Introduction

‘I have collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls’

A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas are Virginia Woolf’s two major political works. Coming from a writer who was adamant that politics disrupted and unsettled the aesthetic flow of a novel, they are particularly interesting as statements of the deep-seated political passions that can only be glimpsed intermittently in her fiction. One function of this introduction will be to show the relationship between the arguments put forward in these two polemical broadsides against the establishment and the underlying themes of Woolf’s fiction. For those readers primarily interested in Woolf as one of this century’s most significant modernist writers, the exercise of studying her political essays to illuminate her novels is extremely valuable.

Yet, and this is perhaps more extraordinary when one thinks how powerful the image of Virginia Woolf as a purist aesthete has been in the past, these political works are actually strong enough to stand alone. A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, even now remains one of the clearest and most eloquent accounts that we have of women’s writing. Certainly many teachers, desperately casting around bulging library shelves of complex treatises on this topic, often decide with relief to go back and recommend A Room of One’s Own. They can be confident that the students will read it, will enjoy reading it and will extract from it – if not ‘a nugget of pure truth’ – at least a solid and well-supported argument that can be discussed on its merits. The case of Three Guineas is stranger, for here is a book that has now found its time. When it was published in 1938 its audience was by and large uncomprehending and hostile and it isolated Virginia Woolf from her friends and family. Now, its equation between masculinism and war is a topic of heated political debate rather than a cranky eccentricity.

Both of these texts, then, speak to contemporary debates in and around feminism. If, in the interpretation of Woolf’s novels, there is room to contest the extent to which she wrote as a ‘feminist’, this is not really a plausible doubt with regard to these two political works. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas are, quite explicitly, feminist polemics. In 1932, as she was starting to work up the material that was to become Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf said to her diary:

And I’m quivering & itching to write my – whats it to be called? – ‘Men are like that?’ – no thats too patently feminist: the sequel then, for which I have collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls.fn1

Many commentators have noted the prescience of Woolf’s ideas and her capacity to anticipate the concerns of feminists in the future. Nowhere is this more fascinatingly clear than if we consider the changes her ideas underwent between the two texts in this volume. Although important continuities in her thought remained, the shifts of emphases and approach from A Room of One’s Own to Three Guineas are very significant. We can find in Woolf’s changing ideas a reflection of the central dilemma of feminism now. Sometimes summarized as the ‘equality/difference debate’, this revolves around whether feminism should press for egalitarian and even ‘androgynous’ solutions to present iniquities or whether feminism should build on existing differences between women and men in its search for a society and polity with better values. Virginia Woolf’s own emphasis moved from upholding an ideal of androgyny in art to a recognition of the power of difference – notably in her insistence that women were social ‘outsiders’.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

‘It is feminist propaganda, yet it resembles an almond-tree in blossom,’ wrote Desmond MacCarthy in the Sunday Times when A Room of One’s Own was published – a review that Virginia Woolf was later to paste into her scrapbooks for Three Guineas.fn2 MacCarthy’s response captures something of the seductive charm of the essay, the literariness with which bald factual arguments are cloaked, and its intimate appeal to the reader. Although – since the essay retains a sense of the talks to young women that it was based on – it seems most obviously to address women, it was also finely calculated to be attractive to men. An American fan, writing to Woolf on reading it, highlighted this in her comment that ‘… the detachment, tact and grace of A Room of One’s Own, and the deadly weapons of poetry, wit and irony which compel the male reader to swallow unpalatable truth as if it were sugar are new in feministic writing.’fn3 Virginia Woolf herself, in a diary entry about the likely reception of the book, conjured up the same critical response when she noted: ‘I am afraid it will not be taken seriously. Mrs Woolf is so accomplished a writer that all she says makes easy reading …’fn4

What, we may ask, was the unpalatable truth, the feminist propaganda, that lay beneath the charming conversational style of A Room of One’s Own? The central argument of the essay is that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Woolf argued that the writer was the product of his or her historical circumstances, and that material conditions were crucially important. She also explored the more complex and subtle ways that such material circumstances affected the psychological aspects of writing and the creative process itself. As she puts it, in A Room of One’s Own:

these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (p. 38)

Woolf commented on these material things in her own life, in her essay ‘Professions for Women’:

… when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made on the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare – if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.fn5

Woolf’s general argument was that women have been constrained from writing by circumstances in which they were deprived of education and denied access to publishing. The passage in A Room of One’s Own where Virginia Woolf describes how angry she was at being barred from an Oxbridge library, because ‘ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction’ (p. 7), is a much-quoted illustration of the general point. More importantly, for Woolf, women were deprived of the right to earn a living from their writing. Prior to the Married Women’s Property Acts, in 1870 and 1882, married women’s income legally belonged to their husbands. Much of the argument of A Room of One’s Own concerns the importance of women’s financial independence. Woolf’s view of writing was one that revolved around ‘freedom of mind’ as the prerequisite of the writer, since she regarded integrity as the base of good writing and integrity was not to be found where the writer was forced to flatter or appease.

Woolf argued that the material impoverishment of women’s lives – including those middle and upper class women who had an affluent lifestyle but no real control over, or ownership of, money – accounted for their lack of creative expression. In a letter to the New Statesman, joining a debate about ‘the intellectual status of women’, she wrote:

To account for the complete lack not only of good women writers but also of bad women writers I can conceive no reason unless it be that there was some external restraint upon their powers.fn6

In considering the effect of women’s social situation on their writing Virginia Woolf stresses the important differences in the opportunities open for women of different social classes and at different periods of history. Up until the end of the seventeenth century it was only eccentric women from the aristocracy, like the Duchess of Newcastle or Lady Winchilsea, who were able – surreptitiously – to ‘dabble’ in writing. With Aphra Behn, the first woman (albeit not a very respectable one, Woolf notes) actually to earn a living by writing, the field was opened for the middle-class woman who could gain some access to education and through this to the world of literature. Even this hard won education, Woolf emphasizes, was available only to ‘the daughters of educated men’ and was not open to women – just as it was not open to men – of the working class.

Virginia Woolf was herself extremely conscious of the disadvantages she had suffered in not being formally educated, as her brothers had been as a matter of course given the family’s scholarly and upper-middle-class background. In the Stephen family (Virginia Woolf’s father was Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and a well-known man of letters in late-Victorian society) the boys went to ‘public’ boarding schools and then to Cambridge while the girls were educated at home. Virginia Woolf wrote an essay entitled ‘On Not Knowing Greek’,fn7 and we find throughout her work a painful awareness of the expense that was lavished on the education of boys while girls languished intellectually under unsatisfactory private tuition or self-taught reading programmes. This theme, as we shall see later, forms the starting point of the argument of Three Guineas, where Woolf invokes the shadow of ‘Arthur’s Education Fund’ (from Thackeray’s novel Pendennis) that lay across the household accounts of the educated classes. The fund was ‘a voracious receptacle’, as the boys needed not only school and college fees, but also friends, conversation, travel and independent accommodation, and all these were bought at the expense of the girls. Thus ‘Arthur’s Education Fund’ has had the effect that women and men may look at the same things, but see them differently:

So magically does it change the landscape that the noble courts and quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge often appear to educated men’s daughters like petticoats with holes in them, cold legs of mutton, and the boat train starting for abroad while the guard slams the door in their faces. (p. 119)

Woolf’s argument about education is a central plank in her general interpretation of women’s lack of access to writing. Her argument is a strongly materialist one, although it is very different from the classic Marxist arguments about artists simply ‘reflecting’ the society in which they lived. In fact, she refers rather disparagingly to the view that – as she put it – ‘politicians’ have that ‘a writer is the product of the society in which he lives, as a screw is the product of a screw machine.’fn8 Woolf’s own view was materialist, but at the same time less reductive; it was that intellectual freedom depended upon material things. Thus the argument of A Room of One’s Own is part and parcel of her more general position that the material situation of a writer will determine what she called their ‘angle of vision’. In a paper read, in a rare but significant identification of the interests of women with working-class people, to the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association in 1940, Woolf linked the vision, or perspective, of writers to their education, and beyond that to their social class background:

