THE VOYAGE OUT

In The Voyage Out a number of middle-class English people set off on a sea voyage with various ultimate destinations. On board, Helen Ambrose encounters her niece, Rachel Vinrace, who is traveling with her father, the owner of the ship. The innocent, virginal Rachel suffers a kind of confused sexual trauma induced by a snatched and passionate kiss from a fellow passenger, Richard Dalloway, who has been picked up en route with his wife, Clarissa. (The Dalloways recur in Woolf's later, more famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway.) So shocked, troubled, and naive is Rachel that Helen persuades her to accompany her and her husband on their visit to South America. Helen appears liberal and open to a sense of shared discovery and adventure. Thus, Rachel is offered a chance to engage literally with wider vistas of experience, but she remains curiously repressed and more interested in intellectual than in emotional development.

In the somewhat unconvincingly established South American setting, Rachel reviews the restrictions of her upbringing in Richmond under the aegis of several traditional aunts. She embarks on a curiously unemotional courtship with and eventual engagement to Terence Hewet. After a trip to a village in the wilderness, Rachel dies suddenly of a feverish illness, in somewhat mysterious circumstances. The title draws attention to the incompleteness of her journey, but it also indicates the need for women to overcome their social conditioning and move beyond male restrictions. Rachel can do this only through death, and she becomes a symbol of the sacrifice of the potential of all young women in the Edwardian society depicted. It is these themes that have led to a reconsideration of the importance of The Voyage Out. Renewed attention has been directed at the novel's modernist aspects of gender and potential liberation from the constrictions of identity.

NIGHT AND DAY

The main characters in Night and Day are two very different young women, Mary Datchet and Katharine Hilbery. Both resist convention in different ways, with the middle-class Mary becoming intellectually and politically active, while the upper-middle-class Katharine dreams of following her passion for the study of mathematics and astronomy, which she prefers to the literary tradition of her family and to the expectation of a socially acceptable marriage. Katharine hides her real passion much as Jane Austen hid her written work, and in a sense this refusal of conventional interests is both literal and symbolic of feminist and creative desire.

The events unfold in London, in various homes and in various episodes in provincial settings. Katharine is loved by Ralph Denham, but she becomes engaged to William Rodney. Like Leonard Woolf, Rodney proposes by letter. Denham's passion for Katharine is diverted toward Mary. In this comedy of social manners, new courtship rituals, and misunderstanding, the rebellion of the young “new woman” underwrites Katharine and Mary's actions. Finally, but enigmatically, Ralph and Katharine are drawn together. According to even sympathetic critics, this remains Woolf's most conventional narrative.

JACOB'S ROOM

The narrative follows Jacob Flanders from a childhood holiday with his mother, Betty, through his university years and on to his rite of passage as a sexually active Edwardian young man. The story line is incomplete and merely conveys some intense episodes that do not conform to traditional plot development. This is neither a fully celebratory nor a condemnatory narrative, for underpinning all the events from Jacob's boating holiday to loves in London and Athens, a sense of impending doom and a feeling of portentousness builds in the novel's impressionistic scenes. The settings are various, from Cornwall, Scarborough, and Cambridge to the Scilly Isles, London, and Greece. This is Woolf's first modernist novel in themes and technique, based around vignettes or sketches that create a patchwork effect.

London provides Jacob's social and emotional education. He is seen through the eyes of various women, revealing his charisma and oddity, from the passing Mrs. Norman on a train, the prostitute Florinda, Sandra Wentworth Williams, besotted Fanny Elmer, sweetheart Clara Durrant, and his mother. Their viewpoints center the narrative differently, and their emotional responses become a shifting perspective on Jacob's presence. Like Woolf and her siblings, Jacob travels to Italy and Greece to absorb the fruits and relics of civilization on the eve of World War I. The final scene is the visit of his mother and a friend to Jacob's room after he has been killed in the war; the only traces of Jacob left are the disorganized fragments of his life, almost as if he never existed. His mother poignantly holds up an old pair of his shoes.

MRS. DALLOWAY

The novel covers the events on one day in London in 1923, representing the varied and interacting perceptions of many lives that cross the same geographic space of central London in Westminster and Bloomsbury. The striking of Big Ben as a motif indicates the imperial center and the irrevocable passing of time as different consciousnesses develop. There is a kind of stream-of-consciousness technique, mixing the perspectives of society hostess and politician's wife Clarissa Dalloway, returning Indian colonial administrator Peter Walsh, and other characters. A “tunneling” process leads to flashbacks from the period of Clarissa and Peter's youthful radicalism and romance at Bourton, the country house of Clarissa's family. Turning her back on Sally Seton, another rebellious friend, Clarissa had married the apparently dull Richard Dalloway. The plot concerns Clarissa's preparations for one of her grand parties, with a visit to a flower shop and an encounter with an old friend, Hugh Whitbread, a court official. The day of this social occasion is coincidentally that of Peter's unannounced visit and the final breakdown of Septimus Smith, a war veteran unknown to Clarissa's set.

Each episode of the novel follows the different perceptions of various onlookers and participants. A limousine passes in a West End street, and the narrative traces different characters' responses. The intersection of lives in Regent's Park, from new arrivals to the city to Peter and to Septimus Smith's insane visions of a dead colleague from the war, follows a similar pattern, with a central event or location linking these fragmentary perceptions. Sounds or images indicate a memory, and the characters shift into the past. There is still, however, a central narrative voice. As none of the situations develops fully as the single focus of the narrative, the reader senses the confusion and fragmentary nature of all of the characters' experiences and their very different understandings of the world. Septimus Smith's Italian wife, Lucrezia, has consulted a psychiatric expert, Sir William Bradshaw, who tells him that he must be hospitalized. At this Septimus becomes increasingly troubled; he believes he has transgressed by committing some unnamed crime against humanity. Clarissa is intensely jealous of the influence of the religious but poor Miss Kilman on her daughter, Elizabeth. Clarissa suffers from a sense of anger and hate that she feels might be unjustified. On a more mundane level, Peter feels resigned to mediocrity. Clarissa senses some worth in her life with the arrival of the prime minister at her party, but news from Bradshaw, another guest, of his patient Smith's suicide conveys a sense that this sort of despair might have been her fate.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

