1.alice Wood - Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism

Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism
Historicizing Modernism
Series Editors
Matthew Feldman, Reader in Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK; and Erik
Tonning, Director, Modernism and Christianity Project, University of Bergen, Norway.
Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK.
Editorial Board
Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand;

Professor Ron Bush, St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham,
Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department
of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English,
University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature,
University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK.
Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations
by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response
to new documentary sources made available over the last decade.
Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual
European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series
reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing
fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods.
Series Titles
Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by
Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck
Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron
Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson
Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle
Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong
Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker
Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley
Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey
Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood
Virginia Woolf ’s Late
Cultural Criticism
The Genesis of ‘The Years’, ‘Three

Guineas’ and ‘Between the Acts’
Alice Wood
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Alice Wood, 2013
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in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
Alice Wood has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-4872-8
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Historicizing Modernism ix
Abbreviations x
Pre-Publication Texts Referenced within Virginia Woolf ’s Late
Cultural Criticism xii
Editorial Symbols xv
1 Introducing Late Woolf 1

British society and literature, 1931–41 4
Woolf in the 1930s and beyond 9
A genetic approach to Woolf 18
2 Critiquing Patriarchy in the Years of The Years 27

Tracing origins: ‘The Turn of the Tide’, 1931 32
The Years: Planning and writing and changing direction 40
Writing a novel of fact 52
Conclusion 58
3 The Evolution of Woolf ’s Feminist-Pacifism in Three Guineas 63

Woolf ’s early pacifism and feminist contexts 67
Three Guineas: Conception and contexts 69
Three Guineas: Composition and pre-texts 74
The Scrapbooks 75
The Drafts 82
The political power of indifference from The Years to Three Guineas 88
Conclusion 98
4 Writing Art in Times of Chaos in Between the Acts 103

The textual and contextual history of Between the Acts 108
Debating the role of art in times of chaos 114
Art’s social role in Between the Acts 123
Conclusion 132
vi Contents
5 Conclusion: Newness and Lateness in Woolf ’s Last Works 137

Woolf and late modernism 139
Conclusion 146
Appendix A: Extracts from ‘1907’ in the Holograph of The Years 149

Appendix B: An Extract from ‘1910’ in the Holograph of The Years 153
Appendix C: An Extract from the Holograph Draft of Three Guineas 165
Bibliography 169
Index 183
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to the series editors, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, and
to David Avital, Laura Murray, Kim Storry and Moira Eagling, in particular,
for their role in bringing this book to fruition. This book’s origins are in my
doctoral thesis and its production additionally owes much to the academic,
financial and pastoral support I received during that period of study. I am deeply
indebted to Andrew Thacker for his expert supervision and guidance. Heidi
Macpherson supplied insightful feedback as second supervisor. Examiners Jane
Dowson and Anna Snaith have been generous with advice and suggestions. I
also wish to acknowledge with gratitude the contribution of Julia Briggs, whose
energetic input greatly enriched the initial framing of my doctoral project and
helped secure funding to undertake it. The majority of this book’s research was
completed through the assistance of a De Montfort University Research Student
Bursary, while the latter stages of writing benefitted from research maintenance
funding from the University of Portsmouth. Special thanks are further due to
Alexei Lambley-Steel for his patience and good humour and, as in all things, to
Mary Wood and Nick Wood for their unwavering encouragement and support.
A segment of Chapter 4 dealing with Woolf ’s contributions to the Daily
Worker was first published in an essay version in Virginia Woolf Miscellany
76 (2009) as ‘Chaos. Slaughter. War Surrounding Our Island’ and I gratefully
acknowledge the right to republish that material here. Extracts from published
novels and unpublished works by Virginia Woolf are used by permission of
The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia
Woolf. Excerpts from BETWEEN THE ACTS by Virginia Woolf, copyright
1941 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed
1969 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company. Excerpts from THE DIARY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF,
Volumes 1-5, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, diary copyright © 1977, 1978, 1980,
1982, 1984 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Excerpts from THE LETTERS
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, Volumes I–VI, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann, letters copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Quentin
Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
viii Acknowledgements
Publishing Company. Excerpts from MOMENTS OF BEING by Virginia Woolf,

copyright © 1985, 1976 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Excerpts from
MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1925 by Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf,
reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Excerpts from A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1929 by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed 1957 by
Leonard Woolf, used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. Excerpts from THREE GUINEAS by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1938
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed
1966 by Leonard Woolf, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company. Excerpts from THE YEARS by Virginia Woolf, copyright
1937 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, copyright © renewed
1965 by Leonard Woolf, copyright © 1977 by Quentin Bell and Angelica
Garnett, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. Excerpts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier
Bell, published by The Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random
House Group Limited. Excerpts from The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by
Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, published by The Hogarth Press,
reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Excerpts from
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann,
published by The Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House
Group Limited. Excerpts from Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf, published
by Chatto & Windus, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group
Limited. All rights reserved.
Historicizing Modernism
This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century

literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus
stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters,
diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing
monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors
and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study
and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as
mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series
has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern liter-
ature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett
Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented
by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’
authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of
supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader
intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will
be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone
Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also
be included here.
A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of
intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their
critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be
historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual
literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist
writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of
the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very
notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no
means discourages more theoretically-informed approaches. On the contrary,
the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing
Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way.
Matthew Feldman
Erik Tonning
Abbreviations
AROO (1998a), A Room of One’s Own, in M. Shiach (ed.), ‘A Room of One’s

Own’ and ‘Three Guineas.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–149.
BA (2011), Between the Acts. Edited by M. Hussey. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
D 1–5 (1977–84), The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by A. O. Bell with

A. McNeillie. 5 Vols. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
E 1–6 (1986–2011), The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by A. McNeillie and

S. N. Clarke. 6 Vols. London: Hogarth.
F (2000b), Flush. Edited by K. Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
HH (2003), A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by

S. Dick with an introduction by H. Simpson. London: Vintage.
L 1–6 (1977–82), The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by N. Nicolson and

J. Trautmann. 6 Vols. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.
MOB (2002), Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Edited by

J. Schulkind with an introduction by H. Lee. London: Pimlico.
MD (2000c), Mrs Dalloway. Edited by S. McNichol with an introduction

and notes by E. Showalter. London: Penguin.
PH (1983), Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of ‘Between the
Acts.’ Edited by M. A. Leaska. New York, NY: University Publications.
RF (1995), Roger Fry: A Biography. Edited by D. F. Gillespie. Oxford:

Shakespeare Head Press.
TG (1998b), Three Guineas, in M. Shiach (ed.), ‘A Room of One’s Own’

and ‘Three Guineas.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–414.
TP (1978), The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years.’ Edited by

M. A. Leaska. London: Hogarth.
Abbreviations xi
VO (2001c), The Voyage Out. Edited by L. Sage. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.
W (2000f), The Waves. Edited by K. Flint. London: Penguin.
Y (1999b), The Years. Edited by H. Lee. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.
Pre-Publication Texts Referencedwithin
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism
Pre-publication texts discussed within Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism

are cited using the catalogue numbers below. The following annotated list
supplies the location, catalogue number and a brief indication of the contents of
each document. Texts listed relating to Woolf ’s ‘Professions for Women’ speech,
The Years and Three Guineas indicate the size and complexity of this shared
pre-textual dossier; the only major pre-text I believe to be missing from this
genetic survey of The Years and Three Guineas are two volumes of final proofs
held at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (for discussion of these
proofs see Haule, 2009). Materials are separated by subheadings for clarity, but
documents relating to ‘Professions for Women,’ The Years and Three Guineas, as
debated in Chapters 2 and 3, should be regarded as interrelated.
‘MS’ indicates manuscript; ‘TS’ indicates typescript. ‘BRG’ indicates texts
held at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American
Literature at the New York Public Library. ‘MHP’ indicates texts held at the
Monks House Papers archive at the University of Sussex. Documents are
undated unless otherwise stated. All but one of the texts below can be found
in Virginia Woolf: Major Authors [CD-ROM] (Woolf, 1996), and this list has
been compiled with the help of the editorial apparatus supplied by Mark Hussey
within this excellent resource. The first portion of the typescript of ‘A Sketch of
the Past’ listed below is available from Woolf Online [Web site and database]
(Woolf, 2008).
Holograph and Typescript Drafts of Woolf ’s Speech to the

L&NSWS
MATERIAL CAT. NO. LOCATION

MS notes for ‘Professions for Women’ speech, 9pp M.1.4 BRG
In ‘Articles, essays, fiction and reviews’ Vol. 4, dated 21 January 1931.
TS draft of ‘Professions for Women’ speech, 25pp M.70 BRG
A draft of the speech with authorial MS corrections.
Pre-Publication Texts Referenced xiii
Holograph and Typescript Material Relating to The Years

MS draft of The Pargiters: a novel-essay, 8 Vols. M.42 BRG
Holograph draft of The Years, dated 11 October 1932 – 15 November 1934:
Vol. 1, 114pp; Vol. 2, 124pp; Vol. 3, 159pp; Vol. 4, 167pp; Vol. 5, 159pp;
Vol. 6, 120pp; Vol. 7, 159pp; Vol. 8, 23pp.
MS fragment of The Years, 17pp M.41 BRG
A draft of the deleted ‘1921’ chapter, featuring Edward, Kitty and Eleanor.
MS paragraph relating to The Years, 1p M.1.6 BRG
In ‘Articles, essays, fiction and reviews’ Vol. 6, a passage relating to ‘1880.’
TS fragment of The Years, 5pp B.4.d MHP
A draft of the final section of ‘1910,’ with authorial MS corrections.
TS fragment of The Years, 3pp B.15.2 MHP
A draft of the final section of ‘1910,’ with authorial MS corrections.
TS fragment of The Years, 11pp M.128 BRG
A draft of ‘1917’ with authorial MS corrections and proof fragments.
Galley Proofs of The Years, 83pp M.137 BRG
First Proofs, incomplete, dated 17 March 1936.
Galley Proofs of The Years, 38pp M.138 BRG
First Proofs, incomplete, dated 14 April 1936.
Page Proofs of The Years, 12pp M.139 BRG
Page Proofs of ‘1917’ (some duplication with M.138), dated 15 December
1936.
Holograph and Typescript Material Relating to Three Guineas

MS reading notes for Three Guineas, 27pp B.16.a MHP
Reading Notebook LV; containing reading notes relating to women,
education and the Chartists alongside a draft fragment of Chapter 2 of
Three Guineas.
MS notes for ‘The Burning of the Vote,’ 10pp B.16.b MHP
Reading Notebook LVI; notes relating to Three Guineas including an
unfinished dramatic sketch titled ‘The Burning of the Vote.’
xiv Pre-Publication Texts Referenced

MS notes on Women and War, 7pp B.16.c MHP
Draft passages relating to Chapter 1 of Three Guineas, dated 1937.
MS notes on Congreve and Three Guineas, 10pp B.16.d MHP
Draft passages relating to Three Guineas on pp. 8–10; dated 2 August 1937.
MS reading notes ‘The inflated brown bug,’ 8pp B.16.e MHP
Reading Notebook LVII; including notes relating to Three Guineas.
The Three Guineas Scrapbooks, 3 Vols. B.16.f MHP
Scrapbooks comprised of press-cuttings, MS and TS extracts; Vol. 1, 67pp,
produced 1931–c.1933; Vol. 2, 59pp, produced c.1935–1937; Vol. 3, 65pp,
produced 1937.
MS fragment titled ‘Draft of Professions,’ 11pp M.1.6 BRG
In ‘Articles, essays, fiction and reviews’ Vol. 6, dated 14 April 1935.
MS reading notes for Three Guineas, 39pp M.30 BRG
Reading Notebook XXXIII; almost all material found within B.16.f, Vol. 2.
MS fragment of ‘Women must Weep,’ 23pp M.40 BRG
Draft passages of Woolf ’s article version of Three Guineas for Atlantic Monthly.
TS fragment of Three Guineas, 1p M.127 BRG
One page fragment from Chapter 3 of Three Guineas on the subject of
‘indifference.’
MS and TS draft fragments of Three Guineas, 162pp M.28 BRG
This folder includes: a 90pp MS draft of Chapter 3, dated 21 September;
a 49pp TS draft of Chapter 1; 21pp of miscellaneous TS; and 2pp miscel-
laneous MS.
TS draft of ‘The Second Guinea,’ 71pp M.29 BRG
57pp TS draft of Chapter 2, dated 28 June 1937, with 14pp miscellaneous TS.
Typescript Document Relating to ‘A Sketch of the Past’

TS draft of ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ 69pp A.5.a MHP
TS draft (incomplete) with authorial MS corrections in pencil and black ink
and MS notes from Leonard Woolf in blue ink, comprised of seven dated
fragments: 18 April 1939, 18pp; 2 May [1939], 17pp; 15 May 1939, 11pp; 28
May 1939, 6pp; 20 June 1939, 4pp; 19 July 1939, 3pp; 8 June 1940, 11pp.
Editorial Symbols
<word> = an authorial insertion.

{word} = an authorial deletion made with a horizontal line.
[word] = an editorial insertion.
[?word?] = a questionable editorial reading.
[illeg.] = an illegible word or sequence of words.
●│passage│● = a long authorial deletion made by a single vertical stroke or
wavy lines.
In an attempt to convey something of the complexity of Woolf ’s revisions, these

editorial symbols distinguish between short deletions made with a horizontal
line through a word or phrase and long deletions made with a vertical stroke
or wavy lines through a passage. Volume and page numbers in my appendices
are indicated in square brackets, i.e. [1: p. 1]. Spelling and punctuation have not
been altered and remain Woolf ’s own.
1
Introducing Late Woolf

Joyce is dead – Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss
Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in type script to our tea table at
Hogarth House. […] Would we devote our lives to printing it? […] One day
Katherine Mansfield came, & I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then
suddenly said, But theres some thing [sic] in this: a scene that should figure I
suppose in the history of literature. […] This goes back to a pre-historic world.
Virginia Woolf, 15 January 1941 (Diary 5: pp. 352–3).
Two months before her own death in March 1941, the news that James Joyce
had died prompted Virginia Woolf to look back on the modern fictions that
she, Joyce and Katherine Mansfield had each once strived to create as relics
of ‘a pre-historic world’ (D 5: p. 353). Early 1920s modernist experimentalism
belonged to pre-history in Woolf ’s mind in part due to the extinction of many
of the period’s champions of avant-garde art and literature, including Joyce,
Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and Ottoline Morrell, all of whom she
mentions in this late diary entry. In addition, as World War II raged on, German
air raids were then demolishing the cityscape that this era evoked for Woolf. Her
London home at 37 Mecklenburgh Square was hit by a bomb explosion on 18
September 1940. ‘Another bad raid’ the following night ‘smashed’ Oxford Street,
the British Museum forecourt, ‘all [her] old haunts’ (D 5: p. 323). On 13 January
1941 she took the ‘tube to the Temple’ and ‘there wandered in the desolate ruins
of my old squares: gashed; dismantled’ (D 5: p. 353). The intellectual circles
and physical spaces in which Woolf had attempted, as a writer and publisher,
to help bring about the modernization of English literature were slowly being
obliterated. In the early months of 1941, despite her preparation of a new novel
for publication, Woolf was uncomfortably aware that the work for which she
and her modernist contemporaries would be chiefly remembered had already
been consigned to literary history.
From the early 1930s, Woolf faced fears regarding the perception of her
writing as outdated. In the context of the Great Depression and increasing
political instability across Europe, a significant backlash emerged in Britain in
2 Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism
the later interwar period against the modernist experimentalism of the 1910s
and 1920s. In New Signatures (1932), Michael Roberts introduced poetry of
the new decade from W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender,
among others, as a ‘clear reaction against [the] esoteric poetry’ of the preceding
generation (quoted in Brooker and Thacker, 2009a, p. 591). In Men Without Art
(1934), Wyndham Lewis alluded to the contemporary belief that ‘Mrs. Woolf
[…] is taken seriously by no one any longer today’ (p. 159). Simultaneously,
other critics of the period began to canonize modernism. As early as 1931,
Harold Nicolson hailed Woolf, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Evelyn
Waugh as representative of the ‘modern’ writers of the post-war period in a BBC
radio broadcast (1931, p. 546). Woolf responded angrily to Nicolson’s grouping
in a letter to Hugh Walpole, exclaiming ‘Lord – how tired I am of being caged’
(L 4: p. 402). Both the backlash against modernism and its early canonization
in the 1930s generated anxieties for Woolf surrounding the reception of her
literary output. This book investigates how such anxieties informed the works
of her final decade, during which Woolf became increasingly preoccupied with
dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, fascism and war.
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism exposes the genesis and evolution
of Woolf ’s late feminist-pacifist politics by unravelling the complex textual
histories of her penultimate and final novels, The Years (1937) and Between the
Acts (1941), and her anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas (1938). Through careful
scrutiny of published and unpublished texts relating to the composition of these
three late works, and wider exploration of the social, economic and political
climate in which they were produced, this study supplies a detailed, historicized
account of the development of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism. My approach to
The Years, Three Guineas and Between the Acts synthesizes feminist-historicist
analysis with the principles and practices of genetic criticism, a French school
of textual studies that traces the evolution of literary works through their early
drafts, or avant-textes (‘pre-texts’). This branch of manuscript study is particu-
larly attentive to the historical circumstances inscribed in textual compositions,
an aspect of genetic criticism that opportunely accords with a feminist-histor-
icist critical framework. A genetic, feminist-historicist examination of these
works reveals the evolution of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism from her previous
writing and thinking, and in response to the tempestuous social and political
climate of 1931–41.
Scholarly conceptions of Woolf, her novels and her criticism have been trans-
formed following the late twentieth-century rise of literary theory through the
insights of feminism, new historicism, post-colonialism and cultural studies.
Introducing Late Woolf 3
The decade in which contemporary critics once caricatured Woolf as apolitical

and obsolete is now, paradoxically, the decade in which she is perceived to have
been most socially and politically active. Linden Peach refers to Woolf ’s ‘osten-
sibly most “social realist” work of the 1930s’ (2007, p. 171); Merry M. Pawlowski
describes Three Guineas as ‘the strongest example in her oeuvre of Woolf
working as a contemporary cultural critic’ (2001, p. 4); and Julia Briggs casts late
Woolf as ‘a serious political thinker’ (2006b, p. 337). While Woolf undoubtedly
concentrated her creative and critical energies towards social and political
commentary in her final decade, we must be wary of viewing this shift in
focus as a movement against her earlier output. As a feminist and a modernist,
throughout her career, Woolf sought to overhaul both the aesthetic conventions
and the implicit patriarchal values of masculine high literary culture. The close
relationship between formal and political radicalism in Woolf ’s early and late
works undermines the integrity of viewing her oeuvre in two distinct phases,
the modernist 1920s and the socially engaged 1930s, and suggests the danger of
applying such labels to wider narratives of British interwar literature.
Following the precedent set by the writers themselves, early critical studies of
1930s literature, including Samuel Hynes’ seminal The Auden Generation (1976),
stressed the opposition in generation, outlook and aim between the young, leftist
writers of the 1930s, including Auden and his New Signatures contemporaries,
and their high modernist predecessors. This emphasis has established a division
between the 1920s and the 1930s in studies of early twentieth-century British
literature, which, while convenient, has been open to perennial challenge. In
the twenty-first century, following Tyrus Miller’s influential appropriation in
1999 of the phrase ‘late modernism’ to describe Anglo-American modernist art
and literature of the late 1920s and 1930s, sustained critical attention has been
valuably directed to modernism’s continued presence and growth alongside
the more overtly politicized literature of the later interwar period.1 Miller and
subsequent scholars of late modernism, notably Jed Esty (2004) and Marina
Mackay (2007), argue that modernism evolved beyond its conceptual origins
in the 1930s and 1940s as experimental writers sought new ways to respond
to the era’s social and political instability. ‘Facing an unexpected stop,’ Miller
contends, ‘late modernists took a detour into the political regions that high
modernism had managed to view from the distance of a closed car’ (1999,
p. 13). This conception of late modernism successfully destabilizes the familiar
divisive narratives of British literature of the 1920s and 1930s and offers an
interesting paradigm through which to interpret the increased social and
political engagement of Woolf ’s later writings. It also relies, however, on our
acceptance of Miller’s contention that high modernism, including Woolf ’s

early output, was not already politically engaged. This study maps Woolf ’s later
career on a similar trajectory to the trajectory of late modernism, but crucially
reads Woolf ’s late cultural criticism as an extension of, rather than a departure
from, the innovative feminist politics and aesthetic experimentation of her
earlier writing. A sustained discussion of these scholars’ conceptions of late
modernism and their relevance to Woolf will draw this book to a close.
The following introductory chapter sets the scene for Virginia Woolf ’s
Late Cultural Criticism with three brief critical surveys. The first provides an
overview of British society, politics and literature in the years 1931–41, situating
the development of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism in its historical and literary
context. The second reviews Woolf ’s lifelong feminist politics with reference
to her major works prior to and beyond 1931, including discussion of the core
theoretical approaches responsible for establishing her reputation as a cultural
commentator. The third introduces the methodology of genetic criticism with
an outline of the approach and content of the subsequent chapters of this study.
British society and literature, 1931–41
The timing of Virginia Woolf ’s late turn to cultural criticism in the 1930s reflects
the pervasive presence of social and political commentary in much British liter-
ature of the later interwar period. In The Auden Generation, the classic survey
around which most retrospective accounts of the decade’s literature are formu-
lated, Hynes asserts that ‘1931 was the watershed between the post-war years
and the pre-war years, the point at which the mood of the ’thirties first became
generally apparent’ (1976, p. 65). Fundamentally important to the pre-war mood
Hynes identifies is the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The financial crisis
that followed this collapse of the American stock market led many European
countries, still recovering from the economic cost of World War I, to experience
steep rises in unemployment and widespread poverty among their labouring
classes. Unemployment peaked in Britain in the years 1931–2, described by
John Stevenson and Chris Cook as ‘the trough of the depression,’ with over 2.5
million people officially registered as out of work (the actual number of jobless
workers, as Stevenson and Cook note, was probably far higher) (1994, p. 15).
Global economies remained in a depressed state throughout the decade until
the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
In the context of sustained economic depression, and as a consequence
of it, Europe in the 1930s became increasingly politically unstable. As Hynes

observes, popular protest, civil disobedience and a growth in fascism became
progressively more visible in Britain and across the continent from 1932:
Hunger marchers demonstrated in London that autumn. […] In November,

Sir Oswald Mosley announced the formation of the British Union of Fascists.
[…] Meanwhile, across the Channel there were riots in Poland and an anarchist
uprising in Barcelona; and in January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of
Germany, the Reichstag burned, and the persecution of Jews and leftists began.
1976, p. 99
Confidence in the League of Nations, the international governmental organi-

zation set up after World War I to prevent further conflict, was gradually eroded
through this period as its attempts to secure worldwide disarmament proved
futile.2 Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 highlighted the ineffectu-
ality of the League’s policy of collective security and exposed the weakness of an
organization which, with no armed force at its disposal, could only impose its
authority through the actions of member states that would always be reluctant
to jeopardize their own political and financial security. By July 1936, when Civil
War erupted in Spain, the League of Nations had virtually collapsed. The policy
of non-intervention adopted by the remnants of the League in response to the
Spanish Civil War, including the British government, was criticized widely in
the European media. Depicted in the British press as a war between democracy
on the left, represented by the Spanish Republican government, and tyranny
on the right, represented by General Franco’s Nationalist forces and the Fascist
Italian and Nazi German troops that supported them, the war engaged the
attention of many leftist British writers, artists and intellectuals, some of whom
even volunteered to assist the Republican cause.3 The threat of another major
global conflict became ever more apparent through the period until finally, five
months after the Spanish Republicans’ surrender to Franco’s dictatorship on 1
April 1939, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, marking the start
of World War II.
‘From about 1930, predictions of war, and anxieties about war, begin to
enter English writing,’ Hynes notes in The Auden Generation, ‘and at about the
same time the younger generation begins to write about itself as a generation’
(p. 61, emphasis in original). Hynes’s study focuses on the development of
these younger writers he defines as the ‘Auden Generation,’ the majority of
whom were English, middle-class, university educated, and born between
1900 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Alongside Auden, after whom
Hynes’s grouping was named, these writers also included: Irish-born poet, Cecil
Day-Lewis; poet and critic, William Empson; novelist, Christopher Isherwood;
poet and publisher, John Lehmann; and poet, novelist and essayist, Stephen
Spender. The anxieties about war that Hynes finds in the writings of this
generation entered the consciousness of all living and working through this
period, however, not only the small circle of writers that Hynes reviews. More
recently Richard Overy has described the ‘overwhelmingly morbid character of
much of the culture and ideas of the inter-war years,’ contending that anxieties
about war had a dramatic impact on literature produced throughout the two
decades following the end of World War I (2009, p. 364). Surveys of 1930s
literature written after The Auden Generation have often sought to present a
more balanced picture of the writing produced in the later interwar period than
that which Hynes supplies.
The essays collected in Culture and Crisis in Britain in the 30s (1979), for
example, examine the existence of radical and left-wing cultural outputs across
the genres of poetry, fiction, critical prose, theatre and film in this turbulent
decade, ranging from Jon Clark’s contribution on the unprecedented amount
of ‘Left’ theatre groups performing plays and sketches to labour movement
audiences in Britain in the 1930s (1979) to Peter Widdowson’s reading of
already established novelists, Aldous Huxley and Woolf, alongside younger
writers such as Isherwood, Edward Upward and Graham Greene (1979). All
of the essays collected within Culture and Crisis are situated in opposition to
the post-war perception of the 1930s as a decade in which political literature
flourished at the expense of aesthetic literature, which remained ‘simplistic,
unimaginative, and crudely propagandist’ (Clark et al., p. 9).
In British Writers of the Thirties (1988), Valentine Cunningham similarly
emphasizes the continued presence of ‘the heroes and heroines of British
Modernism’ through the decade who were ‘still about in large numbers and
still producing’ (p. 21). The 1930s ‘contain at least three literary generations,’
Cunningham asserts, of which ‘Auden and his coterie may be justly thought of
as somewhere in the middle,’ with ‘a most distinguished older generation’ on
one side – including Eliot, Joyce, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats
and Woolf – and ‘the immediate inheritors of the Auden generation’ on the
other (pp. 21–2). In this latter grouping Cunningham includes John Cornford,
a Cambridge-educated Communist and poet who was killed while fighting
for the Spanish Republicans in 1936, and Charles Madge, poet, sociologist,
and one of the founders of Mass-Observation. Established in 1937, this mass
social research organization aimed ‘to create an “anthropology of ourselves”’
through recruiting observers and volunteer writers to study ‘the everyday lives
of ordinary people in Britain’ (‘The original mass observation’). Cunningham’s
expansive discussion of the vast diversity of British writers working in the 1930s
forcefully demonstrates why ‘concentrating only on the Auden clique won’t do’
(p. 26).
Literary histories of the 1930s that stress the importance of the Auden
generation, as these studies have identified, risk suggesting that this small
group of poets were the foremost and only writers of leftist literature in the
period. The decade also contained a significant strand of socially engaged
‘documentary’ literature, evidenced primarily in the era’s prose, to which the
Mass-Observation project corresponds. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris
and London (1933), a fictionalized memoir of Orwell’s encounters with poverty
while living in each of these cities, exemplifies this trend. Orwell’s emphasis
on personal witness in this novel and his blurring of the boundaries between
creative writing and reportage exhibits the documentary qualities that charac-
terized much politicized literature of the 1930s. Down and Out reads in parts
as a novel, with imaginative descriptions of the narrator’s environment and the
characters he meets, and in parts as a journalistic report, with prosaic interludes
on social matters such as: ‘A word about the sleeping accommodation open to a
homeless person in London’ (1999, p. 210). Orwell’s narrator closes his account
by educating the reader about ‘one or two things I have definitely learned by
being hard up’ (pp. 215–6). This work, together with J. B. Priestley’s English
Journey (1934), marked the beginning of a fashion for socially and politically
engaged travel writing from middle-class writers in Britain in the 1930s. The
lengthy subtitle of Priestley’s travelogue – a rambling but truthful account of
what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through
England during the autumn of the year 1933 – signifies the accent placed on
personal experience and accurate testimony in such socialist works. Writing The
Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a study of the acute unemployment and financial
hardship affecting Northern England’s labouring classes, Orwell abandoned the
fictional devices of Down and Out to adopt a style Keith Williams describes as
the ‘new reportage’ (1997, pp. 163–81). The prose produced by Orwell, Priestley
and their contemporaries was as crucial to establishing the leftist tone of 1930s
literature as the poetry and fiction of the writers retrospectively grouped as the
Auden generation.
A further reason for broadening our view of the 1930s, Cunningham
contends, is because ‘the myth of the Auden Generation, in choosing by and
large to leave out novelists […] even if it does let in Isherwood and Upward
and a tiny clutch of other prose writers, is clamantly leaving out women’ (1988,
p. 26). Elizabeth Bowen, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann,
Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith and Woolf, Cunningham reminds
us, were all producing fiction in this decade. Janet Montefiore argues, however,
with some justification, that despite the greater inclusivity of Cunningham’s
‘monumental British Writers of the Thirties,’ his review of the decade equally ‘has
little to say about women writers except for Elizabeth Bowen’ (1996, pp. 19–20).
In Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, Montefiore addresses this deficiency
by examining the work of female and working-class male writers of the decade,
whose political stance she reads as infused with a sense of collective memory.
Cunningham’s assertion that ‘[t]here weren’t many notable woman poets in
Britain in the 1930s’ (1988, p. 26) is further corrected by Jane Dowson’s critical
anthology of 1930s poetry by women (1996), which valuably restores the previ-
ously eclipsed verse of writers such as Frances Cornford, Naomi Mitchison and
Dorothy Wellesley to this decade’s literary canon. Essays collected in Women
Writers of the 1930s (1999), edited by Maroula Joannou, similarly indicate the
vast array of poetry and prose produced by women writers working in this
decade. These studies have done much to reinstate women’s writing within the
wider narrative of 1930s literature in Britain.
Yet despite this widening critical viewpoint on British literature of the 1930s,
the convenient interwar divide between the 1920s and 1930s continues to shape
analysis of the period, even where critics challenge this division. Rewriting the
Thirties: Modernism and After (1997), an essay collection edited by Keith Williams
and Steven Matthews, supports and extends Cunningham’s depiction of the
sustained influence of the 1920s experimentalists in the decade preceding World
War II. This volume attempts to ‘challenge the persistent aftermyth of the thirties
as a homogenous anti-modernist decade’ by showing the ‘over-lapping, competing
and contradictory theoretical tendencies and practical alignments in the decade,’
and by emphasizing the role of Eliot at Faber and Woolf at Hogarth as ‘literary
midwives to the younger writers of the thirties’ (1997, pp. 1–2). Throughout the
1930s Woolf and her husband, Leonard, supported writers of Auden’s generation by
publishing their work through the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press. The year of Woolf ’s
fiftieth birthday, 1932, saw the publication of New Signatures, the landmark volume
of verse which ‘has become a part of the ’thirties mythology’ surrounding Auden
and his coterie (Hynes, 1976, p. 75). This collection was proposed to the Woolfs
by John Lehmann, then assistant manager at the Press. Despite her conflicted
responses to these younger writers and her distrust of their militant political
outlook, Woolf strongly believed that their output should be printed and debated.
While Cunningham’s monograph and Williams and Matthews’s edited

collection have successfully broadened the study of 1930s literature by reminding
readers of the productivity of Woolf and her modernist contemporaries in this
decade, their continued stress upon the divide between the two literary genera-
tions inadvertently perpetuates the myth of the younger writers of the 1930s
as anti-modernist and the older writers of the 1930s as anti-political in their
output. Works such as John Lucas’s The Radical Twenties (1997), which traces
the social and political radicalism of modernist writers, and David Ayers’s
English Literature of the 1920s (1999), which reads 1920s modernist fiction as a
reaction against the capitalist state, undermine such divisions by constructing a
pre-history for the activist 1930s within the modernist 1920s. Virginia Woolf ’s
Late Cultural Criticism builds on the work of critics such as Lucas and Ayers,
and recent studies of late modernism from Miller, Esty and MacKay, by further
calling into question the integrity of viewing the interwar period in two distinct
decades. Woolf ’s development as an experimental cultural critic in her final
decade, radical in her feminist-pacifist politics and in her use of critical and
fictional literary forms, suggests a bridge between two decades and two genera-
tions often artificially divided in scholarly discussions of the interwar period.
Woolf in the 1930s and beyond
At the end of the 1920s, Woolf ’s literary reputation was at its peak. Following
the minor successes of her early novels, The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day
(1919), and her first novel-length work of experimental fiction, Jacob’s Room
(1922), the publication of Mrs Dalloway in 1925 had signalled Woolf ’s arrival
as a major contemporary novelist. Early reviews praised the novel’s innovation
even as they queried its difficulty.4 Surveying Woolf ’s fiction for the New
Criterion in April 1926, Forster declared Mrs Dalloway ‘perhaps her masterpiece’
(quoted in Majumdar and McLaurin, 1975, p. 174). To the Lighthouse followed
in 1927, securing Woolf ’s reputation as a highbrow experimental novelist, while
the highly successful pseudo-biographical Orlando (1928) popularized her
playful blending and breaking of literary forms for a wider reading public.5 The
Common Reader (1925), her first collected volume of essays on literary subjects,
had additionally established Woolf ’s ability as a writer of critical prose.6 Finally
the publication of A Room of One’s Own (1929), an extended critical discussion
of the social and economic circumstances necessary for women to succeed as
writers and across the professions, had demonstrated her aptitude as a feminist
cultural commentator. Heading into the 1930s, Woolf was perceived by many as
a glamorous but elusive aesthete, crowned ‘Queen of the High-brows’ by Arnold
Bennett in the Evening Standard on 28 November 1929 (quoted in Majumdar
and McLaurin, 1975, p. 258).
Bennett’s depiction was reinforced by the release of The Waves in October
1931, Woolf ’s first major publication of the 1930s. This highly experimental
novel represented Woolf ’s most thorough exposition of the multiplicity and
communality of the modern self, and the fullest expression of the innovative
fictional method that she had already demonstrated in the early short stories
‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917) and ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), and in the novels
Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The poetic qualities of
Woolf ’s prose were celebrated in contemporary reviews of The Waves but many
critics doubted whether Woolf could push this method further. At the close of
the first book-length critical study of Woolf, published in 1932, Winifred Holtby
turned from The Waves to prophesy that Woolf ’s ‘range will remain limited, her
contact with life delicate and profound rather than comprehensive’ and ‘she is
unlikely ever to command the allegiance of a wide contemporary public’ (1978,
p. 201). Even to those who celebrated them, Woolf ’s aesthetic investigations into
the human ego were beginning to seem not only esoteric but out of place in the
current troubled economic and political climate.
The publication of Flush in October 1933, a fictional biography of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s spaniel, provided further evidence that Woolf was out of
touch with the society into which she wrote. Writing in the English Review,
Eleanor Carroll Chilton called the book ‘a very charming trifle’, but conjectured
that ‘Mrs. Woolf is growing less and less interested in using her method as a
means of exploring reality, and more and more absorbed in trying to create
reality out of the method itself ’ (1933, p. 557). Despite such criticism, Flush
sold surprisingly well (Briggs observes the sale of ‘18,000 copies in its first six
months in the UK alone’ (2006b, p. 300)), proving to be far more accessible
to the middlebrow reading public than her previous experimental novels had
been and confirming Woolf ’s pre-publication fear that her readers would ‘say
its [sic] “charming” delicate, ladylike’ and ‘I shall very much dislike the popular
success of Flush’ (D 4: p. 181). Later critics have read surreptitious elements of
social critique in the work that contemporary readers largely overlooked. By
‘parodying […] Lytton Strachey’s extravagant debunking of Victorian hypocrisy
in Eminent Victorians’ in Flush, Kate Flint argues, Woolf was also ‘tacitly
restating […] some of the reasons why the Victorian period, with its legacy of
gender attitudes persisting into the present day, still deserved serious scrutiny’
(2000, p. xvi). Nevertheless, when viewed alongside the overtly socially and
politically engaged writings of younger writers of the period, the book appeared
flimsy, individualistic, and entirely disinterested in current affairs.
Woolf ’s activity as a literary journalist also fell dramatically in the 1930s.
Although she continued to write for a wide range of periodicals, including
popular women’s magazines Vanity Fair and Good Housekeeping, the scholarly
Yale Review, and the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Daily Worker, in all
Woolf produced only 50 journalistic articles in the ten years preceding her
death, less than half of the 117 essays and reviews she had produced during
the years 1925–30. The rich language and conversational style of her published
journalism frequently concealed her social and political commentary, and
facilitated the reception of her prose as impressionistic rather than analytical.
Wyndham Lewis argued that ‘Mrs. Woolf […] has crystallized for us, in her
critical essays, what is in fact the feminine – as distinguished from the feminist
– standpoint’ (1934, pp. 159–60, emphasis in original). This obscure description
relates to Lewis’s representation of Woolf ’s writing in Men Without Art as
representative of the now-outdated feminized highbrow culture of Bloomsbury.
He notably attaches no importance to Woolf ’s analysis of women’s historically
oppressed position in society, either in A Room of One’s Own or in her critical
writings at large, asserting instead that ‘feminism is a dead issue’ (1934, p. 160).
The title of Woolf ’s second volume of collected essays, The Common Reader:
Second Series (1932), had supported the perception of her critical outlook as
outdated by stressing this work’s connection with her earlier volume. Woolf ’s
assertion that literature should avoid overt political commentary in A Letter to a
Young Poet (1932) and ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), two signed essays written in
response to the poetry of Auden and his contemporaries, further propagated the
caricature of Woolf as a fading experimental novelist whose intellectual position
had been rendered obsolete by the movement of her times.
Despite these statements against politicized art, which alone might suggest
that she never made a transition from high to late modernist aesthetics, Woolf
was in fact desperately interested in documenting the movement of her times
throughout the 1930s and examining these socio-political contexts in her literary
output. From 1931, she kept scrapbooks of quotations, newspaper cuttings and
articles relating to British and European politics, the rise of fascism, and the
position of women and militarism in British society, as part of her research for
The Pargiters. This unfinished hybrid ‘novel-essay’ was famously conceived as
‘a sequel to a Room of Ones [sic] Own’ on 20 January 1931 (D 4: p. 6), a day
before Woolf ’s delivery of a speech on ‘Professions for Women’ to the Junior
Council of the London and National Society for Women’s Service, and eighteen
days before she completed her draft of The Waves. The Pargiters occupied much
of Woolf ’s attention in the mid-1930s as she repeatedly redrafted, revised, and
finally reworked the enterprise into two separate texts: her socially attentive
novel, The Years, and her overtly confrontational feminist-pacifist pamphlet,
Three Guineas. From a retrospective viewpoint, as Chapter 2 explores, the early
months of 1931 thus appear pivotal within Woolf ’s oeuvre and the origins of
the development of her late cultural criticism. It was at this moment that Woolf
began to channel her experimentalism, literary activity and intellectual focus
into the ‘entire new book’ on ‘the sexual life of women’ that would morph into
her two major works of the 1930s (D 4: p. 6).
When The Years appeared in March 1937, however, the feminist origins of
this endeavour were submerged within the text according to Woolf ’s belief that
aesthetic productions should avoid propagandizing. Woolf innovatively drama-
tized her critiques of patriarchy in this novel, rather than offering overt social
analysis. On publication, the novel was appreciatively received as an uncompli-
cated, realist family chronicle novel, becoming a best-seller in America.7 The
second work to develop from the Pargiters project, Three Guineas, published
2 June 1938, conversely set out Woolf ’s late feminist-pacifist position in an
explicit manner that challenged many reviewers. Reviewing the work for the
Spectator on 17 June 1938, Graham Greene imagined Woolf ’s brain as ‘a large
whorled shell’, finding in Three Guineas that:
When Mrs Woolf ’s argument touches morality or religion we are aware of odd
sounds in the shell. Can a shell be a little old-fashioned […] a little provincial,
even a little shrill? Can a shell be said to lead a too sheltered life?
quoted in Majamdar and McLaurin, 1975, pp. 406–8
Greene’s reference to the essay’s shrillness discloses his discomfort with its
outspoken style and unequivocally political commentary, which he condemns as
outdated and limited in scope. The work in which, paralleling conceptions of late
modernism, Woolf attempted overtly to demonstrate her timeliness by addressing
contemporary politics was paradoxically characterized as ‘old-fashioned’ by those
resistant to its feminist anti-war stance. Such responses were anticipated by Woolf,
as detailed in Chapter 3, who expected Three Guineas to meet opposition from
the male middle classes whose education, militarism and materialism her work so
ruthlessly attacked. Despite its explicit social and political analysis of British patri-
archy, Three Guineas was read derisively by many contemporary critics as further
evidence of Woolf ’s isolation from current affairs.
One reason for this reception is Woolf ’s refusal to deal with or depict the
social and economic problems facing the lower classes in these late works. Unlike
Orwell or Priestley, who, although of lower social standing, were each university-
educated and, in differing ways, also middle-class, Woolf did not attempt to
traverse the gulf between the classes in her writing of the interwar period. In
her ‘Introductory Letter’ to Life As We Have Known It (1931), a collection of
autobiographical writings from members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild,
Woolf publicly voiced her anxieties about writing about labouring-class culture
from a middle-class viewpoint, asserting that ‘One could not be Mrs Giles
of Durham because one’s body had never stood at the wash-tub; one’s hands
had never wrung and scrubbed’ (E 5: p. 228). While fiercely supportive of the
Hogarth Press’s publication of this collection of working women’s memoirs, she
was suspicious of the ‘fictitious’ nature of middle-class sympathy (E 5: p. 232).
Her determination to write only on behalf of that portion of British society that
she knew personally, the daughters of educated men, in her anti-war pamphlet
both reflects the emphasis on personal testimony in documentary literature
of the 1930s and revolts against the assumption that a middle-class writer can
speak with authority on the problems affecting the labouring classes. This reluc-
tance to analyse British society beyond the sphere of the upper-middle classes
contributed to the perception of Woolf ’s feminist analysis in Three Guineas as
limited, as did the ever-increasing threat of war against which, in June 1938, her
thoughts on peace could provide no practical defence.
When World War II broke out in September 1939 Woolf was occupied with
two books: Roger Fry, a biography of her close friend the Bloomsbury art critic
who had died in September 1934, and a new novel, Between the Acts. Woolf
worked on the projects in tandem from 1938. The biography was published
in July 1940, while Between the Acts appeared in July 1941, four months after
Woolf ’s death. Begun and set in pre-war Britain, Woolf ’s final novel is directed
to a country facing conflict. Echoing the form of Mrs Dalloway, a distinctly
post-war text set on one day in June 1923, Between the Acts depicts the experi-
ences of an interlinked cast of characters through one day in mid-June 1939.
Images of violence and the sounds of aerial attack powerfully reverberate
through the text, echoing Septimus Warren Smith’s hallucinations of war in Mrs
Dalloway. Despite the pre-war setting, these images highlight the international
conflict that will soon erupt and splinter the sheltered English community the
novel portrays. Chapter 4 investigates how this novel responds to the question
of art’s social role in wartime, drawing on Woolf ’s earlier public statements on
this subject during 1932–40. Nonetheless, the social and political implications
of Between the Acts eluded many of the novel’s first critics. Woolf ’s suicide
in March 1941 and the subsequent revelation of her mental illness prompted
readers to align her supposed madness with eccentric genius, overlooking
her subversive attempts to analyse the prevailing greed, complacency and
underlying aggression of the predominant patriarchal social order. Respectful
obituaries celebrated Woolf ’s life and works by enshrining her aloofness from
everyday society: Stephen Spender described Woolf as ‘an extraordinary and
poetic and beautiful human being’; Hugh Walpole portrayed her as ‘a lady’ in
the Victorian mould with ‘the air of a priestess’ (both quoted in Majumdar and
McLaurin, 1975, pp. 428, 433). Despite Woolf ’s efforts to expand the scope of
her literary output through cultural analysis and to speak to society at large
through her late fiction and criticism, at her death she was primarily remem-
bered as an isolated aesthete.
Three interlinked branches of scholarship have been fundamental to decon-
structing this perception of Woolf ’s late output, still evident in Quentin Bell’s
1972 biographical depiction of his aunt in the 1930s as ‘a fragile middle-aged
poetess […] caught in a tempest’ (Bell, 1987, 2: p. 185). Feminist criticism,
new historicism, and textual studies have together eroded this portrayal and
gradually replaced it with the now-prevalent image of Woolf in the 1930s
as a social and political thinker. Each of these theoretical perspectives has
significantly drawn attention to Woolf ’s pre-publication and non-fictional texts.
Although Woolf ’s oeuvre has been the subject of numerous critical studies
in the seven decades since her death, her literary and cultural journalism has
consistently received less attention than her fiction. These writings, like Woolf ’s
manuscript drafts, are crucial to the depiction of Woolf in recent criticism as a
politically engaged cultural commentator in her late works.
The rise of feminist theory in the 1970s turned attention to Woolf ’s discus-
sions of women’s role in society in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas,
which, following the reconceptualization of feminism, were now understood
as indicative of a meaningful political stance rather than dismissed as an
outdated individualistic complaint.8 At the vanguard of the Anglo-American
feminist reappraisal of Woolf, Jane Marcus drew scholarly attention to ‘the
social criticism, the sexual politics, of Woolf ’s novels’ (1981, p. xiv). In France,
post-structuralist feminist theorists used Woolf ’s writings to further their
interrogations of the gendered connotations of language for the woman writer;
in 1974, for example, Julia Kristeva evoked Woolf ’s fictional descriptions
of ‘suspended states, subtle sensations and, above all, colors’ to support her
portrayal of woman writers as ‘visionaries’, estranged from the patriarchal
construction of language as ‘from a foreign land’ (1981, p. 166). Many Anglo-

