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

2. D 5:65, 7 March 1937. See Grace Radin, “‘I Am Not a Hero’: Virginia Woolf and the First Version of The Years,” Massachusetts Review (1975): 195–208, and Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1981), 35 and passim; Mitchell A. Leaska, “Virginia Woolf, the Pargeter: A Reading of The Years,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80:2 (winter 1977): 172–210; Jane Marcus, “The Years as Götterdämmerung, Greek Play, and Domestic Novel” and “Pargetting The Pargiters,” Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), chaps. 2–3, first published in Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80:2–3 (winter, spring 1977). Cf. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989), on Three Guineas (106). On her half brothers’ sexual abuse see MB, esp. 58, 67–68, 169, 177. Biographical treatments include QB 1.44; HL chap. 8; Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities P, 1978), Stephen Trombley, “‘All that Summer She Was Mad’: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (London: Junction, 1981), and Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon, 1989). Anna Snaith argues that “Woolf abandoned the essay-novel idea not because fact and fiction were in conflict, but precisely the opposite, because she did not need the genre divide, she had already found a balance between fiction and the ‘truth of fact’ which supported it” (“Negotiating Genre: Re-visioning History in The Pargiters,” in Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations [New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000], 110).

3. M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986), 98, 95–96. Recall Woolf’s appeal to her audience to help the “good cause” of bringing forth “one of the great ages of English literature” in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (CDB 119).

4. D 4:338, 5 September 1935. Sidonie Smith writes that in “A Sketch of the Past” “Part of the ‘truth’ that Woolf tells ‘about my own experiences as a body’ is the unspeakable truth of repression”; her metaphor of disembodiment “sustains … the troubled relationship between the autobiographical subject and the female body” (“The Autobiographical Eye/I in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Sketch,’” in Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993], 102).

5. D 4:6, 20 January 1931. Days later Woolf could hardly stop “making up The Open Door or whatever it is to be called” to finish The Waves (D 4.6, 23 January).

6. D 4.7, 23 January 1931; Woolf continues, “Ethel in her blue kimono & wig. I by her side. Her speech rollicking & direct: mine too compressed & allusive. Never mind. Four people wish the speeches printed … And now Open Door is sucking at my brain.” See Vera Brittain on the program “provided for a large audience by Dame Ethel Smyth and Mrs. Virginia Woolf” (P/S xxxv n); and HL 590.

8. Woolf’s writing was by now a primary source of income. By 1928 her books’ popular success had produced a “sudden, large jump” in income (D 3:43, 22 September)—a “revolutionary increase” that Leonard attributed “first to the sudden success of Virginia’s books and secondarily to the Hogarth Press.” While they already had the life they wanted on £1000 a year, he wrote, “life is easier on £3000 a year”; e. g., he could resign as the Nation’s literary editor. Owing to Orlando and The Years, 1929 and 1938, the years of Woolf’s major feminist essays, were the two highest-earning years of her career. Leonard tracks the Press’s lists and profits during this period and the increased income Vita Sackville-West’s books brought it (Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967), 142–43f, 157, 145); see also HL, chap. 31.

9. P/MN 164–65. As a professional writer in the line of Aphra Behn (who “makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits” [RO 66]) and a breadwinner whose future earnings depended largely upon her continued productivity and sales, Woolf differed markedly from Joyce (who enjoyed Harriet Shaw Weaver’s bounteous patronage) and Proust (whose inherited wealth endowed his writing). Leonard, always Woolf’s first reader as well as manager of the Press, may have been a factor too.

10. P/S xxxiii. See John Maynard Keynes, review of Clare College, 1326–1926, ed. Mansfield D. Forbes, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1928, 1930), The Nation and Athenaeum 48: 17 January 1932: 512–13; P/S xxxiii–xxxv, notes. The sexcentenary history, its editor wrote, sought to give the men of Clare “some glimpse of the greatness of the rock from which they are hewn” (14).

11. Since 1920, when she began publicly criticizing the sex/gender system that her friends took more or less for granted, Woolf had been conscious of “taking my own line apart from” Bloomsbury’s: “One of these days I shan’t know Clive if I meet him. I want to know all sorts of other people—retaining only Nessa & Duncan, I think” (D 2:81, 19 December 1920).

12. RO 49–50. This internalized prohibition against writing about sexuality had not thus far prevented Woolf from writing of prostitutes in The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, and Orlando; menstruation and menopause in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and Mrs. Dalloway; illegitimate pregnancy in Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway; same-sex love in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Room, Orlando, and The Waves; and sexual transgressions in The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway.

13. P/S xl. Cf. Nancy Fraser’s discussion of contestatory “alternative publics” and “subaltern counterpublics”—“parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional identifications of their identities, interests, and needs”—in “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 67 and passim.

14. Cf. the endings of The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts; see Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 9.

15. This is the novel-essay portion, dated 11 October–19 December 1932; on 31 January 1933 Woolf began recasting the chapters as the novel that became The Years (P 159n).

16. D 4:6–7, 28, 42 n. 8, P iv. The editors of the diary and The Pargiters assign these titles to Three Guineas (D 4:6 n. 8), though they led first to the essay-novel; as Radin notes, the first page of the first extant notebook is dated 20 July 1931, and headed “Notes for The Knock on the Door?”; the next several pages have been cut out and the next extant page, dated 11 October 1932, begins The Pargiters (reproduced, P 4) (P xv and n. 4; Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 9 n).

17. Ottoline Morrell, unpublished diary, 9 November 1932 (HL 155). In Mrs. Dalloway “a tap at the door” just precedes Septimus’s suicide (MD 144). Rather than speculate on the events that engendered this psychic trauma, I take Woolf’s declaration that “the damage done to the mind is worse than that done to the body” as read.

18. Breuer’s patient Bertha Pappenheim/“Anna O.” coined the phrase talking cure in 1881 on their discovery that her hysterical symptoms could be “talked away” through systematic description of each occurrence from the latest “back to the event which had led to its first appearance”: “[W]e found … that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words” (Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria [London: Penguin, 1974], 85, 91, 89, 57). First published in 1895, Studies on Hysteria was partially translated and published in New York in 1909; the first Hogarth Press edition appeared only in 1955. Woolf appears not to have read it; Abel, Virginia Woolf, does not mention it.

19. Woolf added that writing the novel dispelled her mother’s almost hallucinatory daily presence (MB 81). In 1931, as she makes the unconscious the wellspring of the fisherwoman’s creativity, Woolf also complains that Walpole’s sealing it over reduces Judith Paris to “words without roots,” “a trivial litter of bright objects to be swept up”; by contrast, Scott’s Ivanhoe has “some roots,” words “ruffled (but oh how seldom) by some raid from the sub-conscious” (D 4:41, 1 September).

Jane Vanderbosch suggests that Woolf may have considered psychoanalysis while at work on The Years. In December 1935, at Aldous Huxley’s suggestion, Woolf had her hand read by the German-Jewish refugee, psychologist, and palmist Charlotte Wolff, remarking that though it was “sheer and mere drivel,” “she’s driven out of Germany—a Jewess” (L 6:5). Woolf had Wolff to tea, and Wolff wrote that Woolf “wanted to know how I would treat people with nervous disorders and anxiety. [Wolff:] ‘ … No therapeutic shortcuts exist for anxiety states, and nervous tension has many causes. … You mean Freudian analysis?’ [Woolf:] ‘Yes.’ [Wolff:] ‘I cannot judge it as I had Jungian analysis. … In certain cases it is contraindicated.’ [Woolf] jumped in. ‘You mean, in my case?’ ‘Yes, I would think so’” (Charlotte Wolff, Hindsight: An Autobiography [London: Quartet, 1980], 46, cited in Vanderbosch, “Virginia Woolf and Psychoanalysis,” VWM 19 [fall 1982]: 4). In Vanderbosch’s view, Wolff’s memoir dispels the myth that Woolf “never considered the application of Freudian theory to her situation” or “consulted a practicing therapist about her ‘case.’” But would Woolf, so well connected to the British psychoanalytic community, have seriously consulted a German Jungian and palmist on this matter? Wolff’s “hindsight” report was possibly written years later, and the Woolfs’ diaries and letters do not corroborate it.

20. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 63.

21. Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir appeared in October 1932. Woolf disparaged it to various correspondents while it lay about unread and finally wrote Holtby on 15 January 1933 that she had “finished” and “enjoyed it very much,” adding that she suspected that “a good many things happened to” its subject “by way of life, that she concealed successfully, but it seems to me, speaking as an outsider, that you have made an extremely interesting story out of her books” (“Nineteen Letters to Eleven Recipients,” ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks, Modern Fiction Studies 30 [1984]: 183). Presumably Woolf concealed a good deal from a biographer she elsewhere denigrates as “feather pated” and a “farmer’s daughter”; “I couldn’t help laughing to think what a story she could have told had she known the true Virginia,” she wrote Violet Dickinson (her early confidante about her half brothers’ sexual abuse), adding a description of Gerald, whom she had just visited; to Margaret Llewellyn Davies she wrote, “I’m told her book is bad—, vain though I am, I cannot read about myself, and my parents and my education—all lies too” (L 6:28, 21 April 1936; 5:125, 10 November 1932).