To the Lighthouse covers the period of two visits by a family and friends to a vacation home in the Hebrides, supplemented by a linking middle section, “Time Passes,” charting the intervening years. In this section the narrative describes outside events in passing, but it concentrates upon the empty vacation house, which is threatened by decay. At the novel's beginning the Ramsays argue over their young son's intended visit by boat to the lighthouse of the title. Mr. Ramsay reduces everything to facts and dismisses the possibility of the trip. Mrs. Ramsay, who nurtures hope and emotional relationships, feels thwarted. Lily Briscoe is a young, struggling artist who sees the life and warmth Mrs. Ramsay seems to impart to real events as an artistic act. In the first section, which is by far the most substantial as it charts the emotional interactions of the characters and a sense of their different inner selves, Lily resists Mrs. Ramsay's plans to shift her gently toward marriage. The eventual change in Lily is demonstrated by her two attempts at very different kinds of painting in the first and last sections of the novel. Between these, in “Time Passes,” a series of tragedies—Mrs. Ramsay's death; World War I; the marriage and death of the Ramsays' daughter Prue; and Andrew Ramsay's death in battle—are all set against the raw power of nature, which is only reversed by the cleaning of Mrs. Bast and Mrs. McNab for the return of the remaining members of the family.

Lily is finally aware that Mrs. Ramsay's vision of life, which the artist adapts for her new modernist style of perception and painting after the war and after Mrs. Ramsay's death, seems to echo William James's idea that “What really exists is not things made but things in the making.”¹ The underlying message is that any ongoing creative ambition or understanding is part of an ongoing life process. Finally, father and son reach the lighthouse, and Lily achieves some artistic sense of her world in a finished painting. Woolf prepared proofs and made revisions to the novel at the same time, and for some reason she did so differently for the British and American editions, which means that there are certain differences between the English and American editions to this day.

ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY

Orlando, Woolf's tribute to Vita Sackville-West, is ostensibly the true story of an aristocratic boy in Elizabethan England who, as the narrative progresses into subsequent ages, appears to have acquired both eternal youth and an androgynous character, apparently changing from male to female and engaging in a variety of relationships. The narrative echoes the writing of each period, the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, the Victorian era, and beyond; with this shifting style Woolf pays homage to the literary culture of England through a variation on the historical romance. Orlando writes his version of Elizabethan poetry, briefly meets the great queen Elizabeth, romances three young women, experiences the 1604 Great Frost in London, attends the court of King James I, and falls in love with a Muscovite princess, Sasha, whom he hopes to marry despite her unfaithful tendencies.

Each period is presented as a different series of adventures. Orlando becomes interested in writing and receives instruction from the poet Nick Greene, but the pupil burns all but one of his works, “The Oak Tree.” Orlando is pursued by an archduchess and requests King Charles I to send him as an ambassador to Constantinople. Drawing on various contemporaneous accounts, Woolf establishes Orlando's presence as if it were historical, including a marriage to Rosina Pepita, a dancer. After a period of seven days' sleeping as if in a trance, Orlando is transformed into a woman. After adventures with a gypsy tribe, she sails back home to what is now eighteenth-century England, but external attitudes have shifted with her gender transformation. After a romance with an archduke, Orlando enters literary society. She dresses as a man for a while until the Victorian age dawns, and she becomes engaged to Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire, also sexually ambiguous, whom she finally marries. Finally, in 1928, Orlando returns to reclaim her family seat, recovering memories of the past and restoring a sense of historical continuity.

THE WAVES

The Waves is an impressionistic, highly fragmented account of the growth of a group of children into adulthood. The manner of their inner lives and often exaggerated responses to the external world is the key to this highly modernist narrative. In the central idea of experience as repetitive but as ungraspable as the waves of the sea, the structure of the novel makes clear William James's concept of “perceptual flux”: “The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest … you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.”² The novel takes six characters, Bernard, Neville, Susan, Rhoda, Jinny, and Louis, from childhood impressions through their lives to death. Each of them delivers a series of monologues on his or her own life and thoughts; in these speeches they reach inner feelings, most especially doubts and fears. A seventh character, Percival, never speaks but is important to all the others. None of them speaks to each other, but their unified experience and common reactions imply some sort of communication and sharing. The passages are descriptive, and the motifs of the waves and the sun indicate a metaphysical and universal presence beyond the specific human focus of each gathering of impressions. Each person has a different character and viewpoint. Bernard is drawn to explain the experiences of the others, turning them into words. From the impressionistic seaside experience of childhood, where each perceives something different, the children explore themselves and their environment. Neville imagines a globe. Susan sees the color of a loaf. Rhoda hears the wildness of startled birds. Louis hears the sound of a chained beast on the sand. A kind of mythic view is intermixed with the impressionistic, drawing out the grand symbolic sense of childhood confusion, meaning, and perception.

As they develop, the children squabble, attend school, and progress to the world of work and study. The contrast between the world of men and women becomes evident. As they meet to celebrate Percival's departure for India, the narrative explores their different emotional states and mature view of the world. A change comes after news of Percival's death, an adult development and a loss of innocence. Bernard struggles to write, sifting the ability of words to convey feelings or situations and wondering whether common things are the only accessible realities. The ambivalent and ambiguous nature of language and its relationship to experience is one of the major themes of the novel. The characters come together when they are much older; Bernard, feeling his failure, wonders what the others have achieved in their lives and how they might be valued. His only sense is that the beating of the waves is less a promise of life than an indicator of the universality of death.

THE YEARS

The Years began as an essay-novel and developed into a modernist saga of the Pargiter family. The unconventional narrative presents random scenes and years of one generation's lives intersecting with those of other generations. In 1880 Colonel Abel Pargiter's wife is dying of cancer as he sits in his club and decides to visit his mistress, Mira. At the family's London home three of the Pargiter children, Milly, Delia, and young Rose, prepare for tea and for the return of their brother Martin and their father. These children represent the generation that is the novel's major focus, but they are bound to the past by blood ties and responsibilities. Colonel Pargiter inquires after another daughter, Eleanor, who has taken her mother's role in charitable works and the household. Delia resents sitting with her mother and imagines herself at a meeting beside Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist leader. After the return of Morris, another of the Pargiter children, the family gathers for their mother's death.