… almost every writer who has practised his art successfully had been taught it. He has been taught it by about eleven years of education – at private schools, public schools and universities. He sits upon a tower raised above the rest of us; a tower built first on his parents’ station, then on his parents’ gold. It is a tower of the utmost importance; it decides his angle of vision; it affects his power of communication.fn9

If Woolf took this position up as a general one, it was developed in far more detail with regard to the specific circumstances, and therefore ‘angle of vision’, of her own reference group – the daughters of educated men. She was particularly aware of the relegation of such women to the private world of home and family, and the damage that this social isolation and narrowness of experience did to them as writers. Woolf speculated that if Jane Austen had lived longer she would have reaped the social benefits of her fame as a writer, getting away from the quietness of her rural life and being able to meet more people and travel. All this, according to Woolf, would have not only enriched Austen’s life, but would have made her novels ‘deeper and more suggestive’.fn10 Woolf’s essays on women writers make the same point – that good writing needs rich experience to emerge – in a variety of different contexts. Another ‘case’ was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of whom Woolf said, ‘it cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her irreparable damage as an artist.’fn11 For George Eliot, the situation was even more poignant, since her social isolation was the product of a double standard of sexual morality that caused women far more suffering than men. George Eliot, who flouted convention by living with a man whose wife was alive but mentally ill, was painfully aware of her pariah status: ‘I wish it to be understood,’ she had said, ‘that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation.’ For a novelist, commented Woolf, to lose the power ‘to move on equal terms unnoted among her kind’ was a serious loss.fn12 Woolf drily draws the comparison with another novelist of the period, a young man by the name of Leo Tolstoy, who was busy philandering around Europe collecting the uncensored social and sexual experience that was later to bring us Anna Karenina and War and Peace (p. 64).

In its simplest form, then, Virginia Woolf’s argument in A Room of One’s Own concerns the external constraints on women’s creativity that were imposed by lack of material resources, lack of education, lack of social experience and lack of access to publishing or other means of communication. There is a second dimension to her analysis, though, and this concerns the nature of the works that do manage to get through these social barriers: she was concerned with the fabric and texture of the writing, psychological aspects of the creative process, and issues of consciousness and identity. Woolf wanted to discuss not only the production of literature, but the ways in which the social context of its reception influenced the writing itself.

In these concerns Woolf anticipated the interests of what is now a thriving school emphasizing the ‘gendered’ character of literary criticism. The use of male pseudonyms by women writers is a striking instance of the problem: it was not possible to be ‘read’ seriously as a writer if you were a woman and hence many aspiring women writers simply decided to publish under male names. Virginia Woolf draws attention to the subtle ways in which the contemptuous and condescending attitude of male critics had influenced women’s writing. ‘One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone in which they were written,’ she writes in A Room of One’s Own, ‘to divine that the writer was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation’ (p. 67).

In her essay ‘Professions for Women’ Woolf undertook an interesting account of the main psychological obstacles faced by women writers of her time: challenging norms of self-effacing femininity and resisting the taboo against women speaking about sexuality. In that essay Virginia Woolf invokes the ‘angel in the house’, whose role entailed sitting in draughts and eating poor cuts of meat so that others would be comfortable, ceaselessly deferring to the wishes and desires of others and never addressing her own. For Woolf, this figure was a writer’s nightmare, always getting in the way of that ‘integrity’ and ‘truth’ that were the hallmark of her literary creed. Woolf manages, in the essay, to drive out this pallid spectre of domestic femininity (in a typically symbolic move of throwing the inkpot at her whenever she turns up) – but is then confronted by the deeper problem of a femininity that takes root at an unconscious level rather than in social convention. Telling the truth about sexuality – ‘telling the truth about my own experiences as a body’ – turns out to be still harder to accomplish. For although men have the freedom to write about sexuality and the passions, this is severely controlled in women and (to put it in modern terms) such constraints are internalized.fn13 Virginia Woolf maintained that there were thus internal as well as external constraints on the writing that women could produce.

In this context it is important to register that, at the time of writing A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf was quite adamant that explicit feminist anger had no place in a woman writer’s novel. She was insistent that the aesthetic integrity of a novel – its ability to make the reader recognize its truth as ‘whole and entire’ – was incompatible with the articulation of political anger. This can be most clearly seen in Woolf’s curiously unsympathetic treatment of Charlotte Brontë. Chapter IV of A Room of One’s Own contains an extraordinary passage in which Jane Austen and Emily Brontë are praised and Charlotte Brontë subjected to a criticism that verges on scáthing – ‘the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds’ (p. 63). Woolf holds it against Charlotte Brontë that her anger interrupts the flow of the novel – citing an ‘awkward break’ in Jane Eyre, where a lengthy political soliloquy ends with a feeble ‘as I was saying’ link back to the narrative present. Woolf comments that ‘she left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance.’ Charlotte Brontë’s books were thus ‘deformed and twisted’ and the angry jerks that they contain mean that her genius will never get expressed ‘whole and entire’. With a rather startling lack of charm and generosity, Woolf concludes, ‘How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?’ (p. 63.) Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, on the other hand, get top marks for walking the impossibly fine Woolf tightrope on this question. They wrote as women but not as women conscious of being women; they did not preach or rage but neither did they give in to the prevailing masculinist values of their time:

What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. (p. 67)

Virginia Woolf’s argument on this point is worth looking into because it illustrates how much she was committed, at this stage, to what we might call an aesthetic of androgyny – which she was later to abandon. At the end of A Room of One’s Own she invokes Coleridge’s conception of the androgynous great mind where male and female qualities live in harmony and thus enable the mind to be fertilized and use all its faculties. Woolf’s interpretation of Coleridge’s notion of androgyny is interesting; for her, he did not mean that a ‘great mind’ was likely to have any special sympathy with women, or would take up their cause – on the contrary, ‘the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind’ (p. 89).

Here we have a classic statement of the so-called ‘equality’ position within feminism. Woolf’s borrowed model of the androgynous mind finds sexual complementarity where others have found sexual difference, and regards the ‘creative, incandescent, and undivided’ mind as a better model than a mind restricted to the feminine or masculine perspective. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf complained that the time she lived in was particularly hostile to this androgynous ideal: the suffrage movement had challenged men’s assumptions and brought about a state of heightened ‘sex consciousness’ in both women and men. For writers, she argued, such ‘sex consciousness’ was disastrous. ‘It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex,’ she concluded (p. 94).

INTERPRETING A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

A Room of One’s Own was published in October 1929, almost exactly a year after the papers it is based on had been delivered at Cambridge. On her return from Cambridge she had made a characteristic diary entry:

Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression. Intelligent, eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own.fn14

In the year that followed, Woolf substantially revised the papers (see the Note on the Text) for publication. In doing so she incorporated a creative rendering of her gastronomic experiences in Cambridge: it seems likely that the lunch she and Leonard Woolf ate in King’s College was not as exquisite as the one described in the book, or the fare at the women’s colleges as grim.

A Room of One’s Own is often regarded as the twentieth century’s most important statement on the question of women and writing. It captures a marvellous, rich argument in an immensely pleasurable and entertaining style of writing. It is eloquent as well as elegant, trenchant as well as witty, passionate as well as amusing. It is perhaps because it has all of these differing attributes, because it plays with its own seriousness of purpose, that the book has been such an enormous success. Virginia Woolf articulated her own ambivalence about how seriously the book was to be taken when she said, ‘It is a trifle, I shall say; so it is, but I wrote it with ardour & conviction.’fn15 This is ostensibly a contradiction, for trifles are not written with conviction, but it gives its readers space to decide for themselves how they want to take it and how they want to read it, and the open-ness of the text in this regard has probably been the key factor in its endurance.

It is not easy to disentangle the author from the text of A Room of One’s Own. For just as the political credo gives insight into the meaning of her novels, so the meaning and effectiveness of the political statement derives, in part at least, from the literary standing of its author. Had A Room of One’s Own been written by a much lesser novelist, there would undoubtedly be much less interest in it now. On this point it is tempting to revert to the book’s own conclusion: that ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ would come, in another century or so, if we worked for her. As she wrote those lines Virginia Woolf could not have known that, a mere fifty or so years later, many people would regard her as having herself acquired this stature as a writer. Woolf’s story of the gifted young woman who committed suicide without writing a word, and the need for us to create the conditions in which ‘she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry’, is a very moving one in the light of her own subsequent life and death. But our note here should be celebratory: by the time of her death at fifty-nine in 1941 Virginia Woolf had written enough to mark her out as one of the finest modern writers – and even, for some, a writer of the calibre of her own admired Shakespeare. Certainly, one might add, she is now more widely read than Shakespeare.

