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HAROLD BLOOM (ESSAY DATE FALL 1994)

SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. "Feminism as the Love of Reading." Raritan 14, no. 2 (fall 1994): 29-42.

In the following essay, Bloom centers on Woolf's passion for reading as the defining feature of her literary criticism, demonstrating the influence of Walter Pater's aestheticism upon her feminist politics.

Sainte-Beuve, to me the most interesting of French critics, taught us to ask as a crucial question of any writer in whom we read deeply: What would the author think of us? Virginia Woolf wrote five remarkable novels—Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941)—which are very likely to become canonical. These days she is most widely known and read as the supposed founder of "feminist literary criticism,"...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Virginia Woolf (Review Date 25 January 1905)
   2. Virginia Woolf (Letter Date 16 October 1920)
4. General Commentary
   1. Herbert Marder (Essay Date 1968)
   2. Barbara Currier Bell And Carol Ohmann (Essay Date 1974)
   3. Toril Moi (Essay Date 1985)
   4. Harold Bloom (Essay Date Fall 1994)
5. Title Commentary
   1. A Room of One's Own
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Virginia Woolf
2. Feminism