22. Three Guineas cites biographies, memoirs, published letters, and diaries in many contexts, for example, to ventriloquize social critique (Mary Kingsley on the poverty of daughters’ formal education) or as “oracles” that women can consult “as our fathers and grandfathers did before us” for prophetic utterances on women’s fate and future in civilization: “The question we put to you, lives of the dead, is how can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings who wish to prevent war?” (TG 114). Cited texts include works by or about Anne Clough, Mary Kingsley, Elizabeth Haldane, Horace Vachell, Mary, Countess of Lovelace, the Duke of Portland, Anthony, Viscount Knebworth, Henry Chaplin, Josephine Butler, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Edward Gibbon, Herbert Warren of Magdalen, Mary Butts, Mary Astell, Sir J. J. Thomson, Lord and Lady Amberley, the Baroness St. Helier, Sir Anthony Hope, Gino Watkins, G. L. Dickinson, John Bowdler, C. E. M. Joad, H. G. Wells, Helena Mary Lucy Swanwick, Sophia Jex-Blake, John Collings Squire, Charles Gore, Sir Ernest Wild, Sir William Broadbent, Sidney Low, Winston Churchill, Charles Tomlinson, Ellen Weeton Stock, Octavia Hill, Lady Salmond, Gertrude Bell, Saint Paul, Charles Kingsley, Upton Sinclair, John Nichols, Margaret Oliphant, Sir Edmund Gosse, Douglas Jerrold, Tennyson, Joseph Wright, William Gerhardi, Charlotte Brontë, A. R. Orage, Emily Davies, Margaret Collyer, Laura Knight, Amelia Earhart, Prince Hubertus Loewenstein, and Georges Sand, among others.

23. D 4:170. This memoir has not been found.

24. L 5:299, 3 May 1934. Hermione Lee finds “no evidence” of the content of Vanessa’s memoir, but it is clear from this letter, Fredegond Shove’s 1918 letter, and other documents that George’s abuses were an open subject between the sisters and with some of their friends (HL 777 n. 68; 156). Lee, in an odd opposition, judges George’s abuses “more emotional than penetrative” and finds a “gap between the available evidence and the story [Woolf] drew from it,” though she acknowledges that “Woolf herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging” (156). By focusing on “penetrative” events, Lee slights Woolf’s own emphasis on “the damage done to the mind,” not least the force of repression in limiting what Lee does construe as evidence. DeSalvo, though her treatment of textual evidence is at times wildly inaccurate, takes psychic consequences more seriously.

25. L 6:28–29, 21 April; notably, Thoby, Adrian, Stella, Vanessa, and her mother do not figure in this solicitation. Cf. “the flood” here to the difficulty of finding “a sentence that could hold its own against the male flood”; and to the memoir of George that “flooded” Woolf with horror (P/MN 163–64, L 3/4 May 1934).

26. “Shy and silent as I am, I remain devoted, grateful, humble and Eternally yr Sp[arroy]” (L 6:42–43, 3 June). “£100 in gold” recalls the Hirsts’ parlormaid who gave the cook twenty pounds in gold before committing suicide in The Voyage Out.

27. Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), 146, cf. 144; see also Jean O. Love, Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness and Art (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 208; DeSalvo, 108–11, 119; HL 123–25.

28. L 1:472, 25? July 1911. On the Victorian ethos of female “passionlessness,” see Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4 (winter 1978): 219–36. On 3 September 1931 Woolf was reading Montaigne “about the passions of women—their voracity—which I at once opposed to Squire’s remarks & so made up a whole chapter of my Tap at the Door or whatever it is” (D 4:42). J. C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury, broadcast “Idle Thoughts” on August 13.

29. “Lets leave the letters till we’re both dead,” Woolf replied when Ethel proposed that they publish their correspondence (L 6:272, 17 September 1938).

30. I have not been able to document the date of “Professions for Women,” nor at the time of my last inquiry had Andrew McNeillie, the editor of the Essays (e-mail correspondence). Jane Marcus judges Leonard’s decision to print this essay and not the 1931 Speech an “editorial suppression of his wife’s anger” in “the interest … of protecting her reputation” (Art and Anger [Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1988], 137).

31. Woolf’s preoccupation with her public in The Pargiters/The Years and her eventual judgment of The Years as a deliberate failure accord with the reception of incest reports in the early twentieth century and public discourse on sexual abuse more generally. Judith Lewis Herman with Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981), observe that the surprisingly high incidence of incest was discovered and suppressed twice, by Breuer and Freud in Studies on Hysteria and by the American sociologist Kinsey in the nineteen-fifties. Only when the American women’s movement rediscovered it twenty years later was it brought to public attention (7). Although the Kinsey researchers documented “the largest number of incest cases ever collected from the population at large,” this “wealth of information … remained buried in the files of the Institute for Sex Research” because the “public, in the judgment of these men, was not ready to hear about incest” (17–18). The Kinsey reports “dared to describe a vast range of sexual behaviors in exhaustive detail,” but about “incest, apparently, they felt the less said the better”; Kinsey wished to defend “the unfortunate male” against “the persecution of malicious females” (17), and “even the most courageous explorers of sexual mores simply refused to deal with the fact that many men, including fathers, feel entitled to use children for their sexual enjoyment” (21). “Without a feminist analysis,” Herman notes, “one is at a loss to explain why the reality of incest was for so long suppressed by supposedly responsible professional investigators, why public discussion of the subject awaited the women’s liberation movement, or why the recent apologists for incest have been popular men’s magazines and the closely allied, all-male Institute for Sex Research” (3). In the United States, virulent public controversies over incest accounts and the problem of testimony raged on in the 1980s and 1990s; various modes of and questions about documentation, vociferous attacks on the credibility of witnesses and defendants, and important exposés of false accusations and convictions have all complicated the issue in the public consciousness without entirely suppressing it.

32. Woolf retrospectively described her intention to Stephen Spender: “a picture of society as a whole,” the characters turned toward “society, not public life,” and shown “from every side” to reveal “the effect of ceremonies; Keep one toe on the ground by means of dates, facts: envelop the whole in a changing temporal atmosphere; Compose into one vast manysided group at the end; and then shift the stress from present to future; and show the old fabric insensibly changing without death or violence into the future—suggesting that there is no break, but a continuous development, possibly a recurrence of some pattern; of which of course we actors are ignorant. And the future was gradually to dawn” (L 6:116, 7 April 1937).

33. Rose’s name associates her with sexuality, in contrast to artist-heroines defined against conventional heterosexuality (Lily Everit, Lily Briscoe, Lilian La Trobe); named after her “invalid” mother, she is also a realist alter ego of Rhoda (Greek: rose) in The Waves. Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale “The Nightingale and the Rose” tells of a nightingale leaning on a thorn “until, by her death agony, a rose is born” (Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde [New York: Vintage, 1984], 285).

34. On gender as “role call” see Laura Ring, “Sexual Harassment and the Production of Gender,” Differences 6:1 (1994): 129–66.

35. See Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 13. The passage figures gender as a loss of language for men no less than women: if to be human is to have language, the exhibitionist’s gibbering marks him as subhuman at the very moment he displays an exaggerated phallic masculinity.

36. See Leaska’s close analysis of Rose’s sexual molestation as an autobiographical allegory, “Virginia Woolf, the Pargeter,” 181f.

37. Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 33.

38. Breuer proposes that hypnoid states—“a kind of vacancy of consciousness in which an emerging idea meets with no resistance from any other”—form “the basis and sine qua non of hysteria” (Studies on Hysteria, part 3, chap. 4).

39. Cf. other out-of-body moments in The Years (25, 74, 267), once titled The Caravan—an image that recurs in The Years and Between the Acts; cf. the “procession” in Three Guineas.

40. Y 358, 381, 367, 336. Leaska terms this father/daughter relationship “emotional incest,” 187f.

41. See galley 188, reproduced in Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Appendix.

42. Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 39–40, 44 and n. 9; D 4:149, 6 April 1933; see PA 164–67. The name Elvira, with its echo of Elijah, means “elf counsel.”

43. “I hardly know which I am, or where: Virginia or Elvira; in the Pargiters or outside,” she wrote on March 25, but when she arrived at “the scene I’ve had in my mind ever so many months” on April 6, she felt “so tired! … I can’t write it now. Its the turn of the book. It needs a great shove to swing it round on its hinges”; a week later: “What fun that book is to me!” (D 4:148–150). On April 25 she urged herself to “be bold & adventurous,” to make it “a terrific affair” with “immense breadth & immense intensity” (D 4:151–52). Touring France and Italy from May 5 to 27, she longed for home, “for I cant stop making up the P.s: cant live without that intoxicant” (D 4:159, 21 May). On coming home she felt “damned … aimlessness … depression … my brain is extinct” and could not “look at Ps,” “an empty snail shell” (D 4:160–61, 30 May). The next day she urged herself “to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence” (D 4:161, 31 May).

44. D 5:24–25, 11, 21 June 1936. Radin sees Elvira as “shrill and angry,” drawn from “the less stable elements in Woolf’s own personality,” which Woolf perhaps tried to keep “under control by limiting Elvira’s role” (Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 153). Octavia Wilberforce, a doctor and distant cousin whom Woolf met in 1937 and who brought cream to the Woolfs during the war, noted that Woolf asked her during one visit about “‘drink in women—Was it curable?’ She had a friend—gifted poetically … I thought I knew whom she meant. You can guess, I’m sure. Very distressed about this” (letter to Elizabeth Robins, 14 March 1941, in Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000], 356). In his 1956 memoir Clive Bell finds “the notion of Virginia as a dipsomaniac … beyond the limit of absurdity” (Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections, ed. J. H. Stape [Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995], 106).

45. Cf. Freud’s view that mourning’s work is never done (chap. 5, n. 56 above).

46. The editor, Mitchell Leaska, notes that Woolf pasted on the label “Diary/Hyde Park Gate/1903?” “presumably at a later date,” since she was not certain of the year, perhaps on rereading it for The Pargiters (PA 163).

47. PA 165–66. This is perhaps the earliest of Woolf’s many signature trees: Clarissa’s Sylvia, the tree in Lily Briscoe’s painting, the woman poet of “the trees, the sky, the thing itself” in Room, Orlando’s oak tree and “The Oak Tree,” the singer split like a tree to the core in The Waves, the tree pelted with starlings that shelters La Trobe.

48. PA 171–72. Following Radin, Leaska observes that, despite the Stephen sisters’ hopelessness at society balls (“We aint popular—we sit in corners & look like mutes who are longing for a funeral”) and their painful family life during their father’s illness, “with pen and ink at hand, Virginia discovered herself mistress over a world of her own making” (PA 163). See also “Thoughts on Social Success,” 15 July 1903 (PA 167–69).