American critics remained distrustful of this conception of feminine writing
(écriture feminine),9 particularly following Judith Butler’s persuasive framing of
gender as performance in Gender Trouble (1990), yet French feminism has had
a lasting impact on Woolf studies by increasing critical awareness of the ways in
which Woolf ’s formal experimentation can be read as indicative of her feminist
politics.
The emergence of new historicism in the 1980s complemented existing
feminist approaches to Woolf ’s oeuvre by resituating her writings within their
cultural contexts. Alex Zwerdling’s pioneering Virginia Woolf and The Real
World (1986) remains valuable for its attentive, socially contextualized readings
of Woolf ’s major novels and extended critical prose, which sought to bring
Woolf down from the ivory tower that her readers and commentators have so
often imagined her to occupy by demonstrating her writing’s deep engagement
with ‘the question of how people are shaped (or deformed) by their social
environment’ (pp. 13–14). Feminist-historicism emerged concurrently as an
influential counter to the linguistically conceived feminism advocated by critics
writing in the tradition of French feminism. The essays of Gillian Beer, in
particular, have been highly influential in shaping a self-consciously feminist-
historicist approach to Woolf (see Beer, 1996).
Equally important to these theoretical re-evaluations of Woolf as a political
thinker and writer was the serial publication of her adult diary and letters.10
The release of these volumes, published by the Hogarth Press between 1975
and 1984, supplied critics with unprecedented access to the private and public
life of their subject.11 Sensing the impulse of self-censorship at work in many of
her published texts, many scholars looked to the manuscripts for evidence of
deleted cultural criticism. Early versions of Woolf ’s published works began to
attract sustained scrutiny from the late 1970s.12 A series of critical studies and
transcriptions of archival materials appeared, including – notably for this book
– Mitchell A. Leaska’s edition of the first volume and a half of The Pargiters
manuscript in 1978 (TP), and Grace Radin’s Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Years’: The
Evolution of a Novel (1981), which still presents the most thorough investi-
gation to date of The Years’ development from conception, through manuscript,
typescript and proof versions, to publication.13 The ‘centrality of Woolf to studies
of contemporary culture,’ Brenda R. Silver astutely observes, ‘has a great deal to
do with feminist critics in the 1970s and early 1980s who saw textual editing as
a means to break through the surface of established texts and established views
and bring to light “submerged” texts’ (1991b, p. 194).
Of course, many critics have challenged this politicized version of Woolf ’s

oeuvre. Her writings met a particularly high-profile backlash in her home country
in the early 1990s, exemplified by Tom Paulin’s depiction of Woolf as ‘one of the
most over-rated literary figures of the twentieth century’ in J’accuse: Virginia Woolf,
a television programme broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four in 1991. John Carey’s
contemporaneous monograph The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) similarly
presented Woolf as an overvalued proponent of elitist, high culture, alleging that,
contrary to the claims of feminist and historicist critics, ‘what the “vast mass” felt
or thought was not of much concern to Virginia Woolf ’ (1992, p. 178). ‘Books
on the Thirties […] from Samuel Hynes to Valentine Cunningham, continue
to denigrate, scapegoat or ignore [Woolf ’s] contribution to social debates and
political activities,’ Marcus noted in 1996 with reference to the extreme antipathy
to Woolf voiced by critics like Paulin and Carey (1996, p. 19). Marcus and,
subsequently, Silver, in her insightful Virginia Woolf Icon (1999, see pp. 150–1),
have interpreted such negative responses and omissions as demonstrative of the
misogyny and inverse snobbery of British academia. Conversely, such unsympa-
thetic depictions of Woolf have only fuelled scholarship of her oeuvre in the last
twenty years, prompting critics to expand and emphasize their analysis of the
ways in which Woolf ’s writing critiques society as a whole, not just the small class
of educated men’s daughters she so often addresses.
The last two decades have witnessed the consolidation within Woolf studies
of Woolf ’s reputation as an important and highly influential cultural critic.
‘Today,’ Briggs observed in 2005, ‘our own redefinition of politics, to include
gender quite as much as race and class, events at home as well as away, is due
in no small part to the arguments advanced in Three Guineas’ (2006b, p. 337).
In response to the publication of a full, chronological edition of Woolf ’s essays
between 1986 and 2011 (E 1–6),14 studies of Woolf ’s previously neglected
literary and cultural journalism have demonstrated her active engagement
in the prominent literary and social debates of her time. Monographs from
Beth Carole Rosenberg (1995), Leila Brosnan (1997), Juliet Dusinberre (1997),
Elena Gualtieri (2000) and Anna Snaith (2000a) successfully established the
financial, professional and intellectual importance of journalism to Woolf, who
produced nearly six hundred articles and reviews during her thirty-seven-year
journalistic career.15 In addition, Woolf ’s diverse interactions with mass print
culture have come under increasing scrutiny over the last decade as the myth of
high modernist writers operating beyond the constraints of the literary market
has been steadily deconstructed.16 In recent years Woolf criticism has engaged
enthusiastically with this movement in modernist scholarship and now reads
her journalism through the insights of the newly emergent field of periodical
studies.17 In this context, many critics have turned their attention to Woolf ’s
role as a public intellectual, including Melba Cuddy-Keane (2003), Naomi
Black (2004) and Anne E. Fernald (2006). The essays collected in Virginia Woolf
and Fascism: Resisting the Dictator’s Seduction (2001), edited by Pawlowski, for
example, explore Woolf ’s contributions through her fiction and criticism to
the public debates surrounding European fascism, while Christina Froula in
Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde positions Woolf at the centre of
Bloomsbury’s thinking about European civilization through her activity as both
writer and publisher (2005, pp. 10–11). Writing in 2007, Snaith has depicted
Woolf as ‘an important cultural theorist’ whose own output ‘anticipated many
of the central ideas’ of the theoretical approaches through which we now under-
stand her work (p. 7).
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism obviously extends out of this recent
scholarly attention given to Woolf ’s role as a public commentator on contem-
porary society and politics in her last decade. Over the last twenty years, the
term ‘cultural criticism’ has become increasingly familiar within the field, as
critics have sought to indicate the breadth of Woolf ’s feminist analysis and to
highlight her close contact with, and interest in, the wider society that many
still presume she wished to eschew.18 In this study I similarly adopt this term
to evoke the multiplicity of subjects, all denoted by the word ‘culture’, with
which Woolf was critically engaged in her late career. Central to this book’s
discussion are her late analyses of the historical and contemporary oppression
of women in patriarchal Britain, the links between patriarchy, imperialism and
war, and the relationship between literature and politics. For the purpose of
this book, the flexibility of the ambiguous label ‘cultural criticism’ is also broad
enough to encompass the diverse formal structures of Woolf ’s examinations of
Britain’s society and politics in her last three major works, which, following the
trajectory of late modernism, experimentally refashion existing prose forms
for the expression of her late feminist analysis. Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural
Criticism offers a fresh perspective on Woolf ’s social and political thinking
by tracing the development of these prose forms and her late feminist politics
through an array of published and unpublished texts produced during 1931–41.
My fusion of a feminist-historicist approach with the principles of genetic
criticism in this study gestures towards the previous importance of textual
scholarship to the late twentieth-century recovery of Woolf as a cultural critic,
and indicates my conviction that this relatively little-known branch of textual
criticism has much to offer contemporary Woolf scholarship.
A genetic approach to Woolf
Drawing on the theories of structuralism and post-structuralism, genetic

criticism focuses on the process rather than the product of literary composition.
Up until the 1980s (when Jerome J. McGann and D. F. McKenzie ‘upset the
scholarly apple cart’ by ‘suggest[ing] the importance of the social condition
of texts’ [Shillingsburg, 2006, p. 8]19), textual criticism focused on authorial
intention, following the influential writings of W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers
and G. Thomas Tanselle.20 Scholarly editors working in this dominant tradition
turned to the drafts of published texts to discover and restore the intended,
‘original’ work of the author. Genetic criticism developed in France in the
1970s in direct opposition to this Anglo-American strand of textual and editing
theory.21 Reflecting back in 1982, Jean Bellemin-Noël recalled how he ‘coin[ed]
the term “avant-texte” as a substitute’ for ‘rough-draft(s)’ (brouillon[s]) in the
early 1970s because ‘rough-draft’ seemed to him to suggest something tangled
(embrouillé), which ‘therefore implied that authors have a presentiment of a
perfect state that they are reaching for’ (2004, p. 30).22 ‘It is too idealistic to
assume that somewhere a perfect Text already exists that writers must find like
treasure,’ Bellemin-Noël asserted, challenging the common assumption that
manuscript drafts represent the authorial origins of a published text by asserting
that manuscripts are ‘not mothers’, but ‘texts as children’ (2004, pp. 30–1,
emphasis in original). Bellemin-Noël innovatively envisioned literary texts in
relation to each other rather than in relation to their author. Early drafts, he
claimed, represent both the same ‘autonomous beings’ that later emerge in the
public arena in print and ‘an infinity of other selves’, which may be unrecog-
nizable to the mature works (2004, pp. 31–2).
The language Woolf uses to discuss the process of literary composition
interestingly foreshadows Bellemin-Noël’s Freudian model of manuscript study.
While he figures the publication of a text as its entry into adulthood, Woolf
depicted the release of The Years and Three Guineas as separate acts of ‘child-
birth’ (D 5: p. 148). Her use of this metaphor relates partly to an increased
awareness of her own childlessness in the mid-1930s, during which she was
experiencing the menopause, or ‘T[ime] of L[ife],’ as she referred to it in
her diary (see D 5: pp. 35, 63, 64). By figuring her draft works as developing
embryos/foetuses, Woolf goes further than Bellemin-Noël to emphasize the
vulnerability, instability and potential changeability of texts at the manuscript
stage. Her metaphor denies her works any fixed independent existence until the
moment of publication. Woolf was always uneasy about setting her works into
any permanent form, correcting proofs for her British and American editions
differently and revising her works perpetually even after publication for subse-
quent editions.23 This dogma of indeterminacy in her writing practice makes her
works particularly open to a study employing the methods of genetic criticism,
a discipline which, as Judith Robinson-Valéry notes, demonstrates ‘that at the
“rough draft” stage a literary or artistic work […] is freer to move, to reshape
its own substance and take positive pleasure in experimenting with its own
numerous forms of plasticity, that is, its capacity to create an almost unlimited
number of potential structures’ (1996, p. 61).
One of the main hazards of manuscript study, however, as Bellemin-Noël
observes, is that ‘what was written before and had, at first, no after, we meet
only after, and this tempts us to supply a before in the sense of a priority, cause,
or origin’ (2004, p. 31, emphasis in original). When undertaking a genetic study
of the evolution of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism this central caveat highlights
the need to be wary of superimposing Woolf ’s subsequent thinking onto her
preceding writings. Just as Woolf, in her essay ‘“I am Christina Rossetti”, ’ was
wary of rearranging the lives of her biographical subjects ‘in all sorts of patterns
of which they were ignorant’, we must be wary of moulding her manuscripts
into arrangements of which she and they were unaware (E 5: p. 554). Yet while
striving to be objective we must also admit, as Dirk van Hulle owns in his 2004
genetic study of Joyce, Proust and Mann, that ‘[s]ince researchers often have the
advantage but also the disadvantage of hindsight manuscript studies may always
involve some degree of genetic manipulation’ (2004, p. 5). ‘Once we are aware
of the manuscript versions and their alternate readings,’ Silver cautions in her
account of the role of textual criticism in Woolf studies, ‘it becomes impossible,
except by a willed act of commitment […] not to be conscious of their presence
within the “final” text’ (1991b, p. 194). The closeness of these discussions from
Bellemin-Noël, Van Hulle and Silver should alert us to similarities between the
theoretical framework of genetic criticism and the current practices of Woolf
studies. Feminist critics of Woolf have been reading and analysing surviving
pre-publication texts alongside her published works for decades as noted
above. The methodology of genetic criticism thus sits comfortably alongside a
feminist-historicist approach to Woolf, offering an extended apparatus through
which to investigate the genesis and evolution of her late cultural criticism.
This book endeavours to remain sensitive to the changing focus and fluctuating
activism of Woolf ’s social and political thinking in her final decade through a
self-conscious awareness of the dangers of retrospective reading.
A second hazard of close manuscript study that genetic criticism specifi-

cally seeks to avoid is the temptation to view writings in isolation from their
social, political and literary contexts. Numerous biographical and socio-political
circumstances influenced the evolution of The Years, Three Guineas and Between
the Acts. Woolf ’s turn towards cultural criticism in the 1930s reflected the
troubled economic and political climate of the decade and a corresponding trend
towards social commentary in much of the period’s literature, and her personal
desire for a new literary and intellectual direction at this time and her persistent
experimental creative drive. Unlike traditional textual scholarship, as Louis Hay
outlined in 1979, genetic analysis ‘encourages us to question […] the opposition
between text and context, between the study of writings and of cultures’ (2004,
p. 23). Hay frames genetic criticism as a methodology that recognizes that ‘the
text is marked by social structures, ideologies, and cultural traditions’, and
contends that ‘in its warp and woof we can read, at every moment, the truth of
the time […]. Or rather a certain truth since the cultural imprint is inscribed in
each text in a specific fashion’ (2004, p. 23). This perception of texts as porous
objects, absorbing their social and cultural surroundings during production in
a manner that allows future generations to recapture the past through reading
them, distinguishes genetic criticism from traditional manuscript study and
accounts for my attention to the social, political and literary backdrop against
which Woolf ’s late cultural criticism evolved. This materialist outlook reinforces
the necessity of acknowledging the influence of contemporary writing, the
contemporary political climate, and her previous output on the genesis of
Woolf ’s late works. Genetic criticism supplies not only a means to investigate
the extensive pre-publication materials that evidence the conception and devel-
opment of Woolf ’s late works, but also a valuable method of viewing The Years,
Three Guineas and Between the Acts as both transitory materializations of a
wider, fluid thinking process, and contained, stable artefacts, marked by the
historical and sociological origins that shaped each work’s composition.
Van Hulle argues that genetic criticism is relevant to literary modernism for
the ‘pragmatic’ reason that ‘so many manuscripts of modernist texts have been
preserved’ (2004, p. 9). Given the large amount of past manuscript analysis
within Woolf scholarship, it is surprising that genetic criticism has received so
little previous attention within the field. For many years, despite the centrality
of manuscript analysis to Woolf studies, most of her critics and editors have
seemed strangely unwilling to engage directly with the practices and termi-
nology of textual scholarship, as if they have been afraid that to do so would
leave them trapped within theoretical discussions of the documental remnants
of Woolf ’s oeuvre and unable to debate the aesthetic and political implications of
her works as a whole. The ongoing publication of the new Cambridge University
Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, the first edition to present consist-
ently and – crucially – transparently edited texts of Woolf ’s works according
to modern scholarly editing practices, indicates that this trend is thankfully
coming to an end.24 In recent years, Woolf ’s Anglophone critics and editors have
also begun to talk about genetic criticism. In 2002 Edward Bishop detailed the
pervasive influence of genetic criticism on his edition of the holograph draft of
Jacob’s Room (Bishop, 2002), although interestingly he had omitted to mention
genetic criticism in the introduction to that volume (Bishop, 1998). In 2005
Briggs implicitly adopted a genetic approach in her biography of Woolf to track
‘the genesis and process of [her] writing’ through surviving drafts, her letters
and diaries (2006b, p. xi). In 2008 an electronic genetic edition of the ‘Time
Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse led by Briggs, Woolf Online (Woolf, 2008),
significantly became the first edition of a Woolf text to be edited according to
genetic principles – and, according to Rebecca Wisor, ‘the first edition of a work
written by Woolf to have been edited according to contemporary textual editing
theories and practices’ (2009, p. 498). In 2010 Finn Fordham’s multi-author
study, I Do, I Undo, I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves, explored
‘the relations between processes of composition and reformulations of the self
during the modernist period’ with a chapter on The Waves (2010, p. 7). These
early applications of genetic criticism to Woolf studies suggest the time may at
last be right for a book-length genetic analysis of Woolf.
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism seizes on genetic criticism’s potential
to explore Woolf ’s writing and thinking processes. This study expands the
outlook of genetic criticism, fusing its principles with a feminist-historicist
perspective to examine the growth of Woolf ’s politics during 1931–41 through
a selection of both published and unpublished texts. The Years, Three Guineas
and Between the Acts ideally lend themselves to investigation of this kind due to
their well-evidenced textual histories, and the rich links between them in terms
of content, context and method. Each of my central chapters examines not only
the work that forms its subject, but also a range of related texts, including letters,
diaries and essays, that together reveal the diverse biographical, social and
political circumstances that directed the development of Woolf ’s late cultural
criticism.
Chapters 2 and 3, documenting the genesis and evolution of The Years and
Three Guineas respectively, are closely interlinked and should be read in tandem
much like the shared textual histories of the works themselves. My approach
to the voluminous and still largely unexplored archival materials relating to

the composition of The Years and Three Guineas adapts the methodology
set out by geneticist Pierre-Marc de Biasi (2004), who breaks down genetic
editorial theory into five essential stages: collecting, classifying, organizing,
transcribing, and publishing all the draft documents associated with a literary
work. While the publication of a genetic edition is evidently not within the
scope of this book, Biasi’s step-by-step guide to dealing with a literary work’s
pre-publication ‘dossier’ remains useful. In particular, his contention that the
activities of organizing and transcribing ‘complement each other’ and should
be performed together, thus making it possible to ‘reduce the illegibilities to
a negligible proportion’, has guided my treatment of these pre-publication
materials which, due to Woolf ’s multiple insertions and deletions, are often
difficult to decipher (2004, p. 55). Chapters 2 and 3 draw heavily on previously
unpublished manuscript and typescript materials to trace the development of
Woolf ’s critiques of patriarchy in The Years and the evolution of her feminist-
pacifism in Three Guineas. A list of editorial symbols employed in this study
can be found on page xv, while longer transcriptions of extracts from significant
manuscript drafts are appended to support my discussion.
My analysis of Between the Acts in Chapter 4, in contrast, has been greatly
aided by Mitchell A. Leaska’s transcriptions of two composite drafts he names
the Earlier and Later Typescripts (see PH) and by the recent publication of
the Cambridge University Press edition of Between the Acts, edited by Mark
Hussey. Hussey’s edition of Woolf ’s unfinished novel significantly ‘move[s] the
work closer to the state in which Woolf left it at her death’ by returning to her
final typescript and revealing the text behind Leonard Woolf ’s revisions for its
posthumous publication (2011, p. lxiii). No doubt much further work remains
to be done directly on the surviving holograph and typescript fragments of
Between the Acts, but the existence of these resources facilitates my broader
genetic reading in this chapter of the evolution of Woolf ’s opinions on art’s
social role prior to and during the production of this text.25 By reading a series
of Woolf ’s late essays as pre-texts to Between the Acts, Chapter 4 illustrates that
despite her comments against mixing art with politics during 1932–40, Woolf ’s
final novel evidences her strong belief that the writer, as an intellectual, has a
responsibility to publicly critique contemporary culture in times of social and
political chaos.
It must be admitted that genetic criticism’s desire for inclusiveness – to collect
and document every text associated with a literary work’s production – presents
a practical difficulty when applying this discipline to study a series of literary
works which are interlinked with the vast output of a highly productive literary
career. A huge quantity of published and pre-publication material relates to the
development of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism and evidently the texts surveyed
here represent only a selection. Nevertheless, it is precisely because of the
immense number of surviving Woolf manuscript and typescript drafts that
genetic criticism provides such a valuable apparatus for analysing her works.
While the assimilation of genetic criticism into a genetic, feminist-historicist
approach is not without difficulties, this book aims to explore genetic criticism’s
potential for Woolf studies by tailoring its principles to fit the requirements of a
clearly defined project.
Chapter 5 closes this study with a re-evaluation of Woolf ’s public emergence
as a cultural critic in her final decade in the context of her wider oeuvre and
contemporary literary climate. Framed by Miller, Esty and MacKay’s discussions
of late modernism, this chapter considers Woolf ’s late outputs in relation to
modernism’s evolution in the 1930s and beyond. A genetic, feminist-historicist
study of the development of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism in The Years, Three
Guineas and Between the Acts, this book concludes, highlights the extent to
which Woolf ’s increased social and political commentary in the 1930s and early
1940s developed from, rather than rejected, the modernist experimentalism of
her earlier writings. Driven by a range of personal, professional and wider socio-
political concerns, Woolf ’s late cultural criticism was as much a product of her
lifelong feminist aesthetic viewpoint as it was a reaction to the economic, social
and political crises that dominated Europe during 1931–41.
Notes
1 Miller notes that the phrase ‘late modernism’ was first coined by Charles Jencks,
an architectural historian, to refer to ‘the persistence in architectural practice of
an avant-garde moralism, utopianism, and purist style’ in the 1960s (1999, p. 9).
Fredric Jameson was the first critic to apply ‘late modernism’ to literature in
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, arguing with regard to
the arts more widely that ‘we should probably also make some place (but not as late
as he does) for what Charles Jencks has come to call “late modernism” – the last
survivals of a properly modernist view of art and the world after the great political
and economic break of the Depression’ (Jameson, 1992, p. 305).
2 Leonard Woolf was heavily involved in the League of Nations at its foundation
and remained a champion of the League’s ideals until its mid-1930s collapse; see
Glendinning, 2006, p. 484.
3 On the active involvement of writers in politics during the 1930s see Mengham,
2004.
4 See ‘A novelist’s experiment’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 May 1925; P. C.
Kennedy, Review of Mrs Dalloway, New Statesman, 6 June 1925; J. F. Holms, Review
of Mrs Dalloway, Calendar of Modern Letters, July 1925; all quoted in Majumdar
and McLaurin, 1975, pp. 160–71.
5 Sandra M. Gilbert notes that Orlando’s ‘post-publication sales were the strongest
Woolf had ever had’ (2000, p. xxxiv).
6 Although a prolific book-reviewer and journalist since 1904, most of Woolf ’s
literary and cultural criticism had previously appeared unsigned in the Times
Literary Supplement, for which Woolf, then Stephen, began writing for editor Bruce
Richmond from 1905.
7 After the release of 10,000 copies of the first American edition of The Years in April
1937, there were twelve re-impressions totalling 37,900 copies between April and
October 1937; see Kirkpatrick and Clarke, 1997, p. 100.
8 Prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism, the socio-political connotations
of Woolf ’s commentary on what David Daiches termed ‘the position of her own
sex’ had been little explored (1945, p. 134) as scholars focused on the experimental
techniques of Woolf ’s fiction; see, for example, Bennett, 1975; Auerbach, 1953;
Richter, 1970; Naremore, 1973; Buren Kelley, 1973. Jean Guiguet’s assertion in 1962
that Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own ‘deserve’ attention ‘if only to prepare
us better to discover certain trends in the rest of her work’, although unexplored,
pertinently foreshadowed the importance of these texts to later feminist readings of
Woolf (1965, p. 192).
9 The division between Anglo-American feminism and so-called ‘French feminism’
evoked here dates from the late 1970s, when, as Jane Gallop notes, American critics
adopted the phrase to refer to ‘a narrow sector of feminist activity in France, a
sector […] perceived as peculiarly French’ (1992, p. 41). On écriture feminine, see
Cixous, 1993.
10 Leonard Woolf had previously released extracts from Woolf ’s expansive journals as
A Writer’s Diary (1953), but this volume had been highly selective.
11 See D 1–5 and L 1–6. The publication dates for the first Hogarth editions are as
follows: V. Woolf, (1975–80), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, (ed.) N. Nicolson and J.
Trautmann, 6 Vols. (London: Hogarth Press); and V. Woolf, (1977–84), The Diary of
Virginia Woolf, (ed.) A. O. Bell with A. McNeillie, 5 Vols. (London: Hogarth Press).
12 Prior to the 1970s, it should be noted, Charles G. Hoffmann first studied Woolf ’s
manuscript revisions to Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Years in three short articles
(1968a, 1968b, 1969).
13 Five editions of transcriptions of early versions of Woolf ’s works appeared between
1976 and 1983: (1976b), ‘The Waves’: The Two Holograph Drafts, (trans. and ed.)
J. W. Graham (London: Hogarth); (1978), The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of

‘The Years’, (trans. and ed.) M. A. Leaska (London: Hogarth); (1982b), Melymbrosia:
An Early Version of ‘The Voyage Out’, (trans. and ed.) L. A. DeSalvo (New York,
NY: New York Public Library); (1982c), ‘To the Lighthouse’: The Original Holograph
Draft, (trans. and ed.) S. Dick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press); and (1983),
Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of ‘Between the Acts’, (ed.) M. A.
Leaska (New York, NY: University Publications).
14 Before 1986 Woolf ’s journalistic writings remained largely uncollected. Leonard
Woolf ’s four-volume Hogarth Press edition of his wife’s Collected Essays, published
through 1966–7, included only those essays that Virginia Woolf had herself
prepared for publication within a signed monograph edition in her lifetime (for
example, those articles revised for publication in the Common Reader volumes),
thus offering more of a selection than a ‘collected’ edition. The majority of Woolf ’s
essays, articles and book reviews remained available only within the ephemeral
newspapers and magazines in which they first appeared. Many of them, including
the large number printed within the Times Literary Supplement, were unsigned.
15 See, also, the articles collected in Virginia Woolf and the Essay, edited by Rosenberg
and Jeanne Dubino (1997), Katrina Koutsantoni’s recent study of Woolf ’s Common
Reader volumes (2009), and Judith Allen’s Virginia Woolf and the Politics of
Language (2010).
16 For example of such debate see Rainey, 1998; Delany, 2002; Collier, 2006; Dubino,
2010.
17 On the impact of periodical study on Woolf criticism see Collier, 2009 and Dubino,
2010. For an overview of the emergent field of periodical studies see Latham and
Scholes, 2006.
18 For example, Gualtieri refers broadly to ‘Woolf ’s activity as a cultural critic,
journalist, reviewer and literary historian’ (2000, p.15), while Leslie Kathleen
Hankins describes Woolf ’s analysis of the intellectual in Three Guineas as ‘cultural
criticism’ (2000, p. 21).
19 The works Shillingsburg credits here with having overhauled the authorial
orientation of Anglo-American ‘copy-text’ editing include J. J. McGann, (1983),
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and
D. F. McKenzie, (1986), The Sociology of Bibliography (London: British Library).
20 See W. W. Greg, 1950–1; Fredson Bowers, 1975; and G. Thomas Tanselle, 1976. For
an overview of the relationships and differences between these three key critics see
Groden, 1991.
21 Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden argue that contemporary Anglo-American
textual criticism continues to be incompatible with genetic criticism, highlighting
textual criticism’s ‘overarching goal of establishing a single conflated text [which]
tends to subsume all variation into an accuracy-versus-error dichotomy’ (Ferrer and
Groden, 2004, p. 10). However, this view of contemporary Anglo-American textual

criticism obscures the work of textual critics following the rise of cultural studies
and the sociological turn in editorial theory, who frequently recognize multiple
authorized versions of texts as equally and variously valuable. See, for example,
George Bornstein’s contention in Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page that
‘[w]e need to know what alternate versions to a text we are studying do or might
exist, but we do not need […] to choose just one version for exclusive attention. On
the contrary, we might […] elect to consider multiple versions’ (2001, p. 5).
22 Judith Robinson-Valéry provides a more contemporary discussion of the ‘negative
undertones of the two key words brouillon and draft’ and the ‘linguistically-induced
prejudices’ that these terms have and may still produce in the reader (1996, p. 60).
23 On Woolf ’s revisions and the ways in which her multiple variants might be edited
see Gabler, 2004, and Briggs, 2006a, pp. 208–30.
24 This ongoing edition is under the general editorship of Jane Goldman and Susan
Sellers. For further details of its principles and approach see their ‘General Editors’
Preface’ (2011).
25 For a comprehensive account of surviving manuscript and typescript materials
relating to Between the Acts see Hussey’s editorial apparatus for the Cambridge
University Press edition of the text, in particular his list of ‘Archival Sources’ and
Introduction; in Woolf, 2011, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi, xxxix–lxxiii.
2
Critiquing Patriarchy in the Years of The Years
The portrayal of Woolf as a feminist social and political commentator in

the 1930s is now so familiar within Woolf studies that to observe that she
channelled her intellectual focus into critiquing patriarchy at this time has
become something of a cliché. To her contemporaries, however, Woolf ’s
principal works of the early 1930s did not necessarily appear any more politi-
cized than her writing of the 1920s. Indeed, the ethereal narrative of The Waves,
playful literary commentary of The Common Reader: Second Series and spoof
life-writing and Victorian setting of Flush may have seemed to signify a retreat
from the explicit feminism of her preceding monograph, A Room of One’s Own,
and a determined eschewal of current affairs. The Years, now commonly read for
its feminist critique, was enthusiastically received on publication as an apolitical
domestic saga. Thus with the exception of a handful of minor outputs, including
her speech on ‘Professions for Women’ to the Junior Council of the London and
National Society for Women’s Service (L&NSWS) in January 1931 and A Letter
to a Young Poet in 1932, Woolf ’s sustained commitment to cultural analysis in
her final decade passed largely without notice from her reading public until the
release of Three Guineas in 1938. Today, in contrast, critics identify the shared
genesis of The Years and Three Guineas in the hybrid ‘novel-essay’ The Pargiters,
Woolf ’s major literary endeavour of the 1930s, and the writing process that
produced her penultimate novel is recognized as crucial to the formation of
her late feminist stance. This chapter interrogates Woolf ’s late turn to cultural
criticism in the early 1930s and the progression of her critiques of patriarchy
during the first half of this decade, by examining a range of published and
unpublished texts associated with the six years of socio-political research,
writing and thinking that preceded the publication of The Years in 1937.
The Years is a complex and wide-ranging novel which, through depicting
three generations of the fictional London-based Pargiter family, evokes and
extends many of Woolf ’s earlier criticisms of the patriarchal values, traditions,
social structures and public institutions of nineteenth-century Britain. Her
longest and outwardly her most conventionally realist fictional output since
Night and Day, Woolf ’s penultimate novel was a great commercial success.
The feminist outlook of The Years was obscured from its first readers, who did
not immediately discern the novel’s inherent critiques of patriarchy following
a protracted period of composition and revision through which Woolf had
submerged references to specific historical contexts and progressively deleted or
embedded the explicit cultural analysis of her drafts. The novel met a negative
reception in contemporary highbrow literary periodicals where it was charac-
terized as ‘abstract’, ‘trivial’ and far removed from the ‘real effect of events on
people’ (Moore, 1977, p. 252). Such criticisms held in the decades following
her death as The Years was frequently read as a failed attempt to use a form
better practised by other writers. ‘[S]uperficial resemblance though there may
be between The Years and a work like The Forsyte Saga,’ David Daiches asserted
in 1942, ‘the difference between the two is far more striking. […] Woolf is not
interested in chronicling the decline of a class, or in the differences between
succeeding generations: her interest is still centred on her old theme, the flux
of experience’ (1945, pp. 105–6). As James M. Haule observed at the Eighteenth
Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in 2008, The Years has been and continues
to be misread by scholars more intrigued by the high modernist aesthetics
of Woolf ’s earlier fictions, commonly perceived as the ‘“real” Virginia Woolf
novels’ (2009, p. 241). Yet, as Judy Suh has valuably posited, Woolf ’s adoption
and subversion of the family chronicle format in the 1930s to elucidate her
feminist politics is highly innovative; ‘Reading The Years within middlebrow
terms,’ Suh argues, ‘illuminates Woolf ’s process of reinventing modernism’
(2009, p. 103). Her experimental use of a popular literary sub-genre to explore
and share feminist cultural analysis with a broad audience accords with Jed
Esty’s contention that the transition from high to late modernism is signalled
in part by ‘the desire to connect more directly with a public of art consumers
(as against the cloistered alienation of high modernism)’ (2004, p. 84). Despite
its apparent similarities with Night and Day, The Years is representative of a
movement forward rather than a retreat within Woolf ’s oeuvre.
A transition in Woolf ’s modernist aesthetics in the 1930s is further highlighted
if we consider that the novel series with which Daiches unfavourably compared
The Years was written by John Galsworthy, one of the Edwardian novelists whom
Woolf had condemned in ‘Character in Fiction’ in 1924 for laying ‘an enormous
stress upon the fabric of things’ rather than depicting characters’ inner lives (E
3: p. 432). Woolf ’s subsequent adoption of a pseudo-historical narrative form in
The Years reflects a distinctive change in her outlook in the later interwar period,
during which, as this chapter explores, she became increasingly concerned with
Critiquing Patriarchy in the Years of The Years 29
documenting and analysing facts through her fiction in response to the era’s
turbulent social, economic and political climate. Woolf ’s attention to factual
details and historical contexts in her last three major works is indicative of the
open engagement with politics that Tyrus Miller identifies as a distinguishing
feature of other late modernist writers of the interwar period (see Miller, 1999,
pp. 12–13). Woolf ’s late output was also informed, however, by her previous
attempts to fuse modernist aesthetics with feminist politics. Multiple factors
combined to influence and direct the development of Woolf ’s cultural analysis
in the 1930s, this chapter illustrates, and her critiques of patriarchy through the
decade extended from rather than rejected her earlier writing practices.
Although The Years remains less read than Woolf ’s modernist novels of the
1920s, the novel’s experimental blending of modernist fictional techniques with
social realism is now largely acknowledged, even if some critics find the scope of
her cultural analysis limited. The abrupt transformation in the reception of The
Years during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been heavily
influenced by study of this work’s pre-texts and supports Brenda R. Silver’s strong
argument for ‘the role that textual criticism, in particular the editing and reception
of manuscript versions of Woolf ’s novels, have played in altering our image of the
“author” and the way we understand her politics and art’ (1991b, p. 194). In the
late 1970s and 1980s critical interest in Woolf ’s manuscript drafts of The Years
along with the publication of her diary and letters revealed her early intentions
for this book as a work of feminist social analysis. Study of The Pargiters drafts
drew scholarly attention to the extensive sociological research Woolf completed
during her writing of The Years and Three Guineas and was central to the estab-
lishment of her current reputation as a cultural critic in the 1930s. Mitchell A.
Leaska’s transcription of The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’ in
1978 made accessible the first one-and-a-half notebooks of Woolf ’s eight-volume
Pargiters manuscript, while Grace Radin’s insightful study of Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The
Years’: The Evolution of a Novel, published in 1981, discussed and made available
two significant chunks cut from the work at proof stage, one of which was set in
wartime London. More recently, Haule has mined new sources relating to the
novel’s advanced composition, including letters, invoices and, significantly, two
bound proofs representing the penultimate draft, to demonstrate that Woolf ’s
‘calm, brilliant restructuring of The Years […] makes it more subtle and finely
constructed’ (2009, p. 237). To date, however, the novel has not been subject to
an investigation informed by the methodology of genetic criticism.
Inspired by Woolf ’s speech to the L&NSWS in January 1931 and evidenced
by numerous surviving manuscript, typescript and proof documents, the
composition of The Years invites genetic analysis. Any discussion of the

genesis and evolution of this novel, and its sister text, Three Guineas, involves
engagement with an extensive array of pre-publication materials. Even a brief
summary of the multiple pre-texts that survive to evidence the production
of The Years indicates the suitability of this novel for genetic study (for a
comprehensive overview of this complex textual dossier see my annotated
list of pre-publication texts referenced within this study and their catalogue
numbers; pp. xii–xiv). Woolf ’s ‘Professions for Women’ talk exists in four
versions: a nine-page holograph draft (M.1.4) and a twenty-five page typescript
draft (M.70), both dating from the era of the speech’s delivery; the first essay
of The Pargiters, dated 11 October 1932 (TP, pp. 5–10); and a heavily revised
and abridged essay version posthumously published by Leonard Woolf as
‘Professions for Women’ (see E 6: pp. 479–84).1 Following this address and
her parallel conception of the work that later evolved into The Years and Three
Guineas, Woolf also began to keep scrapbooks of quotations and newspaper
cuttings relating to the restrictions placed on women’s private, emotional,
professional and public lives and continued this practice until late 1937, leaving
three volumes in all (B.16.f). ‘Every book, every newspaper article that she
read during these years,’ Silver notes, ‘became part of her larger vision’ (1991a,
p. 345). In October 1932 Woolf began a notebook with the story of The Pargiters,
alternating the chapters with socio-feminist essays. The ‘novel-essay’ format
was soon dropped, but she continued to draft her story of the Pargiter family,
which ran to eight notebooks when the first holograph version was completed in
November 1934 (M.42). Two further holograph fragments and three typescript
fragments survive to evidence the development of Woolf ’s novel (M.41, M.1.6,
B.4.d, B.15.2, M.128), which was rewritten during 1935–6 before publication in
1937. An incomplete set of page proofs and incomplete sets of first and ‘final’
galley proofs date from 1936, during which Woolf made dramatic cuts to her
novel and revised in new material (M.137, M.138, M.139).2 Working with
these diverse pre-texts, many relevant to the production of both The Years and
Three Guineas, raises the difficulty of determining the relationships between
them. Applying the editorial practices and principles of genetic criticism to this
sizeable dossier of draft material supplies a valuable methodological framework
for recognizing and unravelling the thinking and writing processes that resulted
in this novel’s production.
Difficulties, inconsistencies and omissions in the narrative and argument
of Woolf ’s penultimate novel are often explained with reference to The Years’
complex textual history.3 Due to the relative inaccessibility of the majority
of these pre-texts, several misconceptions regarding this novel’s evolution