What, however, might the sceptical reader want to question in A Room of One’s Own? The argument is certainly not without its weaknesses. For although Woolf may have argued that the majority of writers were cushioned by their parents’ money, one can produce many instances of writers being inspired by adversity and overcoming extremely inauspicious circumstances. So the basic thesis of A Room of One’s Own is not an uncontentious one.

It transpires that, although Woolf was adamant about the room of one’s own and the money in this text, she was not consistent in her own life about these issues. In her persona as Mary Beton, the narrator/speaker/protagonist of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf says that her aunt had left her £500 a year at around the same time as women were enfranchised (i.e. 1918). She comments drily that, ‘Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important’ (p. 34). To read this as a straightforward autobiographical fact would, however, be to miss out on a typically complex and contradictory reality. For in her own life, Virginia Woolf had been left £2500 in 1909 by an aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen – the interest giving her considerably less than £500 a year but none the less a significant amount. Although she must later have come to see this legacy in the terms used in A Room of One’s Own, she was at the time quite thrown by it. She wrote to her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, describing her aunt’s will, in terms that she recognized, even at the time, as distinctly not-feminist:

It is very disappointing. Nessa and Adrian [her sister and brother] each have £100: I have £2500 … It is miserable for Nessa; still worse for Adrian; I am determined to make him share mine – but there’s no need to talk of that act of feminine weakness.fn16

Not only was she inclined to sacrifice her own independence to share her legacy with her brother, but also she was herself aware of the psychological damage that owning capital can do. A younger Virginia Woolf had described in her diary the gist of a conversation, about whether socialists should renounce inherited capital, in which her husband Leonard Woolf had stuck to the traditional Fabian socialist position that such wealth should be kept and spent on worthy political causes. Virginia Woolf, however, had argued that ‘psychologically it may be necessary if one is to abolish capitalism’, and she reflected that, ‘I’m one of those who are hampered by the psychological hindrance of owning capital.’fn17 Certainly there is consistency in her understanding that material circumstances have profound psychological effects, but there is also a clear shift from the recognition here to the argument of A Room of One’s Own. At the very least, one could say that she had decided as a feminist to prioritize the specific needs of (middle-class) women over the more general (socialist) desirability of abolishing capitalism.

Secondly, one might legitimately question Woolf’s passionate advocacy of what she calls ‘freedom of mind’. In pointing to instances – the education of women for instance – where external constraints hamper freedom of mind, she implies that where such constraints do not exist some absolute mental freedom would exist. This is more doubtful. Certainly there is no essence of mental freedom waiting to be allowed out – and in each social and historical moment the concept and the experience of such liberty may well be very different. Many of the concepts with which Virginia Woolf worked – freedom of mind, freedom of expression, integrity, vision, truth and so on – carry connotations that we might now regard as problematic in terms of what they assume about aesthetic judgement and subjective identity. In her novels Woolf questions assumptions of unitary and uncontradictory identity, and indeed her exploration of shifting, fragmented, divided and multiple consciousnesses has made her a very attractive author to post-structuralist literary critics.

At the same time, however, Woolf had a strongly mystical streak that cut against such tendencies towards fragmentation. It led her to an unproblematic retention of ideas such as ‘freedom’, ‘truth’ or ‘vision’ that we might now understand in more relative terms as the ideas of a particular historical period or intellectual culture. An example can be found in a very interesting passage of Virginia Woolf’s 1931 speech, transcribed precisely from her notes (square brackets show Woolf’s deletions, angle brackets show Woolf’s insertions):

[But what is a woman?] [So it might appear.] Having rid herself of falsehood, so we might put it, she has now only to be herself <and write>. But what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I dont know; I do not believe that you know; I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. [That] <What a woman [is]> is a discovery which you here are in process of making …fn18

The hesitations and equivocations of this passage are fascinating. Woolf goes a long way down the road of what has become the preoccupation of a much later feminism – problematizing and destabilizing the notion of ‘woman’ as a known and predictable category – but she cannot fully accept the consequence: she still regards the essence of woman as something that we shall ‘discover’ rather than an identity that is built.

Thirdly, Woolf’s conception of androgyny and her advocacy of an aesthetic creed in which feminist political anger, and indeed any sex consciousness, should be subordinated to the general vision and narrative of the work are highly contentious from a feminist point of view. A Room of One’s Own takes up a position that aspires to gender neutrality, though elsewhere in her work Woolf speaks of ‘the feminine sentence’ and can be lined up in and for a ‘woman centred’ literary tradition.

Feminists are, of course, divided as to whether, or in what circumstances, one might support gender neutrality, or the so-called ‘equality’ position, versus an awareness of the distinctive situation or attributes of women and the need to build progress on the recognition of ‘difference’ between women and men. It must be said that here, in the manifesto that A Room of One’s Own has become, Woolf’s model of androgyny is the nearest she came to the ‘equality’ position and it is no doubt because she pitched art at the level of general truth – more abstract than sexual difference. Elsewhere in her work, as we shall see clearly in relation to Three Guineas, her position was quite different. And even within A Room of One’s Own there is enough specific address to young women, not least in the call to work for the emergence of Shakespeare’s sister, to belie the formal position of advocating androgyny. In any case it is perhaps too simple to plead for the exclusion of overt anger from art, when Virginia Woolf buried feminist insights into the deepest recesses of her own novels. The real debate hangs on how, not whether, feminist ideas interact with the imaginative content of the novels, and for Woolf simply to proscribe intrusiveness is to deal with the problem at a relatively superficial level.

Both A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas are explicitly feminist texts, but the nature of their ‘appropriation’ by modern feminism has been contested. In relation to A Room of One’s Own, there is an interesting debate as to how far the lectures or the book could be seen as a woman-oriented, even homoerotic – rather than a strictly ‘feminist’ – intervention. Woolf herself had predicted about A Room of One’s Own that, ‘I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist.’ It is well known that at the time of the lectures in Cambridge Virginia Woolf had, in the words of her official biographer Quentin Bell, to some extent ‘identified herself with the cause of homosexuality’. In September 1928 she had taken a week’s holiday in France alone with Vita Sackville-West; Woolf’s extraordinary literary tribute to their intense relationship, Orlando, was published on 11 October; at the same period Virginia Woolf was willing, if not precisely eager, to testify in the trial for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. (Both Woolf and Sackville-West felt that a public stand against censorship on the issue should be taken, although both found Radclyffe Hall herself rather irksome in her belief that the novel was of outstanding literary merit.)fn19

The conversational seductiveness of A Room of One’s Own can be likened to the style of Orlando, and the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, with the heightening of private emotion and public awareness that the publication of Orlando caused, is an important part of the backdrop to the text. ‘I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted …’ wrote Vita Sackville-West, ‘Darling, I don’t know and scarcely even like to write, so overwhelmed am I, how you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg.’fn20 As is often the case with Virginia Woolf, there was ambivalence and contradiction in her sexual and emotional involvement with Vita Sackville-West – and her identification with other women in general. A Room of One’s Own is certainly the high point of this attraction and commitment to women, but even during this period Woolf’s diaries and letters show countervailing thoughts and feelings too.fn21 Later in her life – with Three Guineas the contrasting text to A Room of One’s Own – Woolf was to become less flirtatious and seductive in her writing about women. Three Guineas was also written with ardour and conviction, but was certainly not a ‘trifle’.