In Oxford, another Pargiter son, Edward, romantically pictures his cousin Kitty Malone. He argues with his friends while she reads history with a private tutor and dreams of a kiss from a farmhand. Kitty's mother decides on Lord Lasswade as her daughter's future husband. In 1891 progression is charted, with Kitty now Lady Lasswade in the north and Edward a don at Oxford. Morris, now a lawyer, remembers childhood. Colonel Pargiter dines with Sir Digby Pargiter, his brother, and Sir Digby's wife, Eugénie. Eleanor remains home after Delia's departure to tend her father. In 1907 Martin returns from India, and by the following year Sir Digby and Eugénie are both dead, while the Colonel is immobile after a stroke. Rose is involved in suffrage activity and meets her cousin Maggie, who lives with sister, Sara, in genteel poverty. After a brief coming together of family members, the next phase is Eleanor's trip to Greece after her father's death. In 1914 Martin has a chance encounter with Sara and discovers that Rose has been jailed for breaking windows. There is a family supper scene with Eleanor, Maggie, and Sara during a German air raid in 1917. In 1937 Eleanor returns from another trip, and the family gathers informally and yet ceremoniously, with Eleanor seeking some meaning or pattern from this curious assemblage. The image of the family acts throughout as a curious bond of affection and interest, as much for the characters as for the reader.

THREE GUINEAS

In Three Guineas Woolf uses a monologue style to respond to an imagined audience. She depicts herself considering applications by letter for contributions to three worthy causes. Her own text is footnoted, offering factual and academic credibility to her narrative. The first letter, from three years ago, is from a society for the prevention of war. The writer asks her opinion on how war can be averted. Woolf dramatizes and characterizes the situation, imagining the writer as a prosperous barrister of her own background, the educated class. Citing the Victorian travel writer Mary Kingsley's complaint of her family's investment in her brother's education rather than her own, Woolf describes this process of educating young men for power as “Arthur's Education Fund” and contrasts this with the limited possibilities for women. She invokes the difficult reality of men's patriotism that colors their worldview and describes women's different perceptions of England. Woolf tells of her hesitation to contribute to the cause espoused by the letter and says concerning women's situation, “Our class is the weakest of all classes in the state. We have no weapon with which to enforce our will.”³

The other two letters are from a fund to rebuild a women's college and a society to promote women's professional employment. Woolf conveys how dispossessed women have been and how crucial their participation is to social change. She writes that “if, checking imagination with prosaic good sense, you object that to depend upon a profession is only another form of slavery, you will admit from your own experience that to depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father” (16). In her response Woolf points out the dependence of universities on private financial sources, their exclusion of women, and their failures in preventing war. She sees education of a different kind as a prerequisite for peace. She anticipates a day when the daughters of educated men will join the professions, essential “because unless they are helped, first to educate the daughters of educated men, and then to earn their livings in the professions, those daughters cannot possess an independent or disinterested influence with which to help you prevent war. The causes it seems are connected” (84).

In the final section Woolf argues that the struggle against patriarchy is the same as resistance to fascism. She is suspicious of the organized society against war because of its masculine bias; she promotes the notion of women as part of an “Outsiders' Society” and calls for a wage for wives. Referring to horrific photographs issued from Spain by the government during the civil war, Woolf adds, “A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life. How essential it is that we should realise that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world” (142-143).

BETWEEN THE ACTS

Between the Acts focuses on rural life on a single day in June 1939, in and around Pointz Hall, a rural south England setting. Three generations of the Oliver family—including the aging grandfather Bartholomew Oliver, his son Giles and daughter-in-law Isa, and their children—represent an English way of life under the threat of war and invasion. The arrival of Mrs. Manresa and her young companion, William Dodge, introduce sexual tension into the Oliver household while the community prepares for an annual pageant, organized by Miss La Trobe, that traces English literary history. In this Woolf attempts to convey some timeless and relevant quality of British culture and history, some sort of continuity of the type sensed in Orlando. Miss La Trobe fears for the failure of the pageant. Isa both loves and hates her husband, and the narrative ends enigmatically for her, as if life had blurred with the pageant: “Love and hate—how they tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes. …”⁴

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Examples of Woolf criticism are so numerous that any selection must be partial and ignore some very worthy contributions to the study of her work. The following survey introduces some interesting, varied, and yet typical examples of academic studies concerned with Woolf. Certainly, both early criticism and interest helped establish her reputation, but often this was done in terms of her interesting techniques and virtuosity of style. She comes across as a writer concerned with the structures and dynamics of the novel as a poetic form. Even in her lifetime critics began writing a range of such studies on her work, and they established some of the critical and biographical coordinates that are still recognized. In Virginia Woolf (1932) Winifred Holtby cited the credentials of the author's distinguished literary family as comparable to those of Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day. Holtby surmised that since Woolf's “own imagination seems to be visual rather than aural,” she was influenced by Vanessa as an artist.⁵ Citing the French critic Floris Delattre's Le Roman psychologique de Virginia Woolf (1932), Holtby compared Woolf's style to that of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, suggesting the general influence of Bergsonian concepts in helping Woolf to develop her literary devices. Such early studies as these concentrated on her style, narrative technique, and mixture of the trivial and the profound to create poetic effects. These critics focused less on gender, tending to see Woolf as a minor modernist writer. In the following years she tended to be discussed as a minor modernist novelist, less significant than her male counterparts. This critical position could be said to apply to some degree to the majority of studies of Woolf's work until the late 1960s.

A significant reappraisal of Woolf emerged in the late 1960s and accelerated under the momentum of a move toward a feminist revision of which texts and authors were important in literary study. Herbert Marder's Feminism & Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (1968) was one of the first books to focus in an extended manner on Woolf and the issues of gender. As Marder says of criticism up to that time, “She is known, primarily, as an experimental novelist who perfected a form of interior monologue. Her name is frequently associated with some sort of esoteric cult: aestheticism, the Bloomsbury group. It is easy to see why many people assume, almost as a matter of course, that her novels must be devoid of social significance.”⁶ Taking his cue from E. M. Forster's comments, Marder seeks to alter that perception. He considers Woolf's work thematically, looking at her feminism and its relationship to art, the failings of her family, patriarchy, and androgyny, drawing on the novels to illustrate these concepts. Marder states that “her novels are very far from being ‘pure’ works of art; there is, implicitly, a great deal of social criticism in them—a kind of latent propaganda.”⁷ Marder's strength in a traditional account of these themes is that he recuperates novels such as The Voyage Out and Night and Day, formerly seen as unimportant, as crucial to Woolf's development. He sketches the social setting of suffrage and feminism, demonstrating how they were at the center of public attention from 1905 to 1914 and insisting on Woolf's perception that patriarchal society needed the civilizing influence of women. Marder demonstrates the masculine tyranny of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and the change brought about in the family by young female characters, such as Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day, with their horror of the domestic Victorian world. According to Marder, Woolf expresses the domestic symbolically through “concrete images.” He adds that “Woolf's feminism, it should be emphasized, implied the broadening, not the rejection, of the domestic wisdom traditionally cultivated by women. Her most poetic books are dotted with homely images drawn from the kitchen and nursery. Nor did she attempt, like some feminists, to minimize the difference between the sexes; all her writings stress the fact that men and women are different.”⁸ Marder centers his analysis on A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas as key texts in understanding Woolf. Overall, one might object that he charts Woolf's feminism as primarily a personal and polemical reaction to social events and restrictions as a means of developing an idea of creative and symbolic unity: “Art produced feelings of release and harmony, such as she associated with the androgynous mind. When she avoided that discipline, as in Three Guineas, her writing tended to be morbid.”⁹

In Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (1970) Harvena Richter adopts a more advanced approach in terms of the strategies of Woolf's narrative, dealing with the complexity of the self and the “[d]iscontinuity of personality” to form a coherent description of Woolf's narrative method. According to Richter, Woolf uses “Abstraction, reflection, metamorphosis, discontinuity … not [as] artificial techniques” but to describe aspects of reality.¹⁰ Often vision in Woolf's writing is colored by emotion and event, such as passages on Rachel Vinrace's illness and the tears of Helen Ambrose in The Voyage Out. Richter's study was another advance in the critical reception of Woolf, drawing in detail the theoretical subtleties, density, and seriousness in her writing. Richter goes beyond earlier brief allusions to Henri Bergson as an influence to investigate change as awareness of time and being in the inner consciousness of Woolf's characters, who possess “[a]n aura of emotional awareness drawn from the entire being, [where] consciousness is more than a stream of associated ideas and feelings.”¹¹ Point of view is part of a participatory narrative device, and Woolf's poetic vision is an enlargement of perception, creating an “[o]blique angle of vision” as a radical device. Previously neglected in Woolf are these multiple “modes of subjectivity,” a world of flux and discontinuity within which Woolf conveys a concept of the “multiplicity of the self.”¹²

Richter maps a kind of existential despair in Woolf's employment of the idea of destabilization as a kind of “terror” or epiphany:

This brief disintegration or fragmentation of the moment (which includes the temporary sense of loss of personality or self) may be termed a state of supraconsciousness. It is the “disembodied mood” which certain of Virginia Woolf's less stable characters, such as Rhoda, feel. Yet however related to the pathological it may be, its terrors are familiar; they are the fears felt in nightmares or anxiety dreams. Existing thus on the periphery of universal experience and rousing within the reader a flicker of subliminal response, these fears or terrors form yet another aspect of the complex of emotional reality which Mrs. Woolf attempts to convey.¹³

Suggesting William James's idea of the “transitive” as a useful distinction, Richter distinguishes Woolf's interior monologues and streams of consciousness from those used by Joyce, initiating the critical acknowledgment of Woolf as a major modernist writer using a gendered perspective, in which “the character's thoughts, or awarenesses, seem to be occurring on many levels at the same time—‘multiple moments within the moment.’ When Lily Briscoe feels her many thoughts dancing up and down like gnats in a net, she is experiencing the simultaneities of thought.”¹⁴

Richter perceives in Mrs. Dalloway a doubling of Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Richter's complex exposition of Woolf's discontinuity as a subtle aspect of mental experience, with sensory and unconscious stimuli, allows her to recover the central importance for the Woolfian text of different ways of perceiving an object. Richter establishes the primary importance of the nonmasculine world as seen through characters such as Cam Ramsay (the female child), Lily Briscoe (the female artist and independent woman) and Mrs. Ramsay (the maternal, poetic, feminine, creative eye) in To the Lighthouse.

The 1980s saw a blossoming of a whole variety of Woolf criticism and the reinforcement of her growing reputation. Although not dealing exclusively with Woolf, Richard J. Quinones in Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (1985) redefines the importance in modernism of the awareness of time as a central “indicator-theme.”¹⁵ Using the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, Quinones shows how central to modernism Woolf can be regarded, highlighting as she does the conflict and ambiguity between the innovative and more-limiting aspects of a mechanistic idea of time progression, which can limit the world simply to notions of linearity and progress: “Knowledge itself, not being linear and progressive, cannot be handed down from generation to generation—the fruits of experience benefiting those who come after.”¹⁶ Quinones places Woolf firmly at the center of progressive modernism, demonstrating “the presentation of the rich and complex powers of inner reality,” and “the Modernist trait of achieving multiplicity by virtue of a seemingly passive hero, while at the same time working toward a sense of personal unity and affirmation.”¹⁷

Contrasting the sense of To the Lighthouse with the oceanic feeling of oneness found in Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach” (1867), Quinones finds in Woolf's work a consciousness deepened by an almost Freudian awareness of the modernist sense of alienation, in which the sea fails to offer any answering image of human condition. In Woolf childhood has lost its Romantic implications and becomes a sphere of doubts and unhappiness. In “Time Passes” man is separated from nature and his past as well as from other men; thus, history in its dislocation challenges a masculine sense of continuity: “Virginia Woolf always sought to write from what she called a ‘central feeling’ in which the apparent disjunctive surface images have their roots. The painter, Lily Briscoe, in To the Lighthouse opens herself to the same kind of rhythm that was bearing her in its current. …”¹⁸ Quinones demonstrates Woolf's radical part in the modernist challenge to authority, using a complex critical account of her work.

The strength of Alex Zwerdling's Virginia Wolf and the Real World (1986) is that he recuperates Woolf's relationship with reality and literary realism in terms of a more complex understanding of the world rather than literary traditions. As Zwerdling comments, Woolf criticism up to his time ignored her interest in realism and often obscured her rendition of what can be described as a “social matrix” of events.¹⁹ Even though most critics recognize Woolf's precision in notation of detail, her expansion in poetic fashion of a particular image, it must be added that this use of the impressionistic and its focus on individual perceptions does not represent any simplistic rejection of externality. As Zwerdling notes of To the Lighthouse, “Woolf was trying to expand the theory and practice of realism. She wanted to bring the mimetic techniques of the genre to the recording of psychic process, and this has often been recognized. At the same time, she tried to show that psychic life was far more responsive to external forces than has generally been assumed.”²⁰ It is important to recognize the subtext of social forces that contributed to the development of Woolf's themes. They can easily be missed if one focuses entirely upon the more obvious features of her writing, such as her overt experimentation and use of symbolism.

In Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (1987) Makiko Minow-Pinkney takes Woolf to be best represented in the context of the female modernist agenda. She distinguishes Woolf from writers such as Joyce and Dorothy Richardson in rejecting their egoistic unified subject and draws a contrast between symbolist modernism and Woolf's incipient feminism. Minow-Pinkney's central position is that Woolf saw people as subjects on shifting, confusing territory and thus used androgyny to explore this blurring of boundaries. Minow-Pinkney promotes Orlando to the position of a central text rather than simply an elaborate joke. She questions Elaine Showalter's dismissal of Woolfian androgyny as itself relying on the need for a unified subject. According to Minow-Pinkney's post-structuralist reading, Woolf entered a world of networks and signs in which “the feminist text must call into question the very identities which support this pattern of binary opposition. The concept of androgyny then becomes radical, opening up the fixed unity into multiplicity, joy, play of heterogeneity, a fertile difference.”²¹

Clearly, Minow-Pinkney sees Woolf moving toward a gender-specific view. Minow-Pinkney assumes the fragmentation of the self described by French psychologist Jacques Lacan to be universal and sees in Woolf's modernism and feminism a recovery of the self's repressed unconscious imagery, which revitalizes a symbolic order suppressed by Victorianism. Minow-Pinkney also draws upon the work of theorist Julia Kristeva for the concept of the subject being always in process and applies this concept to Woolf. Minow-Pinkney positions Woolf as part of an avant garde that uses this realization to destroy the unified subject, like a series of explosions in the semiotic and social field. Absence plays its part, for “Jacob is a lacuna in the consciousness of the text, an absent center, a fissure in the novel around which the other characters gravitate.”²² In other words, as much is said by Jacob's absence as when he is directly characterized. Elaborate as the analysis may be, Minow-Pinkney never really explains why all of these characters revolve around Jacob. She argues convincingly, however, that Woolf focuses on a female language, as with Betty Flanders's writing and talk of the world in Jacob's Room. Nevertheless, Woolf's novels are about problems of writing and symbolism in which “[t]he quest for hidden meaning results only in the endless replacement of one signifier by another.”²³ Woolf subverts both the unified subject and male rationality through themes and language. In Mrs. Dalloway “[s]ubjects of sentences are continually shifting, and writing is made ‘porous’ by the tunneling process. One is suddenly pitched into a ‘cave’ of the past.”²⁴ Minow-Pinkney argues that a “transhistorical” (between and across different eras) idea of gender is more significant than any modernist context for Woolf's writing.

In the preface to her Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (1987) Jane Marcus describes how her book emerged from her involvement in ten years of American feminist thinking and writing about Woolf. Marcus concludes that Woolf was committed to a “socialist feminist pacifism.”²⁵ Although Marcus is acute in perceiving the importance of autobiographical contexts, there is more of her own ideological agenda in her study than Woolf's. Nevertheless, Marcus is at least correct in extending Woolf's social thought beyond being simply a matter of feminism. She views Night and Day as a subversion of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1791), “patriarchy's most glorious myth of itself as civilization.”²⁶ According to Marcus, Woolf saw the single woman and spinster as positive identities and sought to create an alliance with blacks and the working class, a notion hardly sustainable by reference to the novels themselves, an objection made by various academics to Marcus's ideas. The most interesting aspect of Marcus's study is the analysis of the significance of the swallow and nightingale motifs in Between the Acts, an undercurrent of rape and violence drawn from classical mythology. Marcus is best with historical suggestions about the roots of Woolf's work: for example, Septimus Smith emerging from the postgraduate lectures of George Savage, her doctor; and the lighthouse motif appearing in her Aunt Caroline Stephen's Quaker writings, in which Woolf's own pacifism is prefigured. However one might object to Marcus's ideological stance being too remote from the texts, her historical research remains intriguing.

By the 1990s academics began to review the claims made about Woolf, as well as the theoretical models with which her work was being made to conform. Perhaps typical is John Mepham's Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (1991). Mepham not only contextualizes Woolf's upbringing and mature experiences but also clearly and intelligently analyzes her novels, particularly those of the creatively fruitful period of the 1920s. His comments are succinct, but informative: “Of all her novels The Waves is the least mimetic, the least ‘realist.’ The voices do not correspond to any real possible form of speech, either inner or public. Their eloquent, poetic effusions are openly artificial.”²⁷ Mepham adds such useful information as tables of Woolf's sales and her and Leonard's earnings, which make clear that for a literary novelist Woolf achieved high sales.

Mepham's biographically rooted study goes a long way toward counteracting some exaggerated or preposterous notions about Woolf herself. He argues eloquently that for too long her essay “Modern Fiction” has been taken for a literary manifesto. He is unconvinced that Woolf felt the essay applicable to her own writing, especially as “it was written years before she developed her own characteristic fictional methods.”²⁸ Woolf's statements can be read equally as a rejection of much of the method of her own earlier novels, and may even be questioned. As Mepham says of her denial of materialism, by which she means a rejection of simplistic, commonsense realism, she may overstep herself since she uses a kind of objectivity herself: “She does not provide us with convincing reasons for accepting her implied value judgements, that the material aspects of life, the constraints of the social order, the requirements of work, cooperation with others on social projects, the disciplines of the reality principle, are trivial and transitory, whereas the spiritual, the contemplative, the world of secret, intimate, private meanings, are enduring and true.”²⁹ Mepham's main contribution to Woolf studies is his healthy skepticism about unsubstantiated or unsupported claims, as well as a reminder that to read or interpret Woolf's texts, one does not have to be reverential.