persist. In particular, discussions about the development of The Years from The
Pargiters often unhelpfully revolve around the perceived opposition between
fact and fiction in these texts. The first critic to survey Woolf ’s Pargiters
holograph notebooks mistakenly asserted that ‘[e]xplicit factual commentary
[…] is limited to the essay portion of the manuscript’ (Hoffmann, 1969, p. 81).
This comment reflected the focus of this article-length study on the first two
notebooks of The Pargiters holograph with their alternate ‘novel-essay’ format,
which led Charles G. Hoffmann to overlook Woolf ’s integration of critical
commentary with fiction at later stages in her draft. Despite much further
investigation into the relationship between the manuscript and printed version
of The Years, this concentration on the first one-and-a-half volumes of the
manuscript continues, no doubt due to the accessibility of these sections after
the publication of Leaska’s transcription in 1978. Hoffmann’s view that ‘[t]he
“Essay” eventually was written and published as Three Guineas’ (1969, p. 80)
remains widely held, while the relation between the fiction-only sections of The
Years manuscript and Three Guineas has been largely ignored.4 My analysis in
this chapter and Chapter 3 conversely highlights links between the fictional and
critical pre-texts that produced The Years and Three Guineas. Critical material
contained in Woolf ’s research scrapbooks, for example, usually associated with
the production of Three Guineas, fed directly into Woolf ’s writing of The Years,
while the fictional drafts in later volumes of Woolf ’s Pargiters manuscript can be
read as pre-texts to Three Guineas. Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism seeks
to be attentive throughout to overlaps in the genesis and evolution of Woolf ’s
last works and thus several pre-texts detailed here are also discussed at length
in the following chapter.
From its conception, the composition of The Years was driven by a range of
contradictory impulses: a wish to explore the historical oppression of women
and to critique the patriarchal values of contemporary Britain, a wish to offer
explicit socio-political analysis and to write fiction. This chapter traces these
impulses and links them to Woolf ’s continued experimental drive in her final
decade. The chapter opens with an analysis of the transitional moment early in
1931 when Woolf began to direct her creative energy into sustained cultural
criticism. I read The Pargiters’ first conception alongside other projects on which
Woolf was working in the early months of 1931, notably her Good Housekeeping
essays, in order to explore the fear of intellectual stasis that in part motivated her
late turn to experimental socio-political commentary. The next portion of the
chapter details the thinking and writing processes through which the innovative
structure and method of The Years were achieved during 1931–6, paying close
attention to the fluctuations in Woolf ’s critiques of patriarchy in this period.
The final portion of this chapter explores the writing processes through which
Woolf sought to underpin this work with factual contexts and feminist analysis.
Sensing the growing trend for politicized literature and feeling adamantly that
she ‘must not settle into a figure’ (D 4: p. 85), Woolf attempted to revitalize her
literary output in the 1930s through the fusion of fiction with socio-political
argument. Rather than a rejection of high modernism and her earlier output,
this chapter emphasizes, this change in working practices developed from and
extended her existing feminist viewpoint and modernist aesthetics.
Tracing origins: ‘The Turn of the Tide’, 1931
On 20 January 1931, a day before giving her speech to the Junior Council of the
L&NSWS, Woolf famously declared:
I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book – a
sequel to a Room of Ones [sic] Own – about the sexual life of women: to be
called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting! This sprang out of
my paper to be read on Wednesday morning to Pippa’s society.
D 4: p. 6
From a retrospective viewpoint, this oft-quoted diary entry and, more widely,
the early months of 1931 emerge as pivotal within the development of Woolf ’s
late cultural criticism. It was at this moment that Woolf began to direct her
attention away from high modernist fiction, represented by the imminent
completion of her most stylistically inventive novel, The Waves, and towards
feminist cultural analysis, signified by this conception of ‘an entire new book
[…] about the sexual life of women.’ This new project, about which Woolf was
‘very much excited’ (D 4: p. 6), evolved into The Pargiters, before emerging into
the public domain as The Years and Three Guineas. Identifying the early months
of 1931 as a turning point in Woolf ’s oeuvre can potentially conceal, however,
the many continuities between her earlier and later outputs. The shift in
Woolf ’s focus from high modernist fiction to experimental social and political
commentary was not immediate or planned. In fact, Woolf began 1931 with
the resolution not to make resolutions, ‘Not to be tied’ (D 4: p. 3). Her desire to
resist restrictive resolutions and to remain open to spontaneity and innovation
at this time highlights the persistent experimentalism that drove her late turn
to cultural criticism.
As Woolf approached the end of her draft of The Waves in January 1931
she was looking forward to the possibility of beginning various new projects;
‘stor[ing] a few ideas for articles: one on Gosse – the critic as talker; the
armchair critic; one on Letters,’ while considering ‘fling[ing] off, like a cutter
[…] on some swifter, slighter adventure – another Orlando perhaps’ (D 4:
pp. 4–5). It was in this context, prior to delivery of her ‘Professions for Women’
paper, that Woolf was seized by the idea of writing a sequel to A Room of One’s
Own. Three days later she remained ‘Too much excited, alas, to get on with
The Waves’ due to ‘making up The Open Door’, as the proposed new book was
now to be called (D 4: p. 6). By 26 January 1931, her forty-ninth birthday, she
had ‘shaken off the obsession of Opening the Door,’ and ‘returned to Waves’,
following the completion of which she planned to turn first to ‘doing Gosse,
or an article perhaps’ (D 4: p. 7). Despite plans to ‘dash off the rough sketch
of Open Door’ in Spring 1931 (D 4: p. 7), in reality other tasks, including
continuing work on The Waves until August 1931, pushed back her first attempt
to draft ‘Open Door’ to 1932. By this time, Woolf ’s new work had a new title,
The Pargiters, and a new form, and had evolved considerably from her original
plan to compose a critical text ‘called Professions for Women perhaps’ (D 4:
p. 6). Resituating the genesis of Woolf ’s Pargiters project alongside her alter-
native ideas for future projects in the early months of 1931 restores flexibility
to this moment of conception and reinforces Bellemin-Noël’s caution that ‘what
was written before […] had, at first, no after’ (2004, p. 31, emphasis in original).
Indeed, this significant transitional period in Woolf ’s oeuvre was characterized
by fluidity and unpredictability.
Inspired by The Waves, images of the sea and of seafaring proliferate in
Woolf ’s diary in the early months of 1931. These nautical motifs evoke a mood
of movement, change, flux, and, conversely, as she drew nearer to the novel’s
end, a fear of stasis. ‘This is the turn of the tide,’ Woolf wrote of the lengthening
days on 2 January 1931 (D 4: p. 3). ‘I’m chopping & tacking all the time,’ she
declared of her creative activity on 7 January (D 4: p. 4). The death of three
men in an aeroplane crash near Rodmell on 25 January reminded her of ‘that
epitaph in the Greek anthology: when I sank, the other ships sailed on’ (D 4:
p. 7).5 A month later, on 17 February 1931, Woolf recalled this classical allusion
ten days after finishing her draft of The Waves to express her subsequent sense
of emptiness and her growing insecurity regarding the value and relevance
of her literary output at this stage of her career: ‘My ship has sailed on’ (D 4:
p. 12). A visit from Aldous Huxley the preceding evening during this ‘back
wash of The Waves’ (D 4: p. 13) had exacerbated Woolf ’s anxieties regarding
the novel and its anticipated reception, and strengthened her wish to expand
her socio-political criticism. This meeting notably shaped the subject matter of
Woolf ’s next journalistic task – a commission to write six articles for the British
edition of Good Housekeeping magazine. When read alongside her ‘Professions
for Women’ speech four weeks earlier and with an awareness of the hybrid
‘novel-essay’ project that sprang out of this paper, Woolf ’s response to her Good
Housekeeping commission further supports the interpretation of early 1931 as a
transitional period within her oeuvre.
Huxley and his wife Maria dined with the Woolfs at Tavistock Square on 16
February 1931. The couple lived in France but were spending time in England
while Huxley researched four articles for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine on the fate
of industrial Britain during the depression.6 David Bradshaw describes Huxley’s
‘frequent sallies across the Channel’ during this period ‘in order to monitor the
effects of the slump at first hand’ (1994, p. viii). Far from ‘an aloof and absentee
observer,’ Bradshaw argues, by early 1931 Huxley ‘became more intensely
ravelled in the chronic social and political crisis which unfolded in the wake of
the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 than any other British writer of his gener-
ation’ (p. viii). Meeting with Huxley at this time, Woolf was similarly struck by
his critical engagement with contemporary social and economic upheavals and
felt intimidated by the couple’s travels and involvement in public life. ‘And I feel
us, compared with Aldous & Maria,’ she recorded, ‘unsuccessful’:
They’re off today to do mines, factories .. black country; did the docks when
they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at
Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities,
– while here I live like a weevil in a biscuit.
D 4: p. 11
This discontent stems in part from the sense of purposelessness and dejection
that Woolf often experienced after completing a novel. ‘Lord, how little I’ve
seen, done, lived, felt, thought compared with the Huxleys – compared with
anyone,’ she despairs (D 4: p. 11). However, her portrayal of herself as static and
inactive, ‘toss[ing] among empty bottles & bits of toilet paper’, while Huxley ‘is
“modern”’ and ‘takes life in hand’ (D 4: p. 12), also reflects her awareness that
the perception of modernity was evolving in the early 1930s and her fear that
she was no longer associated with it.
The high modernist ideals that Woolf had pursued in her writing throughout
the preceding decades were commonly received by readers and reviewers as
old hat by 1931. Indeed, the popular press had been announcing the imminent
death of modernist movements in art and literature since the early 1920s. A
review of Mark Gertler’s paintings in British Vogue in Late February 1922, for
example, suggested that ‘both painters and public are beginning to turn away
from the dry formality of cubism and its kindred schools with an ever-increasing
weariness’ (‘Mark Gertler’, 1922, p. 68). Huxley’s energetic engagement with
social criticism, in contrast, represented a different form of modernity with
a growing audience in the later interwar period. While the inverted commas
encasing the word ‘“modern”’ might indicate that Woolf held some reservations
regarding this perception of Huxley, his visit undoubtedly fuelled her feelings of
literary inadequacy at a time when she, too, was becoming increasingly inter-
ested in publicly analysing British society and culture.
‘And I am to write 6 articles straight off about what?’ (D 4: p. 12), Woolf
speculated in the same diary entry in which she described dining with the
Huxleys. In the wake of The Waves, as Huxley’s visit made her painfully aware
of her comparative lack of public commentary on current affairs, Woolf decided
to use her Good Housekeeping commission to try blending cultural analysis with
discursive narrative. Written between February and April 1931, these essays
guide the reader around the major commercial, cultural and political landmarks
of Britain’s capital city. Her first essay, ‘The Docks of London’, considers the global
production and distribution of goods against a backdrop of crumbling empire. In
‘Oxford Street Tide’, Woolf ’s narrator celebrates the pace, excitement, creativity
and consumer choice of modern London, while disclosing anxieties regarding
the commercial values at work in the department stores of this famous shopping
thoroughfare. In ‘Great Men’s Houses’, she questions the nineteenth-century
cultural values by which historical figures such as Thomas Carlyle are judged
to be ‘great’ through depicting the Victorian home as an absurd melodrama
of patriarchal oppression. Her fourth and fifth essays, ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’
and ‘“This is the House of Commons”’, further challenge the patriarchal urge
to monumentalize the personae of individual statesmen and public figures and
together interrogate the contemporary functions of two institutional British
households, the Church and Parliament. ‘Portrait of a Londoner’ alternatively
monumentalizes an ordinary citizen, the fictional Mrs. Crowe, an archetypal
hostess of the Victorian home. By simultaneously sentimentalizing and satirizing
an earlier era of stable gender roles, Woolf ’s final Good Housekeeping essay
implicitly evokes the relative freedom of women in modern Britain.
First published in Good Housekeeping between December 1931 and December
1932, these six essays were posthumously collected as The London Scene (1975;
2004).7 The theme of the series seems to have been inspired in part by Woolf ’s
meeting with Huxley. His visit to the London docklands is reflected in the choice
of subject for ‘The Docks of London’, and the presence of mammoth tusks in this
essay echoes a letter to Clive Bell on 21 February 1931 in which Woolf reported:
‘[Huxley] spends his week in London visiting docks, where with Maria’s help
he can just distinguish a tusk from a frozen bullock’ (L 4: p. 293). Woolf ’s
visit to the Houses of Parliament to gather material for ‘“This is the House of
Commons”’ similarly corresponds to Huxley’s use of his attendance at a parlia-
mentary debate on 11 February 1931 as the basis for his forthcoming essay
on the failings of modern democracy. Both excursions, and her desire ‘to see
Carlyle’s house & Keats’ house’ while ‘sketching’ her third Good Housekeeping
essay (D 4: p. 13), indicate the importance of research to Woolf ’s production
of these essays, which is a concern that would become characteristic of her late
cultural criticism. As Huxley’s articles were not published in Nash’s Pall Mall
Magazine until after Woolf submitted her series to Good Housekeeping, any
further parallels between the texts are presumably coincidental. Nonetheless, a
brief comparison between Huxley’s docklands essay, ‘The Victory of Art Over
Humanity’, and Woolf ’s ‘The Docks of London’ reveals a number of similarities
and differences in the two journalistic contributions that together highlight the
widening scope and specifically feminist outlook of Woolf ’s evolving cultural
criticism in early 1931.
‘The Docks of London’ opens with the romantic image of ‘the poet’ asking of
a boat on the horizon, ‘“Whither, O splendid ship”’, while Woolf ’s narrator more
prosaically depicts the ship’s inland journey ‘past the gas works and the sewage
works’ to the docks (E 5: p. 275).8 Jeanette McVicker observes that the opening of
Woolf ’s first Good Housekeeping essay plays on the Romans’ insistence ‘that “all
roads lead to Rome”’, which Woolf, ‘mindful, like Conrad, of Britain’s imperial
project’, echoes with her suggestion ‘that all ships “in time” come to anchor in
the Port of London’ (2003, p. 146). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)
opens with a ship anchoring in the Thames and a menacing portrayal of London
plagued by ‘a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the
greatest, town on earth’ (1994, p. 135). Woolf ’s essay evokes Conrad’s bleak
opening, similarly presenting London not as an awe-inspiring imperial capital
but ‘the most dismal prospect in the world’ (E 5: p. 276). Here ‘gaudy funnels
and the tall masts’ of ships ‘show up incongruously against a row of workmen’s
houses’ and ‘the black walls of huge warehouses’ (E 5: p. 275). The idealized
image of London presented by imperial propaganda, that which portrays the
city as the seat of democracy, freedom and opportunity, is incompatible with
the dirty reality of the labour-driven capital and its exploited workers. This
undermining of imperial propaganda echoes Woolf ’s earlier discussions of

empire, with notable links to her essay ‘Thunder at Wembley’, published in
the Nation & Athenaeum on 28 June 1924 (see E 3), which ominously antici-
pates the demise of empire by depicting a thunderstorm at the British Empire
Exhibition.9
The focus of Woolf ’s cultural criticism in ‘The Docks of London’, however,
as in Huxley’s ‘The Victory of Art Over Humanity’, is the mechanisms and
value systems of capitalist free trade. Woolf ’s essay characterizes the ‘temper’
of the Docks as ‘severely utilitarian’; ‘each package of this vast and varied
merchandise [is] picked up and set down accurately […] without haste, or
waste, or hurry, or confusion by a very few men in shirt-sleeves […] working
with the utmost organisation in the common interest’ (E 5: p. 278). Among
this efficiency and order ‘rarities and oddities’ are able to sneak in, but they are
‘instantly tested for their mercantile value’ (E 5: p. 278). The narrator challenges
this commercial value system with her description of the fate of ‘a heap of
larger and browner tusks’ laid out ‘among the circles of elephant tusks’ on the
floor (E 5: p. 278). A mammoth tusk is of less value than elephant ivory to the
buyer, we are informed, because it ‘tends to warp’ and so can be used ‘only
[for] umbrella handles and the backs of the cheaper kind of hand-glass’ (E 5:
p. 278). Woolf ’s narrator highlights the absurdity that mammoth tusks, which
are a greater rarity than elephant tusks and ‘have lain frozen in Siberian ice for
fifty thousand years’, have ‘been examined and graded’ as inferior objects (E 5:
p. 278).
Huxley’s ‘The Victory of Art Over Humanity’ also draws attention to the
utilitarian nature of the London docks, portraying their workings as ‘efficient
and progressive’, and refers to the fact that mammoth tusks are ‘not commer-
cially so valuable’ as elephant ivory (1994, pp. 84–6). Both essays reveal Marx’s
theory of commodity fetishism – the process by which commodities ‘appear as
autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own’ capable of ‘entering into
relation both with each other and with the human race’ (Marx, 1990, 1: p. 165) –
by obscuring the involvement of humans in producing, transporting and storing
the goods they describe. Huxley’s essay is devoid of dockland workers; he writes
only of the labour of the anonymous co-ordinating Port of London Authority.
By omitting the precise origin of the ‘fantastic profusion of eatables, drinkables,
smokables, wearables and miscellaneous usables assembled from every corner
of the earth’ in the dockland warehouses, Huxley highlights the reader’s lack of
knowledge of the colonial nations and peoples who manufacture the goods sold
in Britain (1994, p. 85). His essay concludes by informing the reader that ‘this
Gargantuan profusion […] is the symbol and symptom of world-wide poverty’

(1994, p. 86).
Woolf similarly reminds her readers of their ignorance about Britain’s colonies
in ‘The Docks of London’, according to Anna Snaith and Michael Whitworth
(2007, p. 25). Like Huxley, she omits to note the colonial labour from which
the commodities of the docks derive. Her brief references to dockland workers
are soon replaced by ‘cranes’ that ‘dip and swing’ as if without human guidance
(E 5: p. 279). As Snaith and Whitworth argue, ‘Woolf ’s main focus […] is not
humans but capital’ (2007, p. 26). The allusion to Marx’s critique of ‘the religious
analogies used to describe commodities’ that Snaith and Whitworth (2007,
p. 28) find in Woolf ’s description of the wine vaults as ‘a vast cathedral’, in which
‘[w]e might be priests worshipping […] some silent religion’ (E 5: p. 279), is
paralleled by Huxley’s allusion to the dockland warehouses as ‘cathedrals’ (1994,
p. 86). The two essays differ sharply, however, in the candour and direction of
their cultural criticism. Huxley’s narrator uses his description of the London
docks to critique the global overproduction of goods which, he argues, results
in a cycle of unemployment and lower consumption, and to polemically suggest
that ‘some larger equivalent of the Port of London Authority’ is needed ‘to deal
with the larger chaos of world trade’ (p. 85). Rather than looking outwards to
discuss the global economies of trade, Woolf ’s essay instead turns inwards to
provide an implicit commentary on the female consumer’s role in the sourcing
and production of colonial commodities.
At the close of ‘The Docks of London’, Woolf ’s narrator turns the focus back
on herself and her Good Housekeeping readers with the assertion that ‘[i]t is
we – our tastes, our fashions, our needs – that make the cranes dip and swing,
that call the ships from the sea’ (E 5: p. 280). Woolf ’s final appeal to her largely
female bourgeois readership to recognize that the ‘only thing […] that can
change the routine of the docks is a change in ourselves’ prompts her readers
to realize their potential individual influence as shoppers (E 5: p. 279). ‘The
radical economic ideas of Maynard Keynes, advocate of deficit spending and
credit for the consumer to boost the economy,’ Kathryn Simpson argues, ‘seem
to have informed Woolf ’s experience of and ideas about economic issues’ (2008,
p. 135).10 Keynesian economics are obliquely present in Woolf ’s ambiguous
portrayal of the individual consumer as ‘an important, a complex, a necessary
animal’ whose spending habits impact directly on the workings of global trade
(E 5: p. 280). Such reflections are particularly pertinent, as I have previously
noted, when read within a magazine in which consumerism was supported and
encouraged with editorial footers declaring ‘Advertised Goods are Good Goods’
and ‘All advertisements in GOOD HOUSEKEEPING are guaranteed’ (Wood,

2010, pp. 18–9).
Woolf ’s ambivalent treatment of the consumer in this essay undercuts the
faith in commodified goods that Good Housekeeping seeks to inspire in its
readers and foreshadows modern attitudes to the activity of shopping. Rachel
Bowlby outlines the late twentieth-century transformation of the shopper, from
the 1960s vision of a ‘dim and dazed […] childlike housewife passively picking
up brightly coloured things’ to the contemporary notion of the consumer as
‘the model of modern individuality’, a ‘rational planner who knows what she
wants and competently makes her selection’ (2000, pp. 5–7). Writing at a much
earlier stage of consumerism, Woolf also juxtaposes these two contrary images
of the female shopper. On the one hand she criticizes the buyer’s ignorance
of how commodities are made and sourced, paralleling Bowlby’s vision of the
naive and easily manipulated shopper by ridiculing our lack of awareness that
the handle of the ‘umbrella that we swing idly to and fro’ was once the tusk of
a mammoth (E 5: p. 280). On the other hand she punningly suggests, naming
herself in the process, that her every act has the potential to influence trade
with the fanciful suggestion that ‘[b]ecause one chooses to light a cigarette, all
those barrels of Virginian tobacco are swung on shore’ (E 5: p. 280). Rather
than condemning the reader’s current ignorance of their role in the global
production and transportation of commodities, in this essay Woolf seeks to
empower the female consumer/reader to recognize and use their influence over
the workings of trade positively. This sympathy with the shopper echoes her
article on ‘The Plumage Bill’ for the Woman’s Leader in 1920, in which Woolf
responded to H. W. Massingham’s condemnation of women who support the
plumage trade. Here she argued that Massingham had unfairly overlooked
the role of the male ‘plume hunters’ and ‘profiteers’ in the ‘murder[ing] and
tortur[ing] of the birds’, while alluding to the strength of her own ‘vow taken in
childhood’ not to buy plumage (E 3: pp. 241–3). ‘The Docks of London’ extends
from Woolf ’s previous criticisms of empire and commodity capitalism in her
earlier journalism and, additionally, anticipates contemporary debates about
ethical shopping by prompting her readers to see themselves as powerful buyers
rather than culpable consumers.
Reading ‘The Docks of London’ alongside Huxley’s ‘The Victory of Art
Over Humanity’ illustrates the specifically feminist outlook of Woolf ’s cultural
analysis in her Good Housekeeping essays. This mainstream women’s magazine
provided an ideal vehicle for Woolf ’s fictionalized London walking tour,
through which she contemplates the changing role of women in Britain’s
commercial, social and political power structures. Her decision to accept this
commission and through it to expand her analysis of patriarchal, capitalist and
imperialist Britain clearly reflects her desire to frame herself as a cultural critic
in the early months of 1931. Read alongside her ‘Professions for Women’ speech
in January 1931 and the ideas for a new critical work sparked by that speech,
Woolf ’s London Scene essays can be interpreted as further evidence of a shift in
her oeuvre at this time.11 This shift was motivated by private fears of becoming
outdated and by the current social and literary climate. Anxious to avoid intel-
lectual stagnation, Woolf was inspired by Huxley’s commitment to analysing
the economic pressures on contemporary Britain in February 1931. It is impos-
sible to conclusively determine the extent of Huxley’s influence on Woolf ’s
Good Housekeeping essays, yet her attempt to document the social, political
and commercial landscape of London in this series evidently owes something
to their encounter and conversation. Links between ‘The Docks of London’ and
Woolf ’s earlier journalism illustrate, however, the manner in which her late
cultural criticism developed from her previous output. Woolf ’s turn toward
experimental cultural analysis in the early months of 1931 was enacted through
a gradual transition expanding out from her existing feminist politics.
The Years: Planning and writing and changing direction
Following the completion of her Good Housekeeping articles, Woolf spent late
April 1931 in France with Leonard, returning in May to ‘typing out from start
to finish the 332 pages of that very condensed book The Waves’ (D 4: p. 25).
Her thoughts turned once more to ‘A Knock on the door’ on 28 May, when she
found herself ‘making up sentences, arguments, jokes &c’ as it ‘suddenly forces
itself on me’ (D 4: p. 28). The allusion to ‘arguments’ and ‘jokes’ here reveals
that Woolf was still imagining her new work in essayistic prose, akin to A Room
of One’s Own in form. A reference to reading Montaigne on ‘the passions of
women’ and ‘ma[king] up a whole chapter of my Tap at the Door or whatever it
is’ on 3 September 1931 correspondingly indicates that women’s sexual life was
still central to her conception of the book at this stage (D 4: p. 42). A year later,
when Woolf finally began drafting her imagined sequel to A Room of One’s Own,
however, the work was already developing well beyond its initial conception.
Woolf ’s intentions for the project had shifted substantially from its origins after
eighteen months of thinking, writing and sporadic planning. Between 1931 and
1936 her ‘Tap at the Door or whatever it is’ further evolved through a series of
fluctuations in intention corresponding to her expanding critiques of patriarchy.

The following discussion traces these fluctuations and the process through
which they led to the recasting of Woolf ’s new project as a ‘novel-essay’ and then
subsequently as The Years.
By the time she began drafting it on 11 October 1932, Woolf ’s imagined
sequel to A Room of One’s Own, now titled The Pargiters, had an innovative
structure and an expanded focus. Her ‘Professions for Women’ speech remained
both a pre-text and a pretext for the new work, which began with the subtitle:
‘<A Novel> {An} Essay based upon a paper read to the London & National
Society for Women’s Service’ (M.42, 1: p. 5). The premise that the essay sections
of The Pargiters were written from the remnants of a speech to this society
allowed Woolf to address her readers as if she were speaking with a female,
working audience, just as her opening footnote to A Room of One’s Own had
allowed her to write her history of women and literature as if she were still
addressing the young, female undergraduate students who attended her ‘papers
[…] to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton’ (AROO, p.3).
Yet, in fact, relatively little of the speech given on 21 January 1931 was directly
incorporated into the essay sections of The Pargiters. The surviving twenty-five
page typescript of the speech and the first Pargiters essay begin with almost
identical references to the invitation to speak, but the shared wording is
employed for a different purpose in each. In the speech, Woolf tells her audience
that ‘your Secretary invited me to come here’ in order ‘that I might perhaps tell
you something about my own professional experiences’ to establish her subject
as the challenges she faced as a budding female critic and her need to kill ‘the
Angel in the house’, Coventry Patmore’s pervasive nineteenth-century ideal of
femininity, before she could confidently and freely express her opinions (M.70,
p. 1, p. 4).12 In The Pargiters, the invitation is cited less to establish Woolf ’s
subject than her right to speak on it. Leila Brosnan has observed that Woolf
constructed ‘the essay as letter when it was her own right to articulacy that was
in question’ (1997, p. 127). Here, we see the forerunner of Woolf ’s use of the
epistolary form in Three Guineas as she uses ‘the essay as lecture’ to assert her
right to speak in The Pargiters.
After setting up her position as a lecturer to her readers, and reassuring us
that she is only ‘trying to speak the truth’, the subject of the first Pargiters essay
moves quickly from Woolf ’s own professional experiences to a discussion of
‘professions in general’ and a justification of her claim that ‘in trying to earn
[their] living professionally, [women] are doing work of enormous importance’
(TP, pp. 5–8).13 Many of the dominant themes in The Pargiters essay can be
found in the typescript of the earlier speech; for example, the ‘tremendous
tradition of mastery man has behind him’ (M.70, p. 23), women’s exclusion from
this tradition, and the ‘convention [that] allows men to be much more open in
what they say than women’ (M.70, p. 17). However, any direct correspondence
in language and structure between the two texts dissolves after the first five
paragraphs of the first Pargiters essay. In the later text, Woolf soon introduces
her ‘novel of fact […] based upon some scores – I might boldly say thousands
– of old memoirs’, from which she will quote to enable her readers/listeners to
‘forget that we are in this room, this night’ and ‘become the people that we were
two or three generations ago’ (TP, pp. 8–9). Rather than using the figurative
‘Angel in the house’ to represent the Victorian ‘ideal of womanhood’, or asking
her readers to ‘put [themselves] into the shoes of a man’ and imagine their ‘very
difficult position’ (M.70, p. 5, pp. 20–1), in The Pargiters Woolf uses fictional
episodes to illustrate the differing roles of men and women in the middle-class
Victorian household, and to highlight how the legacy of this domestic patri-
archy continues to shape and constrain men’s and women’s public and private
lives in the twentieth century.
The five fictional chapters of the ‘novel-essay’ correspond to the ‘1880’
section of The Years. The first scene in ‘1880’ shows the Pargiter siblings and
their father, Colonel Abel Pargiter, at tea in fifty-six Abercorn Terrace while
their invalid mother lies dying upstairs. The second scene includes ten-year-
old Rose’s trip to Lamleys and her fear at meeting a man by the pillar box, who
‘gibbered some nonsense at her […] & began to undo his clothes…’ (TP, p. 43).
In the third chapter, we meet Edward Pargiter in his rooms at Oxford, juggling
the affections of his two friends, Gibbs and Jevons (‘Ashley’ in The Years), while
fantasizing about his cousin Kitty Malone. The last two scenes focus on Kitty,
the daughter of an Oxford master. In the fourth we see her life at St Katherine’s
Lodge – entertaining distinguished professors and their wives, pouring tea for
undergraduates, learning history, and dreaming of Yorkshire. The final scene
depicts Kitty’s visit to the home of Nelly Brook (later, ‘Robson’), a fellow pupil
of Lucy Craddock, whose working-class parents are Yorkshire-born. These
fictional scenes serve as illustrations to her argument in the essay sections that
women’s access to the professions is fundamental if they are to gain the financial
and intellectual independence they have so long lacked. They draw on her
lifelong reading of biographies and memoirs and reflect her growing conviction,
expressed in her first Pargiters essay, that ‘we cannot understand the present if
we isolate it from the past’ (TP, p. 8).
Woolf endows her fictional chapters with a sense of history by presenting
these five scenes as only ‘short extracts’ from a much larger, unpublished novel
‘that will run into many volumes’ (TP, p. 9). She gives her first fictional episode
an imaginary chapter number, ‘CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX’, playfully introduces its
characters by referring to their fictional ancestors, and gives their dates, titles
and professions as if she were writing a biography rather than a novel:
The Chapter that I am about to read is taken from volume five and describes a
scene in the life of the Abel Pargiters – Captain Abel Pargiter, R.N. (1826–1890),
the father, being the third in descent from John Pargiter (1730–1785), the
Yorkshire cotton spinner and banker, with whom the book begins.
TP, pp. 9–11
Despite Woolf ’s apparent division between fact and fiction in The Pargiters, the
two modes entwine in the essay sections of the text as elements of the imagined
novel are revealed here that do not appear in the fictional episodes. Only in
the third essay, for example, do we learn of Bobby’s uncomplicated childish
love for Eleanor’s friend Miriam Parish; or are we told that the day after Rose’s
encounter with the man ‘under the lamp’ she ‘began to observe Bobby more
closely’ and ‘hunt about […] in her father’s study for some of his old books
about the treatment of Tropical Diseases, because they had certain pictures’
(TP, pp. 51–3). Both of these details help Woolf continue her argument that
Victorian women grew up to feel disturbed and threatened by their sexuality
because they were kept in ignorance about their bodies, men’s bodies, and sex,
while Victorian males were encouraged to embrace rather than fear their sexual
curiosity. The appearance of these details in an essay section serves to continue
the fiction that Woolf has five volumes of a grand, nineteenth-century-style
realist novel to refer to whenever she wishes to add more information about
her characters. Paradoxically, of course, these references to a fictitious and
cumbersome novel of fact led Woolf to undertake just such a project.
Woolf wrote over 180 pages of The Pargiters between 11 October and 19
December 1932, but soon after the ‘novel-essay’ was recast as an entirely
fictional work. Early in 1933 she found her mind constantly returning to
The Pargiters despite her anxiety to finish Flush. She had begun her fictional
biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel in August 1931 following the
completion of The Waves. Neglected until recently in critical discussions, Flush
was described by Radin as simply ‘a fantasy […] she had started as a lark and
[later] found an unwelcome burden’ (1981, p. 38).14 Yet this text can be viewed
as parallel to and an important stepping stone in the early development of The
Pargiters. Flush was shaped by the same renewed fervour for feminist cultural
analysis that inspired Woolf ’s planned sequel to A Room of One’s Own, and
the same new-found concern with disclosing the sexual life of women. Just as
Flush’s instinctive virility, his ecstatic response to ‘the hunting horn of Venus’, is
tamed through confinement in Elizabeth Barrett’s apartment in Wimpole Street,
Woolf ’s pseudo-biography implicitly suggests, his female owner’s sexuality is
suppressed within the restrictive confines of the nineteenth-century, upper-
middle-class home (F, p. 12). Woolf ’s drafting of Flush during 1931–2 had
already enabled her to link her interest in exposing women’s passions to a wider
exploration of the oppressive social conventions of the patriarchal Victorian
age. In January 1933, as she struggled to complete the final corrections to this
text, her mind was drawn back to furthering this feminist investigation through
writing the fictional portions of The Pargiters.
‘About a week ago,’ Woolf noted in her diary on 15 January 1933, ‘I began the
making up of scenes – unconsciously […] & so, for a week, I’ve sat here […]
speaking aloud phrases of The Pargiters’ (D 4: p. 143). Woolf longed to continue
the fictional side of her ‘novel-essay’, which, by 21 January, she began to fear was
too ‘didactic’ (D 4: p. 145). Questioning ‘the value’ of the draft she had written
a month earlier, she wondered if ‘perhaps it was only that spurious passion that
made me rattle away before Christmas’ (D 4: pp. 144–5). Still burdened with
revisions to Flush, she consoled herself with the prospect that she might soon
return to The Pargiters and to story-telling: ‘oh to be free, in fiction, making up
my scenes again – however discreetly’ (D 4: p. 145). Each of these quotations
discloses Woolf ’s desire for fiction and her anxiety about writing polemical
cultural criticism. Woolf no longer refers to the critical sections of The Pargiters as
‘essays’, but describes them only in relation to their position between the fictional
episodes as ‘interchapters’ (D 4: p. 146). The innovative formal shape Woolf
imagined for The Pargiters at this stage suggests the fractured narrative structures
of postmodern fiction.15 This framework proved too challenging to manage and
was dropped; she recorded ‘leaving out the interchapters’ ten days later as she
worked on ‘revising the first chapter’ (D 4: p. 146). However, the compression
of each of Woolf ’s five fictional chapters, separated by section breaks, into one
‘1880’ chapter in The Years would lead to an equally innovative formal structure.
After dropping the essays from The Pargiters Woolf modernized her family saga
by composing each chapter through a series of interlinking and resonant scenes
in a manner typical of her experimental fiction. Overt social commentary no
longer seemed appropriate or necessary to this new vision of The Pargiters, which
Woolf now hoped to write as a novel with her critical arguments ‘compact[ed]
[…] in the text’ and supported by ‘an appendix of dates’ (D 4: p. 146).
At this stage, Woolf had no thought of producing a separate critical work.

There is an assumption in Woolf criticism that when The Pargiters was
abandoned, the essay and fictional sections of that text were simply divided
as Woolf developed the latter into The Years and set the former aside to be
written as Three Guineas. Yet immediately after dropping the ‘interchapters’ and
throughout 1933, the generic features of this work remained in a state of flux.
On 25 April 1933 Woolf hoped The Pargiters would ‘be a terrific affair […] bold
& adventurous […] includ[ing] satire, comedy, poetry, narrative […] millions
of ideas but no preaching – history, politics, feminism, art, literature – in short
a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on’,
but wondered ‘what form is to hold [it] all together?’ (D 4: pp. 151–2). Having
‘assembled 50,000 words of “real” life’ during the past few months, she felt that
‘in the next 50 I must somehow comment […] while keeping the march of
events’ (D 4: p. 152). She was concerned not to lose sight of her plot. The diffi-
culty was to explicitly argue as well as illustrate her critical viewpoint without
‘becoming static’ (D 4: p. 152).
The character of Elvira Pargiter, later to become Sara in The Years, was crucial
in Woolf ’s mind to achieving this feat. As she worked on what were to become
the ‘1891’ and ‘1907’ chapters of The Years during March-June 1933, Woolf
began to envision Elvira as a mouthpiece for feminist commentary in the novel.
Even before she had begun drafting the adult Elvira, Woolf was so engaged in
imagining her thoughts and opinions that the voice of Elvira emerged as she
contemplated events in her own life. In late March 1933 Woolf was offered an
honorary doctorate from Manchester University which she determined to reject
on the grounds that accepting it would involve participating in and benefiting
from the exclusive, patriarchal education system she reviled. ‘It is an utterly
corrupt society […] & I will take nothing that it can give me,’ she declared in
her diary, describing herself as ‘speaking in the person of Elvira Pargiter’ (D 4:
p. 147). Reflecting on the letters of refusal she must write, Woolf wondered ‘how
[…] to put Elvira’s language into polite journalese’ (D 4: p. 148). ‘I hardly know
which I am, or where,’ she writes; ‘Virginia or Elvira; in the Pargiters or outside’
(D 4: p. 148). Although she was still only drafting the ‘1891’ section in the third
notebook of The Pargiters in which we first meet Elvira and Maggie as children,
Woolf had already figured the adult Elvira’s language and tone as a political
standpoint through which she could communicate feminist critique.
The problem came when Woolf actually began to write Elvira. On 3 April
1933 Woolf began work on a chapter set in June 1901/1902 in manuscript
drafts but later to be ‘1907’ in The Years. At the opening of this chapter, Elvira/
Sara, now aged 17, lies in bed waiting for her elder sister to return from a party.
In April 1933 Woolf drafted two pages of Elvira’s musings, emphasizing her
enforced stillness and isolation due to her deformity and comparing herself to
‘the […] tree in the garden in the middle of the plot’ (M.42, 3: p. 108). Woolf
then crossed out much of her writing and turned to a fresh page to start again.
She had had this scene ‘in [her] mind ever so many months’, but putting pen to
paper she despaired ‘I cant [sic] write it now’ (D 4: p. 149). ‘Elvira in bed’ was
‘the turn of the book’, but, as Woolf wrote on 6 April 1933, ‘doubts rush[ed] in’
and she sensed it ‘need[ed] a great shove to swing it round on its hinges’ (D 4:
p. 149). ‘The figure of Elvira is the difficulty’, she reflected on 25 April 1933 (D 4:
p. 152). She wished to explore Elvira’s social isolation, without interrupting the
integrity of her narrative. Following the realization that Elvira’s role as social
commentator could, if unchecked, result in the same didacticism which she had
hoped to avoid by removing the essay portions of her text, in April 1933 Woolf
determined to prevent Elvira from ‘becom[ing] too dominant’ by presenting
her ‘only in relation to other things’ (D 4: p. 152). In June 1933 Woolf began
redrafting the chapter again, this time slowly developing a method of drama-
tizing her feminist argument through juxtaposing evocative dialogues between
her characters.
In its early manuscript versions, Woolf ’s ‘1907’ chapter interrogates the
oppressive patriarchal social conventions and sexual politics of the early
twentieth century, highlighting the vastly differing outlooks of upper-middle-
class women and upper-middle-class men.16 As in the published novel, the
chapter sets up Elvira’s exclusion from and Maggie’s rejection of their society.
The reasons behind this exclusion/rejection are explicit in the manuscript draft.
The chapter opens with Elvira who, we are told in the June 1933 draft, ‘being
a hump back, never went to parties’ (M.42, 3: p. 126). As she sits reading and
thinking and waiting for her sister’s arrival, Elvira is distracted by the noise of
music from a neighbouring house. Drawing to the window, she observes people
spilling out from a party and tries to imagine the conversation taking place
between a figure in a white dress and a figure in black outside in the garden:
What did a man say, a woman say? out there, when they wandered off, […]
finding it impossible to stay any longer there, in the house; […] It must be
something very passionate, very beautiful. Perhaps there would be a flower.
M.42, 3: p. 119
On Maggie’s return, Elvira questions her sister intently about the party and the
people she has met, speculating excitedly ‘how much must have happened!’
(M.42, 3: p. 125). Maggie, however, describes the evening as ‘dull’, details
her discomfort with etiquette-bound conversation, and envies her sister’s
exemption from such occasions (M.42, 3: p. 127). Maggie recalls with distaste
sitting at dinner next to a man ‘in gold lace’, who declared ‘I like power’ and
then ‘talked to the woman on his other side’ (M.42, 3: p. 128). ‘Ever since the
eighteenth century,’ she reflects, ‘there’s always been a toady’ (M.42, 3: p. 129).
Elvira’s repeated enquiries about her sister’s social interactions are countered
by Maggie’s thoughtful assertion: ‘“And there’s {the} still – there’s still – she
hesitated – the moon mingling with the lamplight made extraordinary patches
[…] “the Eton & Harrow”’ (M.42, 3: p. 132). The moon, symbolizing women’s
latent sexuality, contrasts with Elvira’s earlier imaginings of the male party-goer’s
passionate utterances to a woman in the garden, and cuts into and strengthens
Maggie’s disjointed musings on gender relations. ‘{Poor} little boys knocking
balls about in a {[illeg.]} field,’ Elvira responds, empathizing with the men who
are the product of an upper-middle-class education that breeds competitiveness
and acquisitive aspirations and with Maggie’s difficulty in communicating with
them (M.42, 3: p. 132).
In the final portion of the draft chapter, Lady Pargiter joins her daughters and
chastises Maggie for not speaking more with ‘the most distinguished’ man in
gold lace whom ‘most girls w[oul]d have given their eyes’ to sit beside at dinner
(M.42, 3: p. 139). The identity of the man remains ambiguous; earlier in the draft
Elvira asks ‘he was the prime minister was he – your buffer?’ (M.42, 3: p. 128). The
question is never answered and the suggestion appears to be a fantasy on Elvira’s
part (in The Years he is named by Lady Pargiter as ‘Sir Matthew Mayhew’ [Y,
p. 135]), yet the fantasy is significant and in Woolf ’s drafts of the ‘1910’ chapter,
detailed below, Elvira recalls this evening and depicts this man again as symbolic
of ‘Prime Ministers’ or any man who has ‘sat all day in an office governing the
British Empire’ (M.42, 4: p. 60–1). In both chapters, the sisters’ discussion of
this gentleman and his interactions with Maggie and ‘the woman on his other
side’ is indicative of wider power dynamics between men and women (M.42,
3: p. 128). In the ‘1907’ chapter, renewing a ‘well known argument’, Eugénie
Pargiter upbraids her daughter for socializing with her relative Lady Lasswade,
formerly Kitty Malone, who ‘hates parties too’, while missing the opportunity
to expand her social circle and potentially secure a husband; ‘But do you go to
parties, my dear child, […] to talk to people you meet every day of your life?’
she scolds, ‘No. You go to parties to – ’ (M.42, 3: p. 139, p. 141). The chapter
concludes with Elvira and Maggie pestering their mother for stories of her
courtships as a young woman, which she refuses to tell. Together these various
scenes combine to effectively suggest the sexual ignorance and repression of

young upper-middle-class women in the early twentieth century, their limited
opportunities to socialize freely, and the huge gulf in experience, education, and
power that existed between the sexes at this time.
Drafting her ‘1910’ chapter between 22 June and 30 July 1933, Woolf returned
to these themes alongside recounting the party evoked in ‘1907’. This complex
chapter is twice the length of the published text in the holograph draft, spanning
seventy-five pages in the fourth notebook of Woolf ’s eight-volume Pargiters
manuscript. In both The Pargiters and The Years, ‘1910’ narrates the day of
King Edward VII’s death from the perspective of a selection of members of the
Pargiter family. Rose Pargiter calls on Maggie and Elvira for lunch and invites
them to join her in attending a suffrage campaign meeting that afternoon. Elvira
accompanies her cousin and then, after returning home for dinner with Maggie,
reports back on the meeting, leading the sisters to debate their exclusion from
English society. All direct references to suffrage were cut from the published
version of ‘1910’, but in the after-dinner scene of the holograph draft Maggie
and Elvira debate the subject at length.17 Elvira recalls Maggie’s attendance at
the party in ‘1907’ and her discussion of ‘power’ with the man ‘dressed in gold
lace’ within a wider discussion of the sisters’ dissatisfaction with patriarchal
society (M.42, 3: p. 57). The previous episode is expanded with a sketch of the
woman sitting beside Maggie at dinner as a ‘duchess […] all in diamonds’, in
whose drawing room the representative ‘Toady’ relaxes and is glimpsed ‘pulling
off his boots’ (M.42, 4: pp. 59–60). ‘<Rose> […] wants a vote; yes’, Maggie notes,
considering the sexual politics at work behind Britain’s power structures, ‘{And
Rose spent 5 pounds 10 on her coat, skirt in the Westbourne Grove} […] {thats
why he wont give her a vote”}’ (M.42, 4: p. 61). The attractions of the Duchess
are debated in contrast to Rose’s appearance and implied homosexuality (in the
draft versions of The Pargiters Maggie asserts that ‘if Rose loved anybody […] it
was {obviously not} a man’ (M.42, 4: p. 69)):
Well but look here, Maggie said Elvira,

Suppose you’re the Prime Minister; or any other
high official: like Papa for example;
with a little red box & a sword:
pirouetting about in front of a
looking glass; governing the British Empire,
you dont want a serge skirt that cost
£5 10. in the Westbourne Grove.”
“I dont blame him in the least” said Maggie.
M.42, 4: pp. 61–2
Elvira concludes, thinking back once more to their embellished retelling of the
‘1907’ party, that ‘every patriarch has his prostitute’ (M.42, 4: p. 62). Through
this multi-layered discussion Maggie and Elvira explore their rejection of the
patriarchal cultural values bred in Britain’s governing classes by ‘Eton & Harrow
match & all that’ (M.42, 3: p. 57).
With its attentiveness to gender politics and the symbolic power of clothing,
this chapter strongly anticipates Three Guineas and represents a significant
development in Woolf ’s critiques of patriarchy. Nonetheless, it also draws
heavily on her previous feminist thinking. The description of the governing
male ‘pirouetting about in front of a looking glass’ is strikingly reminiscent
of the assertion in A Room of One’s Own that ‘Women have served all these
centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of
reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’ (AROO, p. 45). Interpreted
through this earlier statement, Maggie and Elvira’s conversation implies that the
duchess in diamonds conciliates the governing patriarch by fulfilling the role of
the flattering mirror and thus sustains patriarchy. Rose, in contrast, dressed in
ready-made clothing and demanding the vote, refuses to support this historical
power dynamic between the sexes and is ignored by the governing men whose
attention she wishes to attract for her cause. Rather than fighting for the vote,
Maggie and Elvira therefore decide that the best way to oppose patriarchy is
by refusing to participate in public life. The sisters’ insistence on the potential
influence of maintaining an outsider status in this fictional draft of ‘1910’
chapter significantly moves beyond Woolf ’s earlier feminist analysis in A Room
of One’s Own and in the earlier ‘novel-essay’ draft of The Pargiters, which chiefly
posits that to achieve gender equality women must participate in patriarchal
British society (e.g. by entering education and the professions). In this entirely
fictional draft of ‘1910’, Woolf conversely experiments through Maggie and
Elvira with a feminist position that emphasizes women’s difference in outlook
from men and argues that this difference must be preserved in order to affect a
complete overhaul of the patriarchal cultural values by which Britain’s social and
political institutions are shaped. This argument, as explored in Chapter 3, was
formative to the development of Woolf ’s late feminist-pacifism.
The Pargiters was recast as a less polemical text during 1933–4 paradoxically
as Woolf was forced to become more polemical in her political engagement.
Her thoughts on women and war were evolving quickly at this time in response
to events across the Channel. On 29 April 1933 she recorded meeting Bruno
Walter, a German composer who had recently fled his country after Hitler
gained power in January of that year. The details Woolf remembered from
their conversation reflected her then current preoccupation with nationalism,

fascism and how the masses can respond to both:
he kept on saying ‘You must think of this awful reign of intolerance. You must
think of the whole state of the world. […] Our Germany – which I loved – with
our tradition – our culture – We are now a disgrace.’ […] He will never go back
there. […] We must band together. We must refuse to meet any German. We must
say that they are uncivilised. We will not trade with them or play with them – we
must make them feel themselves outcasts – not by fighting them; by ignoring them.
D 4: p. 153
Writing an essay on Oliver Goldsmith during April-July 1933, Woolf was