FROM A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN TO THREE GUINEAS

Virginia Woolf turned, in the 1930s, to a new type of fiction and a new political identity. Her feminism became more pronounced and overt, her concern with the rise of fascism more and more profound, and her conviction that women had a particular role to play in combating what she saw as a masculine tendency towards militarism more readily argued. These changes underlie the dramatic shift in her novel-writing practice that we see in The Years (1938). She referred to this as ‘my Arnold Bennett novel’, in a wry recognition that the latest experiment she had made (after a decade of triumphs in the modernist idiom – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves) was an attempt to go back to the socially relevant novel of the nineteenth century in a deliberate and new way.fn22 As John Mepham has noted, this was an ‘astonishing turnabout’ in her thinking.fn23

It is, then, not perhaps surprising that we find the origins of Three Guineas in a speech. Woolf’s diary for 20 January 1931 records the moment at which, like Archimedes, she had a brilliant idea:

I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book – a sequel to a Room of Ones Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday to Pippa’s society.fn24

The process of working through this idea was as lengthy and complex as the original idea had been quick and effortless, for Woolf tried to develop a new literary form – she called it a ‘Novel-Essay’ – to address these questions in ways that were simultaneously politically and aesthetically appropriate. Entitled The Pargiters, the book was to alternate scenes of fiction with chapters of historical commentary and analysis, covering the evolution of the middle-class family from 1880 to the present. In the end, Woolf decided that the experiment had failed, and separated the text into a novel, The Years, published in 1937, and a work of political polemic, Three Guineas, which came out a year later.

It is clear that these were difficult decisions. The Years became a bestseller, particularly in the USA, but took a personal toll on its author greater than any other of her books. Both the novel and Three Guineas went through various incarnations and the history of these texts shows how vexed their composition was in comparison with some of the earlier novels. Luckily, although Woolf abandoned the novel-essay, she did not destroy it and we can judge for ourselves this bold experiment. Published under the heading of The Pargiters we can now read both the speech that triggered the whole project, and the drafted fictional scenes with their accompanying essays. As the editor comments:

… the instances in literature are indeed rare when we find a novelist of Virginia Woolf’s stature presenting a fictional specimen and then immediately analysing, explaining and interpreting the scene for us.fn25

The speech that was to form the basis of Three Guineas was made to the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service, an organization whose secretary was a friend of Woolf’s – Philippa Strachey. Invited to speak about her professional experiences as a woman writer, Virginia Woolf gave a very entertaining speech, airing the problem of ‘the angel in the house’ who had to be dispatched by the independent writer. Some of the speech has been published in Woolf’s essay ‘Professions for Women’ (reproduced in appendix II), and parts of it found their way into Three Guineas. The speech closes with an interesting attempt to talk about the question of women’s independence from the point of view of men: an early indication of Woolf’s future preoccupation with questions of masculinity and the subconscious sources of men’s behaviour. The issue is set up by means of an example – Woolf likens men’s response to women earning their own living to that of a man who comes home one evening to find that his servants have suddenly changed.

He goes into the library – an august apartment which he is accustomed to have all to himself – and finds the kitchen maid curled up in the arm chair reading Plato. He goes into the kitchen and there is the cook engaged in writing a Mass in B flat. He goes into the billiard room and finds the parlourmaid knocking up a fine break at the table. He goes into the bed room and there is the housemaid working out a mathematical problem.fn26

Woolf describes the man’s anger and resentment that his role has been usurped and, most importantly, that his function as the breadwinner becomes unnecessary when women can sell their own skills. But this theme, which was to play so central a part in Three Guineas, is not at this point dealt with in anger. It was the beginning of 1931 and Virginia Woolf concluded by advising her audience of professional women: ‘Do not therefore be angry: be patient; be amused.’ She stressed how ‘extremely difficult’ was the position that ‘you have put this man into’. She emphasized ‘the tremendous tradition of mastery’ that men were used to and would have to overcome. She insisted that there were men who had triumphed, men of generous humanity, ‘men with whom women can live in perfect freedom, without any fear’.fn27

The speech of 1931 airs the theme of male resistance to the independence of women, but Woolf is charming and conciliatory to men in her conclusion. By the end of 1932, when she came to revise the speech as the first essay in her proposed novel-essay, there is a significant change in her tone. In the first paragraph she distances herself from the seductive rhetorical style that so characterizes A Room of One’s Own. Revealingly (and untypically) repeating the crucial words she says, ‘acquit me of the desire simply to seduce and to flatter and to bring you round to my own way of thinking by means of flattery and seduction.’fn28 This new no-nonsense Virginia Woolf describes herself as an ‘outsider’ – a key notion for the argument of Three Guineas. She claims that ‘it is part of a writer’s profession to be an outsider’.fn29Finally, introducing the fictional scenes from her new novel, she insists that The Pargiters is not a novel of vision, but a novel of fact. ‘There is scarcely a statement in it that cannot be … verified, if anybody should wish so to misuse their time.’ The point is a provocative one. Woolf says that it would be ‘easier’ to write history, but that ‘I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.’fn30 Here we have three ideas – the rejection of seduction in favour of cold argument, the notion of Woolf (as writer, later as woman) as an outsider, and a new interest in veracity rather than vision – that make a distinctive break with the Virginia Woolf of the 1920s. Let us now look at Three Guineas, where these principles find their clearest expression.

THREE GUINEAS

The title of Three Guineas is less of a clue to its contents than some of the earlier ones that Woolf tried out in the course of writing it. The Next War, On Being Despised, ‘Men are like that’, Letter to an Englishman, What Are We to Do?, all indicate the themes and arguments of the book more clearly. It is only when you have finished reading the book that the title Three Guineas makes sense, which is unfortunate in the case of a book that has, one fears, been more discussed than it has been read. Woolf’s consideration of what women can do to avoid war – the question posed to her by a correspondent – finally closes when she decides to send a guinea each to three societies with particular aims. The first guinea goes to a rebuilding fund for a women’s college, the second to an organization helping women’s employment in the professions, and the third to her original correspondent, who ran a society aiming to prevent war and (in the 1930s climate of growing fascism) to protect intellectual and cultural freedom. The most important part of Woolf’s argument was that these ostensibly separate causes were in fact inseparable, since women’s financial independence from men – which could only be brought about by education and employment – was an essential precondition for the fight against war. Why was this? It was because in Woolf’s view war in general was a male activity, and fascism in particular was an extreme form of patriarchal dictatorship. Militarism and fascism were bound in with men’s insistence that women restrict themselves to serving the needs of fathers, husbands and families, and subject themselves to the often unreasonable demands of men. According to Virginia Woolf, the links between the tyranny of women’s domestic servitude and the dictatorship of fascists had not been recognized. In the style of a much later feminism she insisted on the general point that ‘the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected … the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other’ (p. 270).

Virginia Woolf’s key problem in Three Guineas was to prove, in particular to men, that the political processes of fascism were linked to the political exclusions of petty patriarchalism. The kernel of the argument of the whole book lies in the passage where she moves from a reference to the routine sexism expressed in Britain (she cites many examples from newspapers and from the civil service, for example, of the view that women should not take jobs that men need) to the attitudes of Hitler and Mussolini. Woolf has described her correspondent as a middle-aged barrister. She says to him:

… abroad the monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion. It is not a photograph that you look upon any longer; there you go, trapesing along in the procession yourselves. And that makes a difference. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent to you. (p. 228)

Thus Woolf argues that it is not only in women’s interests to resist the patriarchal state, and in men’s interests to resist the fascist state, for the enemies are the same and the reasons for resistance the same, too.

Although the intellectual centre of gravity of the book is focused on the specific argument about feminism and fascism, Three Guineas takes up an extraordinary number of complex related issues. Indeed, the book has a scholarly apparatus of notes which take up in more detail and with examples many of the themes elaborated in the text. Woolf had been amassing data for several years: keeping files, taking press cuttings (some of which are reproduced in appendix I), writing to people for information and so on. Some light is thrown on the diligence with which Virginia Woolf tackled this by her correspondence. To Vita Sackville-West, who didn’t like the book and accused her of using ‘misleading arguments’, she said, ‘I took more pains to get up the facts and state them plainly than I ever took with any thing in my life,’ and added that, ‘all I wanted was to state a very intricate case as plainly and readable as I could.’fn31 Posterity is even rewarded with information about why Woolf put the notes at the end of the book rather than at the foot of the page: she told Ethel Smyth that ‘I decided for end, thinking people might read them, the most meaty part of the book, separately,’ adding, ‘I had a mass more and still have. Yes – very hard work that was.’fn32 The sheer quantity of facts and arguments mobilized in the text and notes is quite extraordinary, and there can be no doubt that Woolf was trying to make her case as strongly as she possibly could. The notes to Three Guineas take up questions subsequently discussed by feminists working in the fields of psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, education, literary criticism, medicine, art history, languages, classics and theology. Some of Woolf’s points are real gems that remain eloquent many decades later: one example being the stylish – ‘nature … is now known to vary greatly in her commands and to be largely under control’ (p. 319).

