FROM THE LATE VICTORIAN PERIOD TO WORLD WAR II

Woolf's life covers a period stretching from the last twenty years of the Victorian era right up to World War II. At the time of her death, she felt great personal anguish and pessimism about England's uncertain future. She had earlier planned a joint suicide with her husband if Adolf Hitler's forces invaded. Woolf's work covers many of the social tensions and issues of these times of immense change and turmoil.

In her work Woolf describes the restrictive social values of her Victorian childhood and Edwardian youth. She shows through strong young female characters the partial breakdown of patriarchal families. In Mrs. Dalloway she explores through Clarissa Dalloway and her circle the post-World War I crisis of identity. In The Years Woolf analyzes the Victorian past and how, in terms of family experience, the past was a prologue to her contemporary world. In the autobiographical works published posthumously in 1976 as Moments of Being, she associates such tradition and authority with the figure of her half brother George Duckworth: “George accepted Victorian society so implicitly that to an archaeologist he would be a fascinating object. Like a fossil he had taken every crease and wrinkle of the conventions of upper middle class society between 1870 and 1900. …”¹ Despite this conservatism, Woolf's era was typified by inner contradictions and outward change, a characteristic of all of her themes.

As Woolf's works indicate, her lifetime was a period of immense change, involving a transformation of both personal and public attitudes in England (and, more widely, the West). As her own life experience demonstrates, the world developed mass-communications systems and the means for mechanized and aerial warfare and moved from horse-drawn transport into motorized transportation. Woolf survived the great influenza epidemic that killed millions in 1918 (the same one that “weakens” Clarissa Dalloway's heart), noting its arrival in a neighboring house in Richmond but suffering from depression and mental illness for which medicine appeared helpless. In the same year, Woolf and her pregnant sister, Vanessa Bell, were taken by a horse-drawn carriage, booked by John Maynard Keynes, to a performance at the London Coliseum. Within ten years Woolf was traveling by motorized taxi to the cinema.

The artistic events and social attitudes of Woolf's time seemed as important as parliamentary politics and world events, because under such influences British society emerged from the Victorian patriarchy of her childhood. Art was more radical and exciting than Parliament. This helps to explain the momentum behind Bloomsbury. People like Woolf began to question not only conventional views of the family and the arts but also those of Empire and gender. These challenging forces helped to create the age of modernism. Clearly, traditional values were eroded by a range of factors other than the literary, such as increasing industrialization, the widespread loss of religious faith in European democracies, and the rise of the working classes (by which many bourgeois artists were both inspired and repulsed). There were also a series of financial crises, the scramble for colonial power, and World War I itself. Many of these appear in Woolf's texts. The social and emotional effects of the war are seen in Jacob's death in Jacob's Room; in the behavior of Septimus Smith, Mrs. Foxcroft, and Lady Bexborough in Mrs. Dalloway; and in the supper party interrupted dramatically by a bombing raid in the 1917 section of The Years.

In this age of flux and technological advancement, two issues affected Woolf's life more than any other: aesthetics and the role of women in the arts and society. Both were prominent concerns of her era. In a sense, modernism courted change, since, like its predecessor Romanticism, it had profoundly anti-establishment and radical tendencies. This undercurrent persisted from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the World War II, the period celebrated for modernist art. In a simple historical sense, much of the modernist urge is explained by what it rejected. Woolf and a wide range of different artists rebutted Victorian sentimentalism, with its populism and self-indulgent showiness of style, and also Victorian arrogance concerning social identity. This divided the modernists from the mainstream thinkers of the Edwardian and Victorian periods.

As even the most sympathetic critics concede, Woolf's social class was not fully representative of the majority British experience. She was part of an elite minority. Additionally, she did not choose entirely contemporaneous settings for her fiction. In fact, her relationship to her period is neither immediate nor direct. Her work is not primarily a chronicle of people's lives during the time that she was writing. Only two of her novels are set in the immediate period of their creation. These are Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, with perhaps a third added if one includes The Voyage Out. The social commentary in that novel, however, with its focus on a lost post-Victorian phase, was dwarfed by the events of World War I, making the book seem almost anachronistic. Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts make important reference and appeal to past events as well as those of the immediate narrative time. Clarissa Dalloway's memories of her youth are essential, and through Miss LaTrobe's pageant in Between the Acts, Woolf evokes thematically in the face of potential conflict the historical nature of community and Britishness. The pageant enacts grand moments of community and the past.

All of Woolf's other novels focus on phases of life and values that have palpably been superseded. Night and Day and Jacob's Room depict the social, emotional, and gender limitations of the Edwardian period. To the Lighthouse centers on the late-Victorian world of family holidays and family tensions. The Waves fragmentarily pictures various Victorian and Edwardian rites of passage. Orlando presents a mythic history stretching broadly from the Elizabethan period to the present. The Years conveys much of the minutiae of Victorian and Edwardian family contexts. In her diaries Woolf conveyed more of how she understood her era, with details on her close personal relationships and reflections on the dynamics and structures of the society of her time, particularly gender roles.

Each of Woolf's novels offers a critical picture of many of the wider features and dynamics underlying the period in which she lived and its immediate past. She was perceptive about social nuances and key events and movements. She reworked this history through the prism of a gendered perspective, a woman's view of that world. In Night and Day Woolf parodies patriarchy as a domestic ideal; Mr. Hilbery tries to assuage the shock of his final confrontation with his daughter by reading Sir Walter Scott: “Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening; the extent of the ruin was still undetermined; he had lost his temper, a physical disaster not to be matched for the space of ten years or so; and his own condition urgently required soothing and renovating at the hands of the classics.”²

Although the Victorian sensibility seemed in some ways to persist in family structures, a reversal of the earlier social smugness and a new aesthetic radicalism came together in the avant-garde impulses of Woolf and her immediate Bloomsbury circle. Such social negations were part of her literary perspective. Critics agree that the mating rituals of the young and affluent are made ridiculous in The Voyage Out, conventional life becomes a source of alienation and madness in Mrs. Dalloway, and incest and infidelity are indicated as undercurrents in The Years. In each case these themes run counter to and undermine any authoritative appeal to stability as part of the family structure. Examined closely, Woolf's dynamics are countercultural, despite a textual surface of social interaction and the portrayal of crisis as a deeply personal matter. In The Years Woolf charts the social and personal transition of her era for the Pargiters, an upper-middle-class family modeled on her own extended family. The narrative describes scenes of shoppers, horse-drawn London traffic, and the lives of middle-class charitable women in the 1880s; and, later, brick-throwing suffragettes, World War I, and motorized trams. There is conflict over the British Empire on the question of Ireland, and some of the respectably middle-class family members descend into a shabby-genteel poverty. Through these developments Woolf reveals that the apparent certainties of rank, identity, and position were capable of collapse. From her own experience Woolf shows how the snobbery of England persisted. In Mrs. Dalloway she gently parodies the aristocracy as a privileged class buffeted by larger forces despite its complacency.

