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VIRGINIA WOOLF (LETTER DATE 16 OCTOBER 1920)

SOURCE: Woolf, Virginia. "Letter to the Editor, The New Statesman." In Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joanne Trautmann Banks, pp. 124-27. London: Hogarth Press, 1989.

In the following letter, which originally appeared in the magazine New Statesman on October 16, 1920, Woolf responds to comments made by Desmond MacCarthy—"Affable Hawk"—regarding the intellectual inferiority of women by offering a number of historical precedents that contributed to such a conclusion.

To The Editor, The New Statesman

[Hogarth House, Richmond]

[16 October 1920]¹

Sir,

To begin with Sappho. We do not, as in the hypothetical case of Burns suggested by 'Affable Hawk', judge her merely by her fragments.² We supplement our judgement by the...

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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