49. Holograph M42, Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; transcribed from Virginia Woolf: Major Authors on CD-ROM, ed. Mark Hussey (Woodbridge, Conn.: Primary Source Media, 1997), 345–46, my ellipsis and emphases; hereafter cited as Holograph M42. Curved brackets enclose a passage canceled by a wavy vertical line.

50. See n. 43 above, April 6 entry, which continues, “As usual, doubts rush in. Isnt it all too quick, too thin, too surface bright? Well, I’m too jaded to crunch it up, if thats so; & shall bury it for a month—till we’re back from Italy perhaps … Then seize on it fresh” (D 4:149).

51. In the 1891 chapter, Abel Pargiter wonders that Digby and Eugénie have “money to spare, with three boys to educate” (Y 118); at the Present Day party, Maggie draws a caricature of a big white-waistcoated guest she identifies as “my brother” who “used to take us for rides on an elephant”—not to be confused with another “big man” whose white waistcoat encloses a “magnificent … sphere”—“Chipperfield, the great railway man … Son of a railway porter” (Y 382, 412).

52. Holograph M42, 351. This draft was presumably composed before Woolf left for France on May 5 (since the Third Holograph is dated June 1 and she returned on May 27), perhaps around April 13 (“What fun that book is to me”) or April 25 (“a terrific affair”).

53. Holograph M42, 347–48; my ellipses and emphases.

54. Holograph M 42, 351. Raped by her brother-in-law Tereus who also cuts out her tongue, Philomela weaves her story in a tapestry of images for her sister, Procne; the sisters plot to kill, cook, and serve to Tereus his and Procne’s son Itys. Vengeance done, the sisters are transformed into a nightingale and a swallow, which Woolf rewrites as two nightingales. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 6, lines 412f: “As they fly from him you would think that the bodies of the two Athenians were poised on wings; they were poised on wings! One flies to the woods, the other rises to the roof. And even now their breasts have not lost the marks of their murderous deed, their feathers are stained with blood” (Loeb, Ovid 3, Metamorphoses 1, 335); and cf. Wilde’s figure of the nightingale leaning on a thorn to create a rose (n. 33 above).

55. Holograph M42, 350–51. In this version the “irascib[le]” Elvira makes “a sharp jerk of her arm—flinging the hand out, with annoyance: so knocked over the milk” (ibid.).

56. Holograph M42, 353–91. The page before, dated June 1, begins with Elvira as the Pargiter family historian.

57. “Nothing lived there but the two nightingales, who sang to each other calling, answering, nearer, further, night after night. There were pauses: & then replies. But at what intervals?” (Holograph M42, 355).

58. Cf. Radin’s transcription, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 48.

59. Suffering over this scene, Woolf records what seem to be her own hysterical symptoms: “Absolutely floored. Sally in bed. … I think, psychologically, this is the oddest of my adventures. … Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain. And, even today, when I’m desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to it, I feel I’ve only got to fumble and find the end of the ball of string—some start off place, someone to look at Sara perhaps—no, I dont know—& my head would fill & the tiredness go”; “Isn’t it odd that this was the scene I had almost a fit to prevent myself writing? This will be the most exciting thing I ever wrote, I kept saying. And now its the stumbling block. I wonder why? too personal, is that it? Out of key? But I wont think” (D 4:338–39, 5 and 6 September 1935). Later, headaches (“sharp pain behind the eyes”) gave her “mornings of torture” as she revised The Years (D 4 and 5 passim, esp. 5:24–25, 11 June and 21 June 1936). The mysterious impediments to Woolf’s progress on The Years suggest that the “pattern of repetitions” she created as she revised (Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, xxii) may have been produced unconsciously; see Allen McLaurin’s argument that repetition enabled Woolf to “free the phrases and allow them to become pure pattern. If exact words and phrases to some extent falsify, then the truth might be contained in the modified repetition, the rhythm of language” (Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973], 109, cited by Radin, xxii, 45 n.10).

60. In “Sketch” Woolf recalls still feeling the “thrill” of the parties the next morning as she read Sophocles with Janet Case, who began tutoring her in early 1902 (MB 155–56, cf. 177, 182). Case’s 1911 visit to Virginia at Firle occasioned “a revelation of all Georges malefactions. To my surprise she has always had an intense dislike of him and used to say ‘Whew—you nasty creature,’ when he came in and began fondling me over my Greek. When I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick” (L 1:472, 25? July 1911). See also DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse, chap. 4, and Leaska.

61. Hermione Lee, Introduction, The Years, ed. Lee (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), xxvi; cf. Victoria Middleton, “The Years: ‘A Deliberate Failure,’” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80:2 (1977): 158–71.

62. MB 127. The Pargiters describes Bond Street as, for daughters, “as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles” (P 37); by 1935 the “interminable” Years had “the vitality of a snake”—“some snake thats been half run over but always pops its head up” (L 5:334, 448, 24 September 1934, 1 December 1935). George had died in April 1934; Gerald lived on, old and “melancholy” (L 6:23). Tea at Gerald’s was “like visiting an alligator in a tank, an obese & obsolete alligator” (D 5:21, 1 April 1936). If Gerald was “a lethargic alligator,” George, “my incestuous brother,” survived his own death to judge by a news item Virginia apparently sent Vanessa featuring “an alligator called George at the London zoo which ‘resumed his old aggressive attitudes towards his companions,’ and was removed to a solitary pool where he remained motionless for days, ‘as though sulking’”: “Look at this from the Sunday Times,” she wrote; “I think they might have mentioned us as they put in George” (L 6:28, 56, 71 and n; 21 April, 14 July, 6 September 1936).

63. VO 22; see n. 60 above.

64. Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 54, citing The Pargiters 4:51; she attributes Woolf’s revisions to a “Victorian upbringing” that “inhibited her own ‘powers of expression,’ made certain subjects difficult if not impossible to deal with, especially in … print” (cf. “I am Not” 206); “even in the draft manuscript she never really tackled” women’s sexuality “directly”; “Woolf, whose ‘powers of expression’ on almost any subject were prolific, found herself nearly as tongue-tied as Rose when she tried to deal with sexual behavior,” though the conversations in The Pargiters are “a first tentative step toward overcoming this inhibition” (55).

65. Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 92, citing The Pargiters 6:101. Leaska argues that Woolf wove George Duckworth’s name into Rose’s toy duck-buying episode as well as into Kitty’s first sexual experience (“Virginia Woolf the Pargeter,” 181f).

66. Victoria Middleton, “The Years: ‘A Deliberate Failure,’” reads the last scene as a parody of “those great moments of fulfillment at the end of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse” (170).

67. The ambivalent love between Peggy and North in the Roman camp incident resonates with Octavia Wilberforce’s seemingly blinkered report of a conversation with Woolf, who was studying Octavia for a verbal “sketch”: “I got a pretty shrewd picture of her en passant. … Her step brother George she evidently adored. Did you know him? Oh! and I told her at the start, that the basis of medicine, science, is to try to be truthful—whereas for her I inferred that it wasn’t so important. But my immediate difficulty was to be sure of what was the truth. I might have added that I spent my time living ahead and not in the past. Again the reverse of that backward-looking spirit” (Wilberforce, letter to Robins, 14 March 1941, in Marder, 356).

68. Cf. Wilberforce, in Marder, 356: “And her father rather went to pieces after her mother’s death and ‘threw himself too much upon us. Was too emotional and took too much out of us, made too great emotional claims upon us and that, I think, has accounted for many of the wrong things in my life. I never remember any enjoyment of my body.’”

69. Y 422. Marcus reads The Years as “an opera for the oppressed” in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, 57; “one long series of interrupted discourses, the interruptions themselves marking the daughters’ emergence from the tyranny of the father’s voice” (“Pargetting,” 74).

70. D 5:35, 44, 38; 24, 30 November, 30 December 1936. See Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, 114ff. After surviving an “extraordinary summer” of “almost catastrophic illness” that she had no “wish to analyse,” Woolf reread the novel and found it “happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs, like a dead cat, to L. & tell him to burn them unread” (D 5:26, 24, 28; 30 October, 11 June, 3 November 1936). Leonard had read it in April and offered tepid approval, well aware that it had pushed her near to madness and that “unless I could give a completely favourable verdict she would be in despair and would have a very serious breakdown”; before, he had always “given an absolutely honest opinion”; now he “praised the book more than I should have done if she had been well,” judging it “remarkable” though “a good deal too long” (Downhill 155, cited by Radin 115). Woolf could not “bring myself to believe that he is right” (D 5:30, 4 November 1936). At last the “miracle” was “accomplished. L. put down the last sheet about 12 last night; & could not speak. He was in tears. … I, as a witness, not only to his emotion, but to his absorption … can’t doubt his opinion: what about my own? Anyhow the moment of relief was divine” (D 5:30, 5 November 1936). “Vigorous & cheerful” though she felt after Leonard’s “wonderful revelation,” she continued to feel “despair. It seems so bad,” and to fear public ridicule (D 5:31, 9, 10 November 1936).

71. D 5:66, 10 March 1937. The Years sold 30,904 copies in the USA and 13,005 copies in its first six months in England (Leonard Woolf, Downhill, 144–45).