Certainly, not all thinkers regarded the trend of modernism and the transformation of social ideas as a purely positive development. The once-influential philosopher Rudolf Eucken wrote Main Currents of Modern Thought: A Study of the Spiritual and Intellectual Movements of the Present Day (1908) as a warning:

There is a widespread modern tendency to take sides with the child against the parent, with the pupil against the teacher, and in general with those in subordination against those in authority, as if all order and all discipline were a mere demonstration of selfishness and brutality. … In connection with this tendency we should mention also the feminism with which we are now threatened: this does not aim merely at assisting women to their due rights; it would like to shape education and the whole of civilisation, as far as possible, from the point of view of feminine interests alone.³

In Woolf's era many sought to extend social rights, particularly to affluent women. Her cousin Katherine Stephen served as the principal of Newnham, one of the first Cambridge colleges for women. Woolf herself gave a guest lecture at Newnham on women and fiction. She reiterated her concern with women's education and political rights from both a personal viewpoint as well as a social one. Woolf returned repeatedly to the issue in her writing. In The Years, Kitty Malone reads out loud at her mother's request an editorial from The Times. Like Woolf's own mother, Kitty's mother is enthusiastic about the article's condemnation of the effects of universal education, particularly regarding domestic duties such as cooking. This was of contemporaneous concern. When Woolf accepted the chance to speak at two societies at Cambridge's women's colleges in October 1928, women had only been able to graduate with full degrees from Cambridge since 1920. Even at the time of her lectures, the teachers at women's colleges still had only limited access to library facilities. Woolf's 1929 feminist tract A Room of One's Own both celebrates educational reform and chastises the system for the limits still imposed. She adopted a particular style for her text that Ellen Bayuk Rosenman calls “associative and suggestive rather than strictly logical” and that avoids confrontation by offering a polemical but personalized narrative.⁴ Significantly, Woolf refused in 1932 to deliver the prestigious Clark Lectures in English literature, inaugurated by her father, despite being the first woman to be asked. This was partly because she felt she could not do so “without becoming a functionary; without sealing my lips when it comes to tilting at Universities. …”⁵ Woolf recognized that even by this period the battle for women's rights had not been won completely, and she railed against many of the absurdities of the lingering patriarchal attitudes in her more polemical work, in which she voices resistance to any recurrence of that overt oppression.

Later Woolf felt obliged to reenter this ongoing debate with the publication of Three Guineas in 1938, some thirty years after Eucken stated his conservative and antifeminist fears. She knew the work would prove controversial because many men still shared Eucken's fears and were less liberal than he in proposing a solution. They held to tradition and constraint. Woolf herself suffered directly. In 1920 Desmond MacCarthy patronized her in his public attack on the ability of female novelists, a dispute stemming from her justifiable rebuttal to MacCarthy's glibly favorable review of Arnold Bennett's nonfiction work Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord (1920). In 1935 E. M. Forster told Woolf that the London Library Committee had been discussing whether to admit women, which led her to think she was going to be asked to join. He went on, however, to explain that the committee had concluded by deciding against the idea. This controversy and Woolf's response in Three Guineas not only provide a glimpse of the ideological forces at work throughout this period but also stress the degree of the establishment's opposition to the feminist agenda. The struggle against British patriarchy was comparable in Woolf's view to the fight against fascism: “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.”⁶

In her writing Woolf acknowledges the development of cinematic photography, the spread of the telephone, the growth in secretarial work and typewriting, gradual changes in women's work, and, after World War I, an ongoing crisis in domestic service. All of these developments indicate a mobile social order with an irresistible dynamic of transformation. In Jacob's Room a London street procession creates a traffic jam near Whitehall: “The traffic was released; lurched on; spun to a smooth continuous uproar … sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and the large white clock of Westminster.”⁷ As if to stress the flux and reversal of certainties, toward the end of the novel, after the narrative of Jacob's childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, Woolf introduces other viewpoints. The narrative follows an unnamed parliamentary voice (inevitably a male one at this time) sketching the political and diplomatic descent into war and describes a procession descending into violence beneath the statues of the statesmen of the past. The transition into a more modern age is expressed not only thematically but also formally: with Jacob's Room Woolf moved from the more traditionally inclined narrative structure of her first two novels to the more challenging and experimental modes of modernism. She articulated a similar process of transition through her lifestyle and the discussions she took part in as a member of the Bloomsbury Group. However the group participants were not unique in confronting Victorian verities, nor perhaps did they represent the most progressive force. The painter Wyndham Lewis later looked back and concluded in an extended attack that Woolf and her acolytes represented no more than “a tyrannical inverted orthodoxy-in-the-making.”⁸

Whatever the motivation for and substance of Lewis's objections, Bloomsbury was nevertheless direct and irreverent in its attitudes and approaches, as is seen in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. In picturing the totality of Woolf's world, however, the effect of such intellectual and literary radicalism can easily be overstated, because many of the principles of a very male post-Victorian imperialism remained intact. This can be seen in the more-conventional characters surrounding Clarissa Dalloway, such as her husband and Hugh Whitbread, a politician and servant of the crown. With Richard Dalloway, Woolf reminds the reader that the modern period remained a world run by those who, like Dalloway, could recall Queen Victoria herself. Unimpressed by the memorial to her, he pictures the passing figure of the queen: “He liked being ruled by a descendant of Horsa; he liked continuity; and the sense of handing on the traditions of the past. It was a great age in which to have lived.”⁹ Woolf herself was far from totally rejecting the past and ignoring all traditional cultural values. In January 1936, while working on The Years, she recorded in her diary her reactions to the death of King George V. She and Leonard viewed the coffin at King's Cross Station, as if this were both a human duty and act of homage. Like Richard Dalloway, Woolf's impulses were not republican.

Woolf's aesthetic radicalism and feminism had their limits. This was common in her class. She was not immune to the assumptions underlying the snobbery and intolerance of an upper-middle-class background. She often wrote privately that servants were a problematic breed, describing them almost as coming from a different and lesser order of being. Servants feature only sketchily in her work. In 1918 Woolf predicted in her diary that social values would change in the postwar period, with an erosion in deference from the lower classes. However liberal she might appear to have been, her reaction to such a change was not entirely approving. On the days following the 11 November 1918 Armistice, she found herself appalled by the drunken celebrations, typified for her by a woman with bad teeth kissing several “stolid soldiers.”¹⁰ Woolf was also thankful that the threats of ordinary soldiers toward the officer class, which had characterized the end of war, had subsided. In April 1919, while visiting Katherine Mansfield, Woolf walked to a traditional fair on Hampstead Heath to the north of Bloomsbury. In her antipathy toward the mass of people, she found them detestable, smelly, brutish, and scarcely human. She commented, “I never for a moment felt myself one of ‘them.’ Yet the sight had its charm: I liked the bladders & the little penny sticks, & the sight of two slow elaborate dancers performing to a barrel organ in a space the size of a hearthrug.”¹¹ These were not unusual sentiments among the educated and governing classes, even to the time of Woolf's death.

Despite some progressive views, in other senses Woolf remained a product of the worst prejudices of her age. Despite her marriage to a Jewish husband, she was capable of exhibiting a casual, unreflective anti-Semitism, as when she derided Jewish characteristics in her mother-in-law. Moreover, despite her own madness and that in her family, Woolf appears to have been influenced by the theory of eugenics in her earlier years, and in an infamous passage from her 9 January 1915 diary entry she recorded encountering some “imbeciles” near her home in Richmond: “On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled and looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”¹² In these remarks Woolf was expressing views in keeping with those of others of her time. The birth-control advocate Marie Stopes's eugenic bias influenced her in pioneering birth control among working-class women, and as a cabinet minister Winston Churchill advocated the sterilization of “the feeble-minded and insane classes.”