similarly drawn to Goldsmith’s peculiar anti-nationalism, his ‘detached attitude
and width of view’, and noted that he ‘preferred to call himself a Citizen
of the World rather than an Englishman’ (E 6: p. 21). These sentiments are
echoed and explored in ‘1910’, written concurrently, as Elvira and Maggie
debate their outsider status and discuss whether they are, or would want to be,
‘Englishwomen’ (M.42, 4: p. 57). Woolf ’s treatment of this question through
Maggie and Elvira in her Pargiters draft developed beyond the planned scope
of her novel and necessitated the conception of a separate work in which it
could be explored at length with regard to the growing threat of another major
European conflict. The complex debate outlined above was later omitted from
The Years and reserved for further explication alongside her analysis of fascism
and war within Three Guineas. Even after this excision, however, the sisters’
outsider status continued to be visible in Woolf ’s penultimate novel. Maggie and
Sara’s refusal to conform to patriarchal gender roles or to abide by repressive
social conventions is clear from their first introduction as children in ‘1891’,
dancing around a bonfire ‘like wild creatures with their hair flying’ (Y, p. 119).
Leaska has argued that after writing the first two volumes of The Pargiters,
Woolf dropped her original aim of confronting women’s repressed sexuality
because she realized that ‘if she was going to describe on paper the restrictive
taboos and inhibitions to which her own generation of women were condi-
tioned, the very act of daring to write them out would, on the contrary, disprove
the existence not only of the taboos themselves but also of the inhibition in
describing them’ (1978, p. xviii). This argument is compelling, yet the later
volumes of Woolf ’s Pargiters holograph, including the early drafts of ‘1907’
and ‘1910’ discussed here, contradict the suggestion that Woolf abandoned this
aspect of her feminist analysis. Indeed, reading these volumes alongside The
Years reveals that as well as editing out allusions to her female characters’ sexual
lives, Woolf also revised in details that would emphasize her dramatization
of this aspect of her characters’ experience. Elvira’s speculation regarding the
conversation of the couple in the garden in ‘1907’ in The Years, for example, no
longer contains the explicit word ‘passionate’, but the family member Maggie
speaks to at the party in the later text is her cousin Martin Pargiter rather than
Lady Lasswade, adding weight to this chapter’s depiction of the reliance of
young upper-middle-class women of the era on chaperoned attendance at social
gatherings to meet men. Woolf chose to illustrate the taboos and inhibitions to
which women were subject in The Years by demonstrating in fiction the distinct
gender roles enforced on men and women by patriarchy.
After completing a first draft of The Pargiters in November 1934, Woolf
returned to her manuscript to ‘tackle re-reading & re-writing’ (D 4: p. 261).
She realized she now faced the ‘damnably disagreeable’ task of ‘compacting the
vast mass’ in order for ‘each scene to be a scene’ (D 4: p. 261). By 30 December
1934, following the completion of her eight-volume Pargiters manuscript, Elvira
had become Sara. Woolf still wanted ‘to make both S. & M. bold characters,
using character dialogue’, and she had just ‘finished, more or less’ redrafting
‘Maggie & Sarah, the first scene, in the bedroom’ and was looking forward to
reworking ‘the long day that ends with the King’s death’ (D 4: pp. 266–7). Her
new working title for The Pargiters in December 1934 was ‘Ordinary People’
and the work was still developing (D 4: p. 266). At the close of 1934 and during
1935 Woolf was busy condensing and revising her novel in typescript. On 17
July 1935 she recorded in her diary: ‘Just now I finished my first wild retyping
& find the book comes to 740 pages […] but I think I can shorten: all the last
part is still rudimentary & wants shaping’ (D 4: p. 332). Only three undated
typescript fragments of The Years survive from this stage of composition and
two of these, drawn from the ‘1910’ chapter (B.15.2 and B.4.d), presumably date
from before 30 December 1934 as they refer to Elvira rather than Sara Pargiter.
On 29 December 1935, Woolf declared she had ‘just put the last words to The
Years’, but now at ‘797 pages’ she knew it needed further revising and ‘some bold
cuts’ (D 4: p. 360).
Over the following year Woolf continued to develop her novel through the
correction of a series of page and galley proofs. She cut large portions from
The Years throughout 1936, during the summer of which she suffered a severe
deterioration in mental health, in order to condense her unwieldy novel into
a publishable length and to tighten and sharpen its structure and content.
Significant critical attention has been paid by previous scholars, notably Radin
and Haule, to the surviving proofs that evidence Woolf ’s persistent substantive
revisions to The Years through this late stage of composition. Radin notes, for
example, the insertion at page proof stage of dates for chapter headings and the
short descriptive passages that open each chapter of the published text: ‘It is
remarkable that the preludes and interludes were added so late in the evolution
of The Years,’ she observes, ‘since they seem to be such an important structural
device’ (1981, p. 127). ‘Woolf did not cut the novel in despair and desperation,’
Haule argues, documenting her late introduction of the ‘1918’ chapter, ‘she
refashioned it in dramatic, subtle ways’ (2009, p. 233). While the confrontational
tone and explicit feminist argument present in the holograph notebooks were
removed from the novel, Woolf ’s late turn to cultural criticism had forcefully
shaped the text. When Woolf finally despatched the proofs of The Years to the
printers in December 1936, it remained, as she had first imagined it, ‘a novel of
fact’ (TP, p. 9).
Writing a novel of fact
There is little conflict between fact and fiction in Woolf ’s early visualizations
of The Pargiters despite critical speculation regarding her difficulty merging
these two modes within her penultimate novel. Woolf ’s description of fictional
narrative as ‘“real” life’ indicates her belief that stories can be factual, even if
their characters are invented and their plots imagined (D 4: p. 152). The word
‘truth’ in Woolf ’s declaration, ‘I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction’,
reveals that this reconciliation is possible because Woolf ’s first concern is not
objective ‘fact’, the accurate record of actual people, places, events, dates or
statistical information, but subjective ‘truth’, that is, the faithful representation
of human experiences and emotions (TP, p. 9). Yet, Woolf did become markedly
more attentive to facts throughout the early 1930s. Indeed, her late turn to
cultural criticism is characterized not only by her desire to expand and vocalize
her social and political critique, but also by her determination to support this
move with thorough research and evidencing of her feminist political viewpoint.
Woolf was a professional journalist and the emphasis on factual research in her
late cultural criticism built upon her existing journalistic practices. Inspired by
Aldous Huxley’s visit in February 1931, as described above, she researched her
Good Housekeeping articles with visits to the London docklands, the Houses of
Parliament, and the former homes of Thomas Carlyle and John Keats. When she
began writing The Pargiters in 1932, Woolf correspondingly applied to friends
for accurate information to support her new work. In November 1932, she asked
Margaret Llewelyn Davies if she might once more see ‘a letter from W. Bagehot’
to her aunt, Emily Davies, ‘about women being servants’ so that she could quote
from it (L 5: p. 125). In December she wrote to Ethel Smyth to ask ‘about Mrs
Pankhurst and the suffrage’, explaining that she was ‘turning over that other
little book in [her] mind’ and wanted ‘to know a few facts’ (L 5: p. 141). The
presence of accurate historical contexts within Woolf ’s fictional chapters of The
Pargiters lead them to be as representative of her cultural criticism as the essays
she abandoned. Woolf ’s decision to drop the essay sections was motivated not
by a desire to omit her analysis of the cultural values, sexual politics and social
and economic conditions impacting on the lives of her fictional characters,
but by a wish to integrate this exploration into her story-telling. This fusion of
fact and fiction distinguishes Woolf ’s late turn to cultural criticism and repre-
sents a linear progression from her earlier journalistic methods and aesthetic
experimentalism.
Early critics of The Years often failed to recognize Woolf ’s thoughtful
treatment of facts within her fiction. In 1980, for example, Warner observed
with bewilderment the brief reference to the death of Edward VII in the ‘1910’
chapter of The Years, which, he contended, ‘barely disturb[s] the placid narrative
surface of the novel’ (p. 26). Warner argued that Woolf ’s brisk treatment of
this political event in her fiction indicated a ‘reluctance to deal with hard,
“historical” fact’ (p. 26). Later critics have interpreted this oblique historical
reference more perceptively. Patricia Cramer reads the strained conversation
between the female cousins in this chapter against the backdrop of the King’s
death as an exploration of ‘the barriers to women’s bonding’, which, she argues,
Woolf felt that women must conquer to ‘work together against male supremacy’
(1991, p. 211). Yet much further work remains to be done on the exact nature of
Woolf ’s innovative integration of historical contexts and factual research within
her late fictional texts.
Other events depicted in the ‘1910’ chapter reveal that Woolf had fully
researched the historical details surrounding Edward VII’s death, but chose not
to emphasize or even to adhere to them accurately. The day of Edward VII’s
death, 6 May 1910, was a Friday, as Woolf depicts in this chapter, and a perfor-
mance of Siegfried was indeed playing that evening at the Covent Garden Opera
House, at which her character Kitty Laswade is present. The penultimate scene
of Woolf ’s ‘1910’ chapter focuses on this performance of Siegfried, at which
Kitty sees her cousin Edward and another ‘boy, a cousin of her husband’s’, who
furtively inform her that ‘[t]he doctors have given him up’ as they both look up
to the empty royal box (Y, p. 174). The King was never expected to attend the
Opera House on Friday 6 May 1910, however, as Woolf must surely have known
if she had consulted contemporary newspapers to establish these contexts,
because his sudden illness the previous day had been widely reported. Edward
VII had failed to meet Queen Alexandra at Victoria Station as she returned
from a trip abroad on 5 May 1910 due to the abrupt onset of bronchitis. Woolf
curiously never mentions the exact date in the published form of the novel, even
though it appeared in the manuscript versions and she had evidently checked
it thoroughly. This omission suggests her deliberate blurring of the timeframe.
Her depiction of London poised ‘as if waiting […] for Queen Alexandra to
come’ in the chapter’s opening prelude interestingly corresponds to the antici-
pation of the Queen’s arrival and the King’s public appearance in the London
papers the evening of 4 May (Y, p. 153). By compressing the events of two days
into one, Woolf effectively accelerates the sense of disorientation felt by the
reader as well as the characters at the sudden death of the King. The obscurity
of her reference to Edward VII maintains her focus on the Pargiter family, while
creating an atmosphere of the loss and impending chaos surrounding them. The
death of Edward VII hangs significantly on the last page of ‘1910’, marking the
end of authoritative patriarchy in the novel and, combined with Rose and Sara’s
attendance at the campaign meeting earlier in the chapter, foreshadowing a new
age of protest and shifting relations between the classes and the sexes in British
society.
Woolf ’s innovative application of social and political contexts in her fiction
of the 1930s is further evidenced by her collection and use of newspaper
cuttings to support her writing of The Pargiters. The three scrapbooks of cuttings
Woolf collected while writing The Pargiters are generally considered pre-texts to
Three Guineas, although the first volume was compiled prior to Three Guineas’
conception. These texts look noticeably different from Woolf ’s regular records
of her reading and remind us that she was a professional journalist and that
The Pargiters was at first envisioned as a literary work that would draw on
her experience of journalistic practices. Each of her scrapbooks is filled with
newspaper cuttings, letters, pamphlets, as well as typed and hand-written quota-
tions from articles and books dating from the late 1920s to late 1937. Woolf ’s
sifting of historical and cultural evidence through the collation of articles in
these scrapbooks suggests the action of newspaper clippings services employed
by journalists and researchers to deliver them the latest relevant information for
their research and writing. Periodicals cited in the volumes include The Times,
the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Listener, the Evening Standard and the
Nation, although newspapers are not necessarily identified unless they happen
to remain on the header or footer of a cutting. The first notebook was begun in
1931 and appears to have been completed in 1933, and thus contains research
collected while Woolf was planning her new work, during the writing and
abandonment of her ‘novel-essay’, and alongside her drafting of the first entirely
fictional draft of The Pargiters.
Critical attention has already been paid to several influential secondary
sources for the essay sections of Woolf ’s Pargiters drafts in her first research
notebook, including, notably, Elizabeth Mary Wright’s The Life of Joseph Wright
(1932).18 Leaska notes how Wright’s life informed Woolf ’s portrayal of Mr Brook/
Robson in ‘1880’, while the verb ‘parget’ – ‘to plaster with cement or mortar’, and
by extension, to whitewash – taken from Wright’s dialect dictionary may have
influenced her choice of the family’s surname (1978, p. xiv; see also Leaska,
1977). Wright was a famous dialect scholar and Professor of Comparative
Philology at the University of Oxford from 1901–25, a self-schooled son of
a working mother whose strong egalitarian principles were reflected in his
unconventionally equal partnership with his wife Elizabeth, a former Oxford
student. Woolf ’s earliest reference to the couple appears in her diary on 13 July
1932, where she declared the Wrights ‘people I respect’ and hoped ‘the 2nd
vol. [of the biography] will come this morning’ (D 4: p. 115). In December,
while drafting her ‘novel-essay’, Woolf included a marginal reference to Wright
in the fifth chapter as Kitty visits the Brook family, and numerous references
to the Wrights in the sixth essay (TP, p. 135, pp. 154–8). The Wrights’ union
is depicted as an ideal marriage and his ‘views on education, society, and the
proper conduct of life’ are presented as enlightened (TP, p. 158). Woolf argues
that ‘the force at the back of [his] opinions was […] that Joseph Wright himself
had received no schooling: he was not the product of Eton or Harrow, and King’s
and Christ Church’ but was ‘much more profoundly influenced by his mother’
(TP, p. 155–6). This perception of the destructive influence of a British public
school and university education and, particularly, the values promoted by ‘Eton
& Harrow’ is interestingly echoed in Maggie and Elvira/Sara’s conversation in
Woolf ’s draft of ‘1907’ written in June 1933 (M.42, 3: p. 132). Although direct
references to Wright were revised out of The Years, the mark of her reading
remains in the published novel in the numerous references to the gendered
differences in outlook bred in the Pargiter siblings and their cousins by their
differing experiences of education. In the appendix of Three Guineas Joseph
Wright surfaces again, indicating the continued importance of this research to
Woolf in the 1930s, throughout which she strove to ground her cultural analysis
in fact (TG, p. 402).
Uncovering Woolf ’s use of articles from her research scrapbooks through

The Pargiters to The Years discloses her attempts to integrate the factual
sources of her interchapters within her fiction. Woolf ’s first research scrapbook
includes an article by Mary, Countess of Lovelace on ‘The Chaperonage Age’,
for example, which was printed in The Times on 9 March 1932 (B.16.f, 1: p. 29).
Quotations from this article appeared in the ‘novel-essay’ and implicitly shaped
the writing of The Years before emerging in the notes for Three Guineas. Woolf ’s
discussion of the threat of ‘street love’ to young women in the second Pargiters
essay, written somewhere between 23 October and 11 November 1932, directly
includes Lovelace’s recollection of living ‘near St. James’s Street and all the
clubs’ in the late nineteenth century, ‘so that for my sisters and me to go out
alone into the streets would have been to defy the social taboo in its severest
form’ (TP, p. 36–7). ‘But there were […] “quiet squares and terraces in the
outlying districts,’ Woolf records in Lovelace’s words, ‘where young girls could
at least go about in pairs”’ (TP, p. 37). ‘Happily for the Pargiters,’ she asserts,
‘Abercorn Terrace came under this heading’ (TP, p. 37).19 Woolf had previously
evoked the freedom felt by women able to walk without a chaperone with her
portrayal of married Clarissa Dalloway’s exhilaration at wandering without
restraint through post-war Westminster, but this article enabled her to verify
her depiction of the restrictive social taboo that prevented young women from
walking alone in parts of central London in 1880. This emphasis on verifying
social analysis represents a key development in Woolf ’s cultural criticism.
When redrafting her ‘1880’ chapter in March 1933 in the third volume of
The Pargiters manuscript, Woolf omitted this reference to Lovelace’s article in
line with her intention to embed her cultural analysis into the fiction. Yet the
continued presence of Rose’s traumatic encounter with a predatory male in the
street and repeated references to her elder sisters’ boredom and confinement
within the family home combined to present the Pargiter sisters as thoroughly
restricted by the nineteenth century’s social codes for young upper-middle-class
women. In The Years Eleanor debates which of her sisters should accept Mrs
Levy’s invitation to a dinner party, while Delia and Milly look longingly out into
the street at a young man arriving in a hansom cab to call on their neighbour.
Delia turns back into the drawing-room suddenly with the exclamation ‘Oh
my God!’ and declares her current situation ‘hopeless’ (Y, pp. 18–19). Trapped
waiting for the death of their mother, the novel demonstrates, the Pargiter
sisters’ inability to move freely outside the domestic sphere severely limits
their opportunities to broaden their own horizons through either education or
social interaction. In the ‘Present Day’ section, in response to her niece Peggy’s
query whether Eleanor was ‘suppressed when [she] were young’, Eleanor vividly
recalls this picture of ‘Delia standing in the middle of the room’, despairing ‘Oh
my God! Oh my God!’, and adds to it the memory of ‘herself […] watching
Morris – was it Morris? – going down the street to post a letter…’ (Y, p. 318). As
Peggy regards her elderly aunt as ‘a Victorian spinster’, these recollections clearly
indicate the restrictive social mores that denied Delia the public life she longed
for and Eleanor the opportunity of marriage (Y, p. 316).
Other materials in the first research scrapbook, collected after the ‘novel-
essay’ format had been abandoned, similarly informed Woolf ’s writing of the
fictional drafts of The Pargiters in 1933. A Times article from 10 January 1933
on ‘the paucity of young women’ in church (B.16.f, 1: p. 63), for example,
was integrated into her writing of ‘1910’. Canon F. R. Barry’s warning that
the decline in young women attending services stemmed from ‘a growing
suspicion that they were not really wanted by the Church’ parallels Elvira and
Maggie’s discussion of their alienation from Britain’s socio-political institutions
in the draft version of this chapter written between June and July 1933. In the
after-dinner scene, while discussing their alienation from British patriarchal
culture, the two women agree that ‘to accept the teaching of the Archbishop of
Canterbury with regard to baptism, marriage, & burial, & the nature & conduct
of the soul both here & hereafter’ is something they ‘are not prepared to do’
(M.42, 4: p. 66). While the suffrage debate was removed from the published
version of ‘1910’, and with it Maggie and Elvira/Sara’s assertions regarding
their exclusion from the Church of England, the influence of this article and
the writing process it sparked remains in the ‘1914’ chapter of The Years. Here
Martin Pargiter meets his cousin Sara outside St. Paul’s Cathedral where she
has been ‘[l]istening to the service’ (Y, p. 218). She expresses strikingly little
enthusiasm for or understanding of religion and speculates with regard to the
sparse congregation: ‘What do they think of it, Martin?’ (Y, p. 219). Opening
her prayer-book apparently ‘at random’, she recites words heavily loaded with
Woolf ’s critiques of patriarchy throughout this novel: ‘The father incompre-
hensible; the son incomprehensible – ’ (Y, p. 218). The Times article from
Woolf ’s first research scrapbook may not appear directly in The Years, but its
impact on the development of her critiques of patriarchy in this fictional work
is discernible and provides further support for the interpretation of a change in
her aesthetic practices at this point in her oeuvre.
Earlier in her career Woolf had viewed concern with factual details as the
downfall of the popular Edwardian novelists and the limitation of Jane Austen,
who she ridiculed in a 1913 essay for ‘eliminat[ing] her hedge’ when ‘she found
out that hedges do not grow in Northamptonshire […] rather than run the risk
of inventing one which could not exist’ (E 2: p. 12). In the 1930s, in contrast,
in response to the changing literary and political climate, Woolf desired the
authority of factual accuracy to carry the weight of her cultural criticism.
Drafting The Pargiters in 1932, Woolf declared she wished to produce a novel
of which it could be said; ‘There is scarcely a statement in it that cannot be […]
verified’ (TP, p. 9). This compulsion to document and debate precise social and
historical circumstances in her fiction was influenced in part by the surrounding
literary climate. Woolf ’s interactions with Huxley in February 1931 disclose her
consciousness of changing attitudes to modernity and her fear of outliving her
literary moment. In this context, Woolf sought to revitalize her output in the
1930s through sustained cultural criticism, and in The Years used fiction to
dramatize her evolving critiques of patriarchy. Over the course of writing her
penultimate novel, however, Woolf retained aspects of her earlier anti-author-
itarian attitude to factual accuracy as indicated by her willingness to condense
the historical events of two days into one in the ‘1910’ chapter for greater critical
and artistic effect. No more a slave to literary form than to fact, Woolf subver-
sively abandoned the expected features of the family chronicle novel, such as its
realist fictional method and measured chronological structure, and by including
large temporal breaks between chapters, directed her readers’ attention to the
changing experience and socio-political position of women within contem-
porary Britain. The composition of The Years was therefore marked by both
Woolf ’s late turn to cultural criticism and her evolving modernist aesthetics.
Conclusion
An authorial note scribbled alongside Woolf ’s famous diary conception of her

sequel to A Room of One’s Own – ‘This is Here & Now I think’ – refers to a
working title for The Years and thus explicitly links the evolution of this novel
to the ‘entire new book’ first imagined on 20 January 1931 (D 4: p. 6). The
words ‘I think’ indicate, however, that Woolf herself was uncertain what was, or
would be, the ‘sequel to a Room of Ones Own’ in May 1934 while making this
observation, although she felt it might be the novel on which she was working.
Her uncertainty reflects the fact that Here & Now/The Years was still in an
unfixed and unfinished state at this time and was therefore, as the method-
ology of genetic criticism insists, still open to future possibilities. Rather than
stabilizing our perception of this novel’s textual history then, this marginal note
should alert us to the erratic and changeable process through which The Years
developed from the wreckage of The Pargiters and remind us that the course of
Woolf ’s late cultural criticism was far from set in the early months of 1931. The
Years, while still attentive to women’s repressed sexuality, is not the overt ‘sexual
life of women’ inspired by Woolf ’s ‘Professions for Women’ speech (D 4: p. 6).
Mapping the course of Woolf ’s late turn to cultural criticism in the early to
mid-1930s reveals the multiple fluctuations in her feminist viewpoint during
the writing of The Years. Just as the composition of this novel was prolonged and
circuitous and responded to numerous personal, social, and wider historical
circumstances, Woolf ’s late preoccupation with critiquing patriarchy was the
result of a variety of internal and external influences that led to a gradual and
haphazard shift in the direction of her oeuvre. The redirection of her creative and
critical energies into feminist social and political analysis in her last decade also
represents a significant transition in her modernist aesthetics as the increased
importance of facts and journalistic practices to the production of Woolf ’s
penultimate novel demonstrates. Indeed, it was through the drafting of The
Years, rather than through the conflict between fact and narrative, that Woolf ’s
feminist cultural analysis evolved in scope to spark the writing of Three Guineas.
Notes
1 There is some debate concerning which version best represents the paper that
Woolf presented to the Junior Council of the L&NSWS on 21 January 1931. Jeri
Johnson suggests that the typescript ‘appears to be the actual text of the speech
Woolf delivered’ (1998, p. xxxiv); while Naomi Black believes this typescript may
have been produced ‘soon after the speech was given’ (2001, p. xxi). Black suggests
that references to Ethel Smyth in this paper, the speaker who preceded Woolf at
the L&NSWS meeting, indicate that the typescript could not have been produced
before that night. Yet these allusions supply no specific information about Smyth’s
address but rather convey a general knowledge of her professional life, which, as
a close friend of Smyth, Woolf might easily have written prior to the event. In
addition, whether it was produced before or immediately after Woolf ’s talk, the
typescript nonetheless supplies the fullest contemporaneous account of Woolf ’s
speech. Therefore it is to this typescript that I turn to cite this elusive, oral pre-text.
A transcription of the typescript is also available in TP, pp. xxvii–xliv.
2 It has not been possible for me to access the two bound volumes of proofs for The
Years at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; for an overview and analysis
of these late proofs see Haule, 2009.
3 Eric Warner reads The Years as a failure because Woolf ‘ruthlessly scraped away
any hint of interiority’ from The Pargiters manuscript (1980, p. 29). Jane Marcus
suggests that ‘the novel and the pamphlet and the speech, along with the reading
notebooks, the scrapbooks, and the discarded proofs of The Years, make a huge
documentary that never quite came off ’ (2006, p. xlv).
4 A notable exception to this previous omission in critical discussions of the
relationship between The Years and Three Guineas is the work of Julia Briggs, who
is one of the few critics to have observed the existence of links between the fictional
episodes of the manuscript of the novel and the printed text of Three Guineas (see
Briggs, 2006b, p. 316). Briggs’s work will be further discussed in Chapter 3.
5 The ‘epitaph’ to which Woolf refers is an elegiac couplet ascribed to the Syracusian
poet Theodoridas: ‘I am the tomb of a shipwrecked man. Sail on;/when we went
down, the other ships sailed on’ (see Jay (ed.), 1974, p. 111).
6 The articles were (1931a), ‘Abroad in England’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, May,
16–9, 84; (1931c), ‘Sight seeing in alien Englands’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, June,
50–3, 118; (1931d), ‘The victory of art over humanity’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine,
July, 46–9; (1931b), ‘Greater and lesser London’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, October,
48–9, 108. All are reprinted in A. Huxley, (1994), The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and
Compassion for the Masses 1920–36, (ed.) David Bradshaw (London: Faber). My
references are to Bradshaw’s edition.
7 Woolf ’s six articles appeared in the following issues of the British edition of Good
Housekeeping: ‘The docks of London’, December 1931; ‘Oxford street tide’, January
1932; ‘Great men’s houses’, March 1932; ‘Abbeys and cathedrals’, May 1932; ‘“This is
the House of Commons”’, October 1932; ‘Portrait of a Londoner’, December 1932.
Five of these articles were posthumously published in a collected edition in 1975
(V. Woolf, [1975], The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia Woolf [New York,
NY: Frank Hallman], reprinted in Britain by Hogarth in 1982). All six essays were
collected in the more recent edition, V. Woolf, (2004), The London Scene (London:
Snowbooks). I have previously supplied an analysis of these essays in the context of
their original place of publication in Wood, 2010.
8 The internal quotation is drawn from Robert Bridges’ poem, ‘A Passer-By’; see
editorial note in E 5: p. 281.
9 On Woolf ’s critique of empire in ‘Thunder at Wembley’ see Koenigsberger, 2007.
10 See also Jennifer Wicke, 1994.
11 It is tempting to read Woolf ’s ‘Introductory Letter’ to Life As We Have Known It,
published in March 1931, as further evidence of a shift towards cultural criticism
within Woolf ’s late output. Considering her reluctance to undertake this task,
however, which was completed only at the request of Margaret Llewellyn Davies
with ‘great plodding’ in 1930 (D 3: p. 304), it appears this text was driven by a quite
different impetus to Woolf ’s enthusiastic turn to feminist analysis early in 1931.
Nonetheless, its existence and first publication in an alternate version in the Yale
Review in September 1930 (see E 5: pp. 176–94) again highlights the many overlaps
in Woolf ’s oeuvre, and valuably reminds us of the difficulty of locating her late turn
to cultural criticism in a precise historical moment.
12 For the popular nineteenth-century poem in response to which Woolf ’s ‘Angel’
is derived see C. Patmore (2004), The Angel in the House (1891), in The Victorian
Web [Web site and database], (ed.) G. P. Landow; available from http://www.
victorianweb.org/authors/patmore/angel/index.html (accessed 20 December 2012).
13 References to the first volume and a half of Woolf ’s Pargiters manuscript (M.42) in
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism are to Leaska’s TP, except where my reading
of the manuscript differs from Leaska, in which case I refer to the manuscript
directly.
14 For a recent analysis of Woolf ’s cultural criticism in Flush see Snaith, 2002.
15 Pamela L. Caughie surveys The Pargiters and its ‘novel-essay’ structure through the
lens of postmodernism (1991, pp. 94–104).
16 See Appendix A for transcriptions of extracts from this draft chapter.
17 See Appendix B for a transcription of pages 56–67 from this significant scene.
18 All references to the scrapbooks can be found in Three Guineas Scrapbooks: A
Digital Archive, edited by Vara Neverow and Merry Pawlowski (Woolf, 2001b).
Publication details of works in the scrapbooks, where indicated, have been
determined with help from Neverow and Pawlowski’s bibliography and appendices
D and E of Black’s edition of Three Guineas (Woolf, 2001a).
19 No exact location is specified for Abercorn Terrace in either The Pargiters or The
Years.
3
The Evolution of Woolf ’s Feminist-Pacifism in

Three Guineas
Woolf ’s fullest public exploration of her feminist politics also realizes the most
significant shift in the development of her late cultural criticism – the incor-
poration of pacifism into her feminist stance. Woolf repeatedly states in Three
Guineas that it is the historically oppressed and disqualified position of women
in British society that causes them to feel no sympathy with the patriotic aims
of war. Her famous declaration that ‘as a woman, I have no country […] [a]s a
woman I want no country […] [a]s a woman my country is the whole world’
explicitly reinforces this link between economic, intellectual and social disad-
vantage, and anti-nationalism (TG, p. 313). Rather than positing that women
are biologically inclined to pacifism, Woolf asserts that it is their oppressed
social position that makes them inclined to oppose war. ‘[I]f you insist upon
fighting to protect me, or “our” country,’ she elucidates in the female persona of
‘the outsider’, then ‘let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that
you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share’ and ‘to procure
benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share’ (TG, p. 313). This
position provoked controversy upon the publication of Three Guineas in 1938,
as many who read the text heard only an untimely and irrelevant complaint.
How could Woolf stand in a democratic country on the eve of war bemoaning
the historical mistreatment of women? This chapter addresses this question
by tracing the genesis and evolution of her late feminist-pacifist arguments
through the composition of Three Guineas and its pre-texts, including The
Pargiters and The Years.
On 3 June 1938, the ‘coming out day’ of Three Guineas, Woolf recorded ‘the end
of six years floundering’ in her diary, by which, she declared, she was ‘lumping
the Years & 3 Gs together as one book – as indeed they are’ (D 5: pp. 147–8).
Woolf ’s professional life in the 1930s was dominated by the research and writing
of these two distinct texts, which together evidence the evolution of her cultural
criticism through this eventful decade. Her comment dates the beginning of
her ‘six years floundering, striving, much agony, [and] some ecstasy’ to 1932, in
the autumn of which year she began drafting The Pargiters (D 5: p. 148). This
unfinished experimental ‘novel-essay’ represents the first draft of both The Years
and Three Guineas, although the genesis of all three texts, as detailed in Chapter
2, can be traced back further to Woolf ’s conception of ‘an entire new book – a
sequel to a Room of Ones [sic] Own’ the day before delivering her ‘Professions
for Women’ speech to the Junior Council of the L&NSWS on 21 January 1931
(D 4: p. 6). In response to Woolf ’s statement that the two works are ‘one book’,
the novel and the polemic have been correspondingly ‘lumped’ together by her
critics. The shared textual history of The Years and Three Guineas is well known
and has attracted substantial attention, yet remains little examined – in part, as
Rebecca Wisor observes, because ‘no transcription or edition of the holograph
and typescript fragments of Three Guineas or its sister text, The Years, has
been published’ (2009, p. 499). Wisor suggests this omission may have arisen
from ‘the sheer extensiveness of the holograph documents’, their ‘complex,
fragmented nature’, and the marked ‘discrepancy between the pre-publication
and published versions’ of Woolf ’s outputs in the 1930s, ‘the decade in which
she was engaged in her most forceful critique of militarist, capitalist, fascist,
patriarchal, and imperialist ideologies’ (2009, p. 499). This chapter cannot hope
to fully investigate the diverse body of holographs, typescripts, proofs and
reading notes that Wisor desires to see explored in a ‘post-eclectic’ edition of
Three Guineas (the possible methodology of which forms the central debate of
her thought-provoking article), yet it endeavours to supply a valuable genetic
survey of this work’s evolution and relationship to The Years by analysing the
development of Woolf ’s late feminist-pacifism through these works.1
My genetic analysis of Three Guineas is unusual in locating the origins of
Woolf ’s late feminist polemic not in the essay sections of The Pargiters but in
the fictional drafts of The Years. Julia Briggs is one of the few critics to have
detected the existence of links between the fictional episodes of the manuscript
of the novel and the printed text of Three Guineas. She has identified ‘three
guineas’ as the sizeable sum needed to see a doctor on Harley Street in the
manuscript of The Years (M.42, 4: p. 27), evoked by Rose Pargiter as she and her
two female cousins discuss the inability of most women to gain access to birth
control in the draft version of ‘1910’ (Briggs, 2006b, p. 317). Before setting out
the ‘problems of patriotism, and in particular the attitude of the state towards
its women […] incisively in the third chapter of Three Guineas’, Briggs has
asserted, Woolf ‘discussed them at length in the (extensively rewritten and
largely abandoned) 1910 section of The Years’ (2006b, p. 372). My in-depth
The Evolution of Woolf ’s Feminist-Pacifism in Three Guineas 65
analysis of this section of The Pargiters manuscript in this chapter and Chapter 2
builds on this observation by highlighting how Woolf ’s explicit feminist-pacifist
analyses were, as Briggs terms it, ‘let go of ’ and ‘deferred’ through her writing
of ‘1910’ (2006b, p. 290). The ‘1910’ episode is not the only portion of The Years
manuscript to contain links with Three Guineas, however, and this chapter will
extend Briggs’s contention by charting how Woolf ’s cultural criticism developed
through her writing of the 1931 speech, her collection of the scrapbooks, her
drafting of The Pargiters and her composition of Three Guineas. The expansion
of Woolf ’s feminist politics while writing The Years, I contend, was crucial to
the conception and development of Three Guineas. Uncovering the genesis of
Woolf ’s feminist politics through these works prompts a reassessment of the
evolution of Three Guineas and the manner in which it is perceived to be ‘one
book’ with The Years, as Woolf herself retrospectively declared it to be (D 5:
p. 148).
With its complex feminist-pacifist argument and awkward structural
framework, Three Guineas remains a much-debated text. The work received
violently mixed reactions on publication, as detailed by Brenda Silver and Anna
Snaith in their separate studies of responses to the book (Silver, 1983a; Snaith,
2000b). Its feminist-pacifist stance was understood positively by some readers
as an active position of protest, while others derisively portrayed Woolf ’s
proclaimed neutrality as evidence of her failure to understand the gravity of the
current situation of European political unrest. Three Guineas represents Woolf ’s
most significant attempt to speak directly and pertinently to contemporary
politics, yet many first readers found it unsuccessful in precisely this endeavour.
Q. D. Leavis famously ridiculed Woolf ’s representation of the daughters of
educated men as outsiders as irrelevant to modern society in a searing, and
not entirely unjust, review of Three Guineas published in Scrutiny in September
1938. Woolf ’s concept of ‘indifference’ as a political tool from which ‘certain
actions must follow’ that ‘would help materially to prevent war’ was challenging
to readers unable or unwilling to grasp that her feminist complaints were part
of a larger argument about women’s ability to employ active non-violent force
against militarism (TG, pp. 313–14).
The controversial pacifism Woolf expressed in this work fell out of favour
with the onset of World War II, causing Three Guineas to disappear from most
critical discussions of her output until the 1970s, when the text was reclaimed by
second-wave feminism. Since this recovery, extensive examinations by feminist
critics into the subversive style, structure and politics of this text have ensured
the reinstatement of Three Guineas to Woolf ’s oeuvre (see Marcus, 1987; Bowlby,
1988; Silver, 1991a; Black, 2004). ‘Today,’ Briggs observed in 2005, ‘Three
Guineas is generally recognized as a founding document in the history of gender
studies’ (2006b, p. 310). Yet the lack of a holograph facsimile or transcription
of this work continues to attest, as Wisor identifies, to ‘the long-standing bias
among critics and publishers for Woolf ’s fiction – and quite specifically against
the vitriolic Three Guineas’ (2009, p. 499, emphasis in original). The taxing style
and argument of Three Guineas leave literary critics and theorists from broader
academic fields still debating the significance of Woolf ’s coded expressions of
anger in this text.
This chapter investigates the evolution of the feminist-pacifist opinions
Woolf voiced in Three Guineas through the draft materials relating to this
polemic, The Years, and their shared pre-texts. Tracing the evolution of Woolf ’s
feminist-pacifism from her ‘Professions for Women’ speech through The
Pargiters and The Years to Three Guineas fundamentally undermines the fact/
fiction binary through which previous critics have viewed Woolf ’s oeuvre
(see, for example, Buren Kelley, 1973). It was the development of Woolf ’s
feminist politics while writing her penultimate novel, rather than the tension
between fact and fiction, which necessitated the production of a new critical
work suitable for expounding her late feminist-pacifist stance. The chapter
opens with a brief introduction to Woolf ’s pacifism, locating the origins of
her late anti-war stance in her earlier resistance to violence, and contextual-
izing this resistance within wider early twentieth-century associations between
pacifism and feminism. My discussion then details the personal, professional
and socio-political circumstances surrounding Woolf ’s conception of Three
Guineas between 1935 and 1937 as the structure and focus of this work was
found. This contextual discussion is followed by a detailed examination of the
various pre-publication documents that evidence the composition of Three
Guineas, through which, I demonstrate, Woolf ’s feminist politics evolved in the
1930s in response to the rise of European fascism. The chapter concludes with
an in-depth analysis of Woolf ’s development of the concept of indifference as
a forceful political position and aesthetic technique through her writing of The
Years and Three Guineas. The challenging style and structure of Three Guineas
clearly reflect the same desire with which Woolf embarked on The Pargiters, to
accurately evidence her cultural criticism, and can be read as further evidence
of a shift from high to late modernist aesthetics in her final decade. Yet a genetic
approach to Three Guineas also reveals the extent to which Woolf ’s late cultural
criticism emerged from her earlier feminist politics, journalistic practices and
formal experimentalism.
Woolf ’s early pacifism and feminist contexts
My last chapter read the early months of 1931 as transitional within Woolf ’s
oeuvre, the moment at which her intellectual focus shifted from high modernist
fiction to feminist cultural analysis, while maintaining that her late cultural
criticism expanded from her earlier practices and interests as a writer. The
evolution of Woolf ’s anti-war stance in Three Guineas similarly developed from
her previous critiques of patriarchy and earlier pacifism. In the typescript of
her unfinished memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, begun on 18 April 1939, Woolf
recalled her childhood aversion to violence. Fighting with her brother Thoby in
the garden at St. Ives, she recollected:
Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: Why hurt another person? I dropped my
hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling; {it
was profoundly sad}. It was a feeling of hopelessness <sadness>.
A.5.a, p. 122
This early confrontation with the moral ambiguities surrounding conflict and
violent resistance left her ‘feeling horribly depressed’, Woolf details, as she
‘became aware of something terrible; and of [her] own powerlessness’ (A.5.a,
p. 12). The mixed feelings of hopelessness, sadness and powerlessness identified
here later transformed into a fervent commitment to pacifism, intensified by
the First World War and Woolf ’s witness of the huge losses sustained and the
psychological trauma inflicted on both military and civilian survivors of this
prolonged and seemingly fruitless conflict. Woolf ’s protest against violence in
advance of the anticipated Second World War in Three Guineas developed from
her existing pacifist convictions, but represented a significant shift in intellectual
position through the analytical synthesis of her anti-war sentiments with her
feminist politics.
The association of feminism with pacifism itself, of course, was far from
revolutionary for Woolf or her contemporaries in the 1930s. The essentialist
gender roles in which British patriarchal society was grounded had long propa-
gated the idea that women, as nurturers, were biologically more inclined to object
to war than men, to whom war was an extension of their duty, as the stronger
sex, to protect and defend the women and children of their society. Such roles
were evoked in World War I recruitment posters and literature, for example, in
Owen Seaman’s poem ‘To the Shirker: A Last Appeal’ (1914), by the represen-
tation of England as a damsel in distress whose survival would be compromised
should ‘her manhood fail / To stand by [her] in her deadly need’ (cited in
Roberts, 1998, p. 197). Pro-war propaganda played on gender stereotypes to

question the masculinity of British men who were unwilling to enlist and, after
the Military Service Act of January 1916, to stigmatize as effeminate those who
refused to be conscripted. The enthusiastic role taken by many women’s suffrage
campaigners in the war effort, in contrast, successfully destabilized this socially
constructed gender binary (see Marwick, 1977). Richard J. Evans identifies the
paradoxical pacifist standpoint of many feminists of the suffragette campaign,
who ‘shed[] their reluctance to fight for the vote’ and engaged in militancy, while
arguing that once the vote was granted them ‘the creation of a female electorate
would bring about a range of social and political reforms, stemming from
women’s interest in a more just and humane society’ and ensure ‘the reversal of
the arms race and the guarantee of peace’ (1987, p. 122). Connections between
feminism and pacifism in the early twentieth century were often contradictory
and can appear odd in the light of later feminist theory.
Woolf ’s own involvement in the suffrage campaign prior to World War I had
been limited to administrative work. As a pacifist and a feminist, many of whose
male friends were conscientious objectors, Woolf was somewhat bewildered
when it became clear that it was women’s participation in the events of war that
would finally admit them to the electorate. In January 1916 she wrote to Margaret
Llewelyn Davies of her disordered feelings in response to the continuing war:
I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast
and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction keeps going a day longer –
without some vigorous young woman pulling us together and marching through
it – Do you see any sense in it? […] And now they’ll give us votes; and you say –
what do you say Miss Ll.D? I wish I could borrow your mind about 3 days a week.
L 2: p. 76
Woolf ’s desire for ‘some vigorous young woman to pull[] us together’ against
war reveals her belief that women’s entry to the political arena would enable
them to act as an active and effective balance to male governance. Woolf judges
the war, and by extension the political institutions which direct it, to be distinctly
masculine and, for this reason, it is a young woman rather than a young man
that she imagines will point out its absurdities to the male governing classes.
‘The link between feminism and pacifism was not a new one for Woolf, nor for
other feminists of her generation’, as Briggs notes, but the position she suggested
in Three Guineas was unusual and provoked resistance (2006b, p. 315). While
some welcomed her feminist critique of the implicit value assigned to capitalist
greed, imperialist expansion and patriotic violence in British patriarchal culture,
others were at a loss to recognize this fundamentally pacifist argument within