John Batchelor's Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (1991) analyzes Woolf's method of writing and what might be regarded as the modernist, experimental texts: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts. Batchelor attempts to confront the issue of the influence of both Leonard Woolf and Leslie Stephen: “One can see that Virginia Stephen is very much her father's daughter: the atheism, the pride, the self-will, the ambition and the industry are all his.”³⁰ Primarily using textual analysis, Batchelor demonstrates that the style and approach of Woolf's writing present a challenge to conventional realism but not an abandonment of its mimetic ambitions. He is skeptical of Woolf's attitude toward organized feminism. He sees in her novels a Bergsonian notion of time, as in the initial seashore scene of Jacob's Room and in later examples, where a character's consciousness and that of the author seem in contention: “The two methods, the external and the internal impressionisms, are pulled together. …”³¹ Batchelor's critical approach to the novels is clear, consistent, and carefully researched. He explains in precise terms how particular passages convey different ways of regarding time, especially in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, with their Bergsonian sense of inner experience. Interestingly, Batchelor sees Between the Acts as a major achievement for all of its ambivalence; the failures of Miss La Trobe's pageant indicate a “‘reality’ … which involves closing the gap between clock time and mind time. …”³²

Toward the end of the 1990s critics such as Jane Goldman returned to Woolf's relationship with the real and refused to see in her a total commitment to pure being or the artistic moment. In The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (1998), Goldman explores “the Woolfian moment in the context of ‘the real world,’ that is in the material and historical realm beyond merely the personal and subjective; to understand some of the feminist implications of Woof's aesthetics.”³³ Goldman traces the influence of Woolf of the Postimpressionist exhibition of 1910 and the solar eclipse of 1927. She also questions the significance of the Bergsonian notion of nonlinear time in Woolf's writing, seeing more the influence of modernist art, with the traditional handling of chiaroscuro—light and shade—replaced by a mosaic of color, described as a “new feminist language of color.”³⁴ This is the domestic sphere of Mrs. Ramsay absorbed into the art of Lily Briscoe, a world of family, emotion, and domestic realities: “Mrs. Ramsay emerges from these contradictory moments both as a shadow to the light of patriarchy and as a potential source of counter-illumination.”³⁵ Combining close reading with historical references, Goldman creates an enticing, worthwhile, if complex reading of Woolf's texts.

ART IMITATING LIFE

There are innumerable examples in Woolf's fiction of art imitating life, for her creative work drew quite explicitly on the biographical contexts of her own life, family, and friends. This was not a simple matter of recording events, for Woolf transformed her own existence into a series of narratives that drew upon the issues of her age and reflected the new forms of art in the modernist movement. She also drew on the constrictions and peculiarities of her family and, more broadly, the social conditions of women, less than free or equal. Woolf's transformations of biography into fiction indicate that work and family life created conflicting obligations for women and could never be combined. Thus, a division exists in To the Lighthouse between the demands of a vocation and of domestic life that no one manages to balance. It appears as if Woolf in her fiction draws some stark conclusions about the failings of relationships in life.³⁶

Rachel Vinrace exists within a closed and narrow world of Victorian childhood and adolescence, very much in the manner of Woolf, ignorant about sexual matters and naive in the ways of the world. Like Rachel, Woolf suffered from the elaborate courtship rituals and the search for meaningful affection, and she lost her mother at a young age. The Voyage Out centers on a love triangle, much as the one in Woolf's own life after Clive Bell's marriage to Vanessa evoked a jealous reaction in her. Critics have pointed out that there are parallels between Rachel's fiancé, Terence Hewet, and Bell; it may be significant that Rachel's love interest is based not on Woolf's husband but rather on her brother-in-law. The illness from which Rachel dies in an alien land suggests the suffering of Thoby Stephen, who died of the typhoid contracted while traveling in Greece with his sisters. The Voyage Out and scenes of Jacob Flanders abroad in Jacob's Room were drawn from the 1904 trip of the Stephens and Gerald Duckworth to Italy and Paris and Woolf's 1905 journey to Spain with her brother Adrian. Both were in part sea voyages and must surely have provided the background for Rachel's voyage. Louise A. DeSalvo indicates that Woolf was working on the episodes detailing the growing but nonsexual intimacy between Rachel and Terence a few months before she finally accepted Leonard Woolf's proposal, and that these episodes reflect the Woolfs' own courtship and the curious dynamics of their relationship.³⁷ In fact, there is ambivalence in the courtship and the level of the woman's enthusiasm both in fact and fiction. In life Virginia and Leonard were married on 10 August 1912; in the novel Rachel dies. Yet, Woolf drew from the intimate physicality and sexual elements of the male-female relationship, especially after her wedding trip to the Continent, in writing the novel. Rachel's headaches and delirium might indicate sexual repression rather than any specific external illness; Woolf may well have drawn on certain concepts (and diagnoses) favored by her physician, George Savage, whom she later satirized in Mrs. Dalloway. In his major early work, Insanity and Allied Neuroses: Practical and Clinical (1884), Savage indicated that mania of this kind, particularly among women, invariably originated from sexual trouble.³⁸

In Night and Day Katharine Hilbery's distinguished literary family reflects the Stephen family's ties (through Leslie Stephen's first wife) to William Makepeace Thackeray and the Stephen children's relationship to the legacy of their father and his literary work. The episode of Katharine's being scrutinized over the household accounts reflects Vanessa's recollections of Leslie Stephen's complaints to her (and, prior to her, Stella Duckworth) about domestic money matters.³⁹ The scenes in Night and Day recounting feminist activity in a nonmilitant suffrage society were drawn directly from Woolf's own activities. Carol Hanbery MacKay identifies Anne Thackeray Ritchie (Woolf's “aunt” Anny) as the model for Mrs. Hilbery, reinforcing the Thackeray connection in the novel.⁴⁰ Generally Night and Day expresses the struggle of women to work and their demands for other forms of social recognition different from those of their mothers, the social and domestic dimensions of which Woolf observed throughout her life. The feminine and the humorous combine in Mrs. Hilbery's pilgrimage to Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, and her theory that Anne Hathaway was the true author of Shakespeare's sonnets. This episode was based on an elaborate joke made by Anny.⁴¹

Much of Jacob's Room was drawn from the Stephen family's vacations in Cornwall, experiences Woolf was also to make central in To the Lighthouse. Jacob Flanders is seen in this kind of setting in childhood and, later, during the sailing trip taken with his Cambridge friend in and around the Scilly Isles. The opening scene of the childhood holiday of Jacob's Room is striking. The child-oriented perspective challenges the authoritative narrative viewpoint. It also seems uncannily to draw on a story, “The Monkey on the Moor,” written by Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen, and posthumously found in her notes, corrected as if for potential publication.⁴² Later scenes in Jacob's Room rework the life experience of Woolf's brother Thoby, with study at Cambridge and travel in Greece, like the trip that led to Thoby Stephen's death from typhoid fever. The death of Jacob in war represents not only his individual loss but also the tragic fate of his generation, mirroring Woolf's experience of the wartime sacrifice made by friends such as Rupert Brooke.

Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway represents the social class to which Woolf belonged, and it has been suggested that the character was based on Kitty Maxse, an acquaintance whom Woolf first met in 1898 and in fact disliked. Clarissa has a heart murmur, as Woolf herself did, and was originally intended to die in early plans for the novel. Many critics agree that Mrs. Dalloway is most autobiographical in regard to the details of Septimus Smith's madness, drawn from Woolf's own bouts of insanity. Much attention has been spent in various diagnoses of both Woolf and her characters. As John R. Maze says, for instance, “Smith is a textbook example of paranoid schizophrenia, with delusions of persecution and ideas of reference—that people were looking and pointing at him, that the car's stopping had some reference to him.”⁴³ Maze cites Woolf's long-established identification with Smith, reinforcing the idea that on one level he is a double for or mirror of Clarissa's psychological state. Woolf's madness seems to have informed her particular narrative sense of identity and embodiment. From Rachel's illness in The Voyage Out to the curious disembodied consciousness in The Waves, critics have been absorbed in linking elements of Woolf's work to her own pathology, her physical and mental suffering. In All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf, Female Victim of Male Medicine (1982) Stephen Trombley points out: “During all of Virginia's breakdowns, she had a peculiar relationship to her body. She felt that it was sordid; she found eating repulsive; she felt as if her body was not the center of her ‘self’—that she somehow existed at odds with it, or divorced from it. Not only is a problematical sense of embodiment a central factor in all of her breakdowns, but it is also one of the perennial themes of her novels and, indeed, of her essays, letters, and diary.”⁴⁴ In To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay's activities in visiting the sick and needy and her subsequent death reflect the death of Woolf's mother; Julia Stephen's tendency toward both sacrifice and self-asserted virtue verged on martyrdom.

This pattern is repeated with the death of the Pargiters' mother in The Years: the eldest daughter, Eleanor, has to assume her mother's domestic and charitable roles (much as Stella and, after her death, Vanessa did in the Stephen household after the loss of Julia). In To the Lighthouse Mr. Ramsay exhibits all of the same characteristics of self-assertion, correctness, and yet professional doubt that have been noted at length in Leslie Stephen. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay were such accurate portraits of Woolf's parents that they evoked deep emotion in Vanessa. Unquestionably, To the Lighthouse offers many biographical parallels beyond the parents. Batchelor finds much of Thoby in Andrew Ramsay and of Stella Duckworth in Prue Ramsay, who dies in childbirth. Originally, the novel developed from a planned story, “The Old Man,” which was explicitly based on Woolf's childhood experiences at Talland House in St. Ives. Clearly, the original focus was to have been on Leslie Stephen, but since other material was worked in for the novel, this suggests other, less obvious parallels. Many critics have claimed that Lily Briscoe's paintings are crucial to placing Woolf's vision. Daniel R. Schwarz notes that Lily's artistic work depends upon an inner vision by the second phase of her aesthetic experiment, her tree drawn from the mind's eye. Schwarz concludes that in a historical sense “Lily's second painting is Post-Impressionist,” perceiving the direct influence of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse in Woolf's use of spatial relations as a device for “imbuing everyday experience with the magic of meaning and form,” just as in modernist art.⁴⁵

Lily may be considered to incorporate features of Woolf and Vanessa as a sort of composite figure. Another possible source of creative inspiration for Lily as a young woman painter who is criticized by male companions may have been Anny's Miss Angel (1875), a historical novel based on the life of the eighteenth-century English painter Angelica Kauffmann. In the novel Kauffman is at work in Venice copying the works of the great masters. Her fellow lodger and painter Antonio is scathing at her hope to reproduce any masterpiece, which he describes as like trying to paint the sun. Kauffman faces limitations similar to those that Lily faces, limitations that form a central concern in the first section of To the Lighthouse. Lily on one level is Kauffman's modernist counterpart. Panthea Reid identifies Lily's thinking and endeavors with Vanessa's ideas in favor of “the spontaneous and fresh embodiment of vision and emotion” over technical skill in painting, a lesson that Lily partly learns from Mrs. Ramsay.⁴⁶ Reid argues that Lily develops and effectively becomes a proponent of Roger Fry's theories of art, and that the speed with which Woolf wrote the second section of the novel indicated her intention to employ the same method in writing prose. Ironically, Fry criticized the “Time Passes” section, with its exaggeration and the poeticizing of inanimate objects, so much that Woolf decided not to dedicate the book to him as originally intended. In this section—together with the concluding one, in which Lily thinks of Mrs. Ramsay's absence—there may be an echo of the thoughts on life and death of family friend William James: “The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought. …”⁴⁷

The mood of experiment in The Waves captures the feeling of change and transformation that imbued the period of Woolf's youth and early adulthood, recreating in its form and voice the social and artistic ferment and enthusiasm of those times for Bloomsbury in particular. The title was originally to be “The Moths,” which derived from a letter from Vanessa in France describing catching and chloroforming a huge moth. Parallels to Woolf's relationships later in life can be found in other works. It is well established that the title character of Orlando is modeled on Vita Sackville-West, as is indicated not only by the setting (based on Sackville-West's family home), but Wolf's use of her friend as a model for photographs in the first edition of the book, presenting her in the various phases of Orlando's life. In The Years the sexual abuse Woolf suffered when young resurfaces not only in undercurrents of incestuous desire but also in an episode in which young Rose Pargiter sneaks out alone to the shops only to be traumatized by an old man exposing himself to her.

In Between the Acts Miss La Trobe finds herself in a situation much like Woolf's own late in life. In the pageant she stages, Miss La Trobe explores the possibilities of celebrating England's past as a unifying possibility while resisting jingoism; her position is that of a strong, opinionated woman rejected by the younger generation of the village. In Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Works of Forster and Woolf (1985) David Dowling points out that Woolf was apparently asked to arrange or script such a pageant at Rodmell (the site of the Woolfs' country retreat, Monk's House), which probably suggested the idea of including such a pageant in the novel. Woolf was much attracted by the idea of England, with its traditional and aristocratic lineage, despite remaining opposed to imperialism and patriarchy. As Suzanne Raitt notes, there was an underlying contradiction in Woolf's different attitudes: “Woolf's attraction to Sackville-West was also an attraction to aristocracy, Englishness, wealth: all the social privileges about which later, in Three Guineas, she was to express so much ambivalence.”⁴⁸Between the Acts is an exploration of those elements, of the shifting unity and disunity of the culture and the self. In the course of her pageant Miss La Trobe considers and plays out all of the paradoxical themes that concerned Woolf herself. In the end, a sense of theatricality and the source material in the play of people's lives could at times appear indistinguishable to her.