Woolf's era was a time of dramatic political, changes such as the decline of the Liberal Party and the rise of the Labour Party, in which Leonard Woolf was a leading figure. Virginia attended the party's annual conference a number of times, but political upheaval hardly features in her writing. Nor do many of the other social conflicts of her times, such as the shooting of militant trade unionists or the conflict in Ireland. Much more about these matters surfaces vividly in Woolf's diaries. It is evident from this record that Woolf was perhaps less politically engaged than many of her contemporaries with radical views but that she had her own agenda concerning feminism and women's rights. Early in May 1926, she sketched the effects of the General Strike of that year: “An exact diary of the Strike would be interesting. … Everyone is bicycling; motor cars are huddled up with extra people. There are no buses. No placards. No newspapers. … [W]ater, gas & electricity are allowed; but at 11 the light was turned off. I sat in the press in the brown fog, while L. [Leonard Woolf] wrote an article for the Herald. A very revolutionary young man on a cycle arrived with the British Gazette. L. is to answer an article in this.”¹³

Initially, Woolf made note in her diary of the raising of food prices and her dependence on radio news because of the absence of newspapers. Yet, within a day, she wrote of being taken shopping to buy dresses with the editor of Vogue, an event that appears to have excited her more than the political and social turbulence. Significantly, during this period of political commitment on Leonard's part, the couple argued intensely for two days. On 9 May she wrote, “There is no news of the strike. The broadcaster has just said that we are praying today. And L. & I quarreled last night. I dislike the tub thumper in him; he the irrational Xtian in me.”¹⁴ Toward the end of the strike, on 13 May, Woolf recorded the celebrations enjoyed in Bloomsbury style, despite the fact that the miners' dispute was still unresolved: “I suppose all pages devoted to the Strike will be skipped, when I read over this book. Oh that dull chapter, I shall say. Excitements about what are called real things are always unutterably transitory. … In short, the strain removed, we all fall out & bicker & backbite. Such is human nature—& really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. We dined with a strike party last night & went back to Clive's [Clive Bell].”¹⁵ Later, in August 1931, against the backdrop of world financial crisis when England withdrew from the gold standard and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald split the Labour Party by forming a coalition government, Woolf wrote of her concerns about whether her literary efforts might be remembered as being rather like fiddling while Rome burned.¹⁶

By this time, as her diaries testify, Woolf felt acutely middle-aged, and by the 1930s she was perplexed both by the mood of politicization of a new literary generation and the descent into crisis and military conflict. As the decade progressed, a polarity between left and right extremism seemed to influence the younger generation. They were caught up in events such as the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War. Julian Bell, Woolf's nephew, served in Spain with the ambulance corps of the International Brigade and died from shrapnel wounds. Increasingly, Woolf felt impelled to take part, although at times reluctantly because of the nature of the meetings, in fund-raising and consciousness-raising events. Gradually, her sense of crisis deepened as an intense personal feeling. She felt more isolated as the European situation degenerated. In 1938, with Hitler absorbing territory, Woolf responded with Three Guineas, yet she feared that older intellectuals like herself were being overtaken by events. Her response was a feminism that was not understood at the time. In her diary she described military maneuvers as masculine “games,” increasingly seeing international conflict as a problem of men and patriarchy. Critics remain divided on how appropriate a response this represented. Woolf was genuinely disturbed by the turn of world events, especially after her and Leonard's own visit to Nazi Germany. They encountered the crowds and their conformity firsthand. After the German annexation of Austria, Woolf, along with most of her contemporaries, found her life dominated by the threat of war and ongoing militarism. In September 1938 she reflected:

What would war mean? Darkness, strain: I suppose conceivably death. … All that lies over the water in the brain of that ridiculous little man. Why ridiculous? Because none of it fits. Encloses no reality. Death & war & darkness representing nothing that any human being from the Pork butcher to the Prime Minister cares one straw about. Not liberty, not life … merely a housemaid's dream. And we woke from that dream & have the Cenotaph to remind us of the fruits. … We may hear his [Hitler's] mad voice vociferating tonight. Nuremberg rally begun: but it goes on for another week.¹⁷

Woolf recorded the fall of Barcelona in January 1939. There were synchronized explosions in London attributed to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). After World War II began in September, Woolf listened with fascination to the news in December of the imminent departure of the German battleship Graf Spee from the harbor at Montevideo, Uruguay, where the ship had gone for refuge after an earlier engagement with British warships in the South Atlantic:

Oh the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Monte Video today into the jaws of death. And journalists & rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to see the sight. This seems to me to bring war into a new angle; & our psychology. No time to work out. Anyhow the eyes of the whole world (BBC) are on the game; & several people will lie dead tonight, or in agony. And we shall have it served up for us as we sit over our logs this bitter winter night. And the British captain has been given a KCB [Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath].¹⁸

To Woolf it appeared that the mood of the world had changed with this descent once more into war. Here was the mass media hurrying to convey every detail of the destruction and despair. The literary and cultural revolt of modernism had once seemed to offset some of the despair of World War I. After 1939, it seemed to Woolf, as to many of her generation, that, like the Graf Spee itself, modernism was cornered and about to sink itself in desperation. This feeling had been building for some time. In September 1938 Woolf described the proceedings of the Memoir Club, which was a regular feature of later Bloomsbury. Keynes reviewed their earlier optimism and their belief in critical debate and its ability to sort out the problems of the world: “Maynard read a very packed profound & impressive paper so far as I could follow, about Cambridge youth; their philosophy; its consequences; Moore; what it lacked; what it gave. The beauty & unworldliness of it.”¹⁹ Like Bloomsbury itself, at times Woolf felt like an anachronism.

WOOLF'S TIME IN HISTORY

Almost without exception, Woolf is seen by critics as an essential figure in the modernist movement. Especially after her death, she came to be considered a key modernist writer. Modernism can be an elusive term, its exact definition a cause for great debate and disagreement. There is a consensus of opinion that this social and artistic movement involved a profound shift. It meant a revision of how people saw their world and included technological change. The revolution in the arts and aesthetic matters allowed progressive thinkers to challenge much of what had preceded them. In Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh, returning to England from India, reflects on the changes that have occurred during his absence: “Those five years—1918 to 1923—had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different.”²⁰ Agreeing on modernism's general features is complex, since it is argued there are various modernisms rather than any unified vision or experience. Certainly, Woolf's texts offer a glimpse into aspects of a world already being reshaped by great forces and becoming far different from the environment into which she had been born. There were changes in values most especially among the intellectual and artistic class to which her family belonged. Social convention was anathema. Feminism revised the position of women.