What, then, are the complex and interrelated ideas that Woolf elaborates in this text? Readers are sometimes surprised to find that the first chapter contains a serious discussion of the politics of dress. Men, Woolf argues, use distinctions of dress to symbolize rank and status; like the labels on things in a shop, they advertise the quality of the goods. So much do they differ from women in this that they do not even notice their peculiarity, and here Woolf amuses herself with a note about a judge, preposterously dressed in scarlet, ermine and a vast wig of curls, solemnly pronouncing on the psychology of women’s clothes (p. 279). The function of the photographs in Three Guineas is, of course, to ridicule these patriarchal, hierarchical dress codes. But the point is closely drawn into Woolf’s underlying theme when she argues that the symbolic function of dress is closely connected to war: ‘your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers’ (p. 138).

The first chapter of Three Guineas then moves into a critique of the universities, called forth by a letter asking for a contribution to a women’s college rebuilding fund (in real life, the same Newnham College, Cambridge, as had featured in A Room of One’s Own). Woolf believes that she should respond to this letter in the context of the other request she has received – for her to take part in an anti-war society’s work. What contribution might the women’s college make to an anti-war effort? Woolf suggests that universities have not traditionally done much to avoid war, indeed they have tended to teach people to use rather than to hate force (p. 151). From this observation, which ties in with Virginia Woolf’s lifelong loathing of academic institutions (discussed in a more general way later on in this introduction), various speculative arguments are floated. For a university to help in preventing war, what should be taught in it? On this, Woolf is quite clear: ‘Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital’ (p. 155). Founded on poverty and youth, the women’s college should take advantage of those qualities and be a centre for cooperation rather than competition. But, of course, such an institution will not help its students to get the jobs they need, for which they have to have letters after their names in the approved fashion. In response to this, Woolf floats the more dramatic possibility that she will send a guinea to the college, earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches’, so that it can be used to burn the place down (p. 157). But in the end she concedes that the voice of women will only be heard if they can exert an independent influence; if they are restricted to the private realm women’s interests will lie in shoring up marriage, the empire and war. And to escape this restriction they will need to be able to earn a living, for which they will need an education. Thus, Woolf reaches the depressing conclusion that, imperfect as the women’s college may be, she will send it a guinea – with no strings attached – as a contribution to the prevention of war.

The second chapter takes up this theme, in an exploration of women’s employment. Woolf says that she has received a letter, asking not only for money but also for cast-off clothing as a contribution to the work of an organization dedicated to supporting women in the professions. In real life this was the National Society of Women’s Service, to whom Woolf had originally made her speech in 1931. Woolf begins by expressing astonishment that professional women should need her help, and this causes her to investigate their situation. Looking at the civil service she tries to square the claim that professional women have difficulty in earning £250 a year with the salaries listed for public administrators, many of which are over £1000. Woolf encounters what sociologists now call ‘vertical occupational segregation’, the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ on women’s rank and earnings within organizations. As Woolf puts it:

… those to whose names the word ‘Miss’ is attached do not seem to enter the four-figure zone. The sex distinction seems, according to Whitaker [Whitaker’s Almanack, Woolf’s favoured reference book], possessed of a curious leaden quality, liable to keep any name to which it is fastened circling in the lower spheres. (p. 170)

Modern readers may be wondering about the effect of ‘Mrs’ as a prefix in those days: there was a marriage bar which made their employment impossible. As Woolf put it, ‘In Whitehall as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage’ (p. 174).

In a typical move, Virginia Woolf sets up in this chapter a shorthand that she will then use to refer back to later in the book. She describes the pattern of segregation at Whitehall in terms of an ‘odour’ or ‘atmosphere’, made much stronger when it is explicitly argued in the newspapers that the government should force employers to give work to men rather than women. Woolf says, ‘There! There can be no doubt of the odour now. The cat is out of the bag; and it is a Tom’ (p. 174). Reference to ‘smells’ will now stand in for men, in the interests of men, forcing women out of employment and back into the home. Similarly, this same key passage in the book develops the image of a malign little egg, the poisonous germ of an idea that is shared both by the sexist contributor to the Daily Telegraph who wants the government to act in men’s interests and by the fascist dictators. Woolf quotes Hitler making an identical point: that man is responsible for his family and the nation, woman for family, husband, children and home (p. 175). She comments that Hitler and Mussolini are recognized as dictators, seen as dangerous, as well as ugly, animals. But when the poison of fascism is spat by a little insect in the heart of England it is not seen as such. In a telling allusion to Blake’s Auguries of Innocencefn33 Woolf describes the dictator at home: ‘And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England’ (p. 175). The caterpillar, the insect, the egg, the worm are one and the same – metaphors of unrecognized fascism. Woolf’s most scathing eloquence is reserved for a man – H. G. Wells – who had criticized feminists in Britain for not protecting women in Germany and Italy from the effects of fascism and Naziism. Woolf’s outburst, which she self-deprecatingly describes as having the symptoms of becoming a peroration, is worth quoting in full as the emotional centre of Three Guineas:

And is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity? And must not that fight wear down her strength and exhaust her spirit? Should we not help her to crush him in our own country before we ask her to help us to crush him abroad? And what right have we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the week eggs like these? (p. 176)

The chapter ends with a plea for women’s entry to the professions to be brought about in such a way that women ‘remain uncontaminated’ by the corrupt structures of that world. Woolf argues that women must adopt various forms of self-denial and self-policing for this goal to be achieved, and she presents these as the conditions under which she is prepared to make a donation to the society for helping women in the professions. These conditions are characteristic of Virginia Woolf: idealistic, unreasonable and romantic at the same time as being insightful, courageous and truthful. The first, and most general, condition is that the society should avoid narrow feminism and ‘help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession’ (p. 205). Here we see a reflection of Woolf’s intense ambivalence about feminism – knowing how fascist dictators discriminate on the bases of sex, race, religion and so on, she found it anathema to recommend a similar form of (positive) discrimination for women. To this painful dilemma we can, perhaps, trace the source of her view that women’s political role must be that of ‘outsiders’. It is, effectively, an abdication of political agency in the face of the danger of contamination.

Woolf’s other conditions are also vexing. Poverty is enjoined: women should earn an independent income but no more. In practice, of course, this is a difficult matter to judge; Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s own standard of living rose as she earned more from her writing.fn34 Intellectual chastity is recommended: you must refuse to ‘sell your brain’. Derision is desirable: when offered bribes such as ‘badges, orders, or degrees’ they should be flung back with ridicule. And finally, Woolf advocates ‘freedom from unreal loyalties’: national pride, religious pride, college pride and sex pride are all forms of seduction that should be resisted (p. 203). These conditions, Woolf argues, will enable women to join the professions without taking on their possessiveness, pugnacity and greed. They will enable women to have a mind of their own. Then that independent mind can be used to abolish the horror and folly of war (p. 208).

The chapter ends with an evocation of maternal approval of this act of daughterly authenticity. The daughters will be singing that they have done with tyranny; the mothers will laugh from their graves that it was for this that they suffered in their own times: ‘Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!’ (p. 208.) Three Guineas is often thought to be more pessimistic about women’s solidarity than A Room of One’s Own, which had celebrated the female tradition and ‘thinking back through our mothers’, but in this passage we see a flash of Virginia Woolf’s earlier optimism.

Many of the points elaborated in the final section of Three Guineas have been foreshadowed earlier in the text, but it is none the less an extraordinary culmination of the general argument. Woolf advances an interpretation of how support for war ties in with other more general aspects of men’s role and power in society, including subconscious ones; she explains why women’s identification with patriotism is less than that of men; she interrogates women’s financial dependence within the family and recommends wages for motherhood. She (not surprisingly, given how contentious all these issues are) also engages in a very spiky debate about feminism and concludes by advocating a position of ‘outsiders’ for women who are opposed to war. To the correspondent who had asked for her support in his campaign to prevent war by fostering cultural and intellectual freedom she offers a guinea – but symbolically refuses to sign up as a member of the society.