Woolf ’s challenging gender analysis.
‘Feminism is responsible for the worst of her books’, E. M. Forster declared
of ‘the cantankerous Three Guineas’ in the Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1941
(1942, p. 23). Even friends within Woolf ’s intellectual circle were unable to
grasp the pacifist position she presented in this text. Inhibited somewhat by age
and gender, as he owns, Forster’s adverse reaction towards Woolf ’s feminism
renders him incapable of recognizing her analysis in Three Guineas as political,
even as he delivers a remarkably astute, if satirical, summary of it:
She was convinced that society is man-made, that the chief occupations of men
are the shedding of blood, the making of money, the giving of orders, and the
wearing of uniforms, and that none of these occupations is admirable. Women
dress up for fun or prettiness, men for pomposity, and she had no mercy on
the judge in his wig, the general in his bits and bobs of ribbon, the bishop in
his robes, or even on the harmless don in his gown. […] She refused to sit on
committees or to sign appeals, on the ground that women must not condone
this tragic male-made mess, or accept the crumbs of power which men throw
them occasionally from their hideous feast. Like Lysistrata, she withdrew.
p. 23
Forster not only dismisses but entirely overlooks Woolf ’s pacifism – a remarkable
oversight considering his own refusal to fight in World War I. His complete
failure to note her anti-fascism and anti-war stance, despite his otherwise
perceptive synopsis of her opinions, indicates how challenging the position
Woolf advocated remained in the 1930s. Her insistence on the relevance
of feminism to the anti-war campaign was incomprehensible to many of
her contemporaries. Yet feminism, anti-fascism and pacifism were entirely
entwined in Woolf ’s mind by this time. The links between them can be seen
developing long before Woolf ’s public condemnation of patriarchy and fascism
in Three Guineas in 1938.
Three Guineas: Conception and contexts
Alongside drafting her fictional Pargiters/Years project, Woolf first mentioned

the desire to write a separate feminist pamphlet in her diary on 1 January 1935.
In her annual summary of books to write, she included both ‘On being despised’,
the emotive title through which she conceived Three Guineas at this time, and
‘Ordinary People’, her current working title for The Years (D 4: p. 271). Woolf ’s
declaration that she ‘must finish Ordinary People’ although her mind was
‘pumping up ideas’ for ‘Despised’ echoed two years previously when she could
not proceed with The Pargiters until Flush was done and dusted (D 4: p. 271).
This tension continued over the next two years, as Woolf struggled to complete
The Years while constantly thinking of the new project she planned not to begin
in earnest until the first was finished. The title ‘On being despised’ discloses
Woolf ’s first intention in this work to explore the animosity of patriarchal
society towards women. Between January 1935 and January 1937, however,
when, following the completion of The Years, Woolf finally settled down to
writing Three Guineas, her plans for her feminist pamphlet were constantly in
flux.
Throughout 1935 numerous conversations and events prompted Woolf to
expand her feminist politics and to consider how she might express her feminist
opinions in a prose work. An invitation from Elizabeth Bibesco to join the
committee of an anti-Fascist exhibition led to a debate between Bibesco and
Woolf in January 1935 about the relevance of ‘the women question’ to their
campaign (D 4: p. 273). ‘I am afraid that it had not occurred to me,’ Woolf
quotes Bibesco as having pointedly written, ‘that in matters of ultimate impor-
tance even feminists c[oul]d wish to segregate & label the sexes’ (D 4: p. 273).
‘What about Hitler?’ Woolf responds (D 4: p. 273), indicating that the repressive
gender roles and misogynist outlook and aesthetics of Nazi Party ideology
already signified to her the close links between patriarchy and fascism. In
January 1935 Woolf was alert to the parallels between the figure of the patriarch
and the figure of the dictator, and her feminist cultural analysis of British society
was consequently evolving in response to the mounting threat posed by fascism
to European democracy. The focus of Woolf ’s feminist pamphlet shifted accord-
ingly and a month later, when Woolf referred to her prose work, she recorded
being ‘plagued by the sudden wish to write an Anti fascist Pamphlet’ (D 4:
p. 282).
A conversation with E. M. Forster in April 1935 turned Woolf ’s attention
back to the casual sexism of Britain’s educated classes. Forster’s chance remark
about the London Library’s refusal to ‘allow ladies’ in their committee, despite
his rather patronizing proposal that ‘ladies [have] improved’, sent Woolf ‘into a
passion’ of composing phrases for ‘Being Despised’ (D 4: pp. 297–8). ‘[T]hese
flares up are very good for my book,’ she considered, ‘for they simmer & become
transparent: & I see how I can transmute them into beautiful clear reasonable
ironical prose’ (D 4: p. 298). The continued use of the title ‘Being Despised’
reveals Woolf ’s prevailing wish to compose a pamphlet considering male
hostility to women and the disadvantaged position that women have historically
occupied. Meanwhile, along with the rest of the country, Woolf was increasingly
aware of the threat of war escalating as the media reported ‘incessant conversa-
tions – Mussolini, Hitler, Macdonald’ (D 4: p. 303). She and Leonard decided to
consult an acquaintance in the Foreign Office about their plan to drive through
Germany the following month on their way to holiday in Italy. ‘How far could
I let myself go in an anti fascist pamphlet’, Woolf considered, as Ralph Wigram
was ‘a little defensive about Jews in Germany’ and advised them against the
route (D 4: pp. 301–2). Despite his reservations, in May the Woolfs entered
Germany and inadvertently found themselves in the middle of a reception
for Goering in Bonn. Having witnessed ‘[b]anners stretched across the street’
declaring ‘The Jew is our enemy’ at first-hand, Woolf records her ‘anger’ at both
‘the docile hysterical crowd’ with their ‘rather forced’ support of Nazism, and
at herself and Leonard, for having also made themselves ‘obsequious’ to such a
regime in order to pass through German customs and the rally unnoticed (D 4:
p. 311).
In June 1935, reading a review of Mary Moore’s The Defeat of Women (1935),
with its complaint that ‘women have dropped their sacred task’ of motherhood,
brought Woolf back to thinking about the oppressive gender roles of her own
country and ‘flood[ed]’ her mind with her ‘Professions book’ (D 4: p. 323).
The title change – back from ‘anti fascist pamphlet’ to ‘my Professions book’
(D 4: p.302, p. 323) – sounds as if Woolf is considering writing two separate
critical works at this time. Yet this inconsistency may just reflect how Woolf ’s
envisaged polemic was constantly changing shape during this turbulent year
as her feminist and political convictions evolved. Many factors contributed
to Woolf ’s new prose work even before she had begun writing it. In August
1935, it was hearing of her ‘American fame’ and ‘how a room of ones [sic] own
is regarded’ across the Atlantic that awoke Woolf ’s ‘insensate obsession’ to
write her prospective sequel (D 4: p. 335). Harold Nicolson’s news flattered her
vanity and bolstered her confidence as a feminist thinker, but it also suggested
a receptive and lucrative market for her planned political pamphlet in America.
This consideration was important when Woolf had spent nearly three years
tied up with The Years, while the British economic slump led Leonard to again
predict ‘a very lean year at the Press’ (D 4: p. 353).
By October, after attending the Labour Party conference in Brighton, Woolf
‘couldn’t resist dashing off a chapter’ of Three Guineas, which she was then
referring to as ‘The Next War’ (D 4: p. 346). At the conference, Woolf had
witnessed Edward Bevin’s devastating attack on George Lansbury’s pacifism
and Lansbury’s subsequent resignation as leader of the Labour Party. ‘Tears

came to my eyes as L[ansbury] spoke’, Woolf noted in her diary (D 4: p. 345).
The event prompted Woolf to consider her own position and the extent of her
accountability for Britain’s involvement in international politics. On the one
hand, she questioned her ‘duty as a human being’ in this matter and decided
her ‘sympathies were with [Dr Alfred] Salter who preached non-resistance’; on
the other, she excused herself from the obligation of forming an opinion with
the inaccurate portrayal of herself as disenfranchised – ‘[h]appily, uneducated &
voteless, I am not responsible for the state of society’ (D 4: pp. 345–6). Women
had, of course, gained equal voting rights with men in Britain in 1928 but Woolf
continued to feel herself an outsider to the governmental institutions of her
country. She regarded women as less accountable for war-making than men
since they had so long been excluded from the procedures of parliament and
so had not yet had time to assert their political opinions. This belief in women’s
lesser responsibility for the current political situation did not, however, prevent
Woolf from responding actively to it.
David Bradshaw has detailed Woolf ’s involvement in two anti-fascist groups
from 1935: the British Section of the International Association of Writers
for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC) and For Intellectual Liberty (FIL) (see
Bradshaw, 1997, 1998). Her support for the former originated from her role
on the organizing committee of the British delegation to the International
Congress of Writers in Paris in June 1935 at which the IAWDC was formed
(Bradshaw, 1997, p. 6). Although Woolf did not attend the congress, according
to Bradshaw, ‘in its wake she, Forster, Stephen Spender and Ralph Fox’ all
helped ‘in establishing the British Section of the IAWDC’ (1997, p. 9). Bradshaw
deduces that Woolf was part of the organization, chaired by Cecil Day-Lewis,
until August 1936 when she ‘finally resigned’ feeling ‘harass[ed]’ and ‘abused’ by
the constant tensions between committee members (1997, p. 15). By this time
Woolf had already become associated with FIL, a group consisting of a broader
spread of progressive artists and intellectuals including Leonard Woolf, who
was a leading member. Although Woolf herself did not enrol, she was present
at the organization’s first pilot meeting on 5 December 1935 along with W. H.
Auden, Vanessa Bell, Aldous Huxley and Storm Jameson. In the following year,
the FIL ‘held regular meetings under its vice-chairman, Leonard Woolf, in the
drawing room next to Virginia’s study’ (Bradshaw, 1997, p. 15). Woolf signed
her name to several FIL pamphlets campaigning against individual cases of
injustice, such as the continued imprisonment of the German journalist and
pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, interned without trial by the Nazis on 28 February
1933, but during 1936 she became increasingly suspicious of the group’s general
campaign material which called high-handedly ‘“for united action in defence of
peace, liberty and culture”’ (quoted in Bradshaw, 1998, pp. 42–3, 58). ‘[Woolf]
was now operating as an Outsider,’ Bradshaw argues, ‘working against fascism in
her own way and on her own terms’ (1998, p. 48). He astutely notes the implicit
challenge to FIL’s campaign literature present in Three Guineas in the assertion
of Woolf ’s female narrator to her male correspondent: ‘We can only help you
to defend culture and intellectual liberty by defending our own culture and our
own intellectual liberty’ (TG, pp. 282–3). While Woolf was closely linked to the
activities of Britain’s anti-fascist intelligentsia in the mid-1930s she could not
sympathize with the sentimentalized, homogenizing view of British culture set
forth in their campaign letters.
On 30 December 1935, a day after declaring her typescript draft of The Years
completed, Woolf ‘had an idea […] how to make [her] war book’:
to pretend its [sic] all the articles editors have asked me to write during the past
few years […]. Sh[oul]d women smoke. Short skirts. War – &c. This w[oul]d
give me the right to wander: also put me in the position of the one asked. […]
And there might be a preface saying this. to give the right tone.
D 4: p. 361
The sudden conception of her pamphlet as a series of epistolary responses was

reflected by a new title on 3 January 1936: ‘Answers to Correspondents’ (D 5:
p. 3). At this moment, with the structure of her pamphlet found, the perception
of women and their sexuality within British society was still crucial to her ‘war
book’, as indicated by her references to debating ‘[s]hort skirts’ and whether
‘women [should] smoke’ (D 4: p. 361). However, the influence of Woolf ’s
contact with the British Section of the IAWDC and FIL and their campaign
letters through the early months of 1936 seem to have shifted Woolf ’s focus onto
the single question of war and how women can respond to the call to prevent it.
This shift is reflected in the new title Woolf gave to the work on 18 March 1936,
‘Letter to an Englishman’ (D 5: p. 18). The change from plural to singular, from
the sexless ‘Correspondents’ to an ‘Englishman’, suggests Woolf ’s discomfort
with the patriotic sentiment and patriarchal bias of the anti-fascist campaign
material she received in this period. Soon after, Woolf found the framing device
of giving ‘Two Guineas’ on 24 March 1936 (D 5: p. 20) and her final title, ‘3
Gs’, on 24 November 1936 (D 5: p. 35). Despite having largely planned the
framework and title for her polemic by March 1936, the development of Three
Guineas through this period was suspended as Woolf struggled to complete The
Years. As detailed in the preceding chapter, a full draft of her novel was finished
in December 1935 but it was not until 30 December 1936 that Woolf was able
to sit down with the final set of galley proofs and record that they were ‘to go off
today’ (D 5: p. 44). Work on Three Guineas was also disrupted in the summer of
1936 as Woolf suffered her worse mental health breakdown since 1912–13. Yet
the preparatory thinking she had dedicated to her envisioned pamphlet early in
1936 meant that once Woolf finally set to it in January 1937, the core writing of
Three Guineas was completed in only nine months. Closer examination of the
pre-publication material relating to the composition of Three Guineas reveals,
however, that while linear, the process through which this work was conceived,
planned, written and published was far from straightforward.
Three Guineas: Composition and pre-texts
The writing of Three Guineas is evidenced by a large selection of pre-texts of

varying length and coherence. No complete manuscript or typescript draft
of the text survives.3 The largest remaining draft fragment is a ninety-page
holograph of the third chapter, grouped together in a loose-leaf folder alongside
a forty-nine-page typescript draft of the first chapter, with twenty-one miscel-
laneous typescript pages and two odd holograph pages laid in at the end (M.28).
A fifty-seven-page typescript of Woolf ’s second chapter titled ‘The Second
Guinea’ (M.29) also remains, along with fifteen further miscellaneous typed
pages (M.29; M.127). Although not coherent drafted versions, the earliest and
most sizeable documents relating to the development of Woolf ’s envisaged
new book on the sexual life of women are the three notebooks of feminist and
pacifist research Woolf assembled throughout the early to mid-1930s (B.16.f).
Yet, as Naomi Black astutely highlights, the ‘wealth of material available about
the evolution of Three Guineas’ also extends well beyond these three scrapbooks
to ‘the sixty-four “reading notebooks” that Virginia Woolf prepared over thirty-
six years of her life as a professional writer’ (2004, p. 52). ‘The questions of
precisely what may be said to constitute a version of Three Guineas,’ Wisor notes,
‘and precisely where the boundaries of the work are situated are contentious at
best’ (2009, p. 500, emphasis in original). Only texts and reading notes directly
connected to the evolution of Three Guineas are regarded here as versions of the
work. Eight further sets of Woolf ’s reading notes relate directly to Three Guineas
(B.16.a, B.16.b, B.16.c, B.16.d, B.16.e, M.1.6, M.30, M.40), several of which
incorporate short draft passages from the text. Four of these are catalogued by
Silver as ‘Reading Notebooks’: RN XXXIII (M.30), RN LV (B.16.a), RN LVI

(B.16.b) and RN LVII (B.16.e). The juxtaposition of reading notes and draft
fragments in many of these documents, even those relating to the advanced
stages of Three Guineas’ composition, illustrates how interconnected the activ-
ities of research and writing became for Woolf during the production of her
last works. Some of these documents are dated in full; some with only a day,
a month, or a year, and some are not dated at all. Any attempt to construct a
chronology for these texts is evidently open to dispute.4 In the following section
I seek to organize the multiple pre-texts relating to the composition of Three
Guineas into a chronology of the thinking and writing processes that produced
her late feminist-pacifist viewpoint.
The Scrapbooks
Woolf ’s three scrapbooks filled with research specific to her major feminist
works of the 1930s present an unusual pre-text for a genetic study. Compiled
between 1931 and 1937, they were begun following Woolf ’s enthusiasm for
writing an imagined sequel to A Room of One’s Own in January 1931, but
before the form and focus of either The Pargiters/The Years or Three Guineas
was conceived. Although Woolf finished the major writing of Three Guineas in
October 1937, she continued adding to her third scrapbook as she worked on
the notes. Filled with numerous newspaper clippings and fragments of copied
extracts affixed with adhesive labels, Woolf ’s scrapbooks reveal the thinking
rather than the writing processes behind The Years and Three Guineas, although
these processes are interlinked. There are no dates to signal when Woolf affixed
material and items do not appear chronologically. The lack of chronological
sequence of material included within each notebook indicates that rather than
regularly updating her scrapbooks in reaction to the morning’s paper or her
current reading, Woolf hoarded material and then sat down to sustained periods
of research, sifting through old papers and previous reading and collecting the
results in these volumes. Thus the arrangement of material within the scrap-
books reflects her evolving feminist analysis, and there are incidents of linguistic
correlation between the clippings and the text that indicate the thought processes
central to her works’ composition. Through their inclusion and provocative
juxtaposition of research material, for example, these scrapbooks reveal that
Woolf turned her attention out from British sexual politics to contemplate inter-
national politics long before her published writings evidenced this shift. These
documents are pre-texts for The Pargiters and The Years as well as Three Guineas,
as Chapter 2 demonstrated, although much of the material contained in the

three scrapbooks appeared directly only in the discursive secondary references
that append Woolf ’s polemic. Having discussed Woolf ’s first research scrapbook
with reference to The Pargiters and The Years in the preceding chapter, I now
turn to the second and third notebooks, seemingly produced after an interval in
Woolf ’s 1930s practice of journalistic scrapbooking.
The article that begins Woolf ’s second reading notebook is dated 4 March
1936, although the volume also contains material from 1934–5. This initial date
suggests a gap of two or three years in Woolf ’s collection of material following
the completion of her first research scrapbook in 1933, perhaps while she
focused on writing The Pargiters. However, an additional document, Reading
Notebook XXXIII (M.30), presents an overlap between the first and second
scrapbooks. Almost all of the text in Reading Notebook XXXIII is duplicated
elsewhere in Woolf ’s scrapbooks of cuttings. This spiral-bound notebook
contains thirty-nine pages of longhand passages copied from books, ranging
from The Life of Joseph Wright (1932) to Laura Knight’s Oil Paint and Grease
Paint (1936) (M.30, p. 12, p. 35). As Silver observes, ‘the chronology of the
notebooks is uncertain’ (1983b, p. 161). Did Woolf continue researching for
her new work in this notebook after finishing her first scrapbook in 1933 and
then later transfer her observations into a new scrapbook in 1936 alongside
her collected press cuttings? This possible chronology matches the publication
years of the material collected, yet seems unlikely; why would Woolf have
chosen to copy out thirty-nine pages of notes twice? It is surely more probable
that the purpose of this fourth notebook was to record research completed in
a library, which Woolf would then type out for inclusion in the larger volumes
of press cuttings on returning home. This contention is supported by the lack
of clippings or passages from sources other than monographs within its leaves.
The notebook would therefore have been kept concurrently with Woolf ’s first
and second scrapbooks, rather than post- or pre-dating either. A break therefore
does seem to exist in Woolf ’s collection of material from 1933–6. This reveals
that when Woolf resumed the practice of keeping cuttings and quotations
in a second notebook in 1936 she had already envisioned writing a feminist
pamphlet presented as ‘Answers to Correspondents’ (D 5: p. 3).
Material in the second and third scrapbook was therefore collected following
Woolf ’s writing of the first manuscript version of The Years and with the idea of
a separate, explicitly feminist-pacifist pamphlet in mind. An article on the third
page of the second notebook corresponds to Woolf ’s analysis of the relationship
between patriotism and patriarchy in her manuscript of The Years during
1933–5 and anticipates her repeated exploration of this subject in Three Guineas.
This unidentified newspaper cutting details a speech on the subject of England
as ‘The Home of Liberty’ given at the banquet of The Society of St George in
October 1935 by Lord Hewart, then Lord Chief Justice of England (see B.16.f,
2: p. 3). ‘It may be that our buildings have failed to reach a spectacular height,’
Hewart declares, drawing a comparison with America, ‘[but] England is the
home of democratic institutions – that is to say, of the system of government
which makes every citizen responsible’ (B.16.f, 2: p. 3). ‘For those who have
been trained in English schools and English universities, and who have done
the work of their lives in England,’ he insists, ‘there are few loves stronger than
the love we have for our country’ and England will ‘be defended to the last’
(B.16.f, 2: p. 3). The patriotic sentiments expressed here are exactly those evoked
and opposed by Elvira and Maggie in the early drafts of the ‘1907’ and ‘1910’
chapters of The Years, written during June-July 1933, in which they refer specifi-
cally to English public schools as the site of gender difference (M.42, 3: p. 132;
M.42, 4: p. 57). Throughout Three Guineas Woolf also posits that women cannot
share the masculinized sentiment of patriotism because they do not enjoy the
same access to English schools and English universities as the sons of educated
men and therefore are less inclined to idealize their country or to support its
engagement in war. The inclusion of this article within Woolf ’s second research
scrapbook, read alongside Woolf ’s Pargiters holograph and Three Guineas,
significantly evidences a direct genetic link in the development of her late
feminist-pacifist stance from the novel to the polemic. Lord Hewart’s words
convey exactly the national self-praise that Woolf ridicules in her draft chapters
of The Years and rails against in the third chapter of Three Guineas. Although
the article itself was excluded from the published version of Three Guineas, Lord
Hewart was pictured, as Alice Staveley has identified, in the fourth of the five
photographs that intersect the text (1998, pp. 4–5).5 Formerly a journalist and a
Liberal MP before his outspoken term as Lord Chief Justice, Hewart would have
been easily recognizable to contemporary readers pictured in his judicial robes
and wig.6 Hewart is one of many possible figures Woolf could have included as
a symbolic patriarch, but this pre-text suggests he was chosen because following
the collection of this cutting he was connected, in her mind at least, with the
self-satisfied patriotism recorded in this article.
Woolf first suggested the idea of including ‘4 pictures’ in her envisaged
feminist sequel on 16 February 1932 while collecting material in her first
notebook, but the photographs to which she refers have not been identified (D
4: p. 77). The photographs used in Three Guineas do not appear in the reading
scrapbooks, but in the second volume Woolf does begin collecting photo-
graphs of representatives of patriarchy and authoritarianism (see Humm, 2003).
Figures represented include: Major Emil Fey, pictured in military uniform,
Austria’s former Vice-Chancellor who organized the violent suppression of
the country’s leftist Social Democrats in 1934; Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian
politician and Mussolini’s son-in-law, ‘in flying kit’; the Pope, pictured in robes
at a celebration of his seventy-ninth birthday in Rome; and four Heralds from
the British royal household in ornate dress proclaiming the date of King Edward
VIII’s coronation (B.16.f, 2: pp. 5, 20, 44, 46).7 While these photographs predate
those incorporated in Three Guineas, their subjects clearly foreshadow the
pictures of military, religious and governmental figures dressed in extravagantly
symbolic public clothing that Woolf chose for inclusion in this text. Emily
Dalgarno states that ‘[t]he theme of Fascism appeared late in the period of the
notebooks’ and argues that they ‘suggest a writer who until 1936 was concerned
primarily with local problems of gender and class’ (2001, p. 155). Yet Woolf ’s
inclusion of a photograph of Major Fey from 1935, combined with her reference
to Bibesco’s Anti-Fascist exhibition and her involvement in the British Section
of the IAWDC that year suggests otherwise. Although her thoughts on fascism
are not collected in the notebooks until 1936, Woolf ’s cultural criticism had
evidently expanded beyond local problems of gender and class before this point.
The presence of several photographs of continental dictatorial figures in Woolf ’s
scrapbook reveals a familiarity with European politics that is only implicitly
present in Three Guineas itself, but which crucially informed her controversial
feminist-pacifist stance. The need to recognize and attack the dictator at home
in order to defend against fascism led Woolf to include photographs of British
patriarchal figures in Three Guineas rather than dictators abroad.
Also included in the second Three Guineas scrapbook are several campaign
letters requesting Woolf ’s support from religious, educational and political
organizations. These letters, and those included later in the third volume,
evidently reflect Woolf ’s recent decision to structure her polemic as a series
of epistolary responses late in December 1935. The first and most unexpected
request in the second notebook is from the Deane Congregational Church in
Bolton, dated 23 January 1936. In longhand, the writer asks if Woolf might
provide any items to sell on a ‘Celebrity Stall’ at a fundraising bazaar held jointly
by ‘a united church effort in Bolton’ (B.16.f, 2: p. 2). The letter is perhaps a little
unwisely directed, yet its unassuming request for gifts to sell seems to have
stayed with Woolf and features in the second chapter of Three Guineas. Here, the
honorary treasurer of a professional women’s society asks the narrator to make a
subscription or, ‘Failing money […] any gift will be acceptable – books, fruit or
cast-off clothing that can be sold in a bazaar’ (TG, p. 210). Woolf suggests this
quotation is taken from a letter received from the L&NSWS in 1938, but Black
doubts whether ‘the phrases that the narrator presents in quotation marks in the
text of Three Guineas are actual quotations at all’ (2004, p. 83). This improbable
request for second-hand clothing to sell to support professional women is likely
a fantasy based on appeals Woolf had previously received, such as the letter
from Bolton’s united congregational churches. This fabrication allows Woolf ’s
narrator to ask in her text: ‘Why is she so poor, this representative of professional
women, that she must beg for cast-off clothing for a bazaar?’ (TG, pp. 210–11).
Of course the then current secretary of the L&NSWS, Pippa Strachey, was not so
poor, but imagining this request to have come from impoverished professional
women gave Woolf a motive to explore the disadvantaged financial position of
educated, working women in contemporary British society.
The other campaign letters included in Woolf ’s second volume of cuttings
come from more likely sources. The second letter, dated 19 February 1936, is
from J. P. Strachey, principal of Newham College, Cambridge (B.16.f, 2: p. 7).
Pernal Strachey, sister of Pippa Strachey, asks Woolf if she would consent to
become a member of a new ‘Committee of Patrons’ in support of the college’s
appeal to raise £100,000 ‘to reconstruct out-of-date buildings and to provide
additional accommodation’ (B.16.f, 2: p. 7). This request parallels the repre-
sentative request of ‘one such treasurer’ in Three Guineas, who the narrator
describes as ‘asking for money with which to rebuild a women’s college’ (TG,
p. 182). The college remains unspecified so that the appeal epitomizes the
financial difficulties of all women’s educational institutions in Britain at the
time. The third letter to appear, dated 12 August 1936, is a request for a signature
of support from the British Committee of the International Peace Campaign
(IPC) of which Viscount Cecil and Pierre Cot were jointly president (B.16.f, 2:
p. 29). At first glance this appeal from a peace society looks as if it might have
suggested Woolf ’s conception of her work as a ‘Letter to an Englishman’ on the
prevention of war (D 5: p. 18). However, the appeal was written by a woman,
Dame Adelaide Livingstone, the British Committee’s vice-chairman, and is
dated from five months after Woolf had first proposed the format in her diary
(D 5: p. 18).
Another five letters are collected in the third notebook. These are (in order
of appearance in the volume): a letter from Pippa Strachey, as secretary of the
L&NSWS, asking members to campaign against ‘the differential income-limit
proposed for men and women’ under the Widows’, Orphans’, and Old Age
Contributory Pensions Bill (dated 19 June 1937; B.16.f, 3: p. 23); an undated
informational pamphlet from the IPC appealing for funds (B.16.f, 3: p. 24); a
letter from Monica Whately, secretary of The Six Point Group (dated 7 June
1935), raising awareness of the degradation of women in Nazi Germany (B.16.f,
3: pp. 29–30); a circular from the National Society for Equal Citizenship (dated
February 1936) asking ‘for help financial and otherwise’ (B.16.f, 3: p. 34); and
a notice from the British Section of the IAWDC about an upcoming meeting
on 1 November 1937 (B.16.f, 3: p. 51). Despite links between several of these
organizations and those evoked in Three Guineas, Black has argued convinc-
ingly that none of the letters collected in Woolf ’s notebooks exactly match
any of the three appeals to which her narrator responds (2004, pp. 81–5). The
majority of Woolf ’s letters ask for endorsement not money, and none of them
request a guinea. A guinea would be an odd request to Woolf from the majority
of these correspondents, many of whom were her acquaintances, and to whom
her celebrity name and support were worth far more than this relatively
small amount of money. Woolf ’s plan for Three Guineas as an epistolary work
prompted her gathering of this correspondence, rather than her receipt of these
letters inspiring its form.
The three letters of Three Guineas function as a structural device rather than
a historical record. The public letter was a common trope in 1930s pamphlet
literature, employed by the Hogarth Press, for example, in their Hogarth
Letters series issued between 1931 and 1933.8 Around the same period, during
1930–32, Woolf experimented three times with the public letter format; in
a signed review titled ‘All About Books’ (published in the New Statesman &
Nation on 28 February 1931; see E 5: pp. 219–25), in her preface to Margaret
Llewelyn Davies in Life As We Have Known It (published 5 March 1931; see E
5: pp. 225–41), and in her contribution to the Hogarth Letters series, A Letter to
a Young Poet (published in 1932; see E 5: pp. 306–23). Woolf ’s employment of
this propagandistic literary form corresponds with and responds to the climate
of public political debate in the 1930s. This essay form imitates the framework
of a paradoxically private document to address the public as a whole on an issue
of collective concern. Yet the public letter has a long history, of course, and
represented to Woolf the eighteenth-century tradition of journalistic essayistic
debate. The title of Woolf ’s Hogarth Letter explicitly referenced this tradition
through paralleling the title of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Letter of Advice to a Young
Poet’, published on 1 December 1720 (Swift, 1848, 2: 295–300). Her use of the
‘letter/essay’ structure in these early 1930s works and in Three Guineas also
represents an extension of her earlier use of the ‘lecture/essay’ format in A Room
of One’s Own (and in the first essay of The Pargiters and the Second Common
Reader version of ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ [see E 5: pp. 572–84]) in
order to candidly state her opinion on a subject while drawing her readers into
dialogue. ‘Letters play a symbolic role in women’s move from private to public,’
Snaith observes; ‘[they] are of paramount importance for Woolf ’s feminist
politics’ (2000b, p. 1). The form of Three Guineas extends from Woolf ’s earlier
modernist essayistic practices, but it also indicates an attempt to engage with
literary forms popular and suitable to the climate of public political debate that
raged through the 1930s. Woolf ’s use of the epistolary mode in Three Guineas
determinedly shifts her feminist-pacifist cultural analysis into the public realm,
adopting and subverting a literary form associated with 1930s modernity, and
gives her socio-political opinions voice while also resisting didacticism by
framing her answer on the subject of how men and women are to prevent war
as only one response within a wider debate. As Black suggests, the lack of direct
correspondence between the surviving campaign letters Woolf collected and
those to which the narrator of Three Guineas replies should remind us that the
letter writer of Three Guineas is ‘a symbolic figure significant for the negative
characteristics of the group she represents’, not Woolf herself (2004, p. 82). Both
the ‘letter/essay’ format and her narrative stance as the middle-class daughter
of an educated man are a rhetorical strategy designed through her collection of
research in the scrapbooks.
Material in Woolf ’s third scrapbook was collected from mid- to late 1937.
Many of her notes in this volume fed directly into the final stage of writing
Three Guineas. A short passage from Elizabeth Haldane’s From One Century to
Another (1937) is collected; Woolf would later quote from this source four times
in the notes for Three Guineas (see B.16.f, 3: p. 52; TG, pp. 368, 371, 398, 408). A
number of sources document her responses to war. A newspaper report on the
bombardment of Almeria clipped from the Daily Telegraph in 1937 (full publi-
cation details unidentified) and a booklet by French reporter Louis Delaprée on
The Martyrdom of Madrid: Inedited Witnesses (1937) both document the many
civilians left homeless, dead or injured by the actions of Italy and Germany
in the Spanish Civil War (B.16.f, 3: pp. 9, 20). These sources inform Woolf ’s
evocation of the Spanish Government’s photographs of ‘mutilated’ bodies,
‘dead children’ and ‘ruined houses’ in the published version of Three Guineas
(TG, pp. 164–5). The description of these photographs enables Woolf to induce
‘horror and disgust’ in the mind of her readers while highlighting the usual
censorship of such atrocities in the media, as emphasized by the subtitle to
the Delaprée pamphlet (TG, p. 165). Delaprée is also cited at length in the
endnotes of Three Guineas to substantiate Woolf ’s discussion of the seductive

‘fighting instinct’ (TG, pp. 402–3). Later in the third scrapbook, Woolf copies out
a number of lines from Antigone (B.16.f, 3: p. 62). References to Sophocles’ play
had appeared in earlier manuscript versions of The Years and Three Guineas, but
these passages show that Woolf returned to the text again while compiling the
notes for her polemic to gather quotations for her lengthy comparison between
Creon and ‘Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini’ (TG, p. 395). Woolf ’s three
reading scrapbooks provide a fascinating documentary history of the 1930s as
well as numerous insights into her writing process and the development of her
feminist-pacifist arguments.
The Drafts
Although she did not begin writing it in earnest until 1937, Woolf ’s earliest
version of Three Guineas is probably preserved in a miscellaneous notebook
from 1935 (M.1.6). This document contains an eleven-page longhand draft
titled ‘Draft of Professions’, dated 14 April 1935. Black (2004, pp. 63–4) has
put forward a strong case for these pages being Woolf ’s first effort ‘to sketch a
draft of On Being Despised, or whatever it is to be called’ at which she recorded
making a ‘rash attempt’ in her diary on the same date (D 4: p. 300). The ‘Draft’
begins with a return to the format of Woolf ’s speech to the Junior Council
of the L&NSWS in 1931. If this text is an early draft of Three Guineas then
it confirms an assumption of many previous critics – that when composing
a separate pamphlet on the feminist topics suggested by her writing of The
Pargiters, Woolf ’s first impulse was to use the earlier essay portions of that
work. The awkward phrasing of the ‘Draft’ suggests that Woolf returned to this
format from memory, however, without consulting her original speech or the
first essay of her first version of The Pargiters. Her opening lines – ‘In asking me
to speak […] [you] have done me a great honour. But what a strange position
to find oneself in!’ – function as crude shorthand for the more polished intro-
duction present in the first Pargiters essay (M.1.6, p. 125). ‘Draft of Professions’
is scrappy, haphazard, and written primarily to vent Woolf ’s desire to begin
writing her feminist pamphlet without the expectation that it would serve as a
considered outline for that text. At no point in its history were the essay sections
of The Pargiters ever directly transferred and recast as Three Guineas. This sketch
was soon rendered redundant by later plans for the framework and argument
of her polemic. Nevertheless the document records an interesting moment in
Three Guineas’ development, when Woolf considered women’s need to gain
equal access to education and the professions her core subject and had not yet
stumbled on the idea of structuring her essay as a letter.
After two years of planning and numerous false starts, Woolf began
drafting a text recognizable as Three Guineas in January 1937. By this stage, as
outlined above, the work had been substantially reconceived through a series
of transformations in response to various personal and wider socio-historical
circumstances. Woolf ’s plan on 28 January was ‘to write it out now, without
more palaver’, which she began and continued through to October, drafting the
chapters sequentially (D 5: p. 52). A note in her diary on 28 February indicates
that she was working on the first chapter: ‘I again dropped my pen to think
about my next paragraph – universities – how will that lead to professions &
so on’ (D 5: p. 62). On 2 March she was still ‘absorbed […] in the Un[iversit]y
part of 3Gs’ (D 5: p. 64). In the next two weeks Woolf presumably finished a
draft of this chapter, as she recorded being ‘too jaded to tackle the Professional
chapter’ that she planned to follow it on 17 March (D 5: p. 69). Woolf ’s hope to
have Three Guineas ‘roughed in by Easter’ proved unrealistic as she struggled to
channel her thoughts into her planned form in the early months of 1937 (D 5:
p. 52). Seven pages of holograph notes on women and war probably date from
this period (B.16.c). The passages in this notebook predominately relate to the
first chapter of Three Guineas as Woolf grapples with a definition for the class
her narrator will ‘call […] the {sisters} <daughters> of educated men’ (B.16.c,
p. 4). The draft also contains some sentiments that relate to later chapters of
Three Guineas, including the famous declaration: ‘I have no country to fight for’
(B.16.c, p. 2). However, the unstructured comments on women’s lack of equal
access to education and their consequential anti-patriotism contained in this
notebook correspond more strongly with the key themes of Woolf ’s first chapter
and support the dating of these pages to this time.
Another fragmentary pre-text for Three Guineas apparently from this stage
of composition differs substantially to anything else within the dossier. Reading
Notebook LVI consists of ten undated loose manuscript pages, five of which
contain notes for a drama titled ‘The Burning of the Vote: A Comedy’ (B.16.b,
pp. 3–8). This sketch is roughed out through a list of phrases, whether bullet
points or speech for a chorus is unclear. References to ‘cheques for one guinea’,
‘all moonshine’, ‘leaving your letter unanswered’, ‘the Spanish photographs’, and
an addressee who wants ‘a suggestion how to prevent war’ indicate that Woolf
had identified the central motifs and devices of Three Guineas at the time of
writing and dates this document to 1937 (B.16.b, pp. 4–8). This dramatic sketch
was probably conceived as a possible occasional piece through which Woolf
hoped to convey the opinions of Three Guineas in a more immediate, comedic

form; perhaps, as with her earlier comic sketch Freshwater (1923), with a specific
private audience in mind. It is unlikely that ‘The Burning of the Vote’ was ever
considered an alternative to Three Guineas, but its existence does challenge our
perception of Woolf ’s revisionary processes. The shift from a document-based
to a performance-based text entirely changes the manner in which the reader/
audience views and experiences a literary work and thus alters its nature, yet it
seems probable that Woolf perceived the dramatization of Three Guineas not as
the production of a new work but as simply an experimental formal revision, not
dissimilar to her assertion on 9 May 1938 that her next novel, Between the Acts,
was ‘to become in the end a play’ (D 5: p. 139). Although only a fragmentary
pre-text, ‘The Burning of the Vote’ encapsulates Woolf ’s innovative approach to
literary composition and revision and highlights the remarkable formal fluidity
of her late cultural criticism.
After two weeks holiday driving around Western France in May 1937, on
1 June Woolf declared ‘I have at last got going with 3 Guineas – after 5 days
grind, re-copying & to some extent re-writing, my poor old brain hums again’
(D 5: p. 90). The reference to ‘re-copying & […] re-writing’ before beginning
the second chapter suggests that Woolf revised each section of Three Guineas
‘to some extent’ as she wrote it, rather than completing a full manuscript draft
of the entire text before revising it in typescript as she had with The Years. A
fragmentary typescript of this first chapter is collected in the folder catalogued
as M.28 (which also contains the largest holograph draft fragment of the text
although there is no reason to suppose the two belong together). Forty-nine
consecutive pages of typescript present a draft of the second half of the first
chapter. Beginning with a description of the elaborate and symbolic clothing
of the professions, Woolf ’s narrator describes the processions of the sons of
educated men from the perspective of their sisters. Her narrator moves on to
answer the letter from the honorary treasurer of the building fund of a women’s
university college. Much of this prose is incorporated into the published version
of Three Guineas, although the ordering of the paragraphs was rearranged,
further material added, and some removed. Her revisions are evidenced by a
substantial number of manuscript deletions and additions on the typescript.
Several of the miscellaneous typed pages that append this document also
duplicate sections of this draft, evidencing Woolf ’s sustained reworking of the
most troubling paragraphs of her first chapter.
On 28 June 1937 Woolf declared herself to be ‘at work on the Second Guinea’
(D 5: p. 100). A surviving 57-page typescript of ‘The Second Guinea’ is also dated
28 June, suggesting that she had already written a manuscript draft of her second
chapter at this point and was now setting to work on preliminary revisions. In her
diary Woolf described this stage of her writing as ‘a terrible lot of reasoning (for
me) & fitting in of the right quotations’ (D 5: p. 100). A number of interrelated
manuscript documents appear to date from the spring and early summer of 1937,
evidencing the evolution of this ‘very difficult chapter’ (D 5: p. 100). Reading
Notebook LV (B.16.a) is linked to this period by the declaration of ‘the end of the
second guinea’ that concludes a section of Three Guineas drafted in this document
(B.16.a, p. 2). The first two pages of this loose-leaf folder consist of short draft
fragments of Three Guineas, while the remaining twenty-five pages contain further
research for Woolf ’s polemic, including passages from A Memoir of Anne Jemima
Clough (B. A. Clough, 1897) and J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond’s The
Age of the Chartists (1930) (see B.16.a, pp. 3–10, 25–8). The paragraphs read as a
series of rough notes rather than coherent paragraphs, which suggests that though
they refer to the end of her chapter, they may have been written at a relatively
early stage of its development. The draft sections presented in Reading Notebook
LVII (B.16.e), in contrast, are more assured. This covered spiral-bound notebook
contains notes from Winifred Holtby’s Letters to a Friend (1937) alongside four
pages of draft argument relating to the second chapter of Three Guineas (B.16.e,
p. 2). In an extract titled ‘The Professions’, Woolf asserts, ‘we must make a different
institution: “We” are the only people who can criticise; the wage-earners’ (B.16.e,
p. 4). The next three pages discuss women’s need for financial independence to
make objective political judgements, and lament the relatively small number
of women, as represented by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU),
in this position. ‘The woman who dies worth 36 million, like Ellerman,’ Woolf
observes, ‘has yet to be born’ (B.16.e, p. 7). The moneyed gentleman referred to
here is Sir John Reeves Ellerman, shipowner and financier, who died suddenly in
1933 leaving an estate valued for probate at £36,685,000 to his 23 year-old male
heir (see Rubinstein, 2004). The comparison with Ellerman not only evokes his
vast financial legacy but also his rise up the social scale through professional
enterprise, rising from the son of an immigrant German shipbroker to an English
baronet, with relatively little schooling and without attending university. It might
be unthinkable in the mid-1930s that any woman would die worth 36 million,
Woolf ’s narrator admits, but the fact that the first man to achieve this feat was
a social climber and outsider suggests that perhaps one day it might be possible
for a professional woman to do the same. Despite appearing chaotic, the notes in
these two documents indicate that Woolf had a clear outline for Three Guineas in
mind.
Alongside recording the difficulty of starting work on her second chapter

on 28 June 1937, Woolf noted that she ‘was heartened by reading some of the
first’ and saw the work ‘as 3 Chapters suddenly; & if I can drive my pen hard,
might have it done by August’ (D 5: p. 100). On 11 July she described herself as
‘in full flood every morning with 3 Gs’ (D 5: p. 101). The August deadline was
soon rendered impossible, however, by the sudden death of Julian Bell in Spain
on 18 July. Serving as a voluntary ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War, he
had been struck by a shell fragment. The Woolfs learned of their nephew’s death
on 20 July. Woolf visited Vanessa daily in the weeks that followed, remarking
on 6 August that though she had ‘3 Guineas to finish: the last chapter, now
I suppose [is] stiff & cold’ (D 5: p. 105). Nonetheless, she determined to ‘try
[it] tomorrow: then polish off Congreve […] & so to Roger this autumn’ (D 5:
p. 105). Her acceptance of the task of writing Roger Fry’s authorized biography
following his death in 1934 also hung over her head at this time. A third set of
reading notes relating to this period and headed ‘Monday 2 August’ begin with
draft passages for her essay on William Congreve (B.16.d, pp. 1–7). Following
these pages, the notebook contains a draft of several paragraphs relating to Three
Guineas but rather than looking forward to the final chapter these paragraphs
echo the first chapter, including, again, Mary Kingsley’s assertion, drawn from
Stephen Gwynn’s The Life of Mary Kingsley (1932, p. 15), that ‘Being allowed
to learn German was all the paid for education I ever had’ (B.16.d, p. 9). This
repetition evidences the production of Three Guineas’ confusing reverberative
structure, while also perhaps reflecting Woolf ’s difficulty resuming her project
following Julian’s death in war-torn Spain. ‘We had both been certain he would
be killed,’ Woolf wrote of herself and Vanessa to Vita Sackville-West on 26 July
1937; ‘But it was useless to argue. And his feelings were so mixed […] interest in
war, and conviction, and a longing to be in the thick of things’ (L 6: pp. 150–1).
In the following months such questions focused and fuelled Woolf ’s staunchly
anti-war position and her intricate pacifist arguments in her third chapter of
Three Guineas, but directly after the event she was ‘not clear enough in the head
to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and despair’ (L 6: p. 150).
Not until September 1937 did Woolf resume work properly on the third
chapter of Three Guineas. The largest surviving manuscript draft of Three
Guineas (contained in M.28) is dated ‘21st Sept’ on the first page. The holograph
is directed to Woolf ’s male correspondent, addressed as ‘Sir’ (M.28, p. 1).
The narrator begins by discussing with him the limited number of financially
independent daughters of educated men who they might ask to help them
‘protect culture; [and] intellectual liberty’ (M.28, p. 1). She concludes that ‘if
there were two hundred such women […] that is as many as we can expect’
(M.28, p. 1). ‘Consider how little we have to offer by way of reward’ to these
women, she reminds her reader, and how much ‘more courage & indifference
to blame & ridicule’ such women would need ‘than we have any right to require’
(M.28, p. 1). Woolf develops these ideas and her phrasing as she goes along,
working them out gradually over six pages that show her writing and revising
in one process. For example, on one page of her draft she urges her addressee to
‘think […] how much fifty or twenty or ten people, of either sex […] would do,
now, if they pledged themselves not to commit adultery of the brain’; on another
she returns to and revises this section of her argument, this time debating ‘what
could be done by a small {band} number – one hundred, fifty {or} even twenty
people’ to defend ‘Disinterested culture’ (M.28, pp. 2, 4). The draft contains
numerous such amendments, starts, stops, and rewritings. Nonetheless, the
overall ordering of the sections of her argument and much of the prose is very
similar to the published version of her third chapter. The opening pages of the
printed chapter correspondingly discuss the limited number of ‘Daughters of
educated men who have enough to live upon’, asking whether there might be
‘1,000, 500, or even 250’, while questioning what ‘is meant by […] “disinter-
ested” culture’ (TG, p. 289). By September 1937, Woolf had already puzzled out
the most challenging aspects of her final chapter and was able to write her draft
relatively fluently.
On 12 October 1937 Woolf recorded having written ‘ten minutes ago […]
what I think is the last page of 3 Gs’ (D 5: p. 112). It was not quite the last page of
course; the bibliography and notes were still to be added, and during late 1937
and early 1938 Woolf also compressed her three-chapter work into two articles,
titled ‘Women Must Weep – Or Unite Against War’, to be published in America
at the time of Three Guineas’ release.9 The final revisions to her feminist polemic
predictably took longer than planned. Woolf ’s ironic inclusion of inverted
commas when declaring she had once more ‘“finished” the last chapter of Three
Guineas’ on 9 January 1938 indicate her frustration with the never-ending
project (D 5: p. 125). Yet there was a fierce energy to her writing of Three Guineas
which revived her after the recent drudgery of The Years and echoed her first
enthusiastic months of writing that novel. ‘It has pressed & spurted out of me
[…] like a physical volcano’, Woolf noted on 12 October 1937 as she reflected
back on how Three Guineas had evolved through the last five years:
And my brain feels cool & quiet after the expulsion. I’ve had it sizzling now
since – well I was thinking of it at Delphi I remember. And then I forced myself
to put it into fiction first. No, the fiction came first. The Years. And how I held
myself back, all through the terrible depression, & refused, save for some frantic
notes, to tap it until The Years – that awful burden – was off me. So that I have
deserved this gallop. And taken time & thought too. But whether it is good or
bad how can I tell?
D 5: p. 112
There can be no doubt from this quotation that Woolf saw The Years and Three
Guineas as part of the same undertaking. The reference to ‘Delphi’ dates Three
Guineas’ first ‘sizzling’ in her mind to May 1932 when Woolf was on holiday in
Greece, considering the ‘psychology’ of ‘male virtues’ and ‘thinking of the book
[The Pargiters] again’ (D 4: p. 95). Her polemic may finally have come out at a
‘gallop’ but, as Woolf writes, it had ‘taken time & thought too’. She first describes
The Years as Three Guineas ‘put […] into fiction’, but then interestingly corrects
herself with the assertion that ‘the fiction came first’. This adjustment suggests
that ‘the fiction’, The Years, was in fact a separate unit, which asserted itself
before Three Guineas could be fully conceived. The fact that Woolf struggles
with such subtleties when describing the evolution of her texts should once
more remind us not to oversimplify the genetic history of these works as we
look back on their development.
The political power of indifference from The Years to