Despite the acquisition of the vote by all men prior to her birth, Woolf's era was one of ongoing social division. Subtle nuances defined the various classes, and throughout there continued to be significant division in terms of different conditions and wealth. Night and Day charts the conflict between well-established intellectuals, who, like the Stephens, are sufficiently notable and wealthy to be part of a ruling elite, and the lower-middle classes, of which Leonard Woolf and his family were part. Leonard was conscious of this class factor himself, and it plays a large role in his relatively unsuccessful novel The Wise Virgins (1914). Vanessa and Virginia are recognizable as the two central characters in a portrait less than flattering to Virginia herself. Some aspects were drawn from life. Woolf scholars often find themselves uncomfortable with her narrow understanding of class and breeding; she clearly thought that a person's background was a correlative of how much talent and creativity they were likely to have. She felt that the middle classes and aristocrats were an elite on merit. Her diaries show clearly that she recognized physical types who demonstrated better breeding and beauty. These types are very much delineated on class lines. Woolf's obsession with Vita Sackville-West led her into a physical adoration. There may be an underlying theme of idealizing the marginal and the few. It was the mass psychology of her age that Woolf rejected. In Recollections of Virginia Woolf Rosamond Lehmann recalls, “She had a romantic view of charwomen and prostitutes; and her conception of the ruling classes, of rank, fashion, titles, society—all that—was perhaps a shade glamorous and reverential.”²¹

Perhaps if one phrase stands out among Woolf's many critical statements, the best known is her comment on her era and its shift in general consciousness. She said in retrospect that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.”²² In terms of the artistic transformations of her era, this remains an astute remark. Peter Stansky's On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (1996) is devoted to studying the events and concepts underlying Woolf's somewhat bold and thought-provoking assertion. Stansky demonstrates how the Edwardian world was one of changing relationships in which Bloomsbury challenged convention by its intimate form of address (first names instead of the Victorian convention of surnames used between men) and explicit conversational references to sexuality. Stansky illustrates the class decisions and class conflicts in which the working classes were subdued by violence and shows how the power of tradition was eroded with the challenge of the Liberal Party government to the House of Lords. An election was called on a program committed to limiting severely the powers of the Lords to veto legislation, a political struggle referred to obliquely in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out. The character of Helen Ambrose was based in part on Vanessa, who had dined in her younger years with many political luminaries because of family social connections but seemed unaware of their significance. Stansky reports that she “was alleged to have sat next to Asquith [H. H. Asquith, the prime minister] at a dinner party and turned to him and asked him what he did.”²³

Part of a new mood of openness was expressed through Bloomsbury's series of elaborate sexual relationships. This has been read as indicating a liberality toward sexuality. Many members of Bloomsbury carried on affairs or relationships with partners other than their spouses. Vanessa became renowned for her sexual proclivities, and part of the Bloomsbury daring was to mention sex openly. Famously, Strachey is reported to have inquired whether a stain on Vanessa's white dress might be semen. In terms of such openness Woolf seems contradictory. Certainly, in her conversational language she could be uninhibited for a woman of her class and generation. She typed up obscene material for Strachey and even swam naked with the poet Rupert Brooke. Woolf could write in an unabashed fashion to Vanessa about Leonard's wet dreams, but her own sex life seems to have been constrained and at times nonexistent. She was happy to gossip about the innumerable Bloomsbury affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual. There were plenty of intrigues. Vanessa had an ongoing relationship with Duncan Grant after 1914, despite the public continuation of her marriage to Clive Bell and Duncan's constant affairs. Grant had been the lover of Strachey, Keynes, and Virginia and Vanessa's brother Adrian. Grant fathered Angelica Bell, although in this matter Bloomsbury's ostentatious frankness was replaced by secrecy. Angelica did not learn of her parentage until she was seventeen and resented being deceived. Another lover of Grant's was David “Bunny” Garnett, whom Angelica went on to marry, against Woolf's advice, and despite his being her own father's former lover.

Woolf was far from puritanical in her outward life and gestures. When not oppressed by illness, she was remembered for her conversation and humor, even if at times it could prove cutting and sharp. There was what some might regard as an almost undergraduate fancifulness to Woolf's set. Trickery and disguises compelled Bloomsbury, especially with the Dreadnought Hoax in 1910. Woolf, Grant, Anthony Buxton, and Guy Ridley disguised themselves as a royal Abyssinian entourage, paying an official visit to the flagship of the Home Fleet, H.M.S. Dreadnought. This became a public scandal and caused a furor in the popular press. At a fancy-dress ball at Crosby Hall in Chelsea, Clive, Vanessa, Roger Fry, Grant, Adrian, and Virginia dressed in skimpy native African garb that was shocking for the time, with legs and arms “blacked up.” In contrast, Woolf's works are less than explicit about copulation and sexual desire. In her suppression of her eroticism and her artistic expression of sexuality, Woolf can be seen as a product of the more-repressive tensions of her age. Possibly, she was either unable to shake off her moral guilt or dismiss the results of her earlier sexual abuse. Woolf's love affair with Sackville-West involved at most two physical encounters; Vita reportedly suppressed her passion because of fears of inspiring further madness in Woolf.

Woolf recognized the effects of her childhood as a profound influence on both her writing and her individual identity. Certainly, in sexual matters, both public and private experiences indicated a period of upheaval and struggle. Childhood meant not just family issues in a restricted sense; part of their broader meaning can be seen to have had parallels in issues of social concern. As Woolf clearly saw, women were generally suppressed. Her early years passed in an era of culturally approved misogyny and acts of male violence, epitomized infamously by the example of the murders committed by Jack the Ripper. Her own cousin, J. K. “Jem” Stephen, wrote extremely misogynistic and distasteful verses about such acts that were published in Granta, the Cambridge literary magazine. These verses appear to have drawn little adverse comment from the older generation of the Stephen family, despite Jem's own violence and sexual obsessiveness concerning Woolf's half sister Stella Duckworth. Under modernist influences British society emerged from the period of Victorian patriarchy partly because people such as Woolf began to question not only these older attitudes but also those of empire and male power generally.

Woolf's initial rebellion had two strands. The first was a journalistic and broadly artistic response, and the second a matter of adopting risqué and avant-garde lifestyles and activities in which art was the focus of new ways of perceiving things. As her fiction makes clear, Woolf grew up at a time when the world was reshaping itself through commercial and industrial growth. There was accelerating urbanization in England, a world of public transport and advanced communications that shrank the distance between imperial outposts. The transition to motorized and crowded cities is evident in The Years, and worldwide communications are part of the world of Jacob's Room: “The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication.”²⁴ Although one might take The Voyage Out as a retreat from such elements, with its brooding, primeval jungle, it opens on a world of motorcars, seagoing commerce, and the Mediterranean fleet guarding British interests.

Woolf had firsthand experience in key aspects of the women's rights movement. In 1910 she wrote to her Greek tutor, Janet Case, to volunteer for the less-militant wing of the suffrage movement, the Adult Suffragists. Later Woolf did work for the Women's Co-Operative Guild. Changes for women seemed slow to come, particularly in the period leading up to World War I. Progress was delayed by official opposition to the movement for suffrage, which resulted in the celebrated imprisonment for some agitators. In “Memories of a Working Women's Guild” (1930) Woolf describes issues that acted upon the minds of women in 1913, such as the need for liberal divorce laws, a minimum wage, and maternity care, as well as the extension of adult suffrage. Such was the threat of suffrage to the male establishment that it continued to resist extending the vote to women even after World War I. Later, Woolf endured criticism from several males, both fellow writers and even other Bloomsbury figures. These men drew upon their sense of male identity and felt justified in attacking the intellectual and social role of women. Certainly, even apparently experimental writers and thinkers could suddenly appear as part of the establishment where gender was concerned, as Woolf was only too aware. Both in her own life and in her writing she resisted such attacks and took what was the difficult position of supporting feminist resistance and encouraging ongoing militancy among middle-class women readers. Even Woolf's reading notes for Shakespeare's works in the period from 1909 to 1911 demonstrate her intention to bring to one of the great symbols of culture a gendered reading.

