woolf returns to this autobiographical experience in “A Sketch of the Past”: “the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something … the whole world became unreal” (MB 78; ellipsis Woolf’s).

60. D 3:260, 11 October 1929. Woolf’s inspiration for Percival was Thoby Stephen, who died of typhoid in 1906. Woolf thought of dedicating The Waves to him; after reading it, Vanessa Bell wrote, “I think you have made one’s human feelings into something less personal … you have found ‘the lullaby capable of singing him to rest’ [Hamlet]” (D 4:10, 7 February 1931; L 4:390–91 n. 1, October 1931).

61. W 277, 269–70. In writing of Roger Fry’s funeral Woolf evoked bleak recognition of death’s finality against the renewed will to fight and live: “how we all fought with our brains loves & so on; & must be vanquished. Then the vanquisher, this outer force became so clear; the indifferent. & we so small fine delicate. … I felt the vainness of this perpetual fight, with our brains & loving each other against the other thing: if Roger could die. / But then … the other thing begins to work—the exalted sense of being above time & death which comes from being again in a writing mood. And this is not an illusion, so far as I can tell. Certainly I have a strong sense that Roger would be all on one’s side in this excitement, & that whatever the invisible force does, we thus get outside it” (D 4:245, 19–20 September 1934).

62. E. g., Patrick McGee reads the “fin” as the fin/end of writing, a “third voice” beyond “the symbolic order”: “the symbolic Other … the symbolic not insofar as it has been inscribed with meanings by a given culture but as the material trace, the historical condition of the possibility of meaning” (“Woolf’s Other: The University in Her Eye,” Novel 23 [1990]: 229–46; 244); Charles Bernheimer, as “division, difference and death” (“A Shattered Globe: Narcissism and Masochism in Virginia Woolf’s Life-Writing,” in Psychoanalysis and …, ed. Richard Feldstein and Henry Sussman [New York: Routledge, 1990], 205).

63. W 163. Again, The Waves resonates with Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical naming of literary space as “the neutral,” “the outside,” desoeuvement, “essential solitude,” “the other night,” and the ambivalence of “being as dissimulation: dissimulation itself” (see The Space of Literature [L’Espace litteraire, 1955], trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982]).

64. Bernard d’Espagnat, “The Quantum Theory and Reality,” Scientific American 241 (November 1979): 181.

65. Critics tend to emphasize one or the other. DiBattista, e. g., describes The Waves as “a displaced creation myth rendered in distinctly feminine terms and expressing peculiarly feminine ambitions. It describes the formation of a subjectivity which, although common to all minds, finds its representative voice in a female ‘She’ who reflexively comes to know and identify herself” (Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels, 162). While diBattista registers The Waves’ aspirations to “one” (“common to all minds”), her insistence on “a female ‘She,’” and on “distinctly,” “peculiarly feminine” “terms” and “ambitions,” reinscribes the “interest” that, I argue, Woolf labored to surmount. Toril Moi begs the question of “sex … unconscious of itself” in identifying Woolf’s androgyny with Kristeva’s “third position,” beyond women’s “demand for equal access to the symbolic order” and its rejection in the name of difference: women’s rejection of “the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical” (Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory [New York: Methuen, 1985], 12). Invoking Kristeva’s maternally identified semiotic, Minow-Pinkney links The Waves’ rhythmic, choric prose to the “she” who writes it (Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, chap. 6). Reversing this promotion of “she” over “one,” Garrett Stewart rejects the essentialist equation of the semiotic with the maternal and argues that The Waves “transmits textual energy along the momentarily ungendered and non-signifying person of a vocal agent without identity, whose bodily cooperation alone spans the recesses within that combined cerebration and subjectivity known as reading” (Garrett Stewart, “Catching the Stylistic D/Rift: Sound Defects in The Waves,” ELH 54 [Summer 1987]: 458).

66. Woolf memorializes the organic, bodily locus of The Waves’ textual production (complete with bloody birth imagery) in a letter to Ethel Smyth: “I wrote this morning; and then took one of Leonards large white pocket handkerchiefs and climbed Asheham hill and lost a green glove and found 10 mushrooms, which I shall eat in bed tomorrow, with bacon, toast, and hot coffee. I shall get a letter from Ethel. I shall moon slowly dressing; shall loiter talking, shall hear about the funeral of our epileptic Tom Fears, who dropped dead after dinner on Thursday; shall smell a red rose; shall gently surge across the lawn (I move as if I carried a basket of eggs on my head) light a cigarette, take my writing board on my knee; and let myself down, like a diver, very cautiously into the last sentence I wrote yesterday. Then perhaps after 20 minutes, or it may be more, I shall see a light in the depths of the sea, and stealthily approach—for one’s sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the sea. Now these are the great excitements of life. Once I would have written all this [the letter] twice over; but now I can’t; it has to go, with its blood on its head” (L 4:223, 28 September 1930).

67. In “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf describes the violent perceptual “shocks” that lead to writing: “I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; … a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together” (MB 72). The “shock” felt as “token of some real thing behind appearances,” which the artist strives to “make … real”—to endow with material form in the realm of appearances—evokes Kant’s proposition that art throws a bridge between the noumenal and phenomenal realms, while Woolf’s description of the “great delight,” “the strongest pleasure known to me,” “the rapture I get when … I seem to be discovering what belongs to what” (akin to Lily Briscoe’s experience of “the joy of freedom”) bodies forth his view of the artist as “nature’s favorite” (MB 72).

68. D 3:260, 11 October 1929. Following The Waves’ both/and logic, I would augment Stewart’s identityless “vocal agent” (n. 65 above), which relies on the literary text’s material silence, with this visual and aural image of a woman singing, her (imaginary) sex and voice aspects of organic nature. While the human voice is usually inflected by physiological sex, it is no reliable index to the sex of the body from which it issues; even professional singers cannot always distinguish, say, a countertenor from a soprano and might, for example, mistake Marilyn Horne in Vivaldi’s Orlando for a tenor.