Three Guineas
Lili Hsieh has noted Woolf ’s use of ‘a politics of affect’ in Three Guineas, ‘which
is based, paradoxically, on indifference’ (2006, p. 29). Woolf adopts indifference
as a method of ‘approach[ing] a bracketed truth in a way that is not conciliatory
nor combatant or partisan,’ Hsieh argues, but that ‘demands a non-partisan,
disinterested, yet engaged and interested, readership’ (2006, p. 29, emphasis in
original). ‘From Rebecca West to Adrienne Rich,’ she observes, ‘the presumption
that anger implicates actions of positive political results is hardly questioned’,
and Hsieh contends that this is ‘a tendency which is continued in the otherwise
powerful readings of Woolf by Jane Marcus and Alex Zwerdling’ (2006, p. 24).
In Three Guineas, Woolf works hard to develop a tone that avoids anger and yet
might still prompt action. Her figuring of a style of language as representative of
a political stance extends from her earlier essayistic techniques but also, through
her attempt to overtly persuade her readers to her feminist-pacifist position,
signifies a new willingness to engage in propaganda. This change reflects a shift
in her modernist aesthetics in response to the extreme political instability of the
era. The final section of this chapter explores the development of indifference in
Woolf ’s late works as an innovative aesthetic technique and active political tool
through which she advocated opposition to patriarchy, fascism and militarism.
Tracing a series of allusions to the image of a procession or caravan that appear
throughout the pre-texts for Three Guineas, from ‘Professions for Women’ to The
Years, reveals the expansion of Woolf ’s feminist politics through 1931–8, the
progressive fusion of her feminism with her pacifism, and her gradual framing
of indifference as a powerful stance against war through both the form and
argument of Three Guineas.
The link between feminism and pacifism can be seen developing within
Woolf ’s Pargiters project long before her conception of Three Guineas. With
hindsight, the major arguments against patriarchy expressed in Three Guineas
can be viewed as having evolved from a handful of apparently offhand comments
on the root of ‘the Angel in the House’ in the speech Woolf delivered to the
Junior Council of the L&NSWS (M.70, p. 4). In the typescript of that talk, Woolf
describes the ‘Angel in the house’ as ‘a dream, a phantom – a kind of mirage like
the pools and the palm trees which nature places in the desert to lure the caravan
across’ (M.70, p. 5). She is ‘the ideal of womanhood created by the imaginations
of men and women at a certain stage of their pilgrimage to lure them across a
very dusty stretch <of the journey>’ (M.70, p. 5). In this text Woolf ’s analysis of
why this ‘ideal of womanhood’ was required is limited to a reference to ‘reasons
I cannot now go into – they have to do with the British Empire, our colonies,
Queen Victoria, Lord Tennyson, the growth of the middle class and so on’, but
these factors became the starting-point for her later exploration through the
1930s of the inhibited social relations between men and women (M.70, p. 5).
In The Pargiters, Woolf begins to explore the nineteenth-century model of
ideal womanhood through illustration in the fictional chapters and through
discursive argument in the essay portions of this text. At times her analysis
develops a point from the earlier speech; Alfred Tennyson, for example, receives
a mention in the fifth essay of The Pargiters. In the typescript of the speech
Woolf included a quotation from ‘Lord Tennyson’ to demonstrate how ‘men
[…] in the age of Victoria’ cherished the idea of the ideal woman as a persona
with an allure so strong ‘all male minds perforce / Swayed to her from their
orbits as they moved’ (M.70, p. 5). In The Pargiters, she evokes Tennyson’s
‘Locksley Hall’ as evidence that he ‘held that women’s passions were intrinsi-
cally weaker than those of his own sex’ (TP, p. 110). She contrasts this opinion
with that of Montaigne writing three hundred years before Tennyson (although
Woolf mistakenly has him writing ‘about 1400’), that ‘the passion of a woman
was by nature stronger than that of a man; but was repressed, very painfully, by
the rigours of convention’ (TP, pp. 109–10). Since ‘the rigours of convention
which Montaigne had noted had been [going] on for almost five hundred years
– almost as long as the Oxford Colleges had been in existence,’ Woolf notes,
they ‘may have produced its effect’ (TP, p. 110). Referring back to the previous
fictional episode as if it provided a factual example, Woolf details how ‘Kitty,
who was 21 in 1880, therefore inherited the effects of an education which, if we
attribute any importance to education, was bound not merely to teach a certain
code of behaviour, but also to modify the passion itself ’ (TP, p. 110). Woolf ’s
discussion of the ‘Angel in the house’ expanded from a description of the ideal
of womanhood in her original speech to an analysis of the role of this ideal in
shaping the social behaviour of nineteenth-century women and in moulding
their internal reactions to the world around them.
This analysis became the basis of Woolf ’s evocation and exploration of
women’s historical sense of exclusion from British society during her drafting
of The Years, and of her later debate in Three Guineas of the indifference to
patriotism that this exclusion affects in women. The image of British society as
a caravan crossing the nineteenth-century desert returned in Woolf ’s extended
investigations of patriarchy in drafts of the ‘1910’ chapter and would be evoked
again in Three Guineas. At the typescript stage, Woolf even adopted ‘The
Caravan’ as a working title for her novel (D 4: p. 274). The repeated presence
of this motif alongside Woolf ’s comments on patriarchy in the ‘1910’ section
of The Years reveals a clear genetic progression between the earlier speech,
the novel and the polemic, and discloses that the fictional draft versions of
The Years were also pre-texts for Three Guineas. Yet the image of a lone female
character imagining herself as part of a desert caravan first appeared in Woolf ’s
output in The Voyage Out (1915). Leaving England, Rachel Vinrace notes that
‘people in ships’ view England as ‘a very small island […] a shrinking island’,
while she feels herself to be ‘an inhabitant of the great world […] more lonely
than the caravan crossing the desert’ (VO, pp. 29–30). No explicit critique of
patriarchy occurs in this passage, but the images of the caravan and of England
as an isolated and shrinking island are startlingly evocative of The Years, Three
Guineas and Between the Acts. Such overlaps place my genetic reading of Three
Guineas and its pre-texts in the wider context of Woolf ’s lifelong interest in
critiquing culture, once more reminding us that her late feminist-pacifist stance
and the motifs through which it is expressed grew out from her earlier oeuvre.
The significance afforded to ‘1910’ in The Years evidently reflects Woolf ’s
famous assertion in ‘Character in Fiction’ that it was ‘on or about’ this year
that ‘[a]ll human relations […] shifted – those between masters and servants,
husbands and wives, parents and children’ (E 3: pp. 421–2). Margaret Comstock
recognizes ‘the despair Maggie and Sara feel about human character in “1910”’
as ‘[p]robably the bleakest “sneer” in the novel’ towards the current British
socio-political system (1977, p. 259). The inability of Maggie and Sara to explain
their feminist position clearly to Rose, or for Rose to talk about her past, demon-
strates to Patricia Cramer that ‘patriarchal socialization has made them afraid to
speak openly’ (1991, p. 211). Susan M. Squier reaches a different interpretation
of this chapter through reading it alongside two typescript fragments of the
after-dinner discussion between Sara and Maggie (B.15.2, B.4.d). ‘Dialogue and
mock debate delineate the differences in position between Elvira, Maggie, and
Rose’ in these earlier drafts of the scene, Squier asserts, reading their discussion
as an echo of debates raging among feminists within the Women’s Social and
Political Union in the spring and summer of 1910 as the WSPU ‘revised its
methods in fighting for women’s rights, moving from militance to pacifism in
hope of achieving parliamentary support for the Conciliation Bill’ to extend
votes to women (1983, pp. 205–6). Squier argues that these eight typescript
pages are ‘concerned less with the general relation between women and patri-
archal society than with specific tactical disagreements within the women’s
movement’ (1983, p. 210). Tracing the genesis of this scene back even further to
the holograph draft of ‘1910’, the sneer on patriarchy Comstock recognizes in
the published chapter can be found here alongside the feminist debate Squier
identifies in the typescript drafts. Woolf reworked this debate extensively at
manuscript stage as she used this chapter to explore her own contrary opinions
about how women might respond to and ultimately enter into patriarchal
society through the dialogue of Rose, Maggie and Sara.
The after-dinner scene at the end of ‘1910’, compacted to five pages in the
printed text of The Years, fills thirty-four pages of Woolf ’s fourth Pargiters
manuscript notebook and was written between 13 July to 30 July 1933.10 This
draft version of the ‘1910’ after-dinner scene, as outlined in my previous chapter,
depicts Maggie and Elvira discussing their sense of exclusion from English society
at length. The focus of the scene in the manuscript version, as in the typescript
fragments, is a letter that Elvira drafts to Rose explaining that she and Maggie
would rather reject the vote and maintain their role as outsiders than participate in
the current oppressive and propagandizing systems of male government. ‘Here we
are […] Magdalena, Elvira Pargiter,’ Elvira writes to Rose in the manuscript draft,
‘& […] considering the matter, with the aid {of Whittakers [sic],} we conclude,
that though we thank you, for the offer […] to become Englishwomen […] the
disadvantages & indeed dangers of this <position> {proceeding}, – far outweigh

the benefits’ (M.42, 4: p. 63). She continues:
In our opinion the acceptance of a vote makes us liable to honours we deplore, &
to services which we abominate – meaning by that {degrees,} titles <degrees> &
shooting savages with muskets. Moreover […] it would be <surely,> incumbent
on us […] to accept the {teaching} […] of the Church of England […] which
we are not prepared to do.
M.42, 4: p. 64
Woolf revises the phrasing of Elvira’s justification for refusing the vote repeatedly
over several pages, each time evoking her aversion to the exclusivity of the
education system and the professions, her abhorrence of militarism and empire,
and her inability to follow the teachings of the Church. After this outburst,
Elvira strains to bring her letter to a close. Maggie suggests she should ‘hope
Uncle Abels [sic] gout is better; & send him our best love’ (M.42, 4: p. 66).
This reversion back to etiquette-bound trivialities prompts Elvira to exclaim:
‘●│God knows, Maggie, its [sic] a complicated business […] the moment I put
my pen to the paper, & say […] we hope Uncle Abels [sic] gout is better│●’
(M.42, 4: p. 66). Her struggle to find an appropriate tone with which to address
Rose having explained her rejection of the vote parallels Woolf ’s difficulty in
using ‘polite journalese’ to refuse the honorary degree she was offered from
Manchester University in 1933 (D 4: p. 148), and foreshadows her attempts
to combine courtesy and civility in her narrator’s response to her male corre-
spondent in Three Guineas.
In writing this fictional text, Woolf is already tussling with the prose style
she will later develop for Three Guineas to expound the political opinions
suggested by the process of writing this novel. As Elvira adopts the tone of
the subordinate, caring female in her letter, she ‘●│{at once} see[s] [her]self
taking part in the procession, through the desert, with nothing but a clump of
trees on the horizon; & the spears of savages; & hyena howling│●’ (M.42, 4:
p. 66). Woolf returns to the image of the caravan in the desert at this point as a
representation of the journey of the Pargiter family through history. ‘●│{What
[…] right have we} to break off from the procession; – from one end of time
to the other,’ Elvira asks Maggie, as she imagines this procession ‘com[ing] to
the rock’ at which ‘we, Magdalena & Elvira Pargiter, stop & say to the Pargiters,
Here we {take our} break off. Here we {make our own line through the desert,}
leave you│●’ (M.42, 4: p. 66). Woolf ’s use of the word ‘procession’ rather than
‘caravan’ in this representation of nineteenth-century patriarchal society as a
convoy through the desert brings new connotations to the image first evoked
in the typescript of her ‘Professions for Women’ speech. As Squier notes in her
reading of the typescript drafts of this episode, ‘Maggie and Elvira Pargiter play
on the word “procession”, formerly royal and patriarchal, now practised by the
suffragists in huge marches’ (1983, p. 206). Yet within the broader context of
the manuscript draft of this chapter, Maggie and Sara’s decision to ‘break off ’
from this nineteenth-century procession with its imperialist values represents
resistance both to this patriarchal tradition and to the WSPU marches of 1910.
The anti-suffrage sentiment and outsider position expressed elsewhere in this
section evoke Woolf ’s later suggestion in ‘The Burning of the Vote’ that her
audience should ‘not raise movements […] [or] praise famous women’ (B.16.b,
p. 4). In calling for women to ‘make [their] own line through the desert’, Elvira
specifically rejects the vote and Britain’s patriarchal socio-political systems, with
which she fears she and her sister would be compelled to engage if they entered
the current political sphere as enfranchised ‘Englishwomen’ (M.42, 4: p. 66).
The manuscript draft of ‘1910’ becomes increasingly incoherent as Woolf
attempts to develop her metaphor of the rock as the significant moment at
which the middle-class daughters of educated men determine to assert their
independence from the patriarchal family. Woolf continued to play with this
motif in typescript versions of the chapter. Two of the three surviving typescript
fragments of The Years relate to the ‘1910’ section of the manuscript. The three-
page fragment (B.15.2) and the five-page fragment (B.4.d), both transcribed
and published by Squier in her article, are close to the manuscript in content
and refer to ‘Elvira’ rather than ‘Sara’, indicating they were produced before 30
December 1934 when Woolf first used the new name in her diary (D 4: p. 266).
In the five-page typescript, Woolf fleshes out her earlier sketch of the Pargiter
procession reaching a rock, adding enthusiasm to Elvira’s imaginings of revolt:
‘We hope Uncle Abels [sic] gout is better’ she began, an[d]
broke off, waving her pen in the air.
“It’s a tremendously exciting affair, Maggie. <She broke off>
Here we are, following the procession through the
desert, with nothing but a camp of trees on the
horizon, and the spears of savages and hyenas
howling; and now we are come to this rock; this
formidable and craggy […] mountain; and {we}
rubbing our eyes and taking a look round, we
<wave our swords in>
wave our hands to the assembled company, blow them
<the air> a kiss and make off on {a track of our own}.
B.4.d, p. 2
In this version a militant undertone, implied by the waving of swords, accom-

panies the sisters’ jovial departure from the desert procession with the blowing
of a kiss. This undertone in part explains Squier’s interpretation of the passage
as a suffrage march. Reading forwards from the manuscript draft as I have
here, however, leads to a different interpretation: Maggie and Elvira are not
campaigning for but rejecting the vote as they triumphantly break off from the
procession of patriarchal Pargiters. This example illustrates why genetic critics
are wary of the potentially misleading consequences of reading backwards from
a published text. Squier’s analysis of the typescript, while shrewd and provoc-
ative, has been shaped by knowledge of this passage in the published novel, in
which Woolf heightens the militant undertone and offers a much less complex
portrayal of suffragism.
By the first proof stage in March 1936, Woolf had axed the letter to Rose from
the after-dinner section of ‘1910’ (see M.137, pp. 34–40). The idea of the Pargiter
family as a procession was transferred to the lunch section of ‘1910’ in which
Rose visits Sara and Maggie. In The Years Rose sits with Sara and Maggie in their
flat when Sara takes ‘a fork in her hand, […] dr[aws] a line on the table-cloth’
and declares it to be:
‘The Pargiters […] going on and on and on’ – here her fork touched a salt-cellar
– ‘until they came to a rock,’ she said; ‘and then Rose’ – she looked at her again:
Rose drew herself up slightly, ‘ – Rose claps spurs to her horse, rides straight up
to a man in a gold coat, and says “Damn your eyes!” Isn’t that Rose, Maggie?’ she
said, looking at her sister as if she had been drawing her picture on the table-cloth.
Y, p. 161
There is no direct reference to a convoy crossing the desert in the published

novel but the mark of its presence in earlier versions remains. Woolf entirely
changes her use of the image in The Years through portraying Rose rather than
Sara or Maggie as the female character who breaks away from the procession
of Pargiters. Rose is a suffragette.11 Here her hostility to ‘a man in a gold
coat’, evocative of Woolf ’s earlier drafts of the ‘1907’ and ‘1910’ chapters (see
Appendix A and B), contributes to our sense that Rose is a feminist outsider.
She is placed in opposition to his authoritative role, designated by his luxurious
clothing, to which she responds with a military demeanour, ‘clap[ping] spurs to
her horse’ and ‘rid[ing] straight up’ to him (Y, p. 161). Her militarism presents
a far less radical response to patriarchy than Sara and Maggie’s indifferent
outsider role in the manuscript version of this chapter. Rose’s involvement in the
suffrage campaign is less revolutionary than Elvira and Maggie’s rejection of the
vote and active refusal to participate in Britain’s oppressive socio-political insti-

tutions. Any debate of these two contrary feminist positions is suppressed in
The Years, however, by the removal of Sara’s letter to Rose; a letter that, in retro-
spect, anticipates Woolf ’s use of the letter form to set out her feminist-pacifist
stance in Three Guineas. These revisions remove the most controversial aspect
of Woolf ’s feminist-pacifist argument against patriarchy from the published
novel. By changing the character who encounters the rock and revolts against
the Pargiter procession Woolf withholds her discussion of the political power of
‘indifference’, reserving explicit investigation into this anti-patriotic and pacifist
position for her later feminist pamphlet.
In the second chapter of Three Guineas, echoing Elvira’s letter to Rose in the
Pargiters manuscript, Woolf ’s narrator draws a picture of ‘the procession of
educated men’ in her letter to the treasurer of the women’s professional society
and asks her female reader how the daughters of educated men are to relate to
it (TG, p. 243). ‘There they go, our brothers,’ Woolf imagines, ‘mounting those
steps […] ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching, administering justice
[…]. It is a solemn sight always – a procession, like a caravanserai crossing a
desert’ (TG, pp. 240–1). She once more evokes the caravan motif to describe
the progression of patriarchal British society and to consider how women, now
equally responsible for this society, are to conform to or break away from this
society’s values, institutions and customs. ‘[F]or the past twenty years or so,’
she asserts, ‘it is no longer a sight merely […]. For there, trapesing along at
the tail end of the procession, we go ourselves’ (TG, p. 241). In Three Guineas,
Woolf asks her female readers, ‘On what terms shall we join that procession?’
(TG, p. 243). She equates individual greed with the greed of nations, arguing
that she will only give a guinea to the female treasurer ‘if she can satisfy us
that our guinea shall be spent in the cause of peace’ (TG, p. 238). The narrator
finally determines that if women are to join the professions, which they must in
order to obtain the financial independence to think for themselves, then they
must retain ‘freedom from unreal loyalties’ (TG, p. 271). In the third chapter
of Three Guineas Woolf imagines indifference to such loyalties as an effective
political tool through which, if women ‘bind [themselves] to take no share
in patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praise’ and
refrain from restricting others from access to the privileges they have recently
gained, then ‘the daughters of educated men would help materially to prevent
war’ (TG, p. 314). ‘For psychology would seem to show that it is far harder for
human beings to take action when other people are indifferent,’ Woolf argues,
‘than when their actions are made the centre of excited emotion’ (TG, p. 314).
She therefore advocates indifference as ‘the duty to which outsiders [should]

train themselves in peace before the threat of death inevitably makes reason
powerless’ (TG, p. 314).
As Hsieh has noted, indifference is not only described as a political tool in
Woolf ’s polemic but also practised by her narrator as a method of presenting her
arguments without angering or alienating her reader. Mirroring Elvira’s attempt
to remain polite towards Rose while trouncing her political opinions in ‘1910’,
in Three Guineas Woolf attempts to alert her readers to their positive support
for war-making without appearing accusatory, and to describe the inequalities
between the genders without apportioning blame. Her concern to develop
a courteous tone with which to prompt a receptive reading of her cultural
criticism from male and female readers is evidenced by stylistic revisions in
the draft of the polemic. In the holograph of the third chapter Woolf focuses
intently on how her female narrator will respond to her male addressee’s request
for a guinea.12 She plays around with the pitch of the address, informing her
correspondent in a tone of feigned solemnity: ‘You too it seems are a supplicant,
[…] an honorary Treasurer, asking for money to further the aims of his society.
[…] Thus it might be possible, as {we found} in the other two cases, of Honorary
Treasurers asking for guineas, to bargain & impose terms’ (M.28, p. 6). After
some discussion of her supplicant’s objectives – ‘to defy tyranny, dictatorship,
slavery’ – Woolf drops this exaggerated manner and declares frankly ‘If these
are your aims […] then there is no further need of bargaining between us. Let
{us} <me> make this quite plain. The guinea is yours […] without any return
on your part’ (M.28, p. 7). This switch from stylized to simple rhetoric has the
effect of suggesting that the narrator’s previous suspicion of her correspondent’s
values was merely a tongue-in-cheek performance and that she was quite sure
of their united position throughout. The deletion of ‘us’ in favour of ‘me’ further
supports Woolf ’s portrayal of her narrator’s plain speaking here and emphasizes
the impression of a shared understanding between her and her reader. In fact,
of course, the narrator’s tone of sincerity is as much an act on Woolf ’s part as
her first tone of scepticism, yet critics of Three Guineas ‘often read […] Woolf ’s
personal emotions as contents’, as Hsieh observes (2006, p. 25).
Woolf uses such narrative shifts in register, in this draft and throughout the
printed text of Three Guineas, as a means to disguise her emotions so that she
can question the political beliefs and social behaviour of her readers without
appearing aggressive. The choice of a male peace activist for Woolf ’s primary
fictional correspondent in Three Guineas is similarly a device to allow her to
address her male readers, most likely to respond negatively to her critique
of dictatorial patriarchy, as if they are complicit in her pacifist stance. As she

alludes to the greater status and privileges of ‘Englishmen’ in comparison to
‘Englishwomen’ in the draft of the third chapter, Woolf first defines ‘Englishmen’
as ‘your sex’, then as ‘your class’, and then finally deletes both and inserts ‘our
fathers’ (M.28, p. 7). This revision tones down her narrator’s allocation of blame
towards her male reader, drawing the two correspondents together in collusion
against a shared opponent. Woolf ’s female narrator conspires with her brother
against the lingering activities and beliefs of a previous generation.
In the published version of Three Guineas, Woolf again revised this passage;
here the narrator tells her male addressee she ‘has no wish to be “English” on the
same terms that you yourself are “English”’ (TG, p. 301). Woolf ’s reinstatement
of the second person pronoun reflects her desire to avoid overt conciliation
while retaining her reader’s favour. She drops the explicit distinction between
men and women in an attempt to lessen her chances of being dismissed as a
fanatical feminist protester. Shortly after, she even goes so far as to burn the
word ‘feminist’ so that men and women might work together ‘for the same
cause’ (TG, p. 303).13 Woolf ’s famous renunciation of this word is enacted by her
narrator so that ‘in that clearer air’ that follows, it might become evident that
the ‘daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, “feminists”
were in fact the advance guard’ of her correspondent’s peace movement (TG,
p. 303). ‘The whole iniquity of dictatorship,’ she asserts:
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. But now we are fighting together. The daughters and sons of
educated men are fighting side by side.
TG, p. 304
Woolf ’s feminist-pacifist analysis of British patriarchal society is presented

forthrightly in Three Guineas, but the narrator’s strictly controlled tone retains
the underlying distant and objective stance developed in her draft, even at her
most personable, in an attempt to curtail hostility in her readers towards her
cultural criticism. E. M. Forster’s sceptical reaction to Woolf ’s feminist-pacifism
in his lecture indicates that her espousal and stylistic use of indifference in Three
Guineas was not necessarily successful in calming her detractors. Yet perhaps
Woolf would not have been entirely displeased with Forster’s incredulous
description of her analysis in Three Guineas as ‘unreasonable’ (1942, p. 24). This
work was after all the culmination of the socio-political project with which, on
16 February 1932, she had hoped ‘to blow up St Pauls [sic]’ (D 4: p. 77).
Conclusion
Tracing the development of Woolf ’s feminist-pacifist argument in the 1930s,

and her expression of it through the multiple texts related to The Years and Three
Guineas, advances our understanding of the complex relationships between
these works and her intentions in them. The change witnessed in her works
during the last decade of her life does not reflect an entirely new political
conviction but rather an expansion of her previous feminism, a wish to be more
vocal in her cultural criticism, and a need to support this move with thorough
research and evidencing of her feminist and anti-fascist analysis. Woolf ’s pacifist
stance in Three Guineas, viewed critically by many of her contemporaries as a
passive denial of, or refusal to engage with, the pressing political situation, in
fact represents an active position of protest, if an idealistic one. Mark Kurlansky
would describe her argument in Three Guineas as one of ‘nonviolence’, a term
which he defines and outlines in contrast to pacifism:
Nonviolence is not the same thing as pacifism. […] Pacifism is treated almost
as a psychological condition. Pacifism is harmless and therefore easier to accept
than nonviolence, which is dangerous. […] Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is
a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing.
2006, p. 6
During the 1930s, non-violent resistance to British rule in India had alerted the
British government and the world at large to the potential power that pacifist
protest could wield as a political tool. Woolf noted Gandhi’s release from prison
in her diary on 26 January 1931, an event that was widely reported following
his imprisonment for civil disobedience in May 1930 after leading the Dandi
Salt March during March-April 1930 (D 4: p. 8).14 From her picture of ‘some
vigorous young woman […] marching through [war]’ in 1916 (L 2: p. 76), to
her concept of indifference as a means to ‘help materially to prevent war’ in
1938 (TG, p. 314), Woolf ’s pacifism is based on the conviction that as outsiders
women are well placed to devise an active non-violent force with which to deter
militarism.
The erratic tone of Three Guineas evolved alongside Woolf ’s extensive
exploration of British patriarchy through her writing of The Pargiters, but the
removal of this tone and explicit cultural criticism from the published version
of The Years crucially indicates a difference in Woolf ’s aim for the two works.
The ‘ambiguity in style’ of Three Guineas ‘points to the complexity of her ideas
of affects and aesthetics/politics’, as Hsieh argues, but it also highlights Woolf ’s
determined effort to forcefully persuade her audience of her socio-political

convictions in this text (2006, p. 26). This effort was recognized by contem-
porary readers. Silver notes that Woolf ’s style was praised in almost all of the
surviving letters she received in response to Three Guineas, many of which
admired ‘her ability to slip otherwise unpalatable truths down unsuspecting
throats’ (1983a, p. 261). Pippa Strachey, for example, delighted that Woolf had
written ‘[s]omething that the gentlemen of our acquaintance will be forced to
take up on account of its author & will be unable to put down on account of
its amusingness until they have reached the bitter end’ (quoted in Silver, 1983a,
p. 261). Three Guineas differs so visibly from the rest of Woolf ’s output because
she decided to embrace the urge to propagandize in this text, central to much
politicized literature of the era, which she had fought so hard to avoid in her
writing of The Years. In this respect, The Years and Three Guineas cannot be
considered a single ‘work’ in the terminology of textual and genetic criticism
because the purpose and politics of each are too clearly distinguishable for
them to be one literary endeavour. Yet the reading and writing processes that
produced these works are impossible to tease completely apart. The novel and
the polemic may not strictly be one book but they are unmistakably two sides of
the same project and together they represent an interweaving and sustained late
reworking of the major strands of Woolf ’s earlier critiques of patriarchy, fascism
and war.
Notes
1 Wisor debates the merits and limitations of three possible postmodernist editorial
models available to future editors of Three Guineas: the genetic edition, the parallel
text edition and the fluid-text edition. Her imagined ‘post-eclectic’ edition of Three
Guineas opposes the ‘modernist, essentialist view of textuality that emphasizes […]
the production of emended, definitive editions of texts’, according to which Woolf ’s
works have historically been edited (2009, p. 498). Wisor instead desires an edition
of Three Guineas, like Hans Walter Gabler’s synoptic genetic edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1984), that ‘showcase[s] the instability and plurality of […] [the] work as
witnessed in its multiple textual states’ (p. 500).
2 I reference directly from the typescript here rather than from MOB due to
Schulkind’s editorial revision of ‘It was a feeling of hopelessness <sadness>’ to
‘It was a feeling of hopeless sadness’ (MOB, p. 84). This silent change imposes
completeness on this unfinished passage and conceals Woolf ’s inability to choose
words to describe her intense negative reaction to this early experience of conflict.
3 There is some speculation as to the location of a further manuscript of Three

Guineas which Woolf reported having donated to the American Guild for German
Cultural Freedom in February 1939; see L 6: p. 314. Wisor details the history and
debate regarding this manuscript, which is now generally assumed to be lost or to
be the largest surviving holograph draft (M.28) held by the NYPL; see Wisor, 2009,
pp. 511–3.
4 For another account of Three Guineas’ composition see Chapter 3 of Black’s Woolf
as Feminist (2004) and the introduction to her edition of Three Guineas (2001),
pp. xviii–xxx. Where my conclusions draw on Black in this section this negotiation
is acknowledged.
5 In her introduction to Three Guineas, Marcus credits Staveley with identifying
Hewart in one of the five Three Guineas photographs but notes he was then Lord
Chief Justice, not ‘the sitting lord chancellor’ (2006, p. lxii).
6 Hewart wrote for the Manchester Guardian and Morning Leader during his early
distinguished career in parliament. After his appointment as Lord Chief Justice
in 1922 he became a more controversial figure whose ‘feuds during the 1920s and
1930s [were] famous’ (Stevens, 2004).
7 The photograph of Emil Fey is dated 18 October 1935, the day after Fey’s
retirement. The photograph of four Heralds proclaiming Edward VIII’s coronation
is taken from the Daily Telegraph and dated 30 May 1936. The full publication
details of these cuttings have not been traced.
8 The Press published twelve ‘Letters’ on a range of political, literary and artistic
subjects during 1930–3, each printed as a small, card-backed pamphlet of
approximately 30–40 pages. Woolf ’s contribution to the series is discussed in more
depth in Chapter 4.
9 For an introduction to Woolf ’s abridgement of Three Guineas see Black, 2002,
pp. 74–90. Wisor also discusses the differences between this article and Three
Guineas, and supplies sample passages of a proposed parallel text edition of the
book-length polemic and ‘Women Must Weep’ (2009, pp. 504–10).
10 See Appendix B for a transcription of a portion of this scene.
11 Rose’s active involvement in the suffragette campaign is made explicit in the novel
by a reference in the ‘1911’ chapter to her having ‘been had up in a police-court’ for
throwing a brick (Y, p. 194).
12 See Appendix C for a fuller extract from this section of the holograph draft of Three
Guineas (M. 28).
13 Lucy Delap’s The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early
Twentieth Century (2007) provides a detailed discussion of the changing usage
of the term ‘feminism’ through the early twentieth century, noting that the
‘ambivalence about the term can help to explain Virginia Woolf ’s emphatic rejection
of [it] […] in her 1938 polemic’ (p. 323).
14 For an account of the Salt March protest, Gandhi’s involvement and its effect
see Ashe, 1968, pp. 285–7. For an introduction to Gandhi’s use of the term
‘non-violence’ see M. K. Gandhi, For Pacifists (1949).
4
Writing Art in Times of Chaos in Between

the Acts
On 10 November 1936, four months into the Spanish Civil War, Woolf
recorded with anxiety: ‘Madrid not fallen. Chaos. Slaughter. War surrounding
our island’ (D 5: p. 32). In an article written contemporaneously for the Daily
Worker, ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’, Woolf debated art’s social role in this
ominous political climate. The role of art in times of national and international
crisis became a recurrent concern for Woolf in the later interwar period. The
emergence of a younger generation of overtly politicized writers in the 1930s
forced Woolf to confront her reputation as an isolated and outdated aesthete,
and to investigate and defend her own opinion of the ideal relationship between
literature and society. Woolf entered the burgeoning public debate on this
subject during an era in which, as Richard Overy argues, ‘networks of anxiety’
pervaded British consciousness, encouraging ‘the belief that the Western world
was doomed’ long before the outbreak of World War II on 3 September 1939
(2009, p. 7). ‘By early 1938,’ when she began writing Between the Acts, ‘the
idea of war as a systemic inevitability was widespread’ (Overy, 2009, p. 316).1
This anxious pre-war climate is reflected in Woolf ’s intense preoccupation in
her final novel with the question of what solace or practical aid literature can
provide society in times of chaos. Composed between April 1938 and March
1941, Between the Acts interrogates the state of English culture and society with
more urgency and less certainty than any of Woolf ’s writings in the preceding
decade.
This chapter reads Between the Acts as a sustained work of cultural criticism
through which Woolf interrogates art’s social role and delivers an oblique
feminist-pacifist commentary on the past, present and potential future of
English culture. My analysis of the genesis and evolution of Woolf ’s socio-
political viewpoint in this novel extends beyond the draft documents that
directly evidence its composition (although this pre-publication material will
also receive attention), to trace how Woolf ’s examination of English literature
and society in her final work developed from her cultural criticism in earlier
published texts. Writing her memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’ on 2 May 1939, Woolf
acknowledged the potential for the present to change her feelings and opinions
of the past; ‘What I write today,’ she reflected, ‘I should not write in a year’s
time’ (MOB, p. 87). The following discussion attempts to be sensitive to similar
fluctuations in Woolf ’s thinking, recognizing that her opinion of art’s social role
was equally liable to be ‘much affected by the present moment’ in the volatile
political environment of 1932–41 (MOB, p. 87). Woolf ’s cultural criticism in
her last unfinished work developed out of, and beyond, her earlier feminist-
pacifist critiques of patriarchy and her essayistic statements on the relation of
aesthetics to politics between 1932 and 1940. Through her writing of Between
the Acts Woolf explored communal fears for the future of English culture,
British society and Western civilization in the face of international conflict with
grim pessimism while, paradoxically, maintaining a persistent hope that from
this conflict a positive new future for Britain and for Europe might emerge.
Following its publication in July 1941, nearly two years into World War II
and four months after Woolf ’s suicide, the bleak outlook of Between the Acts
attracted most attention in early critical readings of the novel. David Daiches
described the book as ‘a lyrical tragedy whose hero is England’ (1945, p. 114),
Jean Guiguet contended that Woolf had never ‘expressed her pessimism so
categorically’ (1965, p. 327), and Madeline Moore declared Between the Acts ‘the
saddest story I’ve ever heard’ (1984, p. 147). Joan Bennett conversely suggested
that the novel’s ‘scenes are comic, at times even farcical, as often as they are
moving’ (1975, p. 131). Bennett’s reading of Between the Acts as tragicomedy
has most in common with more recent studies of the novel, which tend to stress
that alongside anticipating the demise of English parochial life, Woolf also
humorously exposes and mocks the imperialist values, localized thinking and
patriarchal gender roles of the society whose passing she predicts and ambiva-
lently mourns in this text. Gillian Beer, whose feminist-historicist reassessments
of Between the Acts in the 1980s and early 1990s have greatly influenced
subsequent readings of the novel, describes Between the Acts as ‘Woolf ’s most
mischievous and playful work, as well as one that muses much upon death and
extinction’ (1996, p. 125). In Between the Acts, Beer argues, ‘Woolf wants to
explore how England came to be; and how it came to be as she described it in
Three Guineas, patriarchal, imperialist and class-ridden’ (1996, p. 147). Woolf ’s
final novel acknowledges and challenges these characteristics in English society
through satire, while simultaneously lamenting the threat posed to English
culture by the ongoing European conflict.
Writing Art in Times of Chaos in Between the Acts 105
More recently, Jed Esty has interpreted Between the Acts as part of an ‘anthro-
pological turn’ within the late work of modernist writers, including E. M. Forster,
T. S. Eliot and Woolf, who, faced with the destruction of British buildings,
people and culture by war and the probable breakdown of Empire, began to
explore conceptions of national identity (2004, p. 2). ‘For Woolf,’ Esty argues,
‘the political crises of the time compelled intellectuals to think nationally, but
also shifted the real terms of national identity away from aggressive Britishness,
toward humane Englishness’ (2004, p. 17). Her presentation of a pageant-play
within Between the Acts, as Esty reveals, corresponds to a late modernist trend
reflecting the desire of writers known for their high aestheticism to experiment
with more accessible literary forms and respond to the turbulent social and
political climate of the later interwar period. The mischievous cultural criticism
of Woolf ’s final novel certainly highlights the tyrannical xenophobic and
warmongering tendencies of British nationalism while, as Esty contends, also
trying ‘to find palatable ways to express her affinity for England’ and imagine a
future for English society (2004, p. 86).
Yet, as Marina MacKay observes, Esty’s central thesis requires us ‘to accept
the premise that high modernism in England was not deeply interested in the
national culture’ before the political upheavals of the 1930s (2007, p. 17). His
reading of Woolf ignores her earlier articulations of attachment to England and
her scrutiny of this sentiment. The sight of a wedding at Rodmell Parish Church
on 22 September 1928, for example, prompted Woolf to contemplate the nature
of Englishness and the extent of her national feeling:
And I felt this is the heart of England – this wedding in the country: history I
felt; Cromwell; The Osbournes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing: of all of whom
[the bride and groom] seem more the descendants than I am: as if they repre-
sented the unconscious breathing of England & L[eonard] & I, leaning over the
wall, were detached, unconnected. […] We dont [sic] belong to any ‘class’ […]
might as well be French or German. Yet I am English in some way –
D 3: pp. 197–8
This quotation illustrates how for Woolf, as Julia Briggs has asserted, ‘the
English landscape was inextricably bound up with English literature’ (2006a,
p. 192).2 It also demonstrates how her sympathy with the myth of England as a
harmonious, rural idyll and her sense of being ‘English in some way’ coexisted
throughout her life with her sense of being an outsider and her vehement anti-
patriotism (D 3: p. 198). The useful distinction Esty makes between Britishness
and Englishness in Between the Acts might equally be applied to Woolf ’s earlier
works; her London Scene essays, for instance, celebrate England’s literature,
countryside and the vibrancy of London life, while also critiquing the cultural
values of capitalist, patriarchal and imperialist Britain. Yet, Woolf was just as
sceptical of Englishness as she was of Britishness. In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus
Warren Smith wryly recalls the romantic notion of ‘an England […] consist[ing]
almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays’ for which he went to war (MD, p. 94).
Englishness and Britishness may appear to present two separate identities in
Between the Acts, but in fact Woolf ’s interest throughout is in negotiating the
links between them. Her novel suggests that English cultural values feed directly
into Britain’s political actions.
MacKay suggests that ‘Woolf ’s surprising participation in what have since
become consolatory cultural memories of the war’ as ‘a moment of lost
communality and unity’ sheds ‘a useful light on the late politics of a writer once
thought apolitical and now routinely presented as a leftwing radical’ (2007,
p. 23). ‘Woolf ’s war awakening makes it impossible to superimpose the pacifist
polemic of Three Guineas on her last novel,’ MacKay contends, positioning
herself in opposition to critics who claim Woolf ’s pacifism never wavered
(2007, p. 30). Anna Snaith, in contrast, has claimed that ‘Woolf ’s commitment
to pacifism […] allowed no oscillation’ (2000a, p. 145). My genetic reading of
Between the Acts recognizes and explores Woolf ’s tempering of her pacifist
argument in her last novel, while maintaining that Woolf ’s hopes for England’s
future in Between the Acts continue to revolve around a feminist-pacifist
vision of revolutionizing British society and resisting its inclination to war by
dissolving patriarchal gender roles.3 Just as her anti-patriotism remains the
dominant theme of Between the Acts, despite this text’s exploration of national
consciousness, her pacifism remains equally important, if submerged, to her
analysis of British society.
Snaith posits that ‘the fixity of [Woolf ’s] pacifism did not translate itself into
her writing’ in her final novel because her arguments against war were super-
seded in the event of a return to international conflict by ‘her concern with the
audience and artist’s roles both during war and in general’ (2000a, p. 146). The
development of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism was motivated from the early
1930s by her conviction that, as intellectuals, artists have a duty to respond
publicly to social, political and economic upheaval in times of national or
international crisis. This conviction affected a transition in the focus of Woolf ’s
oeuvre, but from her earliest fictional outputs and throughout her high experi-
mental novels Woolf ’s output had always reflected her politics. Mark Hussey
views Woolf ’s fiction as ‘a kind of Trojan horse’ that subtly smuggles cultural
analysis into the reader’s thought processes (1991a, p. 10). He contends that by
removing references to World War I from the draft of the ‘Time Passes’ section
of To the Lighthouse, for example, Woolf aimed through a ‘pattern of occlusion’
to fashion a deceptively apolitical appearance for her fiction that would conceal
her critique of war (1991a, p. 10). ‘The connections between male supremacy
and war are rarely explicit’ in Woolf ’s novels, Hussey suggests, because she
‘wants the reader to become aware for herself in the process of reading’ (1991a,
p. 10, emphasis in original). ‘[Woolf] is not writing manifestos,’ he argues, ‘but
creating art that subtly transforms our perspectives by enacting in its form a
subversive content’ (1991a, p. 10). Following this method, which, as detailed
in Chapter 2, had already been expanded in The Years, Between the Acts brings
together elements of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism and conceals them, by
design, within a narrative framework that prompts her readers to take a closer
look at themselves and their complicity in the patriarchal social order that
engenders war.
My analysis in this chapter is organized into three sections. The first offers
a brief overview of the textual history of Between the Acts and the social and
political context in which this novel was written. The second explores Woolf ’s
public statements on the relation of aesthetics to politics during 1932–40,
focusing on three texts written by Woolf in response to the increasing amount
of politicized art, poetry and fiction produced in this period: A Letter to a
Young Poet (1932), ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’ (1936) and ‘The Leaning
Tower’ (1940). For the purpose of this chapter, these three essays are viewed
as pre-texts to Woolf ’s analysis of art’s social role in Between the Acts. The
writers Woolf addresses in these essays are predominately the male, leftist poets
and related prose writers retrospectively identified following Samuel Hynes’s
classic study as ‘The Auden Generation’ (see Hynes, 1976). It is these writers to
whom this chapter refers when discussing Woolf ’s perception of this decade’s
‘leaning-tower generation’ (E 6: p. 274), although it should be noted that Woolf
was, of course, aware that these writers were not the only younger producers of
literature working in this period.4 Woolf ’s public responses to the relationship
between literature and politics and her reflections on art’s potentially human-
izing role understandably evolved during 1932–40 as war became increasingly
likely and then following its outbreak.
The third section of this chapter turns to Between the Acts and the portrayal
of art’s social role in this late text. Woolf ’s essayistic statements on the associ-
ation between art and politics are absorbed and debated in Between the Acts,
which delivers an oblique commentary on the subject and covertly reveals her
feminist-pacifist politics. Woolf ’s examination of English culture and the threat

posed to it by international conflict in Between the Acts emotively echoes her
anxious description in November 1936 of ‘War surrounding our island’ (D 5:
p. 32). Nationalistic war propaganda responded to this vulnerability with assur-
ances of Britain’s difference from and supremacy over her European adversaries,
but Woolf ’s portrait of the inhabitants of Pointz Hall and the surrounding
community stresses their interconnectedness and is indicative of her continuing
conviction that humanity is bound together by aspects of shared experience
capable of traversing temporal and geographical boundaries. The version of
English history offered here, while containing ‘moments of communal longing’ as
Esty identified (2004, p. 92), also, as Briggs has observed, ‘turns Englishness into
a joke’ (2006a, p. 202). Woolf ’s representation of English culture in Between the
Acts is overwhelmingly anti-patriotic and, I argue, conveys her internationalist
political outlook, prompting her readers to recognize shared aspects of human
experience, common to all regardless of historical moment or nationality, rather
than social differences. The many central European Jewish refugees seeking
asylum in June 1939, a nameless voice from the pageant audience reminds us, are
simply ‘People like ourselves, beginning life again’ (BA, p. 88). The community
surrounding Pointz Hall exists not only in English society, of which, for the
purposes of the novel, they are representative, but also, Woolf insists, within a
wider European community to which they are politically and culturally tied.
The textual and contextual history of Between the Acts
Set on one day in mid-June 1939, less than three months before Germany’s
invasion of Poland on 1 September, Between the Acts recaptures the historical
moment directly preceding the outbreak of World War II for an audience now
living through that event. This dating accentuates the wartime moment, empha-
sizing the future that the reader knows to be approaching, while also reminding
the reader that the wartime moment, like the pre-war moment, is subject to
change, cannot last forever, and will one day give way to another post-war era.
Although a consciously wartime text, the textual history of Woolf ’s last novel
begins prior to war’s outbreak. The earliest dated draft of Between the Acts,
initially titled ‘Pointz Hall’, suggests that the work was begun on 2 April 1938.
Woolf ’s first reference to the text appears in her diary on Tuesday 11 April, a
day before the proofs of Three Guineas were due to arrive, as she engaged in
the ‘sober drudgery’ of beginning her biography of Roger Fry to ‘tide over the
horrid anti climax of 3 Gs’ (D 5: p. 133). With twenty pages of her biography
‘put down’ Woolf found her mind ‘free for fresh adventures’; she recorded, ‘Last
night I began making up again: Summers night: a complete whole: that’s my
idea’ (D 5: p. 133). On 26 April 1938 she wrote of the novel that was to become
Between the Acts:
why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all lit[erature] discussed in connection with
real little incongruous living humour; & anything that comes into my head; but
“I” rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation?
[…] And English country; & a scenic old house – & a terrace where nursemaids
walk? & people passing – & a perpetual variety & change from intensity to
prose. & facts – & notes; & – but eno’.
D 5: p. 135
From the first, Woolf had a clear idea of her final novel as a work about
community. Like The Years, it was based on a familiar and popular fictional
sub-genre, the country house novel, and would subvert and modernize this
form. Beginning with a home as The Years had done, Woolf imagined, this new
work would radiate out from this point through its rural location to encompass
also the surrounding ‘English country’ and evoke a collective ‘We’ in a manner
reminiscent of the ensemble voice of The Waves.5
This shift towards the collective in Between the Acts can be read in part
as a response to the frequent accusations of individualism levelled against
Bloomsbury and Woolf from the 1930s. In The Intelligentsia of Great Britain
(1935), for example, Dimitri Mirsky had scathingly declared:
The basic trait of Bloomsbury is a mixture of philosophic rationalism, political

rationalism, aestheticism, and a cult of the individuality. […] Being theoreticians of
the passive, dividend-drawing and consuming section of the bourgeoisie, they are
extremely intrigued by their own minutest inner experiences, and count them an
inexhaustible treasure store of further more minutious inner experiences.
Quoted in Rosenbaum, 1975, p. 384
Following her death, Daiches similarly depicted Woolf as isolated from society
by her class, deducing that, from the prevalence of ‘persons of unusual culture’
in her fiction, ‘it never seems to have occurred to her that the majority of the
population of Britain had not enjoyed the classics and could not read a foreign
language’ (1945, p. 10). In response to such criticisms which had been levelled at
her output from the early 1930s, in Between the Acts Woolf aimed to comment
on British society and politics through portraying the interactions of an entire
community. This approach functioned as a retort to the contemporaries who
characterized her writing as individualistic and outdated, and expanded her