In her own writing Woolf concentrated almost entirely on the female characters. This female perspective is a key aspect of her own literary and general interests. Her struggle against the paternalism and patriarchy of the ruling class were undertaken both as an insider, a member of the upper-middle class, and as an outsider in her cultural position as a woman. It was primarily the women's issues among the many cultural topics of her period that most consistently caught Woolf's attention. Such issues were capable of exciting her anger. In this she was ahead of the mood of the establishment. In Night and Day the revolt of Katharine Hilbery highlights the regressive tendency of British society. Mr. Hilbery consoles himself with the illusion of paternal certitude and control, of money and property, elements that Woolf mocks gently: “Considering that Mr. Hilbery lived in a house which was accurately numbered in order with its fellows, and that he filled up forms, paid rent, and had seven more years of tenancy to run, he had an excuse for laying down laws for the conduct of those who lived in his house, and this excuse, though profoundly inadequate, he found useful during the interregnum of civilization with which he now found himself faced.”²⁵

In To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay ponders the extremes of female experience in the various social classes. She thinks of her mythical Italian noble ancestors and pictures the extreme inequities of wealth that she has encountered on her dutiful and charitable visits to the poor with her “note-book and pencil, with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity. …”²⁶ She is denied her wish to represent in a public sense any such social investigation partly because of the restricted role of womanhood. Yet, she embraces the maternal and domestic. In this way Woolf conveys the contradictions facing women of her mother's generation. The men in the novel may be dissatisfied, but because of a relative lack of success rather than having been offered no opportunity to pursue any such success. Mrs. Ramsay emerges as the most talented and yet most repressed of all the characters in the novel. That Woolf engaged publicly in her own version of such success, often against opposition, conveys the changing role for women in both their public and private worlds. From the world of the constrictive Victorian dresses society moved on to the revealing clothing of the Jazz Age flappers and beyond. The young women in Between the Acts offer a glimpse of a new form of female identity, one for which Woolf had struggled.

Although Leonard Woolf claimed that his wife was essentially politically disinterested, in fact she was well-versed in the suffragette cause. Her espousal of feminism and the cause of modern art formed part of an ideological rejection of British philistinism and Victorian values, a kind of political rejection unfamiliar to Leonard. Concurrently, two episodes marked 1910 for Virginia Woolf. There was violence at demonstrations in Parliament Square between police and militant suffragettes angry at the government for dragging its feet on a limited legislative extension of the vote to propertied women, a kind of commitment that is less radically represented in Woolf's fiction. In the 1910 section of The Years, Kitty Pargiter complains to her cousin Eleanor about the pigheadedness they encountered at a meeting concerning tactics in women's political action. Kitty rejects the use of violence. Later in life, Woolf revitalized her connection with the suffrage movement and feminism through her close friendship with Ethel Sands and friendships with pioneering feminists such as Ray Strachey (sister-in-law of Lytton Strachey) and Margaret Lewellyn Davies. Woolf's fictional images of struggle against monolithic Victorian social ideas ran parallel to her general commitment throughout her life to women's education and development. In Night and Day, Hester Denham studies to pass examinations for entrance into Newnham, the first women's college of Cambridge. This is exactly the kind of education that Woolf was denied—partly from family attitudes and partly due to her health—and the next generation found more accessible.

The other key event of 1910 was the Postimpressionist art exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, staged by Roger Fry in November. The whole enterprise was not an entirely altruistic one since Fry was trying to raise income, and he was disappointed that his share came to no more than £460. The controversy at the cultural heart of London was undeniable. One of the sponsors of the Postimpressionist exhibition, the director of the National Gallery, asked for his name to be removed after inspecting the paintings, as did the Duchess of Rutland.

Not all of the work in the show was new or unknown, whatever the varied responses. The exhibition featured Edouard Manet's last major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-1882), which had been shown at the Grafton Galleries in 1905. Other artists featured included Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. Paintings of Cézanne had appeared in International Society exhibitions in London in 1898, 1906, 1908, and many of the younger artists in Fry's exhibition had their work displayed at Robert Dell's Brighton show in June 1910. Previously these paintings had evoked far less controversy and debate. Not all response was hostile, but the intensity of reactions demonstrates that the arts were a field of significant cultural conflict in a world in transition. Sir William Richmond, a prominent artist and member of the Royal Academy, called the work “atrocities” and “rubbish” and implied that they encouraged unmanliness. Philip Burne-Jones complained of “the cult of ugliness and the anarchy and degradation of art exemplified today by the ‘Post-Impressionists.’”²⁷ On 3 December 1910 The Illustrated London News published cartoons of bemused and amused spectators with the caption “Gazers at Paintings Few Appreciate and Fewer Understand.”²⁸ Arnold Bennett, whom Woolf was to attack over the conservatism of his fiction, responded favorably in several contributions to The New Age, a journal dedicated to thwarting “the smug, failed certainties of the bourgeois nineteenth century.”²⁹

Clearly, from the reactions of both the supporters of the Postimpressionist exhibition and its detractors, aesthetic challenge and artistic experimentation were part of a central cultural debate in the early twentieth century. Yet, these Postimpressionist artists, so favored by Fry, were not necessarily at the forefront of experimentation. Bloomsbury, apart from Wyndham Lewis, was less than enthusiastic about Cubism and the Futurists. The Camden Town group of painters under Walter Sickert's leadership felt that Bloomsbury was celebrating something not thoroughly modern in its focus. Thus, perhaps too much is made of Woolf's progressive sensibilities in the visual arts.

Whatever the broad sense of excitement over the Postimpressionist exhibition, its cultural significance as a marker for change in the arts generally and its catalytic effect upon Woolf herself may be judged by her retrospective description of the event. In Roger Fry: A Biography (1940) she recalls the showing of the works to the press and invited guests prior to the exhibition:

There they stood upon chairs—the pictures that were to be shown at the Grafton Gallery—bold, bright, impudent almost, in contrast with the [George Frederick] Watts portrait of a beautiful Victorian lady that hung on the wall behind them. And there was Roger Fry, plunging his eyes into them as if he were a humming-bird hawkmoth hanging over a flower, quivering yet still. And then drawing a deep breath of satisfaction, he would turn to whoever it might be, eager for sympathy. Were you puzzled? But why? And he would explain that it was … quite easy to make the transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation. They were only pushing things a little further.³⁰

Critics now recognize that, whatever the bias of the group, one of Bloomsbury's skills, shared by Woolf, lay in its use of influence and connections to attract media and cultural interest in order to promote modernist aesthetic production and change the nature of public taste. In this sense Woolf played a part in changing her era, rather than simply reflecting its realities. The paintings of the artists represented in Fry's exhibition, which had influenced others such as Katherine Mansfield, had an even more profound effect on Woolf. One effect was the general adoption of the term Postimpressionist, which first entered the language through advertisements for the show. In reviewing a study of the Postimpressionists in 1911, Woolf declared herself as “an enlightened sympathizer of the ‘now historic exhibition,’” but she still considered the visual arts to be far less important than the literary.³¹ According to Panthea Reid, The Voyage Out was shaped by these cultural and visual experiences: “[Woolf] attempted further unconventionality by making the novel less ‘literary’ and more visual. Similes became metaphors, and language became shapes or ‘blocks.’ She even integrated some of Roger Fry's interest in Turkish art into her South American setting. At the level of word and image, her revisions reveal the influence of Fry and the Postimpressionists.”³²