72. D 5:67–68, 14 March 1937. See the section on The Years in VW:CH, 367–99. Selincourt reads The Years as a “parable” of “the skein of misgivings, mistakings, misconceptions, misapprehensions, out of which we somehow manage to knit together these half-intelligible lives of ours”; he finds its “deeper intention” to reveal “separation and solitude as mere appearances” (375). When John Brophy judged it “a tired anaemic middle class book,” Woolf countered, “no one has yet seen the point—my point” (D 5:69, 17 March 1937). Ethel Smyth called it “superb,” and Woolf-the-publisher noted “selling power” on hearing that Ethel’s friend Alice Hudson had “spontaneously enjoy[ed]” it (D 5:74, 30 March 1937). She felt “found out” when Edwin Muir in The Listener and Scott James in the London Mercury called it “dead and disappointing” and “suffered acutely” to find that “that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure” with “No life in it”; then a brief anonymous notice called it “The best of my books,” and she rallied, feeling “the delight of being exploded”: “One feels braced … amused; roused; combative; more than by praise”; “immune, set on my feet, a fighter” ready to “make a fresh start” (D 5:75, 2 April 1937). She was “floored” to hear that twelve thousand advance copies had been sold in America: “Honestly I do not know what to think … is it good or bad?” (D 5:79, 14 April 1937). Keynes, Spender, and Kingsley Martin all thought it “the best of my books,” along with Vanessa, John Hayward, and S. Koteliansky; “Vita; Elizabeth Williamson; Hugh Walpole” were against (D 5:79–80, 15 April 1937). Later, she noted that the dean of Durham “sneers at me on the BBC—too clever ‘for myself who am only a simple person’—& wrist watches were not invented in 1880” (D 5:84, 30 April 1937); “Scrutiny … calls me a cheat”; and William Faulkner had praised her “most intelligently (& highly)” (D 5:91, 1 June 1937).

1. D 5:57, 19 February 1937, TG 3, 49. Among the funding appeals in Woolf’s three scrapbooks of 1932–37, held at the University of Sussex Library, are a leaflet from the “International Peace Campaign,” signed “Cecil/The Viscount Cecil” (Monk’s House Papers B16f[3]); a letter of 19 February 1936 from J. P. Strachey asking Woolf to become a “Patron” of Newnham College to help launch a funding campaign (B16f[2]); and a flyer dated February 1936 from the National Council for Equal Citizenship (“a direct descendant of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies”), Dame M. Fawcett, President (B16f[3]).

2. Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), 22; see n. 1 above. By 1937 Woolf complained of receiving “six letters to sign daily—or nearly so” and many requests for topical essays (L 6:112, 7 March).

3. D 4:6 n. 8, 361; 20 January 1931, 30 December 1935.

4. On Woolf’s figure of the veil to represent Western women’s subordination in the modern public sphere, see chap. 1, n. 90 above. On Three Guineas’ reception see Silver, “Three Guineas Before and After: Further Answers to Correspondents,” in Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983), and “The Authority of Anger: Three Guineas as Case Study,” Signs 16 (Winter 1991): 340–70; QB, chaps. 8–9, and Quentin Bell, “Bloomsbury and the Vulgar Passions,” Critical Inquiry 6 (Winter 1979): 239–56; and Jane Marcus, “Storming the Toolshed,” Signs 7 (1982): 622–40. Usually hypersensitive to reviews, Woolf was to her own bemusement impervious to “praise and wigging” of Three Guineas. Queenie Leavis’s nasty Scrutiny review gets only brief mention in her diary (5:165–66, 1 September 1938) and letters: “Oh I’ve had such a drubbing and a scourging from the Cambridge ladies—the professors of Eng. lit: at Cambridge for 3gs. I’m a disgrace to my sex: and a caterpillar on the community. I thought I should raise their hackles—poor old strumpets” (6:271, 11 September 1938). As Silver notes, academic accounts of the British cultural scene of the thirties are almost entirely silent on Three Guineas (“Authority,” 353 n. 35).

5. TG 260 n. 41; 7, 23, 32, 34, 39, 60, 99, 113; 192, 160, 28.

6. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, one-volume abridged ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 624; see especially chaps. 55–59 for possible influences on Woolf’s argument. Leonard was reading the 1929 abridged edition during this period (see D 4:159 and n. 6, 21 May 1933). Woolf cites The Golden Bough in RO 30 n. 2. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) discusses anthropological and psychoanalytic discourses without reference to scapegoat theory.

7. Woolf, owning a press, felt herself “the only woman in England free to write what I like” (D 3:43, 22 September 1925; cf. L 4:348, 27 June 1931). Mary M. Childers notes that “the Act did not live up to its promise” (“Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down: Reflections on the Class of Women,” MFS 38:1 (spring 1992): 65f.

8. D 4:77, 16 February 1932; VW: CH 402. The scrapbooks contain two programs for the Palm Sunday service at St. Paul’s on 21 March 1937, with Woolf’s notes and comments on the sermon and 1 Cor. 11 (Monk’s House Papers B16f[2] and [3]).

9. TG 23, 32, 172. Eleanor Pargiter, described as “a fine old prophetess,” reflects on Christianity as a religion of love and life (Y 154, 328).

10. L 1:272, 25 December 1906; 3:457, 11 February 1928; 5:282, 8 March 1934. On Leslie Stephen’s agnosticism and An Agnostic’s Apology, see Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York: Random House, 1984), 234–66 and passim; on Julia Stephen’s agnosticism, 105.

11. Catherine F. Smith, “Three Guineas: Virginia Woolf’s Prophecy,” in Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jane Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 225.

12. In this matter 1 Corinthians differs from 1 Timothy, which (taking the line followed by the Church for two millenia) prohibits women from preaching (1 Tim. 2:12). Historians question Paul’s authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, particularly 1 Timothy, thought to have been composed some sixty years after Paul’s death.

13. TG 188. See Elaine Pagels’s argument that the censored women’s voices in the first- and second-century Gnostic Gospels, buried for sixteen centuries in an earthenware jar dug up at Nag Hammadi in 1945, brought to light the diversity of early Christianity and show that the establishment of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” required the suppression not just of dissenting voices but of an open concept of spiritual authority (xxii). While the Church Fathers interpreted the Resurrection as a literal event witnessed by the eleven remaining disciples—an ingenious political move that enabled them to restrict spiritual authority to this small band and their chosen successors through the apostolic succession—the gnostics resisted the establishment of an “orthodox” Church that would claim a monopoly on the mediation of spiritual authority. Holding that those who had received gnosis or spiritual self-knowledge had gone beyond the Church’s teaching and transcended the authority of its hierarchy, the gnostic Christians argued for experience over “all secondhand testimony and all tradition” as “the ultimate criterion of truth” and “celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive”; for them, authority could “never be fixed into an institutional framework” but remained “spontaneous, charismatic, and open” (The Gnostic Gospels [New York: Random House, 1979], 25).

14. Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 15.

15. “Violence and the sacred are inseparable”; “I might as well have said ‘violence or the sacred.’ For the operations of violence and the sacred are ultimately the same process” (René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977], 19, 258; hereafter cited as VS).

16. Cf. James George Frazer, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 9th ed. (1878), s.v. “taboo.”

17. René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986), esp. chaps. 13–15; hereafter cited as S. Girard argues that the scapegoat mechanism functions in “all mythological and religious beginnings,” shaping “dynamics that other religions succeed in concealing from themselves and from us by suppressing or disguising collective murders and minimizing or eliminating the stereotypes of persecution. … The Gospels … expose these same dynamics with an unequalled severity and strength” (S 165). While Girard treats “the Christian Bible, the combination of the Old and New Testaments,” as the proverbial key to all mythologies to unlock readings of the scapegoat mechanism in many historical and mythological texts, he views the Gospels as a heterogeneous text whose narrators do not always grasp the import of the stories they tell, and he takes a gnostic stance toward the Church’s claims to authority: “Christians have failed to understand the true originality of the Gospels. … Unwittingly, they play the game of their adversaries and of all mythology. They once more make sacred the violence that has been divested of its sacred character by the Gospel text,” whereas the gospel revelation “concerns not only the early Christians persecuted by the Jews or by the Romans but also the Jews who were later persecuted by the Christians and all victims persecuted by executioners” (S 100–02, 126, 212). Girard exemplifies the interdependence of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles by Christ’s allusion to Psalms 35:19 (“let not those wink the eye /who hate me without cause”) in speaking of his own condemnation: “It is to fulfil the word that is written in their law, ‘They hated me without a cause’” (John 15:25); and notes that “Jesus is constantly compared with and compares himself with all the scapegoats of the Old Testament, all the prophets that were assassinated or persecuted by their communities: Abel, Joseph, Moses, the Servant of Yahweh, and so on” (S 117).

18. Girard argues that the Gospels not only precede but make possible the modern Western scientific spirit: “The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented” (S 204).

19. Girard derives his account of the potential violence between men that the scapegoating of women defuses from Freud’s observation that “Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them” (VS 211f); cf. my chapter 9.

20. Public and pubic derive from Latin pubes, which means both “adult” and “the adult male population.” The root pubes thus founds the idea of the public on the site not only of biological maturity but of sexual difference; and the shift from the gender-neutral literal meaning to a male body politic parallels the cultural transformation of biological signs into gender hierarchy. That the public is etymologically the privates highlights this arbitrary construction of the public sphere as an arena of male pubes that subordinates (or veils) female pubes. Cf. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 60.

21. Writing before Kristallnacht, the concentration camps, and the then unimaginable Nazi genocide of the Jews, Woolf could make this case in a way those events now make more difficult to understand. The Woolfs had witnessed the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews firsthand as they motored through Germany in 1935, carrying a diplomatic letter “to protect [Leonard] from the Nazis’ anti-Semitism” (Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967], 185–86). Virginia describes with irony their obsequiousness toward the customs guards coupled with their mounting anger as they passed through streets hung with anti-Semitic slogans (D 4:311, 9 May 1935). In July 1937 Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell was killed in the Spanish Civil War, evoked in the photograph of “dead bodies” and “ruined houses” she calls to readers’ minds (TG 15). Quentin Bell considered Three Guineas to some extent an “argument … with what she supposed to be Julian’s point of view” (QB 2:203). After England declared war on Germany, the Woolfs made provision for suicide in case the Nazis should invade, aware that “the least that [Leonard] could look forward to as a Jew … would be to be ‘beaten up’” (Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939–1969 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969], 46). Unbeknownst to them, they were listed on the 2,300-name Gestapo Arrest List prepared in 1940 in anticipation of Hitler’s invasion of England (Die Sonderfahndungsliste G. B., 222, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Archives, Stanford University); see my chapter 9.