earlier fictional practice of representing the relationships between individuals
as a microcosm of wider society’s behaviour and concerns.6
Practically, Between the Acts was written in a quite different manner from
Woolf ’s earlier novels. She wrote her first version straight onto the typewriter
in snatches of time taken between working on Roger Fry rather than drafting
each section first in longhand. The typescript drafts of this novel and surviving
holograph fragments reveal that the form and action of this book was largely
achieved early in its composition.7 The first two typescript drafts, arranged
from extant typescript fragments and designated ‘Earlier’ and ‘Later’ by their
editor Mitchell A. Leaska, have been transcribed and published under the title
Pointz Hall (PH).8 A third typescript represents Woolf ’s most advanced draft of
the novel and was recently made available through Hussey’s scholarly edition of
Between the Acts (2011). Two further versions of this final typescript survive,
as Hussey notes, one of which evidences Leonard Woolf ’s revisions to the
novel prior to its posthumous publication. Comparison of these draft versions
reveals that, in sharp contrast to the work originally conceived as The Pargiters
and realized as The Years and Three Guineas, Woolf ’s final novel was composed
speedily and went through very few major structural changes. Having begun
drafting her novel in April 1938, by 19 December that year she had ‘written […]
120 pages of Pointz Hall,’ which she then planned to make ‘a 220 page book’ (D
5: p. 193). These first 120 pages of the Earlier Typescript (ETS) sketch out the
narrative of Between the Acts from the opening interactions of the Oliver family
to the central section of the pageant, and the characters, scenes, mood, and even
large portions of the dialogue in this draft already bear remarkable resemblance
to the published text (see PH, pp. 33–103). During 1939–40 Woolf continued
work on the novel, before proudly declaring ‘The Pageant – or Poyntz Hall’
finished on 23 November 1940:
I am a little triumphant about the book. […] I think its [sic] more quintessential
than the others. More milk skimmed off. A richer pat, certainly a fresher than
that misery The Years. I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page. This book was
only (I must note) written at intervals when the pressure was at its highest,
during the drudgery of Roger.
D 5: p. 340
This note of triumph was soon lost during subsequent revisions despite Leonard
Woolf ’s high praise of the novel. In a letter to John Lehmann sent a day before
her suicide, Woolf called Between the Acts ‘too silly and trivial’ for publication in
its current state and insisted that she must revise further to avoid a financial loss
(L 6: p. 486). Leonard enclosed a covering note with his wife’s letter informing
Lehmann of his certainty ‘that Virginia was on the verge of a complete nervous
breakdown’ and asking him not to reply at present (L 6: p. 486, n. 1). In the event
the novel was published, with Leonard as editor for the proofs, on 17 July 1941.
This textual history raises potential difficulties for the critic. Firstly, the
lack of authorial involvement in the latter preparations of the typescript for
publication is problematic. Leaska, editor of the Pointz Hall drafts, notes that
Between the Acts cannot be read as a completed novel and should be viewed
as the third draft of a work to which Woolf would have undoubtedly made
further changes (PH, p. xiv). Regarding the text as unfinished and unstable
causes Leaska anxiety and leads him to speculate how Woolf might have revised
her novel further, suggesting that ‘a great many details in the text […] appear
to have been drawn directly from daily life, and set down on paper without
having been sufficiently assimilated for what the author would have thought to
be appropriate aesthetic transformation’ (PH, p. xiv). Viewing a published novel
as an advanced draft rather than a completed work is less unsettling for a genetic
critic, however, as this methodology is underpinned by the assumption that all
literary works are both fixed textual objects, born of their specific historical
circumstances, and transient materializations of wider, fluctuating thinking and
writing processes. In fact, considering Briggs’s revelation that Woolf returned
to and revised her works for subsequent editions (2006a, p. 208–30), perhaps
all her published texts should be read as advanced drafts, since Woolf herself
evidently did not regard the act of publication as an act of completion. With
this recognition of the continual fluidity of Woolf ’s revisionary processes in
mind, speculations regarding ‘what the author would have thought’ appear
unwise. Woolf ’s opinions regarding the relation of art to life shifted through
the interwar period, making it inappropriate to assume her future choices from
her previous authorial practices. Indeed, as this chapter will argue, the limited
amount of aesthetic transformation applied to Woolf ’s inclusion of details
relating to current affairs in the different versions of Between the Acts can be
interpreted as indicative of her desire to engage more openly with contemporary
society and politics in this late novel. Yet Leonard’s involvement in the prepa-
ration of the final typescript for publication remains problematic. His decision
to place the text of the pageant in italics in the first British edition, for example,
presents a division between the action of the pageant and the reactions of its
audience which is not present in Woolf ’s last typescript. While any pursuit of
textual authority is ‘inevitably compromised’, as the general editors of the new
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf acknowledge (Goldman
and Sellers, 2011, p. xiv), the composite text achieved through Leonard’s silent
revisions has fundamentally altered his wife’s unfinished text and lacks the
editorial transparency required by modern textual critics. It is for this reason
that Hussey’s edition of Between the Acts returns to Woolf ’s final typescript,
exploring Leonard’s revisions in the process, and that in this chapter I choose to
draw my quotations from this edition of the text.9
A second potential difficulty posed by the textual history of Between the
Acts is that once we are familiar with the contexts surrounding the novel’s
production, it is impossible to read the work without an awareness of its
status as Woolf ’s final novel and without knowledge that while considering
revising this book for publication she decided to end her life. Genetic criticism’s
insistence on the potentially distorting effect of retrospective reading should
warn us, however, against interpreting Between the Acts too rigidly through
our awareness of Woolf ’s suicide on 28 March 1941. Knowledge of this event
leads Guiguet to suggest that Between the Acts ‘constitutes a new and final stage
in that eternal quest in which the art of Virginia Woolf consisted’, as if Woolf
herself imagined this novel to be the climax and finishing flourish of her literary
career (1965, pp. 322–3). Yet up until March 1941, far from viewing Between the
Acts as her final literary act, Woolf was busy working on new literary projects
including, notably, a work of criticism to follow in the vein of her Common
Reader collections for which she had already begun two essays, ‘Anon’ and ‘The
Reader’ (Woolf, 1979).10 ‘Between the Acts is not a culmination,’ Snaith observes,
‘it is a text resulting from the contingencies of Woolf ’s situation between 1938
and 1941’ (2000a, p. 148). Reading backwards can tempt critics to see the
novel’s allusions to death and its premonitions of destruction, dispersal and
demise primarily as omens of Woolf ’s own personal ending rather than recog-
nizing that the novel’s musings on death are evocative of collective fears about
the future of England and wider European society in anticipation and then
following the onset of a second world war.11 The novel responds, as Beer has
noted (1996, p. 125), to Woolf ’s awareness of the fate of Jews on the continent,
to the threat of German invasion during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and to her
‘matter of fact talk’ with Leonard about the possibility of ‘suicide if Hitler lands’
(D 5: pp. 284–5).12 Evidently Woolf ’s state of mind while writing informed her
text, but her last depressive episode and subsequent suicide are far less signif-
icant to Between the Acts – the major themes and action of which had been set
two years before her death – than the intense atmosphere of political unrest in
which Woolf conceived and composed this novel.
Three weeks before Woolf began her first draft of Pointz Hall on 2 April 1938,
the Nazi Third Reich made their first military expansion of German territory:
‘Hitler has invaded Austria,’ she noted on 12 March, ‘that is at 10 last night his
army crossed the frontier, unresisted [sic]’ (D 5: p. 129). ‘This fact, which combines
with the Russian trials,’ Woolf continued, alluding to the public trial in Moscow of
twenty-one Stalin opponents under spurious charges of treason or terrorism, ‘puts
its thorn into my morning’ (D 5: p. 129). The threat of invasion hangs ominously
over the Pointz Hall community throughout Between the Acts despite their lack
of voiced interest in events beyond their locality. The novel’s composition saw the
end of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s triumph with the final fall of Madrid. It
also saw the mass arrival of Jewish and intellectual refugees to Britain and France
from Central Europe prompted by the horrific persecution of ethnic, religious
and social minorities under the German Nazi government.13 Finally, it witnessed
Germany’s invasion of Poland, the outbreak of World War II in September 1939,
and the airborne Battle of Britain in 1940 during which the Woolfs’ London home
was demolished. Writing to Ethel Smyth on 1 March 1941 Woolf asked:
Do you feel […] that this is the worst stage of the war? I do. I was saying to
Leonard, we have no future. He says thats [sic] what gives him hope. […] What
I feel is the suspense when nothing actually happens.
L 6: p. 475
Suspense, fear of impending catastrophe, boredom and hope can all be found
in Between the Acts. Both a pre-war and a wartime novel, this work asks what
future there can be for English village life and for England as a whole in the
midst of European conflict.
Political literature had been thriving in Britain throughout the ten-year
build-up to the period of extreme international social and political chaos during
which Between the Acts evolved. Looking back in 1978, Stephen Spender argued
that ‘[t]he thirties was the decade in which young writers became involved in
politics’, adding that ‘[t]he politics of this generation were almost exclusively
those of the left’ (1978, p. 13). Debates about the proper relation between
aesthetics and politics raged across Europe in this period. At home and abroad,
politicized societies of writers and artists emerged to defend culture against
the threat of fascism. As discussed in Chapter 3, Woolf involved herself in the
establishment of the British section of the International Association of Writers
for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC) in 1935. Yet she was inherently distrustful
of art that had been produced as part of a writer’s political programme and
rebuked those she reviewed who weaved social grievances into their work.
Woolf ’s disparaging attitude towards the political literature that thrived during
the 1930s in her essays A Letter to a Young Poet and ‘The Leaning Tower’ has
helped to propagate the impression that she was entirely hostile to the fusing of
political concerns with aesthetics. Shortly after finishing her Letter to a Young
Poet in 1932, however, Woolf turned her attention to how she might combine
literature, social history and feminist argument in her planned ‘novel-essay’, The
Pargiters. As Jane Marcus noted in the first comprehensive study of ‘Virginia
Woolf on Art and Propaganda’, this shared early evolution of The Years and
Three Guineas should remind us that though ‘Leonard felt that art and politics
should not be mixed […] Woolf was uncertain about this’ (1988, p. 114). My
analysis in this chapter acknowledges and investigates discrepancies between
Woolf ’s statements about the relationship between art and politics and her
practice as a literary and political writer during 1932–41.
Debating the role of art in times of chaos
‘[I]f newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell
the truth about politics and the truth about art,’ Woolf argued in Three Guineas,
‘we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art’ (TG, pp. 295–6).
Throughout the 1930s Woolf wrote of art as a faith to be believed in, just as
‘the glory of war’ had become a religion in her eyes among those who failed
to recognize international conflict as merely ‘a tedious game for elderly dilet-
tantes […] the tossing of bombs instead of balls over frontiers instead of nets’
(TG, p. 295). Woolf ’s statements in this 1938 text suggest a distinct separation
in her mind between art and politics. This opposition is complicated in her
later novel Between the Acts. Through the figure of Miss La Trobe and her
precarious pageant, Woolf asks to what extent art can influence the outlook and
behaviour of those who receive it and questions what role aesthetics can occupy
in a society threatened by violence. This change in position in part reflects the
environment of international conflict in which Between the Acts was written,
but it also links back to a number of fundamental long-term contradictions in
Woolf ’s thinking on the relation between aesthetics and politics. Throughout
the 1930s, and, indeed, throughout her oeuvre, Woolf sustained an implicit
belief in art’s ability to humanize and elevate its appreciators above the barbaric
behaviours of society in the mass, while also maintaining that art and the artist
are indelibly connected to, and the product of, the society in which they exist.
The following discussion teases out such discrepancies in Woolf ’s critical state-
ments about the application of politics in art through the 1930s and early 1940s.
Woolf ’s emergence as a public critic of contemporary culture in the early

1930s began with a statement of distaste for overtly political literature. A Letter
to a Young Poet was first published as part of the Hogarth Letters series as a prose
pamphlet in 1932.14 In this essay Woolf famously lamented the growing fashion
for including political sentiment within contemporary verse. Her primary
subject and imagined audience are the predominately male, leftist ‘leaning-
tower’ generation of the 1930s, whose poetry she finds self-absorbed in outlook.
Ostensibly written to John Lehmann, manager of the Hogarth Press and the
‘Young Poet’ of the title (Lehmann’s first collection, A Garden Revisited, had
been published by Hogarth in September 1931), this public ‘letter/essay’ opens
out to address simultaneously three further poets whose poems Woolf cites and
critiques through the course of her discussion: W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis
and Stephen Spender.15 Although their names remain absent, by quoting from
them Woolf directs her analysis of modern poetry to all four poets and their
imitators. Figuring Lehmann and his contemporaries as adolescent malcon-
tents, ‘dress[ing] up as Guy Fawkes and spring[ing] out upon timid old ladies at
street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence-halfpenny’, Woolf
confronts the latent aggression and bitter disillusionment she finds in writing
of this generation (E 5: p. 309). She begs her younger correspondents to ‘treat
[themselves] with respect’ and ‘think twice’ before letting this discontent spill
out into their work (E 5: p. 309). Her allegation that reading modern poetry
is ‘rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking
one in twenty places at once’ further stresses her aversion to the expression of
personal or political anger in a literary text (E 5: p. 316). Contemporaneously
read as an antagonistic declaration not only against those to whom it was
addressed but also against the mixing of art and politics in general, the essay
prompted a hostile response from Peter Quennell, friend of Lehmann and
representative of the younger generation, who replied with his own Hogarth
Letter, A Letter to Mrs. Virginia Woolf (1932).
Direct references to the relationship between art and politics are notably
scarce in Woolf ’s Letter to a Young Poet but Quennell evidently recognized the
debate as implicitly present in her essay as he replied to her on the subject. After
accusing Woolf of liking the verses of her younger poet correspondent ‘even
less than you admit’, Quennell urged Woolf to empathize with the discontented
outlook of the younger generation who ‘can recall barely five or six summers’
before ‘the War to End Wars’ (1932, pp. 5, 17). ‘Strange things happened in his
adolescence’, Quennell notes ominously, reminding Woolf that the modern poet
is ‘the creature of his social and political setting’ and that:
Whether your friend is directly concerned with politics or more sagaciously,

perhaps, passes them by – he is an artist and politicians are politicians – he
cannot escape the backwash which they raise and cannot be expected in an
atmosphere of turmoil to preserve the equanimity of an Augustan poet.
1932, p. 17, p. 20
Quennell suggests the wisdom and desirability of maintaining a divide between

the artist and the politician even though his argument centres on the impossi-
bility of separating the modern poet from the effects of the political climate. His
Letter interestingly stresses this divide more forcefully than Woolf, who avoids
making such a definite statement about the association between art and politics
in her essay.
The crux of Woolf ’s dissatisfaction with contemporary writers in her Letter to
a Young Poet is their overt expression of political opinions within their writing.
Woolf interprets this focus on the writers’ politics as evidence of an insular,
individualistic outlook, paradoxically mirroring and countering the accusation
1930s writers and critics often levelled against her and her Bloomsbury coterie.
She laments that ‘for a long time now poetry has shirked contact with – what shall
we call it? – Shall we […] call it life?’ (E 5: p. 310). The modern poet ‘is much less
interested in what we have in common,’ she argues, ‘than in what he has apart’ (E
5: p. 314). This insistence on literature’s duty to record a wide range of individual
and collective human experience, not only that experienced by its predominantly
male, middle-class, university-educated producers, contains its own politicized
artistic agenda.16 While Woolf ’s mimetic aspirations for contemporary poetry
are not overtly didactic, an oblique, instructive political statement can be located
in her feminist-socialist concern that every variety of human life should find its
expression in literature. The distinction made between aesthetics and politics in
Woolf ’s Letter to a Young Poet is not as absolute as it first seems, yet she maintains,
like Quennell, that the best literature should at least appear to be apolitical. Art has
a responsibility, she suggests, to keep its nose clean.
This argument is developed and expressed at greater length in Woolf ’s
1936 article, ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’.17 This uncharacteristically
explicit declaration on the relation between aesthetics and politics, written four
months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War on 18 July 1936, grew out
of a request from Elizabeth Watson – painter, Communist, and ‘charming and
persuasive […] friend of Quentin Bell’ – who ‘prevailed upon’ Woolf, as Anne
Olivier Bell has identified (D 5: p. 30, n. 4), to write the article on behalf of the
Artists International Association (AIA). The AIA, founded in London in 1933
at the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, was a politically left-wing
exhibiting society whose aim was to promote ‘The International Unity of Artists
Against Imperialist War on the Soviet Union, Fascism and Colonial Oppression’
(quoted in Morris and Redford, 1983, p. 11). Misha Black, one of the AIA’s
founders, later recalled that its ‘roots were very strongly Communist’ and that
the group was ‘initially very much a young man’s organisation’ (quoted in Morris
and Redford, p. 8). During the mid-1930s the AIA maintained fruitful relation-
ships with both the Left Review, whose editors and contributors had styled
themselves as ‘The Writers’ International’, and the Daily Worker, the newspaper
of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), to which a number of AIA’s
members regularly wrote or contributed Marxist cartoons (Morris and Redford,
p. 19). As the organization expanded, altering its manifesto to become a popular
front ‘against Fascism and War and the suppression of culture’ in 1935, it
began to attract associates with a broader range of leftist political consciences,
including pacifists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Morris and Redford, p. 28).
Following the outbreak of Civil War in Spain, the AIA had over 600 members
in August 1936, including many of the most prominent British artists of the
period: Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Laura Knight, Henry Moore and Ben
Nicholson (Morris and Redford, p. 2). Woolf ’s decision to write an article for
the organization, to be published in the Communist Party newspaper on the
occasion of the AIA’s Artists Help Spain exhibition in December 1936, was a
sign, as she informed Julian Bell on 14 November, that all around her she felt
‘politics […] raging faster and fiercer’ (L 6: p. 83).
‘Obviously the writer is in such close touch with human life that any agitation
in it must change his angle of vision’ (E 6: p. 75), Woolf argues at the start of her
Daily Worker article, encompassing and extending her contention that collective
experience should be the main subject of modern verse in A Letter to a Young
Poet. In this atmosphere of increased political anxiety, Woolf asserts that to
understand why the visual artist ‘is affected by the state of society we must try
to define the relations of the artist to society’ (E 6: pp. 75–6). In ‘times of peace,’
she argues, figuring ‘the artist’ here as male, the artist:
held that since the value of his work depended upon freedom of mind, security
of person, and immunity from practical affairs – for to mix art with politics
he held was to adulterate it – he was absolved from political duties […] and in
return created what is called a work of art.
E 6: p. 76
‘Society on its side,’ she continues, ‘bound itself to run the State in such a
manner that it paid the artist a living wage; asked no active help from him; and
considered itself repaid by those works of art which have always formed one
of its chief claims to distinction’ (E 6: p. 76). In peacetime, the artist is granted
detachment from society in order to write and paint ‘without regard for the
political agitations of the moment’ (E 6: p. 76), she maintains, because otherwise
his productions would not provide the humanizing escape from current affairs
that we expect from art. ‘[I]f Bacchus and Ariadne symbolised the conquest
of Abyssinia; if Figaro expounded the doctrines of Hitler,’ she contends, ‘we
should feel cheated and imposed upon, as if, instead of bread made with flour,
we were given bread made with plaster’ (E 6: p. 76). However, Woolf ’s use of the
past tense here is of note. The central precept on which her peacetime contract
is based, that ‘to mix art with politics […] was to adulterate it’, is presented as
outdated (E 6: p. 76). Her allegation that art and politics are held apart by an
unspoken agreement between society and its artists functions only in a remote,
historical moment.
Woolf ’s intimation that Britain was no longer at peace in December 1936
sardonically alludes to the growing public pressure on the British government
at this time, reported at length in the Daily Worker, to intervene against the
nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. The paper’s stance on this situation
is epitomized by a cartoon printed on 4 December 1936, titled, ironically,
‘Restricting the Conflict’ (p. 5). A huddle of pin-striped figures, members of
the League of Nations’ ‘Non-Intervention Committee’ of which Britain was
an enthusiastic proponent, are depicted pleading with a tight-lipped Adolf
Hitler for ‘assurance that we are just seeing things’ as an army of rifle-bearing
soldiers march behind with a Nazi flag in the direction of Madrid. While the
British government resolutely refused to send troops to Spain, the front page
of the Daily Worker issue in which ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’ appeared
praised British volunteers who had recently joined the International Column
in Madrid with the patriotic headline, ‘Spain Now Sings “Tipperary”: The Real
Volunteers at Work’ (Pitcairn, 1936). Edward Scroogie’s account of the AIA’s
December exhibition, printed on the page facing Woolf ’s article, demonstrates
the newspaper’s positive representation of the popular turn against Britain’s
non-interventionist stance at this time. On opening the show, he reports, the
journalist A. J. Cummings declared that people might be surprised to find a
man ‘who had always been interested in pacifist organisations’ introducing this
exhibition, ‘but they must realise that the time had come when, if democracy
was to be saved, pacifism was not enough’ (Scroogie, 1936). A month earlier,
on 12 November, the Daily Worker had printed close-up photographs of the
bruised and blood-splattered bodies of Spanish children killed by the Madrid
bombings (evocative of the photographs of fascist atrocities Woolf alludes to in

Three Guineas) accompanied by the rousing caption: ‘Look on these pictures
and resolve, blow for blow, man for man, shall be our reply until the arms of
democracy have won the only way to peace’ (‘Nazi Bombs’, 1936). Unlike her
Daily Worker editors, and much of the AIA who ‘Why Art To-day Follows
Politics’ aimed to defend, Woolf did not support the opposition of fascism by
force. Her pacifist sentiments remain unspoken, however, within the pages of a
newspaper that now promoted war as the only way to secure peace.
Even without voicing her pacifism, Woolf ’s arguments in ‘Why Art To-day
Follows Politics’ jarred with the Marxist outlook of the Daily Worker. The
paper’s editors printed a disclaimer above her article:
While very glad to print this article by Virginia Woolf in our pages, we must, of
course, point out that it is not entirely our view that she expresses.
We doubt whether artists in the past have been so peacefully immune from
the conditions and issues of the society in which they live as she suggests, and
we feel sure that we can learn quite a lot about ‘the political condition of the age
or the country’ in which Titian, Velasquez, Mozart or Bach, lived by examining
the works which they have left us.18
Yet Woolf also agrees here that the practice of art breeds in the artist, as in the
writer, so strong ‘a feeling for the passions and needs of mankind in the mass’
that ‘the artist is affected as powerfully as other citizens when society is in chaos’
(E 6: p. 77). In the current state of public unrest, she implies, the artist may no
longer be ‘absolved from political duties’ and society may no longer ‘consider[]
itself repaid’ by works of art alone (E 6: p. 76). Woolf prompts her readers to
question the validity of the widely held assumption that art and politics should
not mix even as she herself presents isolation from politics as art’s ideal state.
She concludes ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’ with a statement of the artist’s
responsibility to involve himself in politics when society is in chaos, given that,
faced with the imminent destruction of his society and surrounded by voices
demanding he become ‘the servant of the politician’, the artist cannot remain
apathetic (E 6: p. 77). Prominent political comment might damage the aesthetic
integrity of art, she reasons, but as a citizen, worker and intellectual, the artist
cannot be expected to ignore the serious threat that fascism and war present to
his society, his profession and his existence. With art as her primary subject,
and in the context of the militantly political Daily Worker, Woolf writes more
candidly and less reproachfully on the fusion of politics and aesthetics in this
article than at any other point in the decade.
Turning back to the subject of literature in 1940, Woolf produced a further

contribution to the debate on the relationship between aesthetics and politics
in ‘The Leaning Tower’.19 First published in Hogarth’s Folios of New Writing, this
late essay focuses on the importance of class to the politicized literature of the
1930s. Woolf originally delivered ‘The Leaning Tower’ as a speech to a meeting
of the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton on 27 April 1940, before
revising it to be published by the Hogarth Press in the autumn. On 23 April
1940 she told Hugh Walpole:
I’ve got to lecture – upon you among others – to the Brighton working classes
on Saturday. Modern trends they want to hear about […] ‘Hugh Walpole,’ I
say is an aristocrat. […] Aristocrat intellectually, I add. And what comes next?
Aldous Huxley I suppose: T. S. Eliot I suppose. Auden. Spender.
L 6: p. 394
Primarily addressed to a working-class audience, ‘The Leaning Tower’ contains

a forthright discussion of how the strict delineations of British class structures
and the exclusivity of Britain’s public schools and universities have shaped the
development of English literature.20 ‘It is a fact, not a theory,’ Woolf contends,
‘that all writers from Chaucer to the present day, with so few exceptions that one
hand can count them, have sat upon the same kind of chair – a raised chair’ (E 6:
p. 265). This text provides a thorough explication of the socio-economic privi-
leges on which the writer’s ‘ivory tower’ is founded with an emphatic claim that
this elitist tower is crumbling. Increased class mobility, mass unemployment,
poverty, social unrest, and the threat of war, Woolf argues, combined in the
interwar period to make its writers suddenly ‘acutely […] conscious of their
middle-class birth; of their expensive educations’ (E 6: p. 268). Woolf reads
the politicization of literature in this era as a response to this awareness. She
identifies ‘[t]he bleat of the scapegoat’ in the professed socialist leanings of
this generation’s literary output; unable to whole-heartedly abuse a social
system that provides them with ‘a very fine view and some sort of security,’
she contends, ‘very naturally you abuse society in the person of some retired
admiral or spinster or armament manufacturer; and by abusing them hope to
escape whipping yourself ’ (E 6: p. 268). ‘Discomfort; pity for themselves; anger
against society’ are ‘all very natural tendencies’ for Britain’s interwar writers to
feel, Woolf allows, but nonetheless rebukes them for permitting these emotions
to show in their poetry and prose (E 6: p. 268).
Woolf ’s discussion of the social and economic conditions that have influ-
enced literature produced in Britain from 1815–1940 in ‘The Leaning Tower’
draws on and elucidates the distinction made in ‘Why Art To-day Follows
Politics’ between art’s relation to politics in peacetime and the artist’s social
role in times of political chaos. Beginning at the start of the nineteenth century,
during which ‘England, of course, was often at war’, Woolf charts the influence
of battles, empire-building and defence abroad, and, more significantly, ‘the
peaceful and prosperous state of England’ at home on the production of
literature in the preceding century (E 6: pp. 261–2). The imperial wars in which
England was engaged throughout the nineteenth century engendered a state of
social stability and economic growth that precipitated the rise of the thriving
middle class at home from which the majority of writers and intellectuals were
drawn. Woolf suggests that war ‘did not affect the great majority of […] writers
at all’ in the nineteenth century, since the ‘rumour of battles took a long time to
reach England’ (E 6: p. 261). ‘Wars were then remote’ and ‘carried on by soldiers
and sailors, not by private people,’ she argues:
The proof of that is to be found in the work of two great novelists – Jane Austen
and Walter Scott. Each lived through the Napoleonic wars; each wrote through
them. But, […] neither of them in all their novels mentioned the Napoleonic wars.
E 6: p. 261
Prior to writing this essay, it is interesting to observe, Woolf evoked the Napoleonic
wars in the early pages of her first typescript draft of Pointz Hall (PH, p. 37). This
allusion was retained in the opening of Between the Acts, as if countering her sense
of the previous omission of war in nineteenth-century English literature through
a gesture to the forthcoming oblique but pervasive presence of the current
conflict in her own text (BA, p. 3). Writers can no longer remain aloof from
war, Woolf owns in both the essay and the novel. The proliferation of political
commentary in contemporary literature, she argues in ‘The Leaning Tower’, is the
result of changes in how wars are fought and reported in the twentieth century.
Woolf ’s essay makes a distinction between nineteenth-century wartime and
the wartime of the modern age, which begins for the purposes of ‘The Leaning
Tower’ in 1914. Emphasizing the primitive communications of the pre-indus-
trial era, she asserts that ‘It was only when the mail coaches clattered along
the country roads hung with laurels that the people in villages like Brighton
knew that a victory had been won and lit their candles and stuck them in their
windows’ (E 6: p. 261). ‘Compare that with our state to-day,’ Woolf declares:
To-day we hear the gunfire in the Channel. We turn on the wireless; we hear an
airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine
caught fire; he plunged into the sea; […] rose to the top and was rescued by a
trawler. Scott never saw the sailors drowning at Trafalgar; Jane Austen never
heard the cannon roar at Waterloo. Neither of them heard Napoleon’s voice as
we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening.
E 6: p. 261
Far from remote, Woolf stresses, wars are now experienced on the home
front. This passage reflects Woolf ’s concurrent depictions of war in her Earlier
Typescript draft of Between the Acts and in a short essay composed in August
1940 for an American audience and published in New Republic in October,
‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’.
‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ vividly depicts the impact of modern
warfare on civilians from the perspective of a woman lying in bed in the dark,
‘listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to
death’ (E 6: p. 242). Woolf sends her notes of air raids, of ‘the drone of planes’,
of loudspeakers crying ‘Hitler!’ and of her conviction that a ‘subconscious
Hitlerism’ lives in all patriarchal societies to ‘the men and women whose sleep
has not yet been broken by machine-gun fire, in the belief that they will rethink
them generously and charitably’ and perhaps find in them a way to ‘think peace
into existence’ (E 6: pp. 242–5). In her drafting of Between the Acts, Woolf
similarly alluded covertly to these signifiers of wartime despite the novel’s
pre-war setting. The sound of droning first appeared in the Earlier Typescript
version of Pointz Hall during April-May 1938 as the ‘drone of the breeze’ (PH,
p. 47) and took on a more sinister tone towards the end of the first draft when
Woolf wrote the appearance of the droning aircraft in ‘perfect formation’ that
zoom past during Reverend Streatfield’s speech (PH, p. 166). The composition
of this latter section of the typescript can, according to Leaska, be dated to the
summer of 1940, and is therefore contemporaneous with both the Battle of
Britain, which began in July 1940, and Woolf ’s writing of ‘Thoughts on Peace in
an Air Raid’. In the published version of Between the Acts, the ‘drone of the trees’,
‘of the garden’, continues to sound early in the novel as an overture to the ‘drone’
of the twelve aeroplanes in battle formation that interrupt the Reverend at the
close of the pageant (BA, pp. 11, 21, 138–9). The patriotic songs and disjointed
rhetoric from Miss La Trobe’s gramophone, as Michele Pridmore-Brown (1998,
p. 411) has identified, also evoke Woolf ’s perception of the experience of
‘turn[ing] on the wireless’ in wartime (E 6: p. 261), imitating and exposing the
emotive power of the radio broadcasts through which Britain heard Hitler’s
threats and was rallied by Winston Churchill during the war. In ‘The Leaning
Tower’, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, and Between the Acts Woolf gestures
to the revolutionary impact that technological developments – the radio and
military aircraft – have had on Britain’s experience of warfare.21 Writers of the

twentieth century, she concludes in ‘The Leaning Tower’, are thus more exposed
to war than ever before.
‘The Leaning Tower’ both sustains Woolf ’s prior distrust of literature that
includes explicit political argument in A Letter to Young Poet and recognizes
the impossibility of writers producing works that ignore political events in the
current wartime climate. As she had argued in ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’,
art and politics are not easily isolated from one another in times of social chaos.
The composition and publication of Three Guineas, positioned as a propa-
gandistic rather than an artistic text (despite its innovative aesthetic structure
and tone), embodies Woolf ’s awareness that writers can no longer distance
themselves from politics with the threat of war approaching. Woolf ’s evolving
opinions on this subject during the 1930s and early 1940s are also evidenced by
her fictional practice. The appearance of the Battle of Britain in Between the Acts
through repeated references to the droning sound of aircraft, despite the novel
being set a year before the event, is one example of how Woolf ’s final aesthetic
production blends art with current affairs. Between the Acts engages with and
responds to international politics with urgency, expanding Woolf ’s late cultural
criticism by itself addressing the question of art’s role in wartime.
Art’s social role in Between the Acts
While The Years ends with sunrise and a poignant ‘air of extraordinary beauty,
simplicity and peace’ (Y, p. 413), Between the Acts closes with sunset and
impending conflict. Before they can embrace, and from that embrace perhaps
produce ‘another life’, Isa and Giles Oliver ‘must fight, as the dog fox fights with
the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of the night’ (BA, p. 157). The
contrasting endings of Woolf ’s penultimate and final novel reflect the shift in
Britain’s political outlook from the turbulent but ostensibly neutral period in
which The Years evolved, 1931–7, to the pre-war and wartime era, 1938–41,
in which Between the Acts grew into being. This shift is similarly reflected by
Woolf ’s altered perspective in her final novel on the relationship between art and
society. The composition of The Years was informed by Woolf ’s production of
research scrapbooks; while composing Between the Acts Woolf recorded aspects
of the increasingly turbulent political situation directly into her Earlier and
Later Typescript drafts, drawing on the experimental fictional methods of her
earlier ‘novel of fact’ (TP, p. 9). In line with her earlier statements on the relation
between art and politics in A Letter to a Young Poet and ‘The Leaning Tower’,
Between the Acts does not overtly introduce a political agenda, although the
novel’s sensitive portrayals of the repressed inner thoughts of female outsiders
Lucy, Isa and Miss La Trobe evidently reflect Woolf ’s feminist-socialist concern
to depict those aspects of human experience not recorded by the predominantly
male literary canon. This late novel follows the trend of Woolf ’s earlier fiction in
camouflaging her cultural criticism within the narrative, revealing her politics
through the course of the novel’s action and dialogue rather than in authorial
comment. Yet Between the Acts is also distinctive in its explicit debate, through
the inclusion of references to precise historical events and the portrayal of the
village pageant, of the threat posed to art, literature and society by fascism and
war.
Despite earlier statements against politicized literature and art, Woolf ’s final
novel is scattered with allusions to late 1930s national and international events.
Drafting this text, Woolf returned to the research practices that had evidenced
and shaped her feminist critique of the historical oppression of women in The
Years to embed contemporary contexts in Between the Acts. The process of
journalistic scrapbooking that Woolf adopted to support the production of
The Years and Three Guineas was incorporated into the writing of Woolf ’s later
fictional text. For example, Bart Oliver scans his newspaper for an article on
‘M. Daladier […] pegging down the franc’ in both the Earlier Typescript and
the Final Typescript of Between the Acts (PH, p. 46; BA, p. 10), alluding to the
pre-war decision of Edouard Daladier, then Prime Minister of France, to drasti-
cally devalue the franc in order to stabilize it at a lower level. As reported in The
Times on 5 May 1938, Daladier argued this action was necessary in a broadcast
address on 4 May in part due to the detrimental impact of ‘foreign affairs’ and
‘the divisions of Europe, which did not cease to arm’ on the struggling French
economy (quoted in ‘The Daladier Franc’). When Bart Oliver reads of this event
in his June 1939 newspaper in Between the Acts this now-historical reference
adds both an echo of fact and a sense of unreality to the novel’s pre-war
setting, corroborating and muddying her dating of the ‘present’ moment. The
importance to Woolf of evoking such precise political contexts in her novel is
indicated by the presence of Daladier from the first draft. Leaska estimates that
the portion of the Earlier Typescript containing these references was produced
during 2 April-15 June 1938; the identification of the Daladier reference dates
these pages to the latter half of this early period of the novel’s composition.
From the outset, Woolf composed this aesthetic work through the experimental
blending of fiction and current affairs.
An intensely self-reflexive work, Between the Acts acknowledges the pressure

of politics on contemporary British literature and culture through the absorption
of such journalistic details within her writing process. The transmission of news
reports of specific historical events or of unspecific events with an authentic ring
within the narrative also emphasizes the myth of England as a secure island
nation. The story Isa reads in the newspaper of the rape of a young girl lulled by
English soldiers to see a horse with a green tail (BA, p. 15), as Stuart N. Clarke
has valuably detailed, recalls closely a report in The Times on 29 June 1938 of the
trial of three soldiers from Whitehall Barracks accused of the same crime (1990,
pp. 3–4). The presence of this reference in the novel, first worked into the Earlier
Typescript draft roughly contemporaneously with the article’s publication (PH,
p. 54), contradicts the propagandistic vision of the English soldier as defender
of his country’s women and children and, by extension, the allegory of England
as an island protector of her people. Giles’s reference to ‘sixteen men […] shot,
others prisoned, just over there’ across the Channel similarly erodes the idea
of England as isolated and protected from continental Europe, and highlights
the country’s temporal and spatial position as part of European history in the
making (BA, p. 34). The Jewish refugees alluded to as a recent subject seen ‘in
the papers’ act as a warning to the Pointz Hall residents of the looming diffusion
of their own community (BA, p. 88), ominously emphasized by echoes of the
gramophone’s chant ‘Dispersed are we’ (BA, pp. 75, 141–2, 144). With no actors
left to thank at the close of the pageant, William turns to thank Lucy Swithin
for his afternoon’s entertainment; ‘Putting one thing with another,’ the narration
considers, taking on the thoughts of William, ‘it was unlikely that they would
ever meet again’ (BA, p. 149). A young man, William knows his future lies far
away from the quiet countryside of Pointz Hall if this ambiguous ‘one thing
[and] another’ results in the likely outbreak of war. The action of preparing for,
attending, and discussing the pageant in Between the Acts creates a momentary
oasis from the march of contemporary events, but the characters cannot
ultimately escape this march or England’s proximity to Europe and the coming
war.
England’s close spatial and temporal proximity to war is also signalled in the
novel by Bart Oliver’s revelation that the Channel is ‘Thirty-five [miles] only’
from Pointz Hall (BA, p. 21). The exact location of Woolf ’s fictional ‘middle-
sized house’ in Between the Acts remains a mystery (BA, p. 5), but its distance
from the English Channel was clearly significant during Woolf ’s drafting of the
novel. In the Earlier Typescript version the Channel is ‘Seventy-three miles’
from Pointz Hall (PH, p. 59); in the Later Typescript, written after November
1940, it is at first ‘eighty-three’ and then ‘thirty-five’ miles away (PH, p. 280). By
moving Pointz Hall closer to the Channel in the Later Typescript, Woolf evokes
the pre-war pressure of European politics on English culture and wartime fears
of invasion in Britain in 1940. Her desire to prompt such reflections is further
evidenced by Lucy Swithin’s musings in the Later Typescript, omitted from her
final draft: ‘They call it the North Sea now […] not the German ocean. But
why? […] how could she explain to her niece’ (PH, p. 280). Woolf ’s careful
positioning of Pointz Hall conveys the imminent threat posed by European
politics to English culture, represented in Between the Acts by the house’s inhab-
itants and their community as they prepare to participate as actors and audience
in the performance of the annual village pageant.
Pageantry had both an ancient and a recent cultural history for writers such
as Woolf, Forster and Eliot, Esty details, as ‘one of the ur-genres of English
Literature […] a folk practice from which subsequent literary forms descend’,
and as the modern pageant-play, a genre reinvented and popularized in Britain
by Louis Napoleon Parker in 1905 and much utilized by professional pageant
producers and community dramatic groups through the Edwardian period
(2004, p. 56). The twentieth-century historical pageant was closely related, as
Deborah Sugg Ryan has observed, to the revival of the nineteenth-century
imperial exhibition; Oxford pageant master, Frank Lascelles notably staged the
Pageant of London at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 (2007,
pp. 66–7). In the 1930s pageants were still often performed on Empire Day (24
May), the birthday of Queen Victoria. These plays became a communal method
of chronicling English history from Roman times to the Revolution, with ‘the
hero of the piece […] a provincial town instead of a celebrated saint’ (2004,
pp. 56–7). Miss La Trobe’s choice of England, ‘[a] child new born’, as the heroine
of her ‘island history’ pageant moves from a localized outlook to an apparently
fiercely patriotic outlook on English culture (BA, p. 56–7). Yet it soon becomes
apparent that England is chosen as the pageant’s subject not to glorify English
culture but to critique it.
The anti-nationalistic pageant of Between the Acts explores England’s cultural
and social history with little concern for political events, military victories or
defeats. The various scenes, dating from England’s divide ‘from France and
Germany’ to the present day, attempt to prompt an objective view of changes
in attitude, material living conditions and domestic arrangements of past ages
while spoofing their literary forms (BA, p. 57). Middle English oral poetry,
Restoration comedy, the nineteenth-century music hall and the Edwardian
comedy of manners are all parodied through the pageant. The audience reacts
diversely to this unorthodox spectacle, which appears very different to the

popular Empire Day pageant-plays with their customary rousing finale with
marching and singing and the audience’s participation in a chorus of ‘God Save
the King’ (see Esty, 2004, p. 57). The Pointz Hall men view the pageant with
condescension and irritation: ‘All our village festivals […] end with a demand
for money,’ Bart declares severely with a snort; ‘Let’s hope to God that’s the end,’
Giles gruffly asserts following the skit on the Victorian family (BA, p. 127). An
anonymous voice muses ‘why leave out the Army, as my husband was saying,
if it’s history?’ (BA, p. 142). By leaving out the familiar militaristic elements
expected of an Empire Day pageant, Miss La Trobe challenges her audience’s
conception of history, which is, her literary-based pageant emphasizes, itself
just a story. Following the final scene, when Miss La Trobe reveals her cast
and audience to be ‘Liars most of us. Thieves too’, the audience are divided on
whether the pageant was ‘brilliantly clever’ or ‘utter bosh’ (BA, pp. 134, 142).
What place can there be for art, Woolf ’s final novel asks, in a wartime
climate? What audience can there be to receive it? Miss La Trobe attempts to
use the pageant to turn her audience’s focus on themselves, but her experiment
comes close to failing. As the cast appear with scraps of old tin cans, candlesticks
and broken mirrors to expose to the audience their distorted appearance in the
final scene, ‘Present time. Ourselves’, only Mrs Manresa can bear to face her
own reflection as she unashamedly reddens her lips in the glass (BA, p. 127). In
contrast to her earlier writings on the subject in the 1930s, this novel conveys no
absolute faith in art’s inherent ability to humanize. Isa scans the shelves of the
Oliver family library for a ‘remedy […] as a person with a raging tooth runs her
eye in a chemist’s shop over green bottles’, but nothing she finds there relieves
her intense negative feelings (BA, p. 14). Isa’s lethargy and dejection haunt the
reader throughout the novel – a product of her age, we are informed, ‘the age
of the century, thirty-nine’ – before eventually emerging in a quiet declaration
of despair with the sudden downpour that interrupts the pageant ‘like all the
people in the world weeping’ just before its final scene (BA, pp. 14, 129). ‘Oh
that our human pain could here have ending!’ Isa murmurs (BA, p. 129),22
drawing, as Hussey has identified, on a line from John Milton’s ‘On the Morning
of Christ’s Nativity’; ‘Time is our tedious song should here have ending’ (explan-
atory note in Woolf, 2011, p. 248). Reliant on the language of a previous text,
this stylized pronouncement echoes Bernard’s final soliloquy in The Waves:
‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’ (W,
p. 228). Bernard’s individual confrontation with death becomes a collective
cry of angst as Isa speaks as a representative for a generation confronting the
recurrence of mechanized warfare on an international scale. Art’s social role is

far from secure in Between the Acts, where it supplies a framework to explore
and express emotional crisis. The power of art to actively enrich the civilization
from which and for which it is produced is less than certain.
Yet Between the Acts is a highly intertextual work, laden with fragmentary
allusions to contemporary and canonical poetry, drama and prose as well
as folkloric sayings and references to popular culture. Literature represents
a constant tradition from which we might learn, this novel suggests, and
through which, like Isa evoking Milton, we strive to find language to interpret
and express our reactions to public and private events. ‘Book-shy […] like
the rest of her generation’, Isa continually quotes and misquotes from literary
texts in Between the Acts as if in an attempt to discover a narrative through
which to understand her life and the age in which she lives (BA, p. 14). Faced
with her feelings of disgust and hatred towards her husband, for example, she
continually falls back on a ‘cliché conveniently provided by fiction’ to reassure
herself of her love for this man: ‘The father of my children’ (BA, p. 10). In the
Earlier Typescript, Isa also ‘continu[es] on the rails obligingly laid down for
her […] by novelists’ to affect her identity as a mother, voicing the words ‘“My
son <and daughter,”>’ to stimulate, or at least to simulate, maternal sentiments
(PH, p. 46). No version of the novel ever quite reveals whether such linguistic
clichés can provide any practical assistance to an individual, to a society, or to
an international community on the brink of conflict. Rather than affirming the
importance of England’s literary heritage as an elevating and civilizing force, the
elusive intertextuality of this late fictional work presents literature as shattered
into pieces and unable to offer shelter from the onslaught of night and violence
which hovers portentously at the novel’s close.
Language itself threatens rebellion in Between the Acts. As the Pointz Hall
family sit down after lunch to watch the pageant, a passage of free indirect
discourse informs us (Isa is its likely source but the narration is unclear): ‘Words
this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and
shook their fists at you’ (BA, p. 44). This strange assertion refers in part to the
strained conversation of Giles and Isa, but also, more ominously, to language’s
potential to intimidate, manipulate and prompt violent actions when used as a
tool of oppression. This power is seen in the next paragraph as Giles viciously
summarizes his opinion of William Dodge, the Oliver family’s unassuming
homosexual lunch guest, who here provides Giles with ‘another peg on which
to hang his rage’:
A toady; a lickspittle; not a downright plain man of his senses; but a teaser and
twitcher; a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying;
not a man to have straightforward love for a woman […] but simply a –
BA, p. 44
Giles’s malicious alliterative rant ends with a word ‘he [can] not speak in public’
although Isa guesses it and mentally rebukes Giles for his train of thought:
‘Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other?’ (BA, pp. 44–5).
This silent verbal attack on William plays out in miniature the persecution of
numerous social, religious, ethnic and intellectual minorities at that moment
under fascist regimes across Europe. Woolf ’s distrust of words in an earlier
essay, ‘Craftsmanship’, delivered as a radio broadcast on 20 April 1937 (see E
6: pp. 91–102), is echoed and politicized in Between the Acts as she links the
unreliability of language to her sense of the harm that words, when used as
propaganda, can inflict on human life. Roger Fry similarly sensed the subjective,
potentially harmful nature of language, as Woolf noted in her 1940 biography;
as a result of this subjectivity he questioned whether literature ‘could be
considered an art’ (RF, p. 193). The depiction of words as rebellious in Woolf ’s
final novel reflects her own anxieties about the aesthetic legitimacy of wartime
literature and her deep concern that language might fail her, as a literary artist,
at this time of political crisis.
In A Letter to a Young Poet and ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’ Woolf
presented art as the product by which society shows itself to be civilized, which
should, therefore, show no traces of barbarous sentiments. Her final novel
complicates these assumptions about art’s social role by problematizing the
civilized/barbarism binary. Giles, an apparently well-socialized and civilized
individual – college educated, a stockbroker, the class of man who, on arriving
home to visitors, changes for lunch – is shown to harbour barbarous instincts
behind his calm exterior through his behaviour in the novel. His malevolent
treatment of his wife and William Dodge, and his violent action of stamping
dead the snake choking on a toad, both serve to illustrate how England’s
perceived civilized values, propagated by its patriarchal, bourgeois society, are
upheld by barbarism. An anonymous voice warns the pageant audience in the
closing speech: ‘Consider the gun slayers, bomb droppers […]. They do openly
what we do slyly’ (BA, p. 134). Likewise, Woolf suggests, language and literature
may do slyly what militaristic actions do outright. Art cannot fail to show the
stains of its producers’ implicit barbarism – whether this is revealed by the
privileged, male, middle-class outlook of the nineteenth-century’s canonical
texts that Woolf identified in ‘The Leaning Tower’, or in the angry, leftist poetry
of the 1930s. Yet throughout the novel we find a process of intellectual digging
into England’s literary, cultural, social, biological and geological past, through
which Woolf continues to believe that English society might learn and remodel
itself.
Notwithstanding her earlier statements against the production of politicized
literature, Woolf repeatedly fuses fiction and social commentary in Between the
Acts. Through Miss La Trobe’s pageant Woolf enables her readers, alongside the
pageant audience, to recognize and challenge the patriarchal English cultural
values that have shaped contemporary society. Seeing the Victorian family
depicted in the pageant, for example, Mrs Lynn Jones initially reminisces,
‘Oh but it was beautiful’, as ‘Home, Sweet Home’ warbles satirically from the
gramophone (BA, p. 124). As the scene progresses, Woolf ’s character then finds
herself contrasting ‘Papa’s beard’ and ‘Mama’s knitting’ unfavourably with her
son-in-law’s clean-shaven face and her daughter’s refrigerator (BA, p. 125).
Comparing her children directly with her parents, as if had they been born in
a different sequence each might have lived the life of the other, Mrs Lynn Jones
begins to investigate an ‘unhygienic’ aspect she suspects in the often-sentimen-
talized Victorian family unit (BA, p. 124). ‘Change’, she acknowledges, ‘had to
come’; ‘or there’d have been yards and yards of Papa’s beard, of Mama’s knitting’
(BA, p. 125). Echoing Woolf ’s attempts in The Pargiters to show her female
readers ‘what you were like fifty years ago’ so that they might learn from ‘that
perspective which is so important for the understanding of the present’ (TP,
p. 9), in Between the Acts Woolf supplies her readers with an overview of distant
and recent English cultural history, prompting them to reflect on how and why
English society has evolved into its present state.
While conscious that pacifism cannot bring an end to war in 1941, Woolf ’s
novel also reveals an implicitly pacifist internationalist viewpoint. Throughout
Between the Acts Woolf suggests the need for England to refashion itself as
an active and co-operative member of a wider European community. The
emphasis on Pointz Hall’s proximity to the Channel, for example, the inclusion
of allusions to international politics, and Lucy Swithin’s repeated visions of
England’s prehistoric existence as a swamp, with ‘[n]o sea at all between us and
the continent’ (BA, p. 22), cumulatively undercut the conception of England
as an island nation and suggest an alternative future life for England within
Europe. Woolf ’s internationalism in this novel is closely tied to her feminist
politics (‘As a woman my country is the whole world’, as she famously declared
in Three Guineas [TG, p. 313]), but it also represents a broader political position,
as occupied by her husband. Leonard Woolf was an influential proponent