Like most progressive people of her time, Woolf did not entirely reject the older patriarchal institutions or dismiss their potential worth altogether. She criticized universities but believed in them as a potential means of transforming the lives of women. She wanted women included in government and in the professions. She continued to use the London Library and the British Museum Library to her advantage. Woolf's involvement in the Hogarth Press was more an “intrinsic” than an “instrumental” activity, in that the artistic benefits of the business were more important than the financial ones. (S. P. Rosenbaum cites these categories of G. E. Moore and their possible influence on Woolf.) The press offered an artistic concept of independence, a kind of freedom; at the same time it helped to develop a number of literary careers of importance, including Mansfield's and T. S. Eliot's. The autonomy helped Woolf feel that she could employ unusual, innovative methods in her own works, thanks to the lack of editorial intervention and alteration. When her half brother Gerald Duckworth founded his own publishing house (which published Henrik Ibsen, Maxim Gorky, and Anton Chekhov, as well as modernist writers such as Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson), he had both a financial partner and capital of £12,000. The Hogarth Press did without the luxuries of overhead and a large staff.³³ Unlike another experiment in artistic self-sufficiency of this period, Fry's Omega Workshop, which folded, Leonard and Virginia made the Hogarth Press both financially and critically successful. Literary culture was still very strong, and they satisfied the desire for alternatives to tradition. With the relatively simple and plain design of Virginia's first editions, the Press epitomized the avant garde of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Like Fry, the Woolfs rejected the obsessions of the arts-and-crafts movement of William Morris and others. The Omega Workshop in Fitzroy Square was another experimental Bloomsbury focus point, funded by a legacy left to Fry. Practical difficulties burdened the participants, and the workshop was thwarted by the atmosphere of World War I. As Woolf says in her biography of Fry, “The war had killed, or was about to kill, his own private venture, the Omega.”³⁴ Omega was wound up in 1919, a cultural memory, its failure representing in Woolf's view the persistent philistinism of England.

To think of Woolf's set as composed entirely of aesthetes and removed from the social and political center would be a mistake. One example can be glimpsed in Edward Hilton Young, a family friend of the Stephens and a friend of Forster, whom he accompanied on a walking tour in 1909. Young had proposed to Woolf in 1908, but they had drifted apart. He ran for parliament unsuccessfully at the age of thirty-one in 1910 but was later elected in 1915 while serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Voluntary reserve; in 1935 he was made 1st Baron Kennet of the Dene. There was limited support, particularly among the middle classes, for the striking miners in 1926. Generally the middle-class public, Woolf included, tended to regard the working classes as potentially violent and uncivilized. Her friend Vita Sackville-West was a convinced eugenicist. Like many intellectuals, especially from the 1890s onward, Sackville-West saw the working classes as a cultural threat.

Clarissa Dalloway is at one level a projection not only of women that Woolf knew but also the identity that she might have had to adopt had she taken a different course in life. In reality, throughout this period and even into the 1930s, conservative forces made up the familiar and comfortable territory of the imperial political and administrative class among whom Woolf mixed as a friend, relative, and acquaintance. She might have been radical in terms of her opinions about the role of middle-class women, but in most other senses she remained conservative. The Woolfs' lifestyle was unconventional in sexual terms, but other elements of their lives were less surprising. Like the majority of the upper-middle class, Virginia and Leonard bought and sold property, arranged and disposed of leases, and held and lived at times partly on investments. Woolf shared an interest in the fate of King Edward VIII when he gave up the throne in December 1936 in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Woolf knew the details of the affair long before the general public, commenting in her diary well in advance of the British press.

LIFESTYLE AND CULTURE

Women of Woolf's generation were expected to marry and play secondary roles to their husbands. Woolf resisted such a traditional relationship, describing in Moments of Being her anguish at Victorian and Edwardian social occasions like balls and dinners, where social and courtship games were played according to unspoken rules. She was one of a generation who resisted this and set a new agenda. Her stance became typical, at least for the intellectual women of her day. These women's lives ran counter to the prevailing orthodox, masculine culture. Woolf was typically modernist in that she was sympathetic to social and cultural skepticism about Victorian certainties, most particularly aesthetic or artistic matters. Modernist books are noted for their rejection of nineteenth-century literary realism and for their challenge to any automatic adherence to bourgeois moral codes and set ideas of characterization and sensibilities. In The Years this stance can be seen in Rose Pargiter's contempt for politicians and conventional institutions, which stand in the way of progress for women. In this sense, even Woolf's earliest works, with their gender-specific perspective, can be said to have modernist elements as more than undercurrents. To see Woolf's novels as apolitical or merely obsessed with women's struggles is mistaken. Such a reading implicitly gives priority to the political structures of thought and debate of her times, a conservative reading of aesthetic change. Even in her early work recording Edwardian society and the “new woman” emerging in the middle classes, Woolf showed an awareness of what came to be regarded as political and ideological tensions between the genders and generations. She saw George Duckworth as typical of the men of her background, failing to oppose convention, bullying because of his financial advantages, and part of the “great patriarchal machine” described in Moments of Being.³⁵

Culture was beginning to be transformed through the agency of individual views and actions, particularly those of women. The younger generation in Night and Day appear either puzzled by or disinterested in conventional political issues or debates. Tentatively, the two central female characters, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, move toward at least a cursory and instinctive view of gender as the critical issue of their existence. This view stands in stark contrast to that of Mr. Hilbery. He represents the previous generation, with his recollection of switching his sympathies at a political meeting, swayed embarrassingly by the rhetoric of the other side. Despite their occasional puzzlement, there is a deeper quality in Mary's and Katharine's reaction to issues, representing as they do women of a new generation. At the end of one of the fortnightly informal discussions hosted by Mary, they find the men's discussion noisy and insistent. The two women sense that this represents men's ability to participate in and influence politics as something of great significance in itself:

“I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.”

“I dare say we should. And you spend your life in getting us votes, don't you?”

“I do,” said Mary, stoutly. “From ten to six every day I'm at it.”

Katharine looked at Ralph Denham, who was now pounding his way through the metaphysics of metaphor with Rodney, and was reminded of his talk that Sunday afternoon. She connected him vaguely with Mary.

“I suppose you're one of the people who think we should all have professions,” she said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among the phantoms of an unknown world.

“Oh dear no,” said Mary at once.

“Well, I think I do,” Katharine continued, with half a sigh. “You will always be able to say that you've done something, whereas, in a crowd like this, I feel rather melancholy.”

“In a crowd? Why in a crowd?” Mary asked, deepening the two lines between her eyes, and hoisting herself nearer to Katharine upon the window-sill.

“Don't you see how many different things these people care about? And I want to beat them down—I only mean,” she corrected herself, “that I want to assert myself, and it's difficult, if one hasn't a profession.”³⁶

Clearly, there is a difference in the gendered reaction as to what exactly constitutes politics. This meant that Woolf's pragmatic political perceptions were as overlooked or diminished as those of the two girls in Night and Day. Woolf drew upon such issues explicitly in her feminist, political nonfiction.