22. While other biological and quasi-biological signs of difference—most obviously, race and ethnicity—are subject to cultural coding and hierarchizing, only sexual difference cuts through and across races, ethnicities, classes, nations, and religions. The coincidence of femaleness with other signs of difference puts women who bear them in double jeopardy. Thus, as Nancy Fraser points out, Anita Hill, not Clarence Thomas, became the scapegoat on whom many Americans displaced “a range of class, ethnic, and racial resentments”; Hill’s detractors described her not as a self-made black woman who, like Thomas, came from impoverished origins but as a tool of elite white feminists; and “large numbers of people who believed Hill nonetheless supported Thomas’s confirmation” (“Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections of the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas,” Critical Inquiry 18 [Spring 1992]: 608, 611).

23. Woolf notes the Church’s historical opposition to what it characterized as women’s “obstinate and perhaps irreligious” desire for learning, citing Bishop Burnet’s obstruction of Mary Astell’s plan to found a women’s college in 1694 by dissuading a certain “prominent lady” (Princess Anne or Lady Elizabeth Hastings) from donating £10,000 on the grounds that the college would resemble a nunnery and so “encourage the wrong branch … of the Christian faith” (TG 37, 233 n. 21).

24. TG 99. See Marcus’s discussion of “The Sheep Motif” in “Pargetting The Pargiters,” Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 62–65.

25. TG 36, 232 n. 20. Woolf wonders whether “a biography from the pen of an educated man’s daughter of the Deity in whose Name such atrocities have been committed would resolve itself into a Dictionary of Clerical Biography” (ibid.).

26. On the scapegoat’s ambivalent status as pharmakon (remedy/poison), see Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (1971; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), 61–171, and Girard, VS 296–97.

27. TG 101. The guinea originated in the British slave trade with the African West Coast, first named Guinea (Guiné, from Berber gyana, “black man”) by the Portuguese. The English coin was made of Guinea gold “in the name and for the use of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa”; it was “first struck in 1663 with the nominal value of 20s., but from 1717 … circulat[ed] as legal tender at the rate of 21s.” A “Guinea merchant” or “Guinea trader” was a slave-dealer; a “Guinea ship” or “Guinea-man,” a slave-ship. The guinea was no longer struck after 1813 and had long been out of ordinary circulation by 1938, although it remained the unit of value for such luxuries as professional fees, works of art, racehorses, landed property, and subscriptions to such societies as Woolf’s three correspondents represent (OED). Marcus notes that Woolf’s title plays on Brecht’s Threepenny Opera while defining “the class of her audience” (Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy 79). It also marks Woolf’s class position as an “educated man’s daughter” who has achieved a measure of economic parity with her brothers through her profession and can now use her economic power toward social change. (Woolf’s income for 1937, chiefly from the bestselling The Years, was £2,466 [Leonard Woolf, Downhill, 142]; “for the first time she found herself really wealthy” [QB 2:203]). Woolf’s antiracist conditions on her contribution for professional women subvert the guinea’s history in the act of spending it.

28. TG 152. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), documents unofficial participation in public life by nineteenth-century American women of various classes and ethnicities, some (e. g., philanthropic and moral-reform societies) adapting values linked to domesticity and motherhood. Julia Stephen’s nursing of the poor exemplifies women’s work at the border of private and public spheres.

29. TG 119, 122. Woolf’s diary records one occasion for “derision” when E. M. Forster reported that the London Library Committee had considered (and rejected) her membership, citing Leslie Stephen’s view that women were impossible; she experiments with converting anger into Three Guineas’ more measured language: “The veil of the Temple—which, whether university or cathedral, was academic or ecclesiastical I forget—was to be raised, & as an exception [I] was to be allowed to enter in. But what about my civilisation? For 2,000 years we have been doing things without being paid. … You cant bribe me now” (4:298, 9 April 1935).

30. Sandor Goodhart, “‘I am Joseph’: René Girard and the Prophetic Law,” in To Honor René Girard, Presented on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday by Colleagues, Students, Friends (Saratoga, Cal.: ANMA Libri for the Department of French and Italian, Stanford U, 1986), 89.

31. On Three Guineas’ treatment of women’s complicity with war, see Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Signs 8 (Spring 1983): 422–50. One letter Woolf received from a reader of Three Guineas taxed her with failure to address women’s responsibility in perpetuating the infantile fixation in their sons (Silver, “Three Guineas Before and After,” 265; see Anna Snaith’s edition of the eighty-two letters from readers, “Wide Circles: The Three Guineas Letters,” Woolf Studies Annual 6 [2000]: 1–168).

32. TG 217–18. For an eloquent exposition of this passage see Patricia Klindienst Joplin, “The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and Fascism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts,” South Central Review 6 (1989): 89–104.

33. TG 156. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256.

34. Silver, “Three Guineas Before and After,” 263–64.

35. Silver, “Three Guineas Before and After,” 268, 275 n. 29. Smith’s letter of 7 November 1938 (98–103) and another of 28 November (105–6) are transcribed in Snaith, “Wide Circles”; Woolf’s letters to Smith are lost.

36. This logic may explain Woolf’s eccentric-seeming historical examples: the mayor of an armaments-manufacturing town who announces that she would not darn a sock to help in a war, the organizers of women’s sports leagues who rule out prizes and awards, women students who are absenting themselves from church services in record numbers.

37. The Commission’s recommendation that women’s ministry be confined to the lower orders of deaconesses, lay workers, and theology teachers in women’s colleges contradicts Grensted’s argument that the idea that “man has a natural precedence of woman … cannot be supported” and “must not be confused with … any type of precedence which could have a bearing on the admissibility of one sex rather than the other to Holy Orders” (TG 191).

38. Grace Radin, “‘I Am Not a Hero’: Virginia Woolf and the First Version of The Years,” Massachusetts Review 16:1 (winter 1975), 207. Like Mrs. McNab in To the Lighthouse, Crosby suffers and survives familial loss and disintegration.

39. Y 281, TG 210. Elvira/Sara reads Antigone in The Years; see my chapter 7.

40. Abel argues that Woolf’s vignettes of tyrannical Victorian fathers and their miserable captive daughters (Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett, Sophia Jex-Blake) depict a quasi-incestuous society that normatively sacrifices daughters’ desire to fathers’ and substitutes the seduction theory for the Oedipal complex as the root of men’s irrational opposition to women’s public authority (Virginia Woolf 105–6).

41. 1 Cor. 11:8–16; TG 253 n. 38. Betraying infantile anxiety about maternal power, Paul invokes Adam’s rib/womb fantasy, with its inversion of the son’s birth from the mother into the mother’s cultural birth from the male. His resort to hairstyles to fashion a social sign of sexual difference pantomimes male lack (shorn hair) compensated by social privilege (unveiled head) and female fecundity (unshorn hair) mitigated by social subordination (veiled head).

42. TG 253 n. 38. In Abel’s view, Woolf “cannot sustain ironic mastery of” what Abel interprets as a psychoanalytic rather than Pauline veil: “Three Guineas’s adaptation of the psychoanalytic veil unexpectedly complies with the presumption of female lack”; “The mother’s body in Three Guineas is the site of both a horrifying excess and a lack; whether disgustingly prolific or castrated … it consistently fails to possess positive attributes” (106–7). Yet Woolf explicitly attributes lack to Paul not the maternal body (TG 253 n. 38); far from questioning the maternal body’s positive attributes, she debunks essentializing representations of it that purport to authorize women’s subordination.

43. Three Guineas anticipates Nancy Fraser’s arguments that Habermas’s “uncoupling of system and lifeworld institutions tends to legitimate the modern institutional separation of family and official economy, childrearing and paid work,” amounting “to a defense of an institutional arrangement that is widely held to be one, if not the, linchpin of modern women’s subordination” (“What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989], 113–43, 121–22); and that “It is not now and never was the case that women are simply excluded from public life; nor that men are public and women are private; nor that the private sphere is women’s and the public sphere is men’s. Rather, feminist analysis shows the political, ideological nature of these categories” (“Sex” 609).

44. Cf. contemporary psychoanalytic arguments that the infant’s early perception of maternal plenitude and power underlies unconscious anxiety about female authority; that the “powerful, unconscious” hostility to women’s full participation in the public sphere arises from atavistic dread of a perceived advantage bestowed upon women by nature, for which their cultural subordination compensates; that this anxiety helps engender a war-making public culture; and that this psychology would perhaps change if women and men shared equally in childcare and the public world; e. g., Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper, 1976); Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954); Robert J. Stoller, Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (New York: Science House, 1968); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978); and Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier, “Arms and the Woman: The Con[tra]ception of the War Text” in Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, ed. Cooper, Munich, and Squier (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989), 9–23.

45. TG 224 n. 10, 82. Cf. “A Society” (1920): “While we have borne the children, they … have borne the books and the pictures. … We have populated the world. They have civilized it. … Before we bring another child into the world, we must swear that we will find out what the world is like” (CSF 119); and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1941): “if it were necessary, for the sake of humanity, for the peace of the world, that child-bearing should be restricted, the maternal instinct subdued, women would attempt it” (DM 247).

46. TG 211. Sallie Sears, “Notes on Sexuality: The Years and Three Guineas,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 80 (Winter 1977): 211–20, argues that the female characters in The Years tend to “eroticize liberty; the males, tyranny” (220).

47. At its 1992 General Synod, the Church of England—following “a bitter and exhausting debate,” and by a margin of only two votes—finally voted to ordain women as priests (New York Times, 12 November 1992, A1, A6). At the 1992 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, women’s ordination was hotly debated despite the Vatican’s insistence that the issue is closed, one bishop opining that a “woman priest is as impossible as for me to have a baby” (New York Times, 18 November 1992, A13).

48. Mathews continues, “the Church is a living organism, … continuous with its past but not bound by it, and … the Ministry … is so high and arduous a vocation that the full resources of humanity ought to be available for its fulfilment” (Report of the Archbishops’ Commission 74, 76, 78).

49. TG 157; cf. n. 18 above.

50. Woolf’s compound audience of two professional women and one “civilized” man overleaps Fraser’s “alternative publics” and “subaltern counter-publics”—“parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional identifications of their identities, interests, and needs”—by addressing a representative of the mainstream public on the Enlightenment premise of open debate (“Rethinking” 67 and passim).