The ‘real life’ antecedents of this letter, which frames the beginning and end of Three Guineas, are clear but complex. Woolf devotes a lengthy note to the plethora of manifestos and societies which, during the course of the 1930s, signalled the politicization of intellectuals and others as a result of concern about the rise of fascism (pp. 304–5). She was briefly on the committee of a group entitled ‘For Intellectual Liberty’, founded in 1935 as a British equivalent to the French anti-fascist organization the Comité de Vigilance. In her correspondence she complained to various people about the numbers of letters and meetings she became drawn into, and her increasing irritation and withdrawal becomes evident.

Virginia Woolf saw a parallel between the beliefs and actions of the fascist dictators and those of ordinary men in England. A page of her scrapbooks is reproduced in appendix I where she had juxtaposed a pious political exhortation to stand up to dictators with a divorce court report that showed how dictatorial the husband had been. In Three Guineas the same connection is made in Woolf’s discussion of the educated and sophisticated Mr Jex-Blake, who was so horrified at the idea of his daughter earning money by teaching that he offered to pay the salary himself if she would refuse it from the college and do the work on a voluntary basis (p. 259ff.). The young Sophia Jex-Blake and Virginia Woolf have a certain amount of fun in their treatment of his patriarchally inflicted agonies. Woolf uses the idea of an ‘infantile fixation’, very loosely and idiosyncratically drawn from psychoanalysis, as a means of addressing the subconscious desire for control over his daughter that underlies this father’s extremely manipulative and coercive behaviour. But it is not only Mr Jex-Blake who has this problem; Woolf maintains that ‘society it seems was a father, and afflicted with the infantile fixation too’ (p. 263).

A related theme concerns the ‘unreal loyalty’ of patriotism. For just as the woman has no independent income within the family – a problem which leads Woolf to recommend wages for motherhood and to comment adversely on women’s financial position on the dissolution of marriagefn35 – so she has no status in her country. More than once in Three Guineas Woolf refers to the fact that women lose their citizenship when they marry: where their brothers are England’s sons, they are merely her ‘step-daughters’. Add to this the little amount of England’s land, wealth and property that belong to her and, argues Woolf, the woman will see that she has little to thank the country for. Therefore, Woolf continues, the woman has no interest in a war to protect a country in which she has so small an investment. Virginia Woolf’s hypothetical Englishwoman now develops as the full-blown ‘outsider’, telling her brother that she will not accept that he can be fighting to protect her or ‘our country’. Delighting globally minded feminists, Woolf then comes up with the most quotable quote of Three Guineas: ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (p. 234).

THREE GUINEAS: COMMENTARY AND INTERPRETATION

Interpretation of Three Guineas is complicated by the vexed history of its reception. On the favourable side, its anonymous reviewer in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement described Virginia Woolf as ‘the most brilliant pamphleteer in England’, which understandably pleased her.fn36 Colleagues on the ‘feminist soft left’ of those days, such as the Labour Party activist Sheena, Lady Simon, and many others such as Phillipa Strachey and Lady Rhondda, were much in evidence as sympathizers and admirers of Woolf’s outspoken essay. In addition, many readers unknown to Woolf wrote to her about the book and these letters have been preserved, making fascinating reading. Among various letters from indignant or genuinely puzzled men are a host of delighted, grateful, surprised women readers. One of these women correspondents – most of whom fully endorsed Woolf’s argument – even took it, with some trepidation, a stage further. Belinda Joliffe of New York wrote passionately, hyperbolically and ungrammatically:

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see even you draw back from me in distaste, if I say to you that I believe the BASE of all such stupidity [i.e. war] begins in the home. It is horrible nauseating FAMILY emotional stuff that clutters people up. Here in America, everyone will Kill, Steal, Sweat, Lie, Anything in order to get money, so THEIR children need not work; that they may Advance Socially …fn37

From the vantage point of the 1990s, Woolf’s argument linking masculinism and war is both prescient and uncontentious. A visit to London’s reconceptualized Imperial War Museum is enough to make this point: its thoughtful, rather than celebratory, documentation of war results in a museum bookshop with many titles making just the connections that Woolf had seen. The feminist anti-nuclear weapons movement’s slogan, ‘Take the Toys from the Boys’, is another instance of a general recognition of Woolf’s point. There is also now considerable awareness of the gendered character of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes which Woolf hated so much. Hence the extent to which the Nazis built a culture on the domestication of women, and the cultural politics of Mussolini’s sexualization and domination of Italian women, are now seen as important issues. Similarly, one might note that Woolf’s insistence that fascism is not something completely alien and different, but is coterminous with mundane and everyday sexism, is also an insight not heard until comparatively recently.

Yet if a feminist posterity is inclined to a favourable view of Three Guineas, this was certainly not the universal reaction when the book was published. Perhaps we can ignore the popular press, although the headline ‘WOMAN STARTS NEW SEX-WAR/Says Men’s Clothes are “Barbarous”’ is not without its charms.fn38 Nor was Woolf profoundly affected by the vitriolic attack on the book by Mrs Q. D. (‘Queenie’) Leavis; she had always regarded the entire Leavis/Scrutiny enterprise as priggish and took criticism or praise from them with a certain contempt.fn39 Much more importantly, most of Virginia Woolf’s own circle of family and friends were ambivalent or critical of the book. She had a difficult correspondence with Vita Sackville-West about it, was disappointed that Leonard was so lukewarm, and in her diary noted the general silence of her friends about it: ‘Not one of my friends has mentioned it’, and even ‘my own friends have sent me to Coventry over it’.fn40

Bloomsbury’s collective rejection of Three Guineas involved difficult political issues. It must also have involved complex individual responses to Julian Bell’s decision to go to the Spanish Civil War and terrible personal grief at his death there, aged twenty-nine. Three Guineas was read by them in this context; Virginia Woolf’s writing of the book had, literally, been interrupted by her nephew’s death in July 1937. Julian’s mother, Vanessa Bell, was utterly devastated and found the presence of her sister Virginia very comforting; hence the tragic death of her adored nephew was a blow that Virginia Woolf experienced as closely and appallingly as could be imagined. It took her some while to resume work, and returning to Three Guineas was naturally difficult. Julian Bell’s terrible death did not lead Virginia Woolf to change her opinions in deference to his choice to fight; rather it led her to hold them more strongly. She wrote to Vanessa Bell: ‘I’m completely stuck on my war pamphlet … I’m always wanting to argue it with Julian – in fact I wrote it as an argument with him.’fn41

Julian Bell had wanted to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He went as an ambulance driver, partly because of the distress his decision was causing his mother and family. In March that year Woolf wrote that we ‘have to stop him’, but they did not succeed.fn42 When he died she wrote, to someone outside her immediate circle, using a reflective tone and conceding as much to his decision as she could:

At the moment the private sorrow is so great one cant get anything clear in one’s mind. He was a great joy to us; her children are like my own. But it had become necessary for him to go; and there is a kind of grandeur in that which now and then consoles one. Only – to see what she has to suffer makes one doubt if anything in the world is worth it.fn43

To Vita Sackville-West she wrote she felt nothing but ‘varieties of dull anger and despair’. When the cause for which Julian Bell had wanted to fight had been lost, two years later, Woolf noted bitterly in her diary, ‘Yesterday, Franco was recognized [by the British Government]. And Julian killed for this.’fn44

Three Guineas was, then, a book that was deeply emotionally charged for the intimate circle of Virginia Woolf’s family and friends. She herself wrote out some of her mixed feelings – bewilderment, remorse, anger – about her nephew’s decision in a memoir, which was published with Quentin Bell’s biography.fn45 Looking back on the reception of Three Guineas, by Woolf’s circle, in 1938, it is plausible to see in their silence and hostility a displaced difficulty that they, by tradition pacifists (‘we were all C.O.s in the Great war’)fn46 had experienced in coming to terms with Julian’s decision. Quentin Bell has summarized the criticism that underlay the negative response to Three Guineas:

What really seemed wrong with the book – and I am speaking here of my own reactions at the time – was the attempt to involve a discussion of women’s rights with the far more agonizing and immediate question of what we were to do in order to meet the ever-growing menace of Fascism and war. The connections between the two questions seemed tenuous and the positive suggestions wholly inadequate.fn47

One of the ironies is that this view, which does I think represent a more general feeling among Virginia Woolf’s family and friends at the time, did not itself offer a better solution than Virginia Woolf’s to the menace of fascism. For while many in the Bloomsbury circle did become supporters of the use of military force against fascism, this was not in fact the case for those most intimately affected by Julian Bell’s death. In 1938 Clive Bell (Julian’s father) was arguing an extreme pacifist position, backed by the Peace Pledge Union.fn48 Quentin Bell and Duncan Grant took the classic outsiders’ position in the 1939–45 war against fascism: they remained in Sussex and the murals of a beautiful downland church, painted after the original stained glass had been destroyed by bombing in 1941, are a memorial to that decision.fn49

The general argument about fascism and pacifism in the 1930s provides a significant backdrop to Three Guineas. If one takes the view, as many erstwhile pacifists did as fascism in Europe grew, that the evils of Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s fascism were greater than the evil of war, then the arguments of Woolf’s essay are as inadequate as any other pacifist statement. (But this is not an objection that pacifists can make to the book.) Underlying this more general debate about pacifism is the vexing question of how Virginia Woolf understood the political agency of women. There is a sense in which Woolf’s construction of women as ‘outsiders’ enables her to exempt women from full participation in difficult decisions. There are many instances in her diary and letters that illustrate this general point, one particularly significant one being the diary entry following the 1935 Labour Party conference at which the leader, George Lansbury, was forced to resign after being attacked by Ernest Bevin for his implacable pacifism. Virginia Woolf, in a rather knowing entry, comments that Lansbury’s speech had brought tears to her eyes, that her sympathies were with the speaker who had preached non-resistance and, she added, ‘Happily, uneducated & voteless, I am not responsible for the state of society.’fn50 The significant word here is ‘happily’, which links to a more general ambivalence about political agency in Woolf’s thinking.

A sense of political powerlessness is present in much of Virginia Woolf’s comments on the rise of militarism and fascism in Europe. In 1936 she had written to Julian Bell: ‘I have never dreamt so often of war. And what’s to be done? Its rather like sitting in a sick room, quite helpless.’ Of Hitler’s invasion of Prague in March 1939 she wrote in her diary, ‘My comment anyhow is superfluous. We sit & watch.’fn51Of course these are natural responses, but in Virginia Woolf’s case they were exacerbated by a division of labour between her and Leonard Woolf, often referred to as ‘indefatigable’ in his political activities. In 1936 she wrote to Ethel Smyth as follows:

I am badgered by all kinds of politicians at the moment, and have just written a firm letter to resign my only office, on the ground that my husband does all that for two – or even one dozen.

Similarly, she recorded in her diary, apropos of Leonard discussing strategies with regard to refugees: ‘I go in, out of courtesy. He is doing a job for me.’fn52 Whilst these are not surprising comments, and could even be taken as proof of Virginia Woolf’s underlying sense of political responsibility, they do cast a slightly different light on the issue of political agency in relation to her formal advocacy of the position of ‘outsider’ for women. There is thus an area of unease, an abandonment of agency – possibly even of authenticity – that we should, perhaps, recognize rather than deny. As we shall see later, this is one of a series of ambivalences in Woolf’s political attitudes.

Three Guineas poses a number of questions for contemporary feminist politics. Does the argument apply only or specifically to fascism, or to all forms of militarism? What answer does it offer to those debating whether equality should mean the right of women to bear arms rather than act in a merely supporting role? Whilst this question can be brushed aside when speaking of the armed forces of dominant powers, it is less easy to dispose of in relation to the struggles of oppressed peoples against tyrannical rulers – as the debate over the place of women in the Nicaraguan armed forces showed. A second, perhaps more difficult issue, concerns the application of Woolf’s argument to a society in which women do now have more of an ‘interest’ or investment. Given Woolf’s inclination towards a materialist line of argument – she was not arguing that women were instinctively pacifist, but that they had no national interest to defend – the increasing financial independence of ‘the daughters of educated men’ could lead to a profound change in Woolf’s argument. Finally, too, one might ask the question as to how far the links Woolf made between the public dictatorship of fascism and the husband who makes his wife call him ‘Sir’ should be pressed. Certainly, they are both examples of the exercise of power, but we may find it useful to differentiate rather than homogenize these varying forms of power.

FEMINISM AND POLITICS: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND AMBIVALENCE

However much Three Guineas may have been appropriated by feminism, it is none the less the case that Woolf’s references in the book to feminism are far from sisterly. On page 227 she refers to feminist as ‘a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete.’ At this point Woolf argues that once the right to earn a living has been won, there are no causes specifically requiring the championing of women’s rights – better for men and women to work together in the same cause. On page 246 we find the carefully worded reference to ‘the proud boast’ that a certain corrupt word might be burnt. Between the two references (on p. 229) Woolf inserts the idea of difference between women and men; we might reasonably conclude that this recognition of difference would necessarily restore the political ground on which feminism operates. Here, again, we find Woolf oscillating on a fundamental point of feminist debate: does she want to support the ‘equality’ position, seeing differences between men and women as the product of history rather than biology, and thus favouring the participation of men and women in the quest for a more androgynous future? Or does she want to argue a politics based on difference – difference of instinct, difference of experience – that confirms the separate identities of women and men and leads to different futures for them? In a general sense, the political solution of the outsiders’ society, and the overall arguments of Three Guineas, indicate that Virginia Woolf moved from the androgyny/equality positions of A Room of One’s Own to a much more ‘difference’-oriented stance in Three Guineas. There is, however, an incipient tension in the text on this issue. One could take as an example the reference to the woman/outsider’s view of men’s fighting instinct, which Woolf refers to as ‘an instinct which is as foreign to her as centuries of tradition and education can make it’ (p. 233). This is no ignorant confusion between instinct and socialization, for Woolf explicitly notes how easily the fighting instinct can, ‘if sanctioned’, develop in women (p. 311), and differentiates in the text between instinct and reason. No, we may say that Woolf is underscoring the tension and complexities of what is now, in feminism, discussed as the problem of ‘essentialism’. And it seems possible that the hostility expressed towards feminism in Three Guineas is, in some measure at least, an indication of how difficult – but close to home for Virginia Woolf – were the issues that could not be resolved satisfactorily. Woolf was herself aware of this, noting the different and contradictory emotions that motivated women’s fight against patriarchalism. Significantly, this recognition comes in the context of her most extreme attack on the vocabulary of political activism. Woolf counterposes these real (if contradictory) emotions to political tags and labels, dusty lecture halls, damp and dowdy public meetings, saying that ‘the emancipation of women’ is inexpressive and corrupt and ‘anti-Fascism’ is fashionable and hideous jargon (p. 265). The violence of her language, attacking causes that she not only believed in but also worked for, might alert us to the possibility of contradictory emotions on the part of the author.