There remains something conservative in the distinct way in which Woolf and Bloomsbury came to be at the forefront of creating a new middle-class and intellectual lifestyle and culture. As Malcolm Bradbury says, “Bloomsbury was an intellectual community, but also a social caste, an attitude to life and values, a complex web of friends, an intricacy of relatives, marriages, and liaisons. Any of those involved were the children of the Victorian upper-middle-class intelligentsia, against whom they began to revolt in what, thanks to the influence of Freud, was coming to be called an ‘Oedipal’ way.”³⁷ This was typical of the social networking in England of this whole period, a pattern of life and influence that Woolf's novels reflect. This revolt was not complete, and the Bloomsbury members continued certain traditions. On their now-celebrated arrival in Gordon Square, Vanessa celebrated the past to the extent of hanging the Watts portrait of their father and family photographs of James Russell Lowell, George Meredith, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, all among the potentially great cultural icons of the Victorian age. In fact, Woolf had met Tennyson, and before her own fame, she became irritated with people's questions about the great Victorian poet. The Bloomsbury world remained a class defined by wealth, independent incomes in the main, and well-connected privilege, even if with a bohemian tinge. For instance, by 1916 Woolf's capital had increased, and she was by any assessment relatively wealthy, with a sum of £9,000.³⁸ She was aware of the monetary distinctions and inequalities that persisted between the classes during her life, noting that as late as 1921 the annual income of a servant was a mere £45.³⁹ Like many of her class, Woolf felt it a failing if any of her capital was ever needed for any expenditure; hence the need to work on a freelance, independent basis.

During the period preceding and throughout World War I, many of Woolf's friends shared a similar literary and journalistic lifestyle. They constituted a group made up mostly of either relatives or members of the post-Cambridge set of her brother Thoby's. Initially Bloomsbury was merely an extension of this world, primarily a male world, where, in Rosenman's words, “[w]e hear about her [Woolf's] new freedom in Bloomsbury, where she could banter with Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and the other Cambridge friends of her brother Thoby. Actually she was still very shy and, somewhat defensively, did not find the conversation of these young men terribly appealing.”⁴⁰ Woolf refers to these events in her early writing. Inspired by what she saw as forces for the transformation of her age, Woolf imagined cultural change to be expressed best by the activities of her own group, even if at times she appears to have conceded the possibility that such thoughts could tend toward the grandiose and vague. In The Voyage Out Evelyn Murgatroyd maps out her vision of social and cultural transformation, her aspirations parodying those of Bloomsbury. She describes her vision of

a club for doing things, really doing them. She became very animated, as she talked on and on, for she professed herself certain that if once twenty people—no, ten would be enough if they were keen—set about doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains—of course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet once a week.⁴¹

Evelyn insists that even young women be allowed involvement in political discourse, influencing decisions and contributing to political issues. In The Years Eleanor Pargiter works in an office campaigning for the women's vote. Later, the more militant Rose Pargiter is imprisoned for her brick-throwing in support of the cause. Wolf presents such characters as part of a new intellectual class. She drew from the kinds of women she encountered and fictionalized their lives in such contexts as a political confirmation of a feminist stance.

Woolf's fiction drew its energies from her life. She depended on the Bloomsbury intellectuals, both their celebrated discussion evenings and their other clubs. These activities created a sphere in which she could take herself seriously. The members of the group patterned their lives around creativity and formed a new intelligentsia. Their influential art, journalism, and cultural products encouraged the modernist trajectory that saw people determined to separate themselves from their immediate past. For Bloomsbury and, later, the literary establishment in England, many of these personal links became a set of coordinates for literary and artistic developments of the period. Lytton Strachey was a friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, and Strachey wrote reviews for The Spectator. Strachey's sisters were active in the suffrage movement. In several of her works Woolf conveys the dynamics of this world, in which a new generation came to share new social structures, organizations, and expectations. The Voyage Out centers almost entirely around a moneyed class of younger people traveling abroad, obsessed with aesthetics, marriage, and their own identities. The novel traces many of the realities of the Edwardian prewar upper-middle class and aristocracy, aspiring toward new relationships and yet contained by the continuing presence of the parental generation.

Certain ongoing privileges helped to mold the horizons of the art and the lives of this new, upper-middle-class artistic set. Foreign travel, important also for the earlier generations of the Romantic period, extended the perspectives of youth beyond a constricting social code. Woolf took part enthusiastically in such intellectually motivated travel, and this cultural experience figures as a major theme in The Voyage Out. She visited Greece in 1906, Italy in 1908, Turkey in 1911, and, variously, France, Spain, and Italy in 1912. She later visited Spain in 1923 and traveled widely in France, Italy, and Germany in later years, until World War II intervened. One of her earlier influences was the similarly well-traveled Strachey. In a January 1918 diary entry, with the benefit of hindsight, Woolf reflected on Strachey as typifying a certain male aspect of her class, commenting on his lack of physical warmth and his assumption of privilege. She found his prose “metallic”; for her it depended on a “conventionally brilliant style, which prevents his writing from reaching, to my judgement, the first rate. It lacks originality, & substance; it is brilliant, superbly brilliant journalism, a supremely skilful rendering of the old tune. Written down these words are too emphatic & linear; one should see them tempered & combined with all those charming, subtle & brilliant qualities which compose his being in the flesh.”⁴² Woolf already seemed to perceive alternatives, sensing a more fundamental modernism as a possibility.

Despite her origins, successes, and relative wealth, Woolf seemed constrained by the prevailing orthodoxy in both the conventional world and that of Bloomsbury concerning women's public role. Personally, she agonized over whether she would marry and settle into family life, and she rejected a string of proposals in a version of the elaborate Edwardian game of courtship and engagement that she parodies as almost impenetrable in The Voyage Out. The protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, resists (as Woolf herself had done) the courtship rituals of Edwardian society. In the face of male mockery, Rachel attempts to provide herself with a literary education. This is very much in contrast to the Victorian traditions of the upper-middle class, which are epitomized in the novel by Ridley Ambrose. His very presence and ethics subdue a conversation between Rachel and Terence Hewet. Everything becomes “more formal and more polite,” and they find no appeal in Ridley's narrative personalities and art. He manages to silence the “informalities of the young.”⁴³ Clearly, this effect on young people in general is even more profound on young women. Night and Day opens with Katharine Hilbery engaged in the social ceremony of administering tea. Dutifully, at her mother's suggestion, she shows Ralph Denham her grandfather's study, set out as a shrine to both his poetic genius and the family's colonial Indian connection. Woolf presents a symbolic interconnection of the masculine silencing of women, Victorian art, and the imperial narrative.

