Virginia Woolf
In writing about Virginia Woolf, I’m going to take the easy way out. I will avoid talking about her novels. It’s a decision which will save me from having to explain the power of Mrs Dalloway, a novel about a day in her life, told first person as she moves between tasks and recollections, a day that ends with a dinner party. I won’t have to cover the series of extraordinary conversations over the course of a day by the beach that take place in The Waves. I can sneak past To The Lighthouse, covering moments in the lives of the Ramsay family, especially two visits, ten years apart, to the Isle of Skye. I’m no literary scholar. All I can say about her novels is that Virginia Woolf wrote about people ‘from the inside’, and her stream-of-consciousness books are among the most compelling I’ve ever read.
In this blog, my plan is to avoid her fiction entirely. Instead, I want to explore two of her nonfiction essays, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. However, a little background first. Encouraged by her father, Woolf had begun writing professionally in 1900 when she was just eighteen years old. As I’m sure you know, her family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury in 1904, where she, in conjunction with her brothers’ intellectual friends, formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. She married Leonard Woolf, and they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish many of her books. A Room of One’s Own appeared in 1929, and Three Guineas in 1938.
Virginia Woolf lived a life with debilitating challenges. From the age of 13, she suffered periodic mood swings, going from severe depression to manic excitement, as well as occasional psychotic episodes, which her family referred to as her ‘madness’. However, she wasn’t mad, but she did suffer from and struggled with illness for much of her life. As Hermione Lee put it , she was a woman of “exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism, who made the best use and achieved the best understanding she could of her illness” (in ‘Virginia Woolf’, 1999). For most of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. Any mental, emotional, or physical strain was likely to lead to a reappearance of her symptoms, starting with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race.
In 1940, a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry had been released to a disappointing reception. That depressed her, and then in September and October her two London homes were destroyed in the Blitz. Finally, she completed her novel Between the Acts in November, and was exhausted. Her health collapsed. 59 years old she died by drowning herself in a river close to her home in Sussex on 28 March 1941.
Back in 1928 Virginia Woolf had given two lectures at the University of Cambridge, one at Newnham College, and the other at Girton College. They were to form the basis of A Room of One’s Own, which is really an extended essay. It’s 149 pages long in my Oxford paperback edition, but it could be less than a hundred pages in a standard book format. Written more than ninety years ago, it is an extended critique of the challenges and slights that disempower women. While it addresses social, educational, and financial issues, it is especially concerned with the lack of women writing novels. As the title suggests, it rests on the assertion “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. She weaves her commentary around the problems faced by many women authors, including the Brontës, George Eliot and George Sand, some who chose to ‘hide’ using a male persona. Jane Austen, who published using her own name, was given as a striking exception.
One chapter of Woolf’s essay begins with a simple proposal: “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” After describing what little was known when she wrote about Shakespeare’s life, she continues to contrast Judith’s experience with his:
Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter–indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring woolstapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. he would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager–a fat, loose-lipped man–guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting– no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted — you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last — for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows–at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so–who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body? — killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
As I turned to that section once again, I thought how much had changed in the western world. Many women artists have the resources and the space to flourish. Then I re-read the story about Judith. I scarcely need to comment how uncomfortably close that is to today’s world. Yes, many women have a room of their own, but many do not. If women in the arts are empowered in a way that was almost unimaginable a hundred years ago, but there is so much still to be done. At the same time, as Virginia Woolf might have added, there are other marginal and disempowered groups in relation to whom these comments are all too apposite.
Incidentally, Shakespeare did have three sisters. One, Joan, died in infancy, and another, Anne, died when she was eight years old. His other sister, another Joan, lived until she was seventy-seven, and lived in Stratford-on-Avon. There was a Judith in his life, a second daughter, the twin sister with his son Hamnet, younger than his other (more favoured) daughter, Susanna. Judith was probably illiterate. All of this goes to show that Virginia Woolf had a marvellous skill in intertwining fact with fiction!
For a long time, it was A Room of One’s Own that stuck in my mind, and Three Guineas was almost forgotten. Now I can see that Three Guineas both embraced and developed the views in the first essay but added so much more. The entire essay is structured as a response to an ‘educated gentleman’ who had written a letter asking Woolf to join his efforts to help prevent war. The possibility of war was evident in 1936, and the question was particularly important for Virginia Woolf, a committed pacifist. In the letter (the author is never named), she is asked for her opinion about how best to prevent war. In reply she offers some practical steps.
Woolf opens her response by stating first, and with some slight hyperbole, that this is “a remarkable letter—a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented.” Despite the ‘remarkable’ nature of the letter, Woolf had left it unanswered for more than two years, commenting that as the daughter of an educated man, without access or place in the public world of professions, universities, societies, and government, she feared that there are fundamental differences that will make her “impossible for [educated men] to understand.” Yes, she had received what she rather nicely termed a remarkable letter, but Three Guineas is far more remarkable. Clever, moving, snarky, aggressive and above all a beacon throwing searching and at times astonishing light on life for women in 1938.
