A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

Introduction

1. Diary, IV, 16 Feb. 1932, p. 77.

2. Woolf’s scrapbooks, in which she collected material for Three Guineas, are in the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex library. Examples from them can be found in Appendix I of this volume. McCarthy’s review is filed as MHP B. 16f1.

3. The letter was from Wanda Neff, located as the wife of a Columbia (New York) professor of English (MHP 18).

4. Diary, III, 23 Oct. 1929, p. 262.

5. ‘Professions for Women’, reprinted in Appendix II, pp. 356–61.

6. The debate on the intellectual status of women is reprinted in WE, pp. 30–39.

7. ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, reprinted in WE, pp. 93–106.

8. ‘The Leaning Tower’, reprinted in WE, p. 160.

9. ibid., p. 166.

10. ‘Jane Austen’, in Women and Writing (ed. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Press, 1988, p. 120).

11. ‘Aurora Leigh’ (a review of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s poem of that name) in Women and Writing, p. 139.

12. ‘George Eliot’, in Women and Writing, p. 154.

13. ‘Professions for Women’, in Appendix II, p. 360.

14. Diary, III, 27 Oct. 1928, p. 200.

15. Diary, III, 23 Oct. 1929, p. 262.

16. Letter to Clive Bell, 13 April 1909, Letters, I, p. 391. In his biography of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell comments, ‘She tried to persuade Adrian to take a half of this legacy, but I think without success’ (Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, II, Hogarth Press, 1972, p. 39n.).

17. Diary, 1, 6 Jan. 1918, p. 101.

18. The speech is reproduced in Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters (ed. Mitchell A. Leaska, Hogarth Press, 1978, p. xxxiiiff.).

19. Vita Sackville-West had written to Virginia Woolf that they had to protest against the banning of The Well of Loneliness as it would have been banned – as she put it – ‘even if the W. of L had been a good book’, and that this was intolerable. It is clear from various sources that Virginia Woolf and others were taking a principled stand against censorship rather than defending the book as of extraordinary merit. See The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (ed. Louise De Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, Macmillan, 1984, p. 296).

20. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, p. 305.

21. Jane Marcus has provided an interesting discussion of the lesbian aspects of A Room of One’s Own, drawing on detailed examination of the context of the talks in Cambridge, the significance of Oscar Browning, the references to the obscenity trial and so on, and this historical research is invaluable to the interpretation of the text. Whether one would go so far as to agree that ‘Much of A Room was meant simply to convert her beloved Vita to feminism’ is another matter. Marcus emphasizes the fact that Virginia Woolf appeared for her talk at Girton College with Vita Sackville-West, a symbolic statement of lesbian identification that underwrote the conspiratorially female atmosphere and the seductive discursive style (‘sapphistry’) of Woolf’s lectures. Whilst this is true it is, as so often the case with Woolf, only one side of a more complex and ambivalent story. Characteristically balancing her public image as well as her private negotiations, Virginia Woolf had only the week before gone in a very familial mode to Cambridge, with her husband, sister and niece in tow, appearing for a meal at Newnham College with Leonard, who had not, it transpired, been expected. (There is a longer discussion of ambivalence and Woolf later in the introduction.) See Jane Marcus, ‘Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own’ in her Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Indiana University Press, 1987).

22. The context for this being a ‘wry’ remark is that Virginia Woolf had published a very critical account of ‘social realist’ Edwardian writers such as John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett: ‘… the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress on the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there’ (‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, WE, p. 82).

23. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life, Macmillan, 1991, p. 151.

24. Diary, IV, 20 Jan. 1931, p. 6.

25. The Pargiters, p. xx.

26. ibid., p. xlii.

27. ibid., p. xliv.

28. ibid., p. 5.

29. ibid., p. 7.

30. ibid., p. 9.

31. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 19 June 1938, Letters, VI, p. 243.

32. Letter to Ethel Smyth, 7 June 1938, Letters, VI, p. 235.

33. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ‘The Catterpiller on the Leaf/Repeats to thee thy Mother’s grief’.

34. See John Mepham, op. cit., which includes discussion of Woolf’s sales and income.

35. See Three Guineas, p. 236; and Woolf’s own Note 17, p. 312.

36. Diary, V, 3 June 1938, p. 148.

37. See MHP 18 (University of Sussex).

38. From the Sunday Referee, 29 May 1938.

39. On the Leavises, and their journal Scrutiny, see Diary, IV, 4 Sept. 1935, p. 337; and V, 1 Sept. 1938, p. 165.

40. Diary, V, 19 Dec. 1938, p. 193; 22 Nov. 1938, p. 188.

41. Letter to Vanessa Bell, 17 Aug. 1937, Letters, VI, p. 159.

42. Letter to Ethel Smyth, 17 March. 1937, ibid., p. 113.

43. Letter to W. A. Robson, 26 July 1937, ibid., p. 150.

44. Diary, V, 3 March 1939, p. 206.

45. ‘Virginia Woolf and Julian Bell’, Appendix C, Bell, op. cit.