All of these themes of power relate to Woolf's own experience of her father and her family as dominating influences. They demonstrate the forces of respectful veneration that were still very strong in the British culture of her youth but were to change under the influence of the Bloomsbury generation. Ralph Denham, modeled on Leonard Woolf, is a figure of the new middle class. He articulates the conflict between the generations just after the war, a historical shift that dominates Woolf's fiction: “No, we haven't any great men. … I'm very glad that we haven't. I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of the generation.”⁴⁴ Rather than gaze at the windows of Katharine's house in romantic adoration, Ralph decides to visit her friend Mary Datchet, who tells him of the government's evasions concerning a women's suffrage bill. She draws his respect for her convictions on public issues, an image of the emergent new woman. Woolf herself detested the Victorian image of woman as the “Angel in the House” (epitomized for her by her mother), objecting to the stereotype of sympathy, sacrifice, and purity, which she describes in “Professions for Women” (1931) as a shadow behind her while she wrote. Woolf believed that “[k]illing the Angel of the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”⁴⁵

At a certain level Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet represent not only different aspects of Woolf but also the tensions in the lives of educated women of her era. For Katharine, as for the younger Woolf and her generation, convention rests in family contexts. Woolf conveys this using the metaphor of a “book of wisdom,” in which it is as if “The rules which should govern the behaviour of an unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has not the same writing scored upon her heart.”⁴⁶ Katharine finds herself divided between the financial stabilities of her class and the ill-defined alternatives. This split helped to dismantle, especially in terms of class and language, the apparent fixed virtues and certainties of the Victorian age. Nevertheless many resisted this change until World War II. Certainly, Woolf found the pretensions of her own class ludicrous and parodied them. In a 1915 diary entry she recorded seeing a news report of a speech by her cousin William Vaughan, later headmaster of Rugby School: “I see Will Vaughan quoted in the Times to the effect that teachers neglect the grammar of modern languages, & talk too much about style & literature; but nothing fortifies the character & mind so much as grammar. How like him!”⁴⁷ Vaughan represented the very picture of the world Woolf attacked in Three Guineas.

One personal feature of Woolf's life that tends to draw much critical and biographical attention is her sexual life (or lack of one, according to where scholars stand upon this issue). Critics from the 1980s onward have made much of Woolf's attraction to women. She tended to have close relationships with “Sapphists,” the traditional term for lesbians. Despite her marriage, and with seemingly few objections from Leonard, Woolf had a passionate romance with Sackville-West. Woolf was drawn to Vita because of her aristocratic exoticism. Well before the affair, when she had lunch at the family seat at Knole House with Vita's father, Woolf was impressed by all of the house's historical associations. Lesbianism at this point did not have a full identity, nor was it always seen as a social problem if it did not disturb the relationship such women often maintained with men. Such female relationships were common in the wealthier classes at this time as secondary relationships. Few considered them as part of a political or social identity. Even many “Sapphists” did not consider their relationships with females as a valid alternative to marriage. Woolf wrote the fictional Orlando: A Biography (1928) as an elaborate joke and as a serious historical fantasy. It is also an homage to her relationship with Vita. In it Woolf explores the concepts of gender through a blurring of sexual roles and identities in the figure of the dashing aristocratic protagonist, modeled on her friend and lover. In the text she creates an ideological role for androgyny and lesbianism. Despite Woolf's initial sense that the book served as a break from writing more-serious works, Orlando was highly successful and created a turning point in the Hogarth Press's fortunes, as did the best-selling status of Sackville-West's own novel The Edwardians (1930). Orlando also offers a glimpse into the obsessions of the literary class of Woolf's period with aristocracy, romance, and the transformative power of relationships.

Even though wealthy “Sapphists” tended not to be persecuted, it is worth noting that despite the rise of experimentation in the arts in the early twentieth century, it was still a period of censorship and sexual repression. The erotic and emotional activities of the Bloomsbury “buggers,” or male homosexuals, were strictly illegal (as the prosecution of Oscar Wilde illustrates). Yet, such lifestyles were tolerated among the upper-middle classes as a primarily private masculine bonding. This social atmosphere and Woolf's own reticence about the significance of sexuality in her own life and marriage led her to downplay physical relations and eroticism in her fiction. Yet, these issues neither embarrassed nor intimidated her in any fashion except as part of her inner emotional life, as recollections of the sexual explicitness of Bloomsbury gatherings reveal. Vanessa Bell wrote quite explicitly to her sister, and Woolf accepted the intricate sexual entanglements of her group. Significantly Virginia and Leonard were willing to be publicly recognized as opponents of the censorship and potential prosecution that threatened both D. H. Lawrence and the lesbian writer Radclyffe Hall (although Woolf found the fiction of the latter tedious and uninspiring). The threat of censorship was one of the chief reasons that the Hogarth Press did not publish James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) when given the chance to do so.

Woolf seems to have perceived certain undesirable aspects of mass culture in the populist writing of her time, with its realist ambitions. William Butler Yeats wrote in 1916 that “[r]ealism is created for the common people and was their particular delight, and it is the delight today of all those whose minds, educated alone by schoolmasters and newspapers, are without the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety.”⁴⁸ Woolf dismissed the central assumptions of a conservative, regressive literary traditionalism. Her position included some notion of a loss of faith in conformist identities as offering any real sense or providing any sort of acceptable social bedrock. For modernists, presenting a renewed concept of the world was important, but so too was their need for a literature, mediated by the less-rigid forms of colloquial speech, to describe a different, more fragmented world, where the old orthodoxies could be challenged. The result was a revolutionary new literary epoch, one that is now familiar but that was shocking and exciting at its inception. Woolf played a major role in shaping her times and continues to influence the intellectual debate of later generations.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, second edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 151.

2. Woolf, Night and Day, edited by Julia Briggs (London & New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 406.

3. Rudolf Eucken, Main Currents of Modern Thought: A Study of the Spiritual and Intellectual Movements of the Present Day, translated by Meyrick Booth (London & Leipzig: Unwin, 1908), pp. 359-360.

4. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity (New York: Twayne, 1995), p. 13.

5. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, volume 4 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1983), p. 79.

6. Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 103.

7. Woolf, Jacob's Room (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), p. 171.

8. Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 170.

9. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 117.

10. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 1 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1979), p. 216.

11. Ibid., pp. 267-268.

12. Ibid., p. 13.

13. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 3 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1982), p. 77.

14. Ibid., pp. 79-81.

15. Ibid., p. 85.

16. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4, p. 39.

17. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1985), p. 166.

18. Ibid., p. 251.

19. Ibid., pp. 168-169.

20. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 71.

21. Rosamond Lehmann, in Recollections of Virginia Woolf, edited by Joan Russell Noble (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1975), p. 81.

22. Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Collected Essays, volume 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 320.

23. Peter Stansky, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 158.

24. Woolf, Jacob's Room, p. 171.

25. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 407.

26. Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 9.

27. Quoted in Stansky, On or About December 1910, p. 220.

28. Ibid., p. 223.

29. Ibid., pp. 225-227.

30. Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1940), p. 152.

31. Woolf, quoted in Panthea Reid, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 125, 116.

32. Reid, Art and Affection, p. 121.

33. S. P. Rosenbaum, Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center/University of Texas at Austin, 1995), p. 17.

34. Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 213.

35. Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 153.

36. Woolf, Night and Day, pp. 45-46.

37. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1989), p. 236.

38. John Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 11.

39. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 2 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981), p. 92.

40. Rosenman. A Room of One's Own, p. 40.

41. Woolf, The Voyage Out (London & New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 304.

42. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 1, p. 236.

43. Woolf, The Voyage Out, p. 192.

44. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 12.

45. Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in Killing the Angel in the House: Seven Essays (London & New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 5.

46. Woolf, Night and Day, p. 265.

47. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 1, p. 13.

48. William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 227.