In responding to the letter, Virginia Woolf had faced a dilemma. On the one hand, this was an invitation to step out, to leave her encompassing private life and home and take action to help prevent war, an aim that Woolf clearly shared with her unnamed correspondent. On the other hand, the invitation of the letter was compromised by her unwillingness to simply do what was being suggested, and ‘fit in’ with the public world of men. “Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed.” No wonder she thought about it for nearly three years.
In the course of responding to the writer’s questions and practical suggestions, Virginia Woolf turned to two other letters: a request for funds to help rebuild a woman’s college and a request for support for an organisation set up to help women enter the professions (to begin a professional life). What she had to say gave me a shock. First, I learnt that for years students at the two women’s colleges at Cambridge were not allowed to cite their degrees, they could not add BA to their names. Even when that was grudgingly allowed, they remained unable to be part of the university. Responding to a letter seeking a loan to make a newly acquired house useable by the college, she comments “the colleges for sisters of educated men are, compared to their brothers’ colleges, [are] unbelievably and shamefully poor”. While the rest of the university was affluent, loaded with bequests and donations for men to pursue their research, there was no similar support for Newnham and Girton, which were left scrabbling for small donations to maintain basic support services.
Twenty-five years later I was at the university, in one of those rich colleges. I was aware of the huge imbalance of numbers: around 12-15% of students were women, the rest men. That was the basis that I and many others fought to get men’s colleges to go co-educational. To my shame, I hadn’t understood this wasn’t just about the balance of numbers, even though that was obviously important. It was also about broader access to resources, and on that front I was ignorant. Today the world Virginia Woolf knew is long gone. Women comprise 47% of the undergraduates, comparable to most universities in the UK. In the last decade the university has raised £2.2 bn, and much of that money is going into programs for women, for other categories of disadvantaged people, as well as much needed research on many social issues. Many of Virginia Woolf’s concerns have been addressed, but I probably don’t need to add that real equity in terms of gender, let alone on so many other divisive issues, still faces several challenges to be overcome, eighty years after Three Guineas was published.
There is so much more about education packed into Virginia Woolf’s essay. She doesn’t just want women to have fair access but uses the opportunity to set out a critique of both the education system but also of the professions. It is a critique that nicely illuminates how the system before the war encouraged and sustained the very attitudes that lead to Fascism both at home and abroad. This was the time of Mosely and the black shirts.
Very appropriately, she both supports the value of education and of committing to public service, but she goes further, suggesting the influence of values and priorities “which the daughters of educated men will need to heed if they are to prevent being corrupted by the public order”. She imagines, for example, a new kind of college that avoids teaching the tools of ‘domination and pugnacity’, “an experimental college, an adventurous college…. It should teach… the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds…. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers.” In this, as in so many other ways, we seem to be slipping backwards today. Perhaps we could have an updated edition of Three Guineas, modified to include some more contemporary examples. I imagine it might be titled Three Dollars, or even Three Bitcoin Oops, those might be totally worthless.
At the end of Three Guineas, Woolf moves on from education and the professions to the larger question of preventing war and some practical measures she suggests for so doing. In it she argues that although she agrees with her correspondent that war is evil, she suggests she and he must try to eradicate it in different ways: “since we are different,” Woolf concludes, “our help must be different.” The value of Woolf’s opinion and suggested approach on how to prevent war lies in its radical difference from the views of the letter writer. “Its impossibility of being completely understood is, then, the condition of its usefulness.”
As for the title, the writer of the letter was seeking support for the war effort. Well, Virginia Woolf decided to give to three causes. One guinea goes to rebuilding at a women’s college. The second is a donation to “help the daughters of uneducated women enter the professions’. The third, after careful analysis, is given to the letter writer to use as he thinks best. She concludes “the three guineas, you will observe, though given to three different treasurers are all given to the same cause, for the causes are the same and inseparable”. For Virginia Woolf, that broader aim was ensure the rights of everyone, men and women, to “the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty”.
One of the benefits that comes from writing a blog about a person, in my case usually a writer, is that to do so I need to reread the author’s works. In the case of Virginia Woolf, I had forgotten how brilliantly she wrote. If the two essays present powerful claims for redress given the centuries during which women were treated as secondary citizens, or not even citizens at all, she does so like a builder constructing a house. Each brick is carefully examined, its place considered, its value weighed. Once in place, it may be replaced later or given further support. The result of the process is strength, the house stands firm. This is the approach of these two essays, and especially Three Guineas. Eighty years ago, it should have been regarded as providing a convincing and sufficient basis for equality. Today, if some of the issues are dated and some expectations have been met, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas remain powerful and relevant, while their agendas remain far from finished.