1. D 5:284, 292; 14 May, 9 June 1940. A copy of the “automatic arrest list of more than 2,300 persons,” “originally compiled after the fall of France” and “found by Allied investigators in the Berlin headquarters of security police” as described in an attached news item, its cover stamped “Geheim!”, is held in the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California. The list reads: “115. Woolf, Leonhard, 1880 geb., Schriftsteller, RSHA VI G1. / 116. Woolf, Virginia, Schriftstellerin, RSHA VI G.” Others include Winston Churchill and his cabinet members, Stefan Zweig, Jan Paderewski, Sigmund Freud, and other prominent political exiles and Jewish refugees. Besides petrol, the Woolfs possessed fatal doses of morphia supplied by Adrian Stephen in June 1940.

2. For recent critical views see Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (London: H. Hamilton, 1990), Richard Overy, The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality (New York: Norton, 2001), Clement Liebovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (New York: Monthly Review P, 1998).

3. D 5:318, 169, 290, 326; 11 September 1940, 13 September 1938, 30 May, 2 October 1940.

4. D 5:293, 354, 355; 9 June, 26 January, 7 February 1940–41.

5. Mitchell Leaska calls Pointz Hall “the longest suicide note in the English language” (“Afterword,” PH 451); Daniel Ferrer writes that for Woolf “the result of the book was not life, but madness and death” and that it “cannot be read without being linked to this biographical extension which puts it in its true perspective” (Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby [New York: Routledge, 1990], 115). In fact critics respond to the novel as variously as the spectators to La Trobe’s pageant. Leaska, Renée Watkins (“Survival in Discontinuity—Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts,” Massachusetts Review 10 [1969]), Elizabeth Abel (Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989], chap. 6), Gill Plain (“Violation of a Fiction: Between the Acts and the Myth of ‘Our Island History’,” Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Resistance [Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996]), and others see a parched and barren wartime world, a mid-century waste land from which hope of regeneration has largely receded; for Alex Zwerdling (Virginia Woolf and the Real World [Berkeley: U of California P, 1986], chaps. 10–11), pessimism about civilization’s future dominates. Judy Little (“Festive Comedy in Woolf’s Between the Acts,” Women and Literature 5 [1977]: 26–37), Brenda R. Silver (“Virginia Woolf and the Concept of Community: The Elizabethan Playhouse,” Women’s Studies 4 [1977]: 291–98), Maria diBattista (Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels [New Haven: Yale UP, 1980]), Makiko Minow-Pinkney (Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject [New Brunswick: RutgersUP, 1987], 189–95), Melba Cuddy-Keane (“The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts,” PMLA 105 [March 1990]: 273–85), Mark Hussey, “‘I’ Rejected; ‘We’ Substituted’: Self and Society in Between the Acts,” Reading and Writing Women’s Lives: A Study of the Novel of Manners, ed. Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers [Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1990]), and others see a comic revival of the green world and communal spirit: “art as gift, mere gift, free gift … gratuitous, fragile, and free” (diBattista 234); a “testament of hope” (Hussey 152).

6. TG 166. On the novel’s Englishness, see Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996), chap. 7; and Joshua D. Esty, for whom the novel “proceeds under the sign of the nation because it seemed both possible and necessary to resignify ‘England’ as a meaningful (but geopolitically ‘minor’) social collective” (“Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism, and the English Pageant-Play,” ELH 69 (2002): 269.

7. Y 212, citing Dante, Purgatorio 15:56–57. Woolf judged “1911” “about the best, in that line, I ever wrote” (D 5:18, 18 March 1936).

8. On “the cult of the ‘pageant’” inaugurated by Louis Napoleon Parker and “in spirit … closely akin to … ‘folk art’,” see Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), 92–93, 130–31; L. N. Parker, Several of My Lives (London: Chapman and Hall, 1928); and Robert Withington, English Pageantry: A Historical Outline, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1918–1920). Ayako Yoshino-Miyaura, “Redefining Englishness: Between the Acts and the History of the Modern English Pageant” (MLA paper, Chicago, 1999), discusses the “modern” or “Parkerian” pageant (“actually inspired by German village plays” [1]) and La Trobe’s departures from it. Parker’s first pageant, in Sherborne, Dorset, in 1905, had nine hundred participants and fifty thousand spectators; over the next two decades seventy-three towns invited him to be their pageant master, and he undertook five more. His 1909 York pageant—in his words, “all English history,” “Drama lifting our souls to God, and our hearts to the King—is not that National Drama?”—had thirteen thousand participants and half a million spectators over its twelve-week run (Yoshino-Miyaura, 1–2). Parker’s grandson carried on his “method of producing History without Tears”; see Anthony Parker, Pageants (London: Bodley Head, 1954), 12.

9. BA 212, cf. 23, 213; “An Essay in Criticism” (1927 review of Hemingway’s short stories Men Without Women), E 4:454. See also Woolf’s review of the Arts Theatre’s “The Cherry Orchard” (14 July 1920), E 3:246–49; and my “The Play in the Sky of the Mind: Dialogue, ‘the Tchekhov method,’ and Between the Acts” in Woolf Across Cultures, ed. Natalya Reinhold (New York: Pace UP, 2004), 279–91. John Maynard Keynes (married to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova) thought The Years Woolf’s “best book,” “very moving[;] more tender than any of my books,” and that “one scene, E[leanor]. & Crosby, beats Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard” (D 5: 77–78, 4 April 1937). The Woolfs had seen recent productions of Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters and dined with the director, Michel Saint-Denis, at Vanessa’s (D 5:57 and n. 7, 128, 129 n. 1; 18 February 1937, 10 March 1938).

10. With its Chekhov affinity, La Trobe’s pageant springs at once from English soil and from what Woolf calls in “The Leaning Tower” the “common ground” of the world’s literature: “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for outselves. It is thus that literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and to write, how to preserve and how to create” (The Moment and Other Essays [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948], 154).

11. D 5:285, 237, 302; 15 May 1940, 23 September 1939, 12 July 1940.

12. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), 552–53. Auerbach wrote Mimesis in Istanbul between May 1942 and April 1945; his example is To the Lighthouse, but Between the Acts would serve as well.

13. Henceforth I shall use quotation marks to distinguish what is “real” in the fictional characters’ lives (as opposed to the pageant’s illusion) from the real (historical) world outside the novel.

14. Clarke, “The Horse with a Green Tail,” VWM 34 (1990): 3–4, reconstructs these events from the London Times of 28, 29, 30 June and 26, 30 July 1938. The Early Typescript reads:

“A girl who lives down our way,” she read, “used to go out with the Guards. One of them asked her to come and see the horse with the green tail.” [If you crossed the Horse Guards’ parade, you saw the sentry from behind. He sat in his box with his cloak stretched out to meet the horse’s tail.] In imagination she ran her eye to the horse’s tail where the trooper’s cloak met it. It was set like a black wedge in the horse’s rump. But it was black; not green. “She found it was just an ordinary horse; and they dragged her up to the barrack room and she was thrown down on a bed, the troopers having removed part of her clothing. And then she screamed and hit him about the face”—the girl who lived down our way, the girl with red lips and white cheeks who had gone skylarking. The horse had a green tail; and the grass outside the window was green. A flower bent. A certain pleasure mingled with her disgust; [with her sense of Stuart Princesses;] the window in Whitehall from which Charles stepped to his execution; Nell Gwyn and orange sellers. “She screamed and hit him about the face,” the girl down our way [who had gone to the troopers’ bedroom.] She looked at old Oliver wrinkling his nose over the paper; reading so pompously about politics. The trembling veil of summer air quivered; it was down our way it was an alley in which the girl lived. … The door opened (PH 54–55, Early Typescript).

If Leaska’s tentative dating of this passage (20 May–15 June 1938) is correct, Woolf must have read earlier news accounts than those of the trials Clarke cites. The casual opening, “A girl who lives down our way” suggests a journalistic genre different from the Times’s trial reports, or perhaps a fictionalized report. The Woolfs were traveling in Northern England and Scotland from 16 June to 2 July 1938.

Awaiting Three Guineas’ June 2 publication, Woolf considered founding “an illustrated sheet to be called ‘The Outsider’”; “Oh my Outsider papers: the TLS is now a paper like any other, not my paper”; and: “Ann Watkins says the Atlantic readers haven’t read enough of Walpole to understand my article. Refused. That’s another reason then for my Outsider to be born” (D 5: 128 and n. 8, 132, 160; 7 February, 26 March, 7 August 1938). On Woolf’s analysis of censorship, see my chapter 7.

15. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (1930; New York: Doubleday, 1964), 61, hereafter CD. Woolf read Civilization and Its Discontents, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and Moses and Monotheism, among other works (D 5:250 and n. 5; and 5:252 and n.12; 9 & 17 December 1939). See Abel, Virginia Woolf, esp. chap. 6, and Cuddy-Keane, “Politics.”

16. Totem and Taboo (1913), SE, v. 13, 144; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey (1921; New York: Norton, 1959), 67f. On the anthropological critique of Freud, see W. Arens, The Original Sin: Incest and Its Meaning (New York: Oxford, 1986).

17. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), 211, 219, commenting on Totem and Taboo’s fuller version of the masterplot summarized in the epilogue of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Girard continues, “Strictly speaking, between members of the same community, legitimate sexuality exists no more than legitimate violence”—as Lily Briscoe seems to intuit in picturing Mrs. Ramsay leading “her victims … to the altar” (TL 153).

18. CD 51; cf. “Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization … confronts [men] with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable” (50). Cf. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, rev. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Doubleday, 1964): if “a culture has not got beyond a point at which the satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion—and this is the case in all present-day cultures—it is understandable that the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in whose wealth they have too small a share” (15). For fuller discussion see my chapter 4.

19. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3d ed. (1899; Norton, 1988), 49 and n; see my chapter 2.