WOOLF'S PLACE IN HISTORY

Woolf became famous after a tentative beginning as a writer. In a sense, it is unsurprising that she adapted to the conditions of modernist change after her first two novels. If she had not, as she recognized, her work was likely to have been regarded as negligible, offering her the fate that so haunted her father. This sense of failure, recorded in the characterization of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, equally applied to Woolf herself. It was something she feared until her major successes. It may be that fear of obscurity initiated and motivated her creative efforts. In terms of fame and recognition, Woolf became more celebrated and culturally significant in the years following her death than she was in her lifetime. Like her or loathe her, she has become firmly established as a literary and cultural icon. Her face is recognized the world over, she is studied in universities everywhere because of her feminism as much as her fiction, and innumerable websites are dedicated to her life and her work. The amount of literary criticism itself has become daunting for the average student.

Despite a rejection of modernism by many writers after 1945, Woolf's work came back into vogue in the 1980s. The very factors that make her later texts typically modernist are those features of her experimentation that also characterize later postmodern writing. Her stylistic relevance and her views of gender have maintained contemporary interest in Woolf, preventing her from becoming dated or unfashionable. In some ways, aspects of her work seem more in tune with contemporary thought than with many opinions of her own time. Her experimentation was part of Woolf's response to critics' reactions to the earlier works of many other writers, inspiring her to a new phase of creativity. She proved herself in keeping with contemporary thought and even took literature in new directions. Woolf's response to criticism was to take it as a provocation for new ides. Thus, her novels experiment with form, but more than that, her revisions of literary conventions have reflexive qualities. Through this reflexivity or self-awareness, Woolf's works demonstrate in explicit fashion the difficulty of representing anything without distortion (because words are neither things nor pictures in the physical sense). The attempt at representation without distortion makes the reader aware of the text as a fact and an intervening process (writing about objects in words), as part of the process and the potential problem. These qualities, as well as her prescient analysis of the “great patriarchal machine,” have contributed to the continuing growth of her readership and her fans.

The general fascination with Woolf has been reinforced by a prescient literary strategy on her part that has interested a new generation of readers: the reoccurrence of characters and scenes between different narratives, a process or technique now described as intertextuality, which became popular with writers many years after her death. Like many writers of genius, Woolf was perhaps well ahead of her time.

MOVIE ADAPTATIONS

Orlando. Adventure Pictures, 1992. Directed and adapted by Sally Potter.

Mrs. Dalloway. First Look Pictures, 1997. Directed by Marleen Gorris; adapted by Eileen Atkins.

PUBLIC RESPONSE

Long before she published fiction, Woolf was known among members of her social class for belonging to a famous family with literary and intellectual connections and forebears. She does so in Night and Day through parallels between her own situation and that of Katharine Hilbery, notable because of her famous poet grandfather. Katharine struggles against being publicly known because of her associations with the literati of Victorian society. Before her own early writing, Woolf's well-connectedness was a general feature of the intellectual London-based inner circle of which Bloomsbury was a part.

Outside of this upper-middle-class set, Woolf did not truly figure as part of the public consciousness until the publication of To the Lighthouse in 1927. At this time she became identified with the zeitgeist and the press's fashionable image of the postwar age. She appeared in Vogue, was photographed by Man Ray, and was invited by the New York Herald Tribune on a paid trip to write for the paper. T. S. Eliot praised her work in the Nouvelle Revue Française. When Woolf received the Vie Hereuse Prize in 1928, the award was reported in The Times.

From this time on, press attention, book sales, and public-speaking invitations all testified to a growing response to Woolf and her work. When The Years was published in 1937, more than 13,000 copies were sold in the United Kingdom and almost 31,000 copies in the United States in the first six months.⁴⁹ Continuing academic interest, movie adaptations, the use of Woolf's image in popular culture, and ongoing sales of her major works all exemplify the persistent interest in Woolf and her writing. Although it fluctuated, her income from the Hogarth Press and writing after 1927 was considerable. The invitations she received to support appeals on behalf of victims of the Spanish Civil War indicate her public position as an intellectual and thinker in the 1930s. Since the shift in attention to her feminism in the late 1960s, Woolf has become more publicly acclaimed than ever before. She has acquired an almost mythic status.

Notes

1. William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 263.

2. Ibid., p. 253.

3. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 13. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

4. Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 215.

5. Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932), p. 9.

6. Herbert Marder, Feminism & Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 1.

7. Ibid., p. 2.

8. Ibid., p. 35.

9. Ibid., p. 176.

10. Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 115, x.

11. Ibid., p. vii.

12. Ibid., pp. ix, 41.

13. Ibid., p. 41.

14. Ibid., p. 43.

15. Richard J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 4.

16. Ibid., p. 153.

17. Ibid., pp. 106, 108.

18. Ibid., pp. 170-171.

19. Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 15.

20. Ibid., pp. 22, 24.

21. Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 12.

22. Ibid., p. 28.

23. Ibid., p. 32.

24. Ibid., p. 56.

25. Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. xii.

26. Ibid., p. 21.

27. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), p. 140.

28. Ibid., p. 67.

29. Ibid., p. 70.

30. John Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 4.

31. Ibid., p. 66.

32. Ibid., p. 135.

33. Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1.

34. Ibid., p. 168.

35. Ibid., p. 174.

36. Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, p. 191.

37. Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 3; T. E. Apter, Virginia Woolf: A Study of Her Novels (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 13.

38. Savage, George H., Insanity and Allied Neuroses: Practical and Clinical (London: Cassell, 1884), pp. 133-134.

39. Vanessa Bell, Sketches in Pen and Ink, edited by Lia Giachero (London: Hogarth Press, 1997), p. 67.

40. Carol Hanbery MacKay, “The Thackeray Connection: Virginia Woolf's Aunt Anny,” in Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, edited by Laura Marcus (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 73.

41. Marcus, Virginia Woolf, p. 29.

42. Julia Duckworth Stephen, Julia Duckworth Stephen: Stories for Children, Essays for Adults, edited by Diane F. Gillespie and Elizabeth Steele (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 47.

43. John R. Maze, Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 65-66.

44. Stephen Trombley, All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf, Female Victim of Male Medicine (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 10.

45. Daniel R. Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 39, 41.

46. Panthea Reid, Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 285.

47. James, “Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord,” in Memories and Studies (London: Longmans, Green, 1911), p. 19.

48. Suzanne Raitt, Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 160.

49. Mepham, Virginia Woolf, p. 130.