On a range of key issues this text could be said to house and articulate ambiguities that can also be traced through the extensive documentation of Virginia Woolf’s life. One such issue is the case of ‘contradictory’ or ‘obstinate’ emotion with regard to patriotism. In Three Guineas Woolf writes rather poignantly of the outsider who none the less feels ‘some love of England’ as a drop of pure, if irrational, emotion (p. 234). Woolf’s attitude to British royalty might be taken as an example of her irrational emotions. Ostensibly, she was completely critical: ‘We are flying for 3 weeks holiday to escape the coronation,’ she wrote to Lady Cecil; to Vita Sackville-West (who wasn’t a critic at all) she threw out a sparky, ‘shan’t I be thankful to be in a Courtyard in France, listening to a nightingale, drinking red wine, while you are curtseying and singing God Save the King.’fn53 Yet when the abdication of Edward VIII occurred, although her dominant emotion was extremely critical, she yet recognized an odd and contradictory feeling about it:

He has … thrown away the kingdom & made us all feel slightly yet perceptibly humiliated. Its odd, but so I even feel it. Walking through Whitehall the other day, I thought what a Kingdom! England! And to put it down the sink … Not a very rational feeling.fn54

Virginia Woolf’s essay on Mary Wollstonecraft remarks on a political ambivalence comparable to her own. Woolf clearly understood the ambiguity of Wollstonecraft’s feelings when – a passionate supporter of the French Revolution – she described being brought to tears and insomnia by the sight of the King conducting himself with dignity. As Woolf comments:

Things were not so simple after all. She could not understand even her own feelings. She saw the most cherished of her convictions put into practice – and her eyes filled with tears. She had won fame and independence and the right to live her own life – and she wanted something different.fn55

It is easy enough to point to other instances of political ambivalence in Virginia Woolf. This issue is important in that the traditional view of Woolf as an élitist aesthete has now been decisively displaced by feminist interpretations stressing both her anti-patriarchal stance and her commitment to a range of radical ideas and politics. Yet – to oversimplify a moment – it would be a big mistake to construct Virginia Woolf as an ideologically simple anarchist, lesbian, ecological, socialist, anti-racist feminist. There were, perhaps, one or two areas where her attitude was consistently and unambiguously critical of society. The award of honours, for example, was anathema to her even when – the point at which opposition frequently melts away – she herself was offered them. Her response to being offered state honours was an immediate and unequivocal refusal; her rejection of honorary degrees equally firm. When Hugh Walpole was knighted, she wrote to a friend, ‘What an incredible old ass Hugh is! Think of tagging a title to his quite respectable name! Why?’fn56 One 1933 diary entry makes a direct link between life and letters:

It is an utterly corrupt society I have just remarked, speaking in the person of Elvira Pargiter, & I will take nothing that it can give me &c &c: now, as Virginia Woolf, I have to write – oh dear me what a bore – to the Vice Chancellor of Manchester Un[iversi]ty & say that I refuse to be made a Doctor of Letters.fn57

Throughout her life Woolf remained scathingly critical of the academic system: ‘How I loathe lectures’; ‘I would rather sit in a cellar or watch spiders than listen to an Englishman lecturing.’fn58 Yet there was some flexibility in Woolf’s attitude. In 1939 she and Leonard talked to a class of book production students in a London polytechnic. She commented, ‘No it wasnt formidable. It was rather cheerful. And free & easy. Better much than Oxford & Cambridge.’fn59 Towards the end of her life she had reached some sort of accommodation even with the Oxbridge of her male relatives and friends, from which at earlier points she had felt bitterly excluded:

I like outsiders better. Insiders write a colourless English. They are turned out by the University machine. I respect them. Father was one variety. I dont love them. I dont savour them. Insiders are the glory of the 19th century. They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps.fn60

Honours and academia provide us with Woolf’s least complicated political responses; in many other areas there are much greater contradictions. There is no doubt that, notwithstanding her progressive politics on class and colonialism, Virginia Woolf expressed views in her diary and letters that we would now regard as unambiguously snobbish and racist. The flavour of her political ambiguities can be illustrated by the case of her strong views on marriage. The novels, of course, yield many critiques of marriage and family life. Of the abdication crisis, Woolf noted the advice that the King should keep Mrs Simpson as his mistress, commenting, ‘But apparently the King’s little bourgeois demented mind sticks fast to the marriage service.’fn61 Some time later, after attending a wedding, Virginia Woolf typed out for her Three Guineas scrapbook the following extreme words:

Marriage service. Savages in tail coats.

The woman has no worldly goods must therefore give

her body; must therefore accept her leader. Must

obey. <Every> [No] woman of any sense breaks her vow

to obey before she had left the church. A form.

But why have forms when you ought to speak the

truth? A solemn moment, really marriage.

Virginia Woolf was, of course, herself married. She regarded the form of the marriage service as appalling: ‘last time I went to one I had much ado not to stand up and cry out on the disgusting nature of it.’fn62But there is something bizarrely snobbish in the implication that upper-middle-class intellectuals can have marriages whose meaning transcends the superficial form, when the King’s desire for marriage is petty or lower middle class.

Another instance is the case of Woolf’s views on homosexuality. Blooomsbury’s standard talk of ‘bugger boys’ is perhaps much of a muchness with Virginia Woolf’s rather offensive use of the word ‘savages’. Probing beneath these relatively superficial issues we can turn up more vexatious attitudes on Woolf’s part. When the manager of the Hogarth Press died suddenly in 1937, the ensuing crisis revealed her sexuality. Woolf writes of this very unsympathetically (note the word ‘sordid’) in a letter:

Miss West, our manager, died; this led to other complications – some, as usual, of a sordid though psychologically exciting, kind (this refers to Sapphism and jealousy and the state of mind of friends whose hostility is suddenly revealed by death).fn63

More light is shed on this by an extraordinarily unsympathetic account Woolf gives in her diary of a conversation in which Hugh Walpole explained to her his sexual preferences (‘He only loves men who dont love men’) and practices, and how he could use none of this experience in his novels. Woolf said to herself: ‘They are therefore about lives he hasnt lived wh[ich] explains their badness. Hasnt the courage to write about his real life.’fn64 A remark which seems extremely harsh when one considers that these experiences were at the time deemed criminal, and even in modern times the publishers have felt it necessary to omit names from Woolf’s account! At least, one might say that it is the response of a securely married woman who is not making any effort to empathize with the experience of those inhabiting the margins of sexual/social life. It is, indeed, another side of Woolf, and one that needs to be set alongside the Virginia Woolf of 1928: publicly exercised about the Well of Loneliness trial and semi-publicly seduced by the glamorous Vita Sackville-West.

Finally, we can look at the contradictions of Woolf’s own political activity and reflections upon it. The last years of her life show an increasingly irritated commentary on the ways in which she was being drawn into anti-fascist work: ‘6 letters to sign daily’, ‘idiotic societies’, and so on.fn65 Yet when Vita’s son Ben Nicolson attacked what he regarded as the political élitism and impotence of Bloomsbury, Woolf rose to an impassioned defence of their politics in a series of carefully argued letters to him on the conflicting duties of artist and political activist and how such issues were to be resolved:

What puzzles me is that the people who had infinitely greater gifts than any of us had – I mean Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and so on – were unable to influence society. They didn’t have anything like the influence they should have had upon 19th century politics. And so we drifted into imperialism and all the other horrors that led to 1914. Would they have had more influence if they had taken an active part in politics? Or would they only have written worse poetry?fn66

There can be no doubt, however, that towards the end of her life Virginia Woolf was very exercised by the question of how people like her – artists – should act politically. In 1939, when the Woolfs met Sigmund Freud in London, exiled from Nazi Germany and ill with cancer, he had troubled her by tackling her pacifism: ‘When we left he took up the stand What are you going to do? The English – war.’fn67The next day’s diary entry reverts to the conversation with Freud, with Virginia Woolf going over his response to her feelings of guilt about the defeat of Germany in the First World War. By the following day, Woolf has become exercised about the refugees from Spain, trying to escape the fascist regime that Julian Bell had been killed trying to resist. She noted, ‘A bitter cold wind. Thought of the refugees from Barcelona walking 40 miles, one with a baby in a parcel.’fn68 Significantly, in the month before Julian was killed, eighteen months earlier, Virginia Woolf had been brought to tears by seeing a procession of Spanish refugees from Bilbao – mainly children – walking through Bloomsbury.fn69 So, it wasn’t perhaps surprising that, when asked to give a manuscript to be sold to raise money for the refugees, Woolf overcame her ‘hatred of encouraging writers in their idiotic vanity’ and sent them Three Guineas.fn70 In this gesture it is tempting to see some lasting significance. The manuscript of Orlando has reverted to Vita Sackville-West’s patriarchal heritage, under the terms of her will, and lies under glass at Knole; Leonard Woolf offered A Room of One’s Own to the patriarchal Cambridge that Virginia Woolf had so hated and it languished there, misfiled, for nearly half a century. The manuscript of Three Guineas has had a more honourable fate and it is empowering that, in her own lifetime, she was able to make some use of it in trying to ameliorate the effects of war. She wrote to Elizabeth Bowen, another writer concerned with the refugees:

I’ve a nice letter from someone called something Jones who bought 3 Guineas, I hope for a large sum. Will you thank her, if you see her.fn71

Michèle Barrett