20. As Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it, “Woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man’s world she is still a person, and since [although] she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs”; “woman has remained at once a sign and a value. This explains why the relations between the sexes have preserved that affective richness, ardour, and mystery which doubtless originally permeated the entire universe of human communication” (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 496, cited by Gayle Rubin, who highlights this leap from sacrifice to romance, in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward a New Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter [New York: Monthly Review P, 1975], 201).

21. The gang rape resonates with Girard’s claim that there is “Strictly speaking” no such thing as legitimate sexuality between members of the same community (n. 17 above) by dramatizing the violence of (male) insiders upon (female) outsiders within the community. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) analyzes gang rape as an extreme act in the continuum of practices that constitute the sacrificial traffic in women, one that forces a woman into the role of surrogate victim, “communally possessed in a spirit of ritual counterassertion against the sexual rivalries that weaken male solidarity” (58). On the sacrificial dynamics of marriage and rape in Greek and Latin texts, see Patricia Klindienst Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” Stanford Literary Review 1 (1984): 25–53, rpt. in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 35–64.

22. “The girl said that she was crying and shouting, and he said that if she shouted it would be the worse for her. She screamed and tried to push him away and punched him, and he said he would hit her back and hurt her, as he had been a champion boxer”; “Since Pullin was tried separately from Thomas and Reeves, the girl had to give her evidence twice” (Clarke 3, citing the London Times).

23. Although the novel does not mention the trials, its setting on a June day (albeit in 1939 not 1938) ties it to the news of the late-June rape trials; the abortion trial took place in July. Although we might suppose that the novel’s first English readers would have recalled this shocking case, it goes unmentioned in the early reviews; the American Malcolm Cowley takes the rape as fictional (“twice the heroine finds herself thinking—she doesn’t know why—about a newspaper story she had just read of a girl raped by soldiers,” VW: CH, 449). Would it have registered as real had Woolf been living at the novel’s publication?

24. E.g., Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1986), relates “the mother-figure, the lady in yellow” in the dining room portrait, to “her unlikely daughter-artist, Miss La Trobe” by a “line of descent” that traces not “personal” but “cultural history” (114); in her view, “what optimism resides in the ending is seriously qualified by the failure” of pageant and narrative “to carry forward the communal art of the mother” (133). Jane Marcus argues that the novel depicts the mother-figure as victim and collaborator to show that “the militaristic patriarchal state needs … women to make war” and “casts her in two crucial and needed roles of mother and nurse” (“The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness—Is There a Feminist Fetishism?,” in The New Historicism, ed. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1989], 134). For Abel, a “conceptual as well as actual void haunts Between the Acts, a new inability to think or write the mother, who is always already absent or subsumed … to patriarchy. … There is no maternal realm of nature exterior to culture in this text, whose bleakness derives in part from the collapse of this distinction, central to Mrs. Dalloway and to To The Lighthouse”; absent “the possibility of some position ‘before’ or ‘outside’ culture,” an “originary source” of “creativity,” the novel’s world becomes a “parched” metaphysical landscape (Virginia Woolf, 118, 120–21, 114).

25. Cf. my chapters 5–6.

26. D 5:35, 24 November 1936, BA 210–11. Marcus offers a darker reading of the Antaeus allusion in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 93–95.

27. PH 78, my emphasis; cf. BA 58. Cf. “Florinda’s story”: “her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhead was still unplucked. … she was without a surname, and for parents had only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, her father lay buried” (JR 77, my emphasis).

28. BA 211. Implicitly challenging the legitimacy of what Freud calls civilization and Woolf “half-civilised barbarity,” La Trobe recalls Woolf’s Antigone’s wish “not to break the laws, but to find the law” (TG 210, cf. 124, 215–16; Y 414).

29. Abel observes that Woolf noted, “End w/ the deification of the primal father of the horde” on the “Postscript” of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in Woolf’s Holograph Reading Notes, vol. 21, Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Virginia Woolf 27). Patricia Klindienst Joplin, in “The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and Fascism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts,” South Central Review 6 (1989): 89–104, finds La Trobe “a comically mixed” leader who inspires “not fear but laughter” and raises “the question of whether it is possible to constitute an identity, whether as individual or group, except at the expense of an other who is at once model, rival, authoritarian persecutor, and ultimately, victim to the self” (101, 95, 97–8). For Cuddy-Keane, the outsider La Trobe, herself incorporated in the community, “redefines inclusiveness” in a way that counters Freud’s analysis of the group leader as a father-hero-poet who constellates the group through mutual identification (“Politics,” 279).

30. Leaska dates the ur-biography between 29 August and 1 September 1938 (PH 26, 78).

31. D 5:171, 189, 16 September, 22 November 1938. On the other hand Woolf noted lunch party gossip about “2 cabinet ministers in favor of giving me the O[rder of] M[erit],” which did not materialize (D 5:192, 19 December 1938).

32. Rose Macauley’s book, with its salute to Forster, left Woolf unimpressed, “jealous as I am, rather mean always about contemporaries” (D 5:130, 12 March 1938). Later she urged the need to “fight Hitler in England” against such externally directed protest demonstrations as that of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty against Franco, to which Forster was invited and the Woolfs were not; when Forster agreed (“Thats what I’m always saying. But how?”), Woolf referred to her connections “with Pippa [Philippa Strachey] & Newnham” (D 5:142, 24 May 1938).

33. Forster consulted Woolf on a literary reference in his pageant for the Abinger Church Preservation Fund, performed near Dorking one “Wet black cold” weekend of July 1938, but she did not witness what Esty calls its “historical insipidness” firsthand (“Amnesia in the Fields,” 258). She did attend (possibly with Eliot) Stephen Spender’s Trial of a Judge: “A moving play: genuine; simple; sincere; the mother like Nessa. Too much poetic eloquence. But I was given the release of poetry: the end, where they murmur Peace freedom an artist’s, not an egoist’s end” (D 5:131, 22 March 1938). In 1939 Hogarth published Leonard’s play The Hotel, which Spender thought “a roaring comedy & very original”; it had a private reading at the Keyneses’ but was not performed (D 5:183, 30 October 1938).

34. Eliot began work on “Little Gidding” (1944) early in 1941; five years earlier he had made a pilgrimage to that site of a seventeenth-century Anglican religious community, of which he may have told the Woolfs (Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984], 263). After seeing Murder in the Cathedral Woolf wrote her nephew Julian, “Oh Lord—how I hate these parsons! We went to Toms play … and I almost had to carry Leonard out, shrieking. … the tightness, chillness, deadness and general worship of the decay and skeleton made one near sickness. The truth is that when he has live bodies on the stage the words thin out, and no rhetoric will save them. Then we met Stephen Spender, who was also green at the gills with dislike”; after seeing Romeo and Juliet, she wrote “how it curled up Toms Cathedral and dropped it down the W. C.!” (L 5:448–49, 1 December 1935). In the Early Typescript La Trobe chides herself for her nasty competitive feelings toward William Dodge; see PH 139.

35. D 5:135, 26 April 1938; L 6:230–31, 26 May 1938.

36. D 5:210, 22 March 1939. Woolf missed seeing Eliot’s religious pageant, The Rock, at Sadler’s Wells (28 May–9 June 1934) because of flu, but she read it and—acknowledging her “anti-religious bias”—was “disappointed” by its “cheap farce and Cockney dialogue and dogmatism” (L 5:315, 10 July 1934).

37. La Trobe’s and the narrator’s dialogic poetics diverge from Bakhtin’s Dickensian paradigm of a ruling narrator imposing interpretive judgment on other voices within the text.

38. BA 217-19. Cf. George Macauley Trevelyan, History of England (1926; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1937): “For many centuries after Britain became an island the untamed forest was king. Its moist and mossy floor was hidden from heaven’s eye by a close-drawn curtain woven of innumerable treetops, which shivered in the breezes of summer dawn and broke into wild music of millions upon millions of waking birds; the concert was prolonged from bough to bough with scarcely a break for hundreds of miles over hill and plain and mountain”; “Much of modern London was once a swamp or lake” (3, 17 n. 2). Brenda R. Silver notes that Woolf cites the former passage in “Anon” and “The Reader,” begun in late November 1940 (“‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader,’” ed. Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25 [1979]: 356-441; see also 401–2; and PH 245–46).

39. BA 74. I am indebted here and in this chapter’s last section to Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 26, cf. 12–27, 115; hereafter cited as LK. Arendt notes that “Kant understands history also as part of nature—it is the history of the human species insofar as it belongs to the animal species on earth” (14); her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment links the freedom at play in aesthetic pleasure—“‘a predicate of the power of imagination and not of the will’”—with “‘political thinking par excellence,’ because it enables us to ‘put ourselves in the minds of other[s]’” (LK 102). See also my chapter 1.

40. Woolf writes in “The Leaning Tower”: “We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us. Wealth will no longer decide who shall be taught. … [W]e must become critics because in future we are not going to leave writing to be done for us by a small class of well-to-do young men. … We are going to add our own experience, to make our own contribution. That is even more difficult. For that too we need to be critics” (Moment, 152). Cf. Roland Barthes’s metaphorical “death” of the author, simultaneous with the birth of the active, critical, meaning-making reader.

La Trobe’s avant-garde stagecraft has been likened to Brecht’s epic theater (Herbert Marder, “Alienation Effects: Dramatic Satire in Between the Acts,” Papers on Language and Literature 24 [Fall 1988]: 423–35, and Joplin, “Authority”), Artaud’s theatre of cruelty (Ferrer, Virginia Woolf, chap. 5), Bakhtin’s dialogic poetics (David McWhirter, “The Novel, the Play, and the Book: Between the Acts and the Tragicomedy of History,” ELH 60 [1993]: 787–812), Parker’s modern pageants (Yoshino-Miyaura, “Redefining Englishness”; Esty, “Amnesia”), John Cage’s “living” theatricality (Cuddy-Keane, “Politics”), and feminist performance theory (Penny Farfan, “Writing/Performing; Virginia Woolf Between the Acts,” Text and Performance Quarterly 16 [1996]: 205–15).