46. Woolf noted in her diary, in connection with Julian’s desire to go to the war, ‘I have never known anyone of my generation have that feeling about a war’, ibid., p. 258.

47. Bell, op. cit., p. 205.

48. Diary, V, 4 Aug. 1938, p. 159.

49. St Michael and All Angels, Berwick, Sussex, painted by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Quentin Bell.

50. Diary, IV, 2 Oct. 1935, p. 346.

51. Letter to Julian Bell, 2 May 1936, Letters, VI, p. 33; Diary, V, 16 March 1939, p. 208.

52. Letter to Ethel Smyth, 1 July 1936, Letters, VI, p. 51; Diary, V, 28 Feb. 1939, p. 205.

53. Letter to Lady Cecil, 28 April 1937, Letters, VI, p. 121; Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 3 May 1937, p. 125.

54. Diary, V, 10 Dec. 1936, p. 41.

55. Woolf’s essay on Mary Wollstonecraft was published as one of ‘Four Figures’ in The Common Reader: Second Series (Hogarth Press, 1932, p. 159).

56. Letter to William Plomer, 30 April 1937, Letters, VI, p. 123.

57. Diary, IV, 25 March 1933, p. 147.

58. Letter to Janet Case, 26 May 1937; letter to Victoria Ocampo, 2 Sept. 1937, Letters, VI, pp. 130, 167.

59. Diary, V, 3 March 1939, p. 206.

60. ibid., 26 Oct. 1940, p. 333.

61. ibid., 10 Dec. 1936, p. 41.

62. Letter to Lady Simon, 27 March 1937, Letters, VI, p. 115.

63. Letter to Edward Sackville-West, 14 Feb 1937, ibid., p. 107.

64. Diary, V, 30 March 1939, p. 211.

65. cf. Letters, VI, p. 46, p. 62, p. 64, p. 94.

66. ibid., pp. 413–15, 419–22, 424–5.

67. Diary, V, 29 Jan. 1939, p. 202.

68. ibid., 31 Jan. 1939, p. 203.

69. ibid., 23 June 1937, p. 97.

70. Letter to May Sarton, 2 Feb. 1939, Letters, VI, p. 314.

71. Letter to Elizabeth Bowen, 28 Feb. 1939, ibid., p. 319.

A Note on the Texts

1. Letter to May Sarton, 2 Feb. 1939; Letter to Elizabeth Bowen, 28 Feb. 1939, Letters, VI, pp. 314, 319.

2. Bibliographical data is taken from B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (3rd edn, OUP, 1980, pp. 40–42).

A Room of One’s Own

Chapter I

1 This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa¹ at Girton in October 1928. The papers were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded.

2 ‘We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least … It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys’ schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.’ – Lady Stephen, Life of Miss Emily Davies and Girton College.

3 ‘Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be postponed.’ – R. Strachey, The Cause.

Chapter II

1 ‘“Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.” … In justice to the sex, I think it but candid to acknowledge that, in a subsequent conversation, he told me that he was serious in what he said.’ – Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

2 ‘The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women, and accordingly consulted them as oracles.’ – Frazer, Golden Bough.

Chapter III

1 ‘It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena’s city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phèdre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the “misogynist” Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare’s work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines’ names; and what male characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Bérénice and Roxane, Phèdre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?’ – F. L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114–15.

2 A Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, p. 246.

3 See Florence Nightingale, Cassandra, printed in R. Strachey, The Cause.

Chapter IV

1 Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh.

2 ‘[She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous obsession, especially with a woman, for women rarely possess men’s healthy love of rhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is in other things more primitive and more materialistic.’ – New Criterion, June 1928.

3 ‘If, like the reporter, you believe that female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex (Jane Austen [has] demonstrated how gracefully this gesture can be accomplished …)’ – Life and Letters, August 1928.¹³

Chapter VI

1 The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

2 A Short History of Women, by John Langdon Davies.

Three Guineas

Chapter One

1 Written in the winter of 1936–7.

Chapter Two

1 Since these words were written Mr Baldwin has ceased to be Prime Minister and become an Earl.