41. BA 157, 179. PH 401: “Mrs. Mayhew had sketched her own version of what was to be the conclusion. … she would have a splendid finale. The Army; the Navy; the King and Queen. Very likely that was what Miss La Trobe had planned”; cf. pageant master Anthony Parker: “on to the Finale. The Arena is a blaze of light as the Choir sings the Triumph Song in praise of the Pageant town and all its people. Group by group, the entire casts of all the Episodes enter, forming a great semi-circle of colour right across the Arena, with all their horsemen and all their flags and banners. Then there appear one or more symbolic figures, perhaps representing the Spirit of the Pageant Town, or perhaps the central figures of the Pageant itself. They speak some short verses in praise of the Past and looking with hope towards the Future, and leading up to the National Anthem, which is sung by all the players and the audience. Then, to the stirring music of the March Past, the whole of the performers pass in review before the stands, and our Pageant is over” (Pageant 44–45).

42. BA 58–9, 63, 180. In the “Essay in Criticism” Woolf aligns “the Tchekov method” with the “moderns” who “make us aware of what we feel subconsciously” and “even anticipate it,” “giv[ing] us a particular excitement”; by contrast, Hemingway’s characters seem like “people one may have seen showing off at some cafe” who are “terribly afraid of being themselves, or they would say things simply in their natural voices” (E 4:451, 453).

Apart from her brief fantasy of “the play” without an audience, La Trobe is the antithesis of the “authoritative director” promoted by Gordon Craig in The Art of the Theatre (1905) as “in effect … the only artist in the playhouse,” possessing “paramount supremacy,” “independence,” and “untrammeled authority,” and ideally also the play’s author. Craig eschewed scripts by living playwrights, since “his genius was so much mightier than their poor talents”; living actors were an imposition too, which he addressed in an essay on the advantages of marionettes (Nicoll, English Drama, 106–8). Woolf would have known of Craig’s ideas, whose influence derived less from memorable productions than from his notoriety as their executor; her essay on Ellen Terry mentions Craig, Terry’s son (Moment 205). Woolf also knew Gordon’s sister, Terry’s lesbian daughter Edith (Edy), an actress, theatrical director, designer, and producer to whom Woolf’s idea of La Trobe seems more than a little indebted. After attending a rehearsal Woolf described “Miss Craig” as “a rosy, ruddy ‘personage’ in white waistcoat, with black bow tie & gold chain loosely knotted,” and sketched her directorial manner: “Beautiful lady, you go up to the balcony. Can you step to the left? No: I won’t take risks. Young man, Dunlop, you walk straight—straight, I say—straight—Can’t you move that table? No? Well then to the right. Miss Potter (this with some acerbity) you needn’t dance” (D 2:174, 30 March 1922).

43. BA 113. A version of Isa’s knife scene exists in a typescript titled “Possible poems for P. H.” (PH 559).

44. BA 156. Woolf worked this prose poem into the Later Typescript in autumn 1940, when both 52 Tavistock Square and 37 Mecklenburgh Square were bombed to ruins (see PH 28, 373–77). At Tavistock she “cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble. … So to Meck. All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder. … A wind blowing through. I began to hunt out diaries. What cd we salvage in this little car? Darwin, & the Silver, & some glass & china. … Exhilaration at losing possessions—save at times I want my books & chairs & carpets & beds—How I worked to buy them—one by one—And the pictures. … But its odd—the relief at losing possessions. I shd like to start life, in peace, almost bare—free to go anywhere” (D 5:331–32, 20 October 1940). Struggling with salvage and storage she added: “oh that Hitler had obliterated all our books tables carpets & pictures—oh that we were empty & bare & unpossessed” (D 5:343, 16 Dec 1940).

45. In the “poems for P. H.,” Isa’s wish “that the waters should cover me” follows lines linking a news story of a man who stripped and killed “the girl who came up from the country” with images of blighted or perverted desire (“a worm in the rose,” “a knife in the red hot poker”) and with a dream of love between “brother and sister” (BA 103, PH 559). The “withered tree” recalls the leafless tree in The Years and “A Sketch of the Past” (cf. my chapter 7). Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon, 1989), relates these poems to Isa’s memories of childhood visits to a versifying clergyman-uncle and finds a suppressed incest narrative in her “Songs my uncle taught me,” as Dodge calls them (201f).

46. BA 120. Anthony Parker (n. 8 above) continues, “our Pageant … should span the centuries up to, say, Victorian times. I am against the introduction of modern events, as I consider the Present is not a suitable subject for a Historical Pageant”; “current affairs, manners, customs and clothes are and have always been divorced from glamour in the contemporary eye. Censorship and the laws of Libel forbid the portrayal of the Great Ones of today. Let us rather confine ourselves, in part of our great Finale, to verbal eulogy of current wonders and our Destiny” (Pageants 40, 14).

47. BA 180. Cf. “Not a sound this evening to bring in the human tears. I remember the sudden profuse shower one night just before war wh. made me think of all men & women weeping” (D 5:274, 24 March 1940).

48. Isa echoes Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (“Time is our tedious song should here have ending”); Woolf noted in her contribution to F. W. Maitland’s biography of Leslie Stephen that Milton was the “old” writer her father “knew best; he specially loved the ‘Ode on the Nativity,’ which he said to us regularly on Christmas night. This was indeed the last poem he tried to say on the Christmas night before he died; he remembered the words, but was then too weak to speak them” (cited by Leaska, PH 239).

49. BA 182. As Zwerdling (292–93) and Abel (116) note, Bloomsbury intellectuals were instrumental in founding the League of Nations through their pacifist work in World War I but lost faith in it by 1935; Leonard was “personally … convinced that Baldwin and the French statesmen … had finally destroyed the League as an instrument for controlling aggression and preventing war” (Downhill, 243). The scene recalls Woolf’s summary of a conversation with the “genial” Lord Robert Cecil, President of the League of Nations Union from 1923–45, who was “In good spirits, in spite of the world. But he said, I think there is more vitality both in men & in institutions, than one expects. We have failed (the L. of N.) no matter we must try again” (D 5:33, 17 November 1936).

51. Speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, after the massive evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk.

52. Entry to “sum up the whole of life” at the end of a year (D 4:135, 31 December 1932; cf. D 5:352, 9 January 1941, cited above in the text).

53. BA 209; cf. Lily Briscoe’s tree/self, Orlando’s oak tree, Room‘s feasting “plant” and Woolf’s exhortation to women writers to see the “trees, sky, or whatever it may be in themselves,” The Waves’ sea-green woman split to the core, the withered tree outside Virginia/Elvira/Sara’s window, Maggie’s laughter like a tossing tree hung with bells in The Years, and the Outsider who pelts the tree with laughter in Three Guineas.

54. Y 382. In the Early Typescript Lucy tiptoes upstairs “telling herself the story of the world” (PH 188).

55. The Conrad allusion appears in neither the Early nor the Later Typescript (PH 188–89, 554–55); see my chapter 2, and cf. Mary Beton’s remark that men’s long opposition to women’s emancipation is “more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself” (RO 55).

56. CD 92. Between the Acts’ end resonates with Freud’s closing evocation of his audience: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I … offer … no consolation,” though everyone from “the wildest revolutionaries” to “the most virtuous believers” longs for it; instead he poses the “fateful question” of whether the human race will master the aggression that, with modern war technology, can “exterminate” it “to the last man” and calls his readers to fight on the side of Eros for the uncertain future—“But who can foresee with what success and with what result?” (CD 92). Freud added the last sentence in 1931, as Hitler was on the rise. Freud’s and Woolf’s refusals to prophesy recall Dante’s prophets, plunged deep in Inferno, their heads twisted backward in the contrapasso to punish their presumption against free will.

57. LK 43, 55. In making the faculty of judgment the basis of a political philosophy, Arendt retains the negative, abstract power of moral reason to free human beings from prejudice and violence while emphasizing that reason is made for community, not isolation and “truth is what I can communicate” (LK 40). Cf. Tobin Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” Philosophy and Literature 22:1 (1998): 31–50.

58. LK 40, 141; cf. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965).

59. As we saw (chapter 1, n. 48), Kant distinguishes the “common sense” based in feeling, which underwrites the “subjective universal validity” of aesthetic judgments, from “common understanding, which people sometimes call common sense (sensus communis)” (CJ §20 75, CPJ 122). Arendt, finding in the Critique of Judgment “not yet … political philosophy, but … certainly … its condition sine qua non,” makes a kind of bridge between these meanings (LK 141). As we saw in chapter 6, Kant distinguishes between the determinative judgments of science and ethics—bound, respectively, by natural law and moral law (to which all rational beings subject themselves in their freedom)—and the reflective judgments of aesthetics, which partake of the imagination’s freedom; Arendt extrapolates reflective judgment to the realm of politics and sociability: the beautiful calls out the reflective judgment of “actual inhabitants of the earth” who are made by nature for sociability, for thinking together in public toward a sensus communis (LK 26).

60. LK 73, BA 192. Cf. Kant’s 1759 essay on optimism, cited by Arendt: “I call out to each creature … : Hail us, we are!” “The whole is the best, and everything is good for the sake of the whole” (LK 30).

61. See n. 1 above. The Woolfs had sold Virginia’s share in the Hogarth Press to John Lehmann in March 1938, a development intended to free her for writing. While the sale relieved her to some extent, she remained heavily involved in the Press and the care of the staff, inventory, and hand-press, an especially heavy burden after Mecklenburgh Square was bombed. Although there was never any question that Hogarth would publish whatever Woolf wrote, still, no longer was she “the only woman in England free to write what I like” in quite the same sense. The risks she was used to taking in her writing (think of Three Guineas, of her “growing detachment from the patriarchy”) would no longer be borne by her and Leonard alone (D 5:347, 29 December 1940). Lehmann praised Between the Acts, but a day or two before her death Woolf, worried that its publication would mean “a financial loss,” wrote asking him to withdraw it from the spring list; she planned to revise it for the autumn (L 6:486, 27? March 1941).