of internationalist politics; his International Government (1916) encouraged
the British government to promote the establishment of a League of Nations
following World War I, in which Leonard was involved until its collapse in the
mid-1930s. By the close of the 1930s, Leonard had lost his belief in the power of
reason to bring an end to the present international conflict, arguing in The War
for Peace that ‘the question’ had now become ‘whether, when this war ends, it
is or not possible to regulate and organize the relations of Europeans and their
states in such a way that periodic great wars become improbable’ (1940, p. 3).
The word ‘improbable’ rather than ‘impossible’ here indicates his distance from
his wife’s absolute pacifism. Yet, at the close of Between the Acts, Woolf seems to
pose the same question as Leonard in The War for Peace, if in a more imaginative
fashion. The novel’s final scene offers a cyclical vision of England’s imminent
return to a primitive state, ‘before roads were made, or houses’, through which a
new English society might be born (BA, p. 158). The stripping away of cultural
signifiers such as roads and houses in this closing image of two figures facing
one another in a barren, primitive landscape indicates that this future will not
be governed by existing national boundaries. Woolf asks the reader to consider
how England can and should remake itself in the post-war period.
In the face of international conflict, Woolf admits in Between the Acts that
art cannot be expected to humanize or to offer solace from politics in times of
chaos. Confronted with reports of refugees, economic crisis, Central European
military conflict, and the rape of a young girl by English soldiers, reality is too
strong for Isa Oliver to find comfort in Keats, Shelley, Yeats, Donne, a life of
Garibaldi or Lord Palmerston. Even science – Eddington, Darwin, Jeans – or
a report of The Proceedings of the Archaeological Society of Nottingham cannot
stop her ‘toothache’ (BA, p. 15). While Woolf acknowledges that art cannot
supply a cure for the contemporary political situation in Between the Acts, she
nonetheless responds to it through her novel by fusing cultural criticism and
fiction. Between the Acts, like Three Guineas and The Years before it, attempts
to elicit an analytical response. ‘Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen!’ cries
Miss La Trobe in the pageant’s final speech; ‘ask how’s this wall, the great wall,
which we call, perhaps miscall, civilisation, to be built by […] orts, scraps and
fragments like ourselves?’ (BA, p. 135). Miss La Trobe’s final question begs the
pageant audience, and the novel’s readers, to consider how they might resist
their inherent barbarism and break off from their inherited cultural values of
nationalism and militarism to build a new civilization. The image of English
society as a procession traced through the variant texts of The Years and Three
Guineas in the previous chapter notably appears again in Between the Acts as
Isa stands in the stable yard alone, imagining herself as the ‘last little donkey
in the long caravanserai crossing the desert’ (BA, p. 112). ‘This is the burden
that the past laid on me’, she reflects (BA, p. 112), joining Rose, Maggie, Sara
Pargiter and the narrator of Three Guineas in Woolf ’s cast of female characters
who must choose whether to continue to follow society’s desert procession or
to turn away and start out on their own. Isa’s coming together with Giles in the
novel’s final scene, as predicted by Miss La Trobe’s visualization of ‘two figures,
half concealed by a rock’, suggests the possibility of both men and women of the
younger generation using the experience of war as an opportunity to set out on
a new track (BA, p. 151).
Conclusion
Woolf ’s cultural criticism in Between the Acts is understandably less optimistic

than in her previous works of the 1930s, but the ‘last two pages of the novel’ are
not, as Roger Poole has argued, ‘entirely bereft of hope’ (1991, p. 93). At the close
of the novel, Woolf clings onto the belief that individuals might resist the call
of the dictator and ultimately build themselves a more equal, anti-nationalistic
society through self-analysis and historical study. The outbreak of World War
II led Woolf to contemplate a possibility which, on account of her absolute
pacifism, she had hitherto resisted – that England’s patriarchal framework
might be overhauled through the event of violent, socio-political revolution
rather than gradually, as she had predicted in A Room of One’s Own. ‘By 1939,’
as Overy notes, ‘Britain faced the paradoxical prospect of having to use war
as a means to restore a peaceable international political and economic order’
(2009, p. xix). While Woolf, unlike her husband, was never able to acknowledge
the legitimacy of war as a method to achieve peace in extreme circumstances,
in the event of World War II she nonetheless began to take on aspects of a
viewpoint widely articulated in British interwar public discourse, that through
the current war ‘civilization would be either saved or lost’ (Overy, 2009, p. 5).
In ‘The Leaning Tower’, a wartime essay, Woolf anticipates the arrival of ‘the
next generation’ who will be, ‘when peace comes, a post-war generation too’,
with the hope that unlike the interwar ‘leaning-tower generation’, they will exist
in a world where there are ‘no more towers and no more classes and […] we
stand, without hedges between us, on the common ground’ (E 6: p. 274). Her
essay attracted another round of debate on art’s social role and the political art
of the 1930s in Folios of New Writing in Spring 1941, edited by John Lehmann.
Edward Upward strongly disagreed with Woolf ’s assessment of the leaning
tower generation, arguing that ‘they ought to be praised rather than condemned’
for writing about the failure of bourgeois society (1941, p. 25). B. L. Coombes
critiqued Woolf ’s inaccurate view of the lower end of the class system (1941,
p. 30). Louis MacNeice sympathized with Woolf ’s aim for a post-war classless
society but felt her attacks on the interwar generation were ‘inconsistent
and unjust’ (1941, p. 37). Finally, John Lehmann attempted to locate Woolf ’s
provocative opinions in ‘The Leaning Tower’ in the wider context of her lifelong
‘sympathy with the struggles of working-class people, particularly working-
class women, and her belief in the value of their long, historic effort to make
themselves articulate’ (1941, p. 44). A foreword from Lehmann explained that
these articles ‘were prepared before [Woolf ’s] tragic death, but we have left them
unchanged, believing she would have preferred the argument to go on’ (1941,
p. 6). Considering her commitment to negotiating the role of art in times of
chaos through the 1930s and in Between the Acts, it is fitting that the debate
she opened with the younger writers of the interwar period should continue as
international conflict raged on in the months following her death.
Despite her statements against mixing art with politics through 1932–40,
Between the Acts exhibits Woolf ’s belief that the novelist, as an intellectual, has
a responsibility to critique contemporary culture. Her fictional text, like Miss La
Trobe’s pageant, does not condemn its audience but rather holds up a mirror for
them to see and evaluate themselves. Her escapist picture of rural Englishness
disguises a considered feminist-pacifist commentary that engages with the
current international situation, drawing, like The Years and Three Guineas before
it, on journalistic research. Her final statement of cultural criticism weaves
together imaginative invention with references to recent and contemporary
political contexts in a manner that again suggests a shift in her late modernist
aesthetics. Through these references and the novel’s narrative Woolf decon-
structs the myth of Englishness and exposes as a fallacy the belief in England’s
safety and isolation from continental Europe, espousing an internationalist
political position. The members of the Pointz Hall community, of England, and
of Britain as a whole, Between the Acts stresses, are geographically and politically
part of a wider international community. Woolf ’s last novel presents an oblique
social and political commentary that grows out of her feminist-pacifist thinking
in the preceding decade.
Notes
1 ‘It is difficult to date with any precision the point at which war seemed a certainty’,
Overy notes, but by early 1938 prominent intellectuals were lecturing on ‘The War
Horizon’ and ‘The Present World War’ ‘as if war were now a visible part of the
political landscape’ (2009, pp. 314–6).
2 Briggs supplies a useful overview of portrayals of Englishness throughout Woolf ’s
oeuvre in her article ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being So English’ in Reading
Virginia Woolf, as well as detailing the late nineteenth-century conception of
‘Englishness’ as ‘an ideal of the past […] that bypassed factories and cities to dwell
upon the countryside’ (2006a, p. 190).
3 Kathy J. Phillips similarly observes the importance of Woolf ’s analysis of patriarchy
in Between the Acts as a means to present ‘the past not as a sanctuary but as a source
of modern problems of colonization, gender, and class’ (1994, p. 184).
4 For example, Hussey documents Woolf ’s efforts to champion the poetry of Joan
Adeney Easdale during the 1930s, arguing that the Hogarth Press’s support of this
young female poet ‘reflects a willingness on the part of Leonard and Virginia Woolf
to take risks on behalf of a writer who seemed out of step with the dominant mode
of poetry at the time’ (2010, p. 31).
5 Surveying Woolf ’s collective view of identity in Between the Acts, Mark Hussey
convincingly argues that ‘a dynamic interplay between the inner voice and the
world of relationship’ is central not only to this novel but to all Woolf ’s fiction
(1990, p. 145).
6 Consider, for example, the generational divide between Katherine Hilbery and her
mother in Night and Day as symbolic of the changing social conventions between
the Edwardian and Georgian eras; or the lack of understanding between Clarissa
and her family in Mrs Dalloway as representative of the inability of post-war British
society to recover and reconnect emotionally following the horrors of World War I.
7 An array of draft fragments survive to evidence this work’s production, as Hussey
indicates in his useful list of ‘Archival Sources for Manuscript and Typescript
Material Relating to Between the Acts’ in Woolf, 2011, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi. See Hussey’s
introduction to his edition for his insightful chronology of Woolf ’s production of
this text (2011, pp. xxxix–lxxiii).
8 Hussey notes that ‘Leaska’s published transcription of what he described as
the Earlier (ETS) and Later (LTS) Typescript takes great liberties with the text
to present the two versions in as readable a form as possible’ (2011, p. xlvii).
Nonetheless, Pointz Hall remains a valuable resource and, as Hussey notes, there
is no reason to question Leaska’s dating of the fragments that he arranges into two
coherent drafts. Thus I refer to this accessible edition to trace Woolf ’s composition
of Between the Acts, noting where my identification of references to current events
in these drafts can help to further refine Leaska’s dating of the typescripts.
9 The major substantive difference between Woolf ’s final typescript and the published
novel is, as noted above, the inclusion of italics for the pageant scenes. Other minor
substantive variants between Hussey’s edition and the first British edition where
they occur in my quotations are noted in endnotes.
10 For discussion of these essays see Snaith (2000a) and Eisenberg (1981).
11 Guiguet uses the theatrical imagery of Between the Acts’ finale to speculate
hyperbolically about Woolf ’s mental health in her final months; ‘Had she, too,’ he
asks, ‘found herself at the end of that play, or rather of that entr’acte which we call
life, ready to see the curtain rise on a stage lit up, at last, by that light to which she
aspired?’ (1965, p. 327, emphasis in original).
12 Woolf recorded several discussions of suicide in the event of invasion during
May-June 1940 (D 5: pp. 284–5, 292, 293), concurrent with the Battle of France and
the evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk between 26 May and 4
June 1940.
13 Woolf met several such refugees in the 1930s and early 1940s including, notably,
Sigmund Freud, whom she visited in Hampstead on 28 January 1939 (see D 5:
p. 202). Freud had fled Vienna the previous summer with the assistance of a wealthy
and influential pupil, Princess Marie Bonaparte (see D 5: pp. 202–3, n. 18).
14 V. Woolf, (1932c), A Letter to a Young Poet (London: Hogarth). References will be
to the more accessible version of the essay collected in E 5.
15 The poems included in A Letter to a Young Poet and the collections from which they
are taken are as follows: W. H. Auden, (1930), ‘Poem II’, in Poems (London: Faber),
pp. 39–40; J. Lehmann, (1932), ‘To penetrate that room’, in New Signatures: Poems
by Several Hands, (ed.) Michael Roberts (London: Hogarth), p. 75; C. Day-Lewis,
(1931), ‘Poem XI’, in From Feathers to Iron (London: Hogarth), p. 24; S. Spender,
(1930), ‘At the edge of being’, in Twenty Poems (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 2.
16 It should be noted that Quennell and his leftist contemporaries aimed to evidence a much
broader section of life in their poetry and prose than Woolf finds within their work.
17 V. Woolf, (1936), ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’, Daily Worker, 14 December, 4.
The essay was posthumously renamed ‘The Artist and Politics’ by Leonard Woolf
in (1952), The Moment and Other Essays, (ed.) L. Woolf (London: Hogarth). All
references are to the original version reprinted in E 6.
18 Editorial statement, (1936), Daily Worker, 14 December, 4. The Daily Worker was
launched on 1 January 1930 as a mouthpiece for the CPGB and its editors were
largely drawn from the party; see Dewar, 1976, pp. 85–7.
19 ‘The Leaning Tower’ was first published in Folios of New Writing, a biannual edited
by John Lehmann, in November 1940. All references are to E 6.
20 Mary Joannou insightfully noted the likely dominance of women in the audience
at this wartime lecture in a paper on ‘Virginia Woolf and the People’s War’ at the
Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of
Glasgow (2011).
21 In ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf ’, Beer offers a
thorough discussion of how Woolf ’s literary output reveals the effect that the
coming of the aeroplane had on the English’s conception of themselves as an island
nation (1996, pp. 149–78).
22 In the first British edition, this exclamation begins with the variant ‘O’ as opposed
to ‘Oh’; see Woolf, 2011, and 2000a, p. 107.
5
Conclusion: Newness and Lateness in Woolf ’s

Last Works
On 15 January 1941, in the diary entry with which this study opened, Woolf
reflected mournfully alongside contemplating the death of Joyce: ‘And now all
the gents are furbishing up opinions, & the books, I suppose, take their place in
the long procession’ (D 5: p. 353). Processions feature repeatedly in Woolf ’s late
cultural criticism. They signify a male tradition of symbolic honours, archaic
rituals and emblematic clothing through which the governing classes of patri-
archal British society maintain the insular progenitorial transfer of wealth and
education from father to son. Woolf ’s depiction of ‘the history of literature’ as
a ‘long procession’ in 1941 reveals her intense reluctance to be located in a past
moment with male contemporaries whose literary tradition and outlook she did
not feel herself to share (D 5: p. 353). On 18 November 1940 she had described
her ‘double vision’ as a woman writer (D 5: p. 340). Considering her view of
English literature alongside that of Herbert Read, whose autobiography she had
lately finished, Woolf asserted:
I am carrying on, while I read, the idea of women discovering, like the 19th
century rationalists […] that man is no longer God. My position […] is quite
unlike Read’s, [H. G.] Wells’, Tom [Eliot]’s, or [George] Santayana’s. It is essential
to remain outside; & realise my own beliefs: or rather not to accept theirs.
D 5: p. 340
Throughout her life, as Brenda R. Silver observes, Woolf believed that ‘women,
who have historically been outsiders and agnostics in relation to the institutions
and beliefs that constitute the official version of culture, can write culture anew’
(1990, p. 647). Just as Woolf had imagined women reforming British society by
breaking off from the long caravan of patriarchal history (as Sara and Maggie do
in The Pargiters and Isa must do in Between the Acts), or by joining the procession
of the professions on new terms (as she envisages in Three Guineas), through
her career as a woman modernist writer Woolf hoped to overhaul the literary
conventions and implicit patriarchal politics of nineteenth-century intellectual

culture. Yet if ‘all the gents [were] furbishing up opinions’, and her books, along
with Joyce’s Ulysses, were ‘tak[ing] their place in the long procession’ of literary
history, then how could Woolf continue to remain outside the cultural tradition
that her writing sought to destabilize (D 5: p. 353)?
During 1931–41 the canonization of modernism confronted Woolf with her
profound fear of fixity and stasis and of no longer being free to set out on a
new path of her own. Woolf responded to such fears through her late cultural
criticism, which, this book emphasizes, was shaped by a lifelong experimental
impulse. Her last three works all adopt a well-known literary sub-genre – the
family chronicle (The Years), the public letter (Three Guineas), the country-house
novel (Between the Acts) – and subvert it to achieve modernist and feminist
goals. This use and modernization of popular forms, according to Jed Esty,
signifies a wish ‘to connect more directly with a public of art consumers’ which
is characteristic of late modernism (2004, p. 84). Yet the appearance of ‘social
facts’ within Woolf ’s late works emphatically does not imply, as Tyrus Miller
writes of other modernists working in the later interwar period, ‘a failure to
repress […] the turbulent historical energies that sweep through late modernist
works’ (1999, p. 32, emphasis in original). The innovative, fractured forms of The
Years, Three Guineas and Between the Acts were conversely designed precisely to
express and debate ‘historical energies’. The close relationship between formal
and political radicalism in Woolf ’s late writings thus calls for a re-evaluation
of the validity of viewing her oeuvre in two distinct phases, split between the
high modernist aestheticism of the 1920s and the active social engagement of
the 1930s, and cautions against applying such labels within wider narratives of
interwar literature.
To conclude Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, this chapter resituates
Woolf ’s last works in the context of her wider oeuvre and trends in British
interwar literature, exploring the tension between ‘newness’ and ‘lateness’ in
literary outputs from Woolf, other modernist writers, and their detractors in
this period. This discussion is framed through an analysis of selected recent
conceptions of late modernism from Miller in Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction
and the Arts Between the World Wars (1999), Esty in A Shrinking Island:
Modernism and National Culture in England (2004), and Marina Mackay in
Modernism and World War II (2007). Positioning Woolf ’s late cultural criticism
in the context of modernism’s evolution in the 1930s and beyond allows us to
explore the transition in her focus and aesthetics in this period. Yet identifying
Woolf as a socially engaged late modernist in her final works can lead us to
Conclusion: Newness and Lateness in Woolf ’s Last Works 139
overlook the feminist politics that directed her creative and critical outputs from
the outset of her career. Reflecting back on the insights of this book’s genetic,
feminist-historicist investigation, this chapter debates the usefulness and limita-
tions of the label ‘late modernism’ for Woolf studies.
Woolf and late modernism
It may be surprising that Woolf was able to look back in 1941 and view
herself as part of ‘the history of literature’, but the now-familiar narratives
of English modernism had long been under construction by the 1940s (D
5: p. 353). Modernist writer-critics, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and
Woolf, themselves shaped early responses to the experimental poetry and
fiction of the new century through their literary criticism. Definitions of the
modernist movement, as Miller suggests, grew out of and continue to draw on
the ‘figurative and evaluative underpinnings of modernism itself ’ (1999, p. 5).
Writing on contemporary verse in 1932, F. R. Leavis identified Eliot as the most
influential modern poet whose output, along with that of Pound and Gerard
Manley Hopkins, ‘represent[ed] a decisive re-ordering of the tradition of English
poetry’ (1938, p. 195). By 1940, as Marina MacKay notes, ‘John Lehmann could
summarise modernism without sounding a false note: the major novelists were
Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Stein and Hemingway; Eliot was the major poet, with
honourable mention of the older Yeats’ (2007, p. 15).1
Such early accounts of English modernism have since been vigorously and
variously rewritten, notably by feminist and post-colonial critics who, from
the early 1990s, have pertinently challenged the predominantly male, Anglo-
American modernist canon established by the Leavises and the New Critics
through the mid-twentieth century.2 Contemporary modernist critics talk of
‘modernisms’, using the plural to indicate the expansion of their field of study
to include a diverse array of new modernist canons.3 Yet the ‘broad and richly
embellished story’ of modernism’s ‘creation out of the spirit of revolt against
the nineteenth century’, Miller emphasizes, continues to dominate ‘the diversity
and contradictory nature of opinions about what modernism is (or was)’ (1999,
p. 4). This emphasis on rebellion and innovation, on ‘the Poundian imperative
to “Make It New”’, Miller influentially argued in 1999, has resulted in ‘a dispro-
portionate amount of critical attention’ on modernism’s early development
through the 1910s and 1920s (p. 5).4 By directing their attention towards late
modernism, Miller, Esty and MacKay aim to redress this balance by exploring
modernism’s evolution during the late 1920s and into the 1930s and 1940s.
These critics’ perception of modernism as a group of ‘distinctive aesthetic
modes that were not monolithic or static but capable of development and
transformation’ (Mackay, 2007, p. 15) corresponds neatly with genetic criti-
cism’s stress on textual fluidity and reinforces this book’s reading of Woolf ’s late
cultural criticism as an extension of her earlier experimentalism.
The drive to ‘Make It New’, the slogan that Pound used to title his 1934
essay collection and cited in Canto LIII (published in 1940; see Pound, 1964,
p. 275), remained strong among modernists in the late 1920s and 1930s as the
movement’s established and newer practitioners sought to refresh and redirect
the innovative impulses on which modernist aesthetics had been founded.
Pound’s continued production of the Cantos (1964), Eliot’s experiments with
verse drama in the late 1920s and 1930s, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939),
for example, all evidence the persistent attempts of canonical modernist writers
to push high modernism beyond its theoretical first phase in this later period.5
Within Woolf ’s late output, The Waves and Between the Acts most obviously
reflect this desire for modernist rejuvenation. However, as Chapters 2 and 3
argue, The Years and Three Guineas are equally marked by Woolf ’s commitment
to experimentalism. In addition, Woolf ’s public emergence as a cultural critic
in her last decade also represents a feminist and aesthetic commitment to do
something new. Following her completion of The Waves in February 1931, Woolf
feared that she had reached a point of creative and intellectual stasis, ‘toss[ing]
among empty bottles & bits of toilet paper’, while her contemporaries moved
with the times and were ‘modern’ (D 4: p. 12). Her turn to cultural analysis in
this period, evidenced by her use of her Good Housekeeping commission and
her conception of the ‘entire new book […] about the sexual life of women’ (D 4:
p. 6), represents an attempt to move into new political and aesthetic territory.
Yet while Esty and MacKay regard Eliot and Woolf as late modernists, Miller
would not place Eliot, Joyce, Pound or Woolf in this grouping.6 His influential
study focuses on ‘a new generation of late modernist works’, represented by the
later writings of Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and Mina
Loy, whose literature appeared as a reaction to, as well as ‘in tandem with a still
developing corpus of high modernism’ (1999, p. 10).
‘Newness’ was significant not only to modernism in the 1930s, but also, more
emphatically, to the backlash against modernism in this decade. The economic
and political crises of the late 1920s and 1930s, outlined in Chapter 1, impacted
dramatically on the outlook of writers producing and emerging at this time
and the concerns of the audience who received them. The titles of a number
of periodicals from the period stress innovation and the present moment –
Experiment, Venture, New Verse and New Writing – but here ‘newness’ appears
‘less a commitment to formal experimentation than to a faithful rendering of the
everyday, sometimes in an antiestablishment or populist vein or more directly
working-class cause’ (Brooker and Thacker, 2009a, 1: pp. 591–2). In negotiating
a relation to their literary predecessors not every 1930s magazine ‘found it […]
easy […] to dismiss the literary modernists of the 1910s and 1920s’, but many
were conscious of a responsibility to break into ‘a new realm on behalf of a new
generation’ (Brooker and Thacker, 2009a, 1: p. 592, 598). Chapter 4 detailed
Woolf ’s long-standing debate with a younger generation of 1930s writers who
positioned themselves in direct opposition to the high modernist literature of
the previous decade in their landmark New Signatures collection (1932). This
debate culminated in the varied responses offered to Woolf ’s ‘Leaning Tower’
essay in Lehmann’s Folios of New Writing (1941). Woolf distrusted these writers’
overt fusion of art and politics, yet her penultimate and final novels liberally
smuggled in cultural criticism and references to historical and contemporary
social and political contexts, evidencing the increased importance of facts, real
events, and journalistic research to her writing in this decade.
‘Writing politically committed literature represented one obvious and, to many,
attractive way for writers to break out of [the] evident predicament’ of modernism,
Miller contends, interpreting the output of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil
Day-Lewis and George Orwell as ‘a brief but fascinating’ moment when writers of
the 1930s ‘found ways of holding in tension political and literary demands’ (1999,
p. 31). Miller emphasizes that ‘despite the general sense of the thirties as a highly
politicized decade, many other important writers […] could not and did not
link their writing to the vicissitudes of political engagement’ (1999, p. 31). With
its covert political commentary, Woolf ’s late fictional output suggests that the
impact of politics on the decade’s literature may well have been greater than Miller
acknowledges. His survey of 1930s politically committed literature is markedly
limited, yet his angle of vision intriguingly discloses a way of viewing the explicitly
politicized writing of Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis and Orwell alongside the works
of late modernists as evidence of ‘the lines of flight artists took [when] an obstacle,
the oft-mentioned “impasse” of modernism, interrupted progress on established
paths’ (1999, p. 13). Throughout the 1930s, both modernists and modernism’s
adversaries prioritized the ‘new’ as each searched for fresh methods to respond
aesthetically to global economic depression, a changed political climate, and
rising social and international tensions. Miller’s reading thus indicates a valuable
parallel between two literary groupings usually viewed in opposition.
Late modernism’s attempts to recapture ‘newness’ are read by Miller, Esty

and MacKay as evidence of the movement’s troubled responses to the growing
social and political instability of a new era. ‘Their literary structures tottered
uneasily between vexed acknowledgment and anxious disavowal of social
facts,’ he claims, suggesting ‘a failure of the forms’ to contain and respond to
contemporary contexts (1999, p. 32). Esty and MacKay advance this exploration
into the changing historical circumstances that shaped modernism in its later
stages. From different perspectives, both critics focus on modernism’s reactions
to the breakdown of empire in the 1930s and 1940s. Esty explores ‘the anthro-
pological turn’ through which English high modernists began to interrogate
national consciousness in their late works (2004, p. 2). The pageant-play form
employed by E. M. Forster, Eliot and Woolf, for example, Esty asserts, discloses
‘a late modernist transition’ through ‘the desire to mount a more participatory
model of art production (as against the aesthetic virtuosity of high modernism)’
(2004, p. 84). Like Esty, MacKay investigates late modernism’s public contribu-
tions to the national concern with English identity and views this final phase
of the movement’s development as ‘a point of transition […] between imperial
Britain and the devolved archipelago it turned into’ (2007, p. 20). In contrast to
Esty, MacKay examines late modernism’s responses to World War II, an event
sidestepped in Esty’s study, but which MacKay asserts ‘is surely related to the
island’s shrinkage’ and ‘may even be the acceptable idiom for speaking of it’
(2007, p. 17). All three critics depict the stylistic and thematic innovations of
late modernist writers as a consequence of their sense of the pressing need to
engage with a wider reading public and to offer political comment through their
literary works.
At first glance, Woolf ’s literary output during 1931–41 seems to fit perfectly
into the collective paradigm of late modernism offered here. The development
of her late cultural criticism in this period corresponds to these critics’
conviction that modernism evolved in its later stages to exhibit an increased
awareness of its social and political context and to engage more directly with
its audience. Woolf ’s Good Housekeeping essays, published in 1931–2, disclosed
her early 1930s desire to expand her feminist analysis of modern Britain’s
capitalist, imperialist and patriarchal power structures in the presence of an
extended female audience. Flush and The Years, each playfully experimental in
form and slyly critical of nineteenth-century patriarchal British society, proved
by their high sales to engage a wider audience than any of her previous works.
Three Guineas, despite its difficult structure and tone, offered Woolf ’s most
direct and comprehensive feminist-pacifist critique of the interconnectedness
of patriarchy, patriotism and war to date. Finally her unfinished novel, Between
the Acts, was to reflect overtly on England’s fears at the end of the interwar
period and, covertly, on Britain’s position in the current moment of World
War II, subverting the country-house fiction with an aesthetic return to high
modernism in framework and style. Woolf ’s writings clearly became more
socially engaged in her last decade while continuing to utilize and develop
modernist narrative techniques.
To interpret the latter half of her oeuvre through the perspective of late
modernism as conceived by Miller, however, requires that we accept the
contention that high modernism, including Woolf ’s early output, was not
already profoundly interested in its audience and had indeed ‘managed to
view [politics] from the distance of a closed car’ (Miller, 1999, p. 13). ‘Too
often modernism has been seen as an alienated, alienating form of creative
production’, MacKay contests, choosing to focus on ‘public modernism’ in her
study (2007, pp. 20–1). There may be cause for disputing the conception of
late modernism explored by these three critics, particularly Miller and Esty, on
the basis that their reading of late modernism as a reaction against apolitical
high modernism relies on the illusion of modernist marginality that MacKay
identifies. Certainly in the case of Woolf, her modernist output, whether ‘high’
or ‘late’, is rarely devoid of implicit social comment and closely linked to her
feminist politics.
‘The mastery and, indeed, the revolution of the word were accomplishments
prized among male modernists and the critics who canonized them,’ Bonnie
Kime Scott contends, but ‘Woolf was more skeptical’ (1995, 2: p. 1). As a woman
modernist, she had less sympathy than some of her contemporaries with the
idea of literary form as ‘the modernist gold standard […] the universal currency
in which aesthetic value could be measured and circulated’ (Miller, 1999, p. 31).
It was perhaps in part for this reason, along with her prudish prejudice against
its ‘indecency’ and the then-limited capabilities of the Hogarth Press, that the
Woolfs decided not to ‘devote [their] lives to printing’ Joyce’s Ulysses in 1918
(D 5: p. 353). After receiving the lengthy manuscript from Harriet Shaw Weaver
on 18 April 1918 Woolf described the novel as ‘an attempt to push the bounds
of expression further on, but still all in the same direction’ (D 1: p. 140). To push
form forwards in one direction was not enough for Woolf. Her conviction that
novelists should ‘record the atoms as they fall upon the mind’ and ‘not take it
for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what
is commonly thought small’ was inherently bound to her feminist desire to
‘break […] and bully’ the novel form into a more suitable shape to express the
experience of life encountered by men and women in modern times (‘Modern

Novels’, 1919; see E 3: pp. 33–6). In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf famously
argued that a new literary tradition was needed for women writers, one that
would admit and respect subjects usually deemed trivial by men (themselves
restricted by their faulty education) in order to allow women to write ‘as women
write, not as men write’ (AROO, p. 97). From Toril Moi (1985) to Judith Allen
(2010), feminist critics have repeatedly emphasized the importance of ‘locating
the politics of Woolf ’s writing precisely in her textual practice’ (Moi, 1995, p. 16,
emphasis in original).7 Recognizing the gendered politics of language, Woolf ’s
aesthetic experimentalism pushed ‘beyond words and images, at a new relation
to tradition and audience’ (Scott, 1995, 2: p. 1).
From the outset of her career, Woolf ’s modernist fictional experiments
challenged both the formulaic structure of the Victorian and Edwardian novel,
with its ‘thirty-two chapters’ and rigid plot, and the patriarchal values that had
shaped the expected content of this literary genre (‘Modern Novels’, E 5: p. 33).
The anonymous stream of consciousness that narrates ‘The Mark on the Wall’
(1917), Woolf ’s earliest published experimental fiction, urges the reader to
consider:
the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard,
which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose,
since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may
hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany
sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth.
HH, p. 80
Far from apolitical, this high modernist short story uses interiority to engage its
audience in a moment of feminist critique that points forward to Woolf ’s late
cultural criticism in several ways. The portrayal of patriarchy as a nineteenth-
century ‘phantom’, along with ‘the mahogany sideboards and […] Landseer
prints’ of the Victorian age, parallels Woolf ’s vision of ‘the Angel in the house’
in her ‘Professions for Women’ speech in January 1931 as ‘a phantom […] the
ideal of womanhood created by the imaginations of men and woman […]
in the age of Victoria’ (M.70, pp. 4–6). The direct reference to the ongoing
war with Germany as the instrument of exposing this phantom, as well as
contradicting Miller’s notion of high modernist form as a set of protective
gloves ‘meant to hold the world of aggravated political struggle at bay’ (1999,
p. 31), foreshadows Woolf ’s presentation of war as an expression and logical
consequence of patriarchal values in Three Guineas. The allusion to Whitaker’s
Almanack also anticipates Three Guineas, in which Woolf turns to Whitaker

for ‘cold facts’ to illustrate women’s continued exclusion from public institu-
tions and comparative economic disadvantage in relation to men (TG, p. 280,
p. 289). These resonances should once more remind us that while the timing of
Woolf ’s increased commitment to cultural analysis and her public emergence
as a cultural critic in the period 1931–41 represents a response to her literary
climate and contemporary social and political events, the direction and themes
of her late cultural criticism were less the result of the pressure of historical
circumstances than an expansion of her earlier feminist thinking evidenced in
both her fiction and her criticism from the period 1904–31.
‘As a historical category,’ Miller is the first to admit, ‘late modernism’ stands
and falls by its ability to bring to light ‘a significant set of family resemblances
between writers during a certain period of time’ (1999, p. 22). Not all the
resemblances that define late modernism for Miller, Esty and MacKay apply to
Woolf, but their concept nonetheless fruitfully situates her late cultural criticism
within the context of a more politicized version of modernism that evolved
through the 1930s and 1940s. Understanding Woolf ’s late writing as both politi-
cally activist and formally modernist enables us to break down and bridge the
disparate narratives that read Woolf first as a 1920s high modernist and second
as a 1930s social thinker. Positioning her 1930s turn to cultural criticism within
a late modernism that was still striving for ‘newness’ also suggests possibilities
for exploring how her late works anticipated future literary developments.
The ‘more direct, polemical engagement with topical and popular discourses’
and ‘satiric and parodic strategies’ that Miller finds in the writing of his late
modernists prompts him to read this period’s output as part of the ‘narrative
of emergent postmodernism’ (1999, pp. 20, 19, 7). Late modernism and
postmodernism are not one and the same, as Miller stresses, but his perception
of late modernism’s ‘linkage forward into postmodernism’ valuably supplies
another interpretative lens through which to view Woolf ’s perplexing formal
experiments of 1931–41 (1999, p. 7). The fractured ‘novel-essay’ structure of
The Pargiters, mock canine biography of Flush, and complex narrative tone of
Three Guineas, with its circuitous epistolary framework and scattered epitextual
photographs, arguably make more sense as postmodern subversions of literary
genres.8 The prominence of self-reflexive humour, fragmented voices, and the
fusion of high literary allusion with popular culture in Miss La Trobe’s pageant
at the close of Between the Acts prompts us to consider how much further Woolf
might have moved towards postmodernism had she lived to write another book.
Like all period concepts late modernism has its limitations, but its derivation
from Miller’s ambitious attempt to resist the institutionalized narratives of early

twentieth-century literature, reinforced by Esty and MacKay, makes it a deter-
minedly fluid period concept that supports this book’s genetic interpretation
of Woolf ’s late cultural criticism as a direct evolution from the feminist and
aesthetic radicalism of her earlier writings.
Conclusion
‘Thinking is my fighting’, Woolf declared on 15 May 1940, as the threat of

German invasion loomed and Leonard considered joining the Home Guard
(D 5: p. 285). Woolf ’s late cultural criticism grew out of a lifetime of politicized
feminist thinking on the subject of Britain’s socio-political structures, customs
and institutions. Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism has focused on the
development of Woolf ’s feminist politics in her late works, but this book’s
genetic, feminist-historicist analysis of these texts has implications for scholarly
readings of Woolf ’s wider output. The perception of modernism’s origins in an
apolitical aspiration to revolutionize aesthetics still too often leads to interpre-
tations of Woolf that read her first as a modernist in the 1910s and 1920s, and
then as a cultural critic from the 1930s until her death in 1941. Yet Woolf ’s
late cultural criticism can also be interpreted, as argued here with reference
to Miller, Esty and MacKay, as representative of a more politicized version of
modernism that evolved through the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, far from
apolitical, much of Woolf ’s early modernist fiction contains elements of cultural
criticism. Mrs Dalloway was, after all, framed by a desire ‘to criticise the social
system, & to show it at work, at its most intense’ (D 2: p. 248). Genetic criticism,
this study posits, thus supplies a valuable methodological framework that might
enrich future investigations of the thinking and writing processes through
which both her feminist politics and modernist aesthetics evolved during the
composition of her texts.
In the early 1930s, motivated in part by changing cultural conceptions of
modernity and the tempestuous economic and political circumstances of the
later interwar period, Woolf began to question the relationship between liter-
ature and politics. Through her journalism, criticism and fiction, she turned her
attention to expanding her existing feminist cultural analysis of contemporary
British society, and, as the decade progressed, to probing the links between
patriarchy, imperialism, fascism and war. As well as a response to the political
climate of her final decade, Woolf ’s development as a cultural critic in The Years,
Three Guineas and Between the Acts can be interpreted as an attempt to resist
intellectual stagnation, to defy canonization as a 1920s aesthete, and to push
forward her literary experimentalism and feminist thinking by doing something
new. From her earliest modernist fiction to her late cultural criticism, Woolf had
framed literature as a powerful tool, both in form and content, to rewrite, desta-
bilize and, ultimately, to overthrow the patriarchal and nationalistic cultural
values of the society around her.
Notes
1 Within the novelists, Lehmann notably names ‘the chief figures [as] James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf ’ (1940, p. 15), prefiguring Woolf ’s anxiety about her books joining
the procession of literary history with Joyce in her 1941 diary entry (D 5: p. 353).
2 Highly influential to the reinstatement of female and postcolonial writers to the
English modernist canon in the 1990s (including Katherine Mansfield, H. D.,
Mina Loy, Rebecca West and Jean Rhys) is The Gender of Modernism: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (1990). For an authoritative and insightful
discussion of the scapegoating of women’s writing within American modernism see
Suzanne Clark, 1991.
3 Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995) used the term ‘modernisms’
to signify the diversity of European modernism. The plural form has since been
used to signal the emergence of the ‘new modernist studies’, the recent turn
in contemporary modernist criticism towards texts and writers not previously
identified as modernist, with a particular interest in expanding modernism
temporally (as Miller attempts) and geographically, and with a greater sensitivity
to issues of gender, race, the rise of new media and the economics of cultural
production; see Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, (ed.), 2006; and Mao and
Walkowitz, 2008.
4 A notable exception to this trend, Miller acknowledges, is Bonnie Kime Scott’s
two-volume Refiguring Modernism, 1: The Women of 1928; and 2: Postmodern
Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (1995).
5 Eliot’s first attempt at drama was Sweeney Agonistes (1926–7); the project was never
completed as a play but was later published as dramatic verse. A brief experiment
with the pageant-play form in The Rock (1934) introduced Eliot to the ‘possible
role for the Chorus’ (Letter to The Spectator, 8 June 1934, p. 887). In his first two
full plays, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939), both of
which reflect his conversion to Anglicanism, Eliot further explored the possibility of
a modern-day choric verse. For all works above see The Complete Poems and Plays
of T. S. Eliot (1969).
6 Esty’s Chapter 2 reads Eliot’s The Rock and Woolf ’s Between the Acts; MacKay’s
study includes a chapter each on Between the Acts and Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943).
7 See also, in particular, Pamela L. Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism:
Literature in Quest & Question of Itself (1991) and Jane Goldman, The Feminist
Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-impressionism, and the Politics of the
Visual (1998).
8 See Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Caughie, 1991.
Appendix A
Extracts from ‘1907’ in the Holograph of

The Years
The following extracts are transcribed from the third volume of Woolf ’s
eight-volume Pargiters manuscript, held at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg
Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library
where they are catalogued as M.42. They relate to a chapter dated 21 June 1901
in this draft (M.42, 3: p. 116), but later to become ‘1907’ in The Years. Woolf
had already twice tried to begin drafting this chapter in April 1933, at which
point she identified its first scene, ‘Elvira in bed’, as ‘the turn of the book’
(D 4: p. 149). The short extracts below are taken from her first full draft of the
chapter, begun on 2 June 1933 and completed by 18 June 1933. Both are drawn
from the chapter’s central episode, in which Maggie Pargiter arrives home from
a party and is questioned about it by her sister Elvira (‘Sara’ in the published
novel).
Extract 1
[3: p. 125] The door had opened while Elvira

<without her was looking at the moon. Her sister had come in.
hearing> She stood there in her evening dress. {She had
kept her promise of coming in.}
Elvira was startled for a moment,
{seeing her standing there,} & then burst out;
She wanted to be told instantly all in one
word if possible about the party. It was
only four or five hours since Maggie had gone:
but how much must have happened! First
the arrival, the steps & carpet; & the door
opening & then going in, following papa & mama
150 Extracts from ‘1907’ in the Holograph of The Years
upstairs, & the people standing about in the

room. And then dinner arrives. And then
Maggie takes somebodys arm. On her right is
one man & on her left another.
“Well?” she demanded.
Extract 2
[3: p. 127] Oh, It was dull then,” she said in {every sort of} way,
Lights, pictures, everything. I mean, {not} even the
procession down the staircase, with all the trains
of the women’s dresses –
But {Hunch} {<Hunch>}, said Maggie, observing {with interest}
how crooked her sister was – crooked not only in
her back, but everywhere, slightly, as if she had been
blown upon, made one sided – {parties arent a}
one {cant sit down & look, one cant} one
doesn’t sit down at a party; & look.
●│{‘Why not?’} {They come} One has to pretend –
thats why you’re so lucky .. you say you’re
a hump back: you say well one has to
pretend
You mean, the old lady. │●
one doesn’t simply sit on the stairs & look
you have to answer {you have to say}
{old} {they say, “Have you} They ask you
Have you been to see Ellen Terry…
And you say? “No.”
And then – Oh then, have you read…
some book or other. And I said to him
Yes. For one cant go on saying no, always.
And then he says?
Oh how lovely the [illeg.] are. And you say,
I say, Isnt it rather uncomfortable, dressing
like that. The old buffer was going on to
town, I suppose: A
And he said. Well he said,
Extracts from ‘1907’ in the Holograph of The Years 151
[3: p. 128] one gets used to it: {anyhow} one likes power.
{P}
He said it just bending a little to the right,
because they were handing the fish? {perhaps}
No: he said it leaning back in his chair,
looking rather red.
{And fat?} He {would} rest<ed> his hands on the
table, one on either side of his plate for a
moment? Power, Miss Pargiter, he said. {Ju}
{Just in one word.} like that. And
every part of him that was visible was
thick {with} gold lace: ●│{so} {D’you know what}
When they come home, uniforms like that are
put in {[illeg.]} tin boxes, with lots of
tissue paper. The footman says –
he was the prime minister was he – your buffer?
{I mean Maggie} the man who sat next you in
gold lace. │●
●│He was very large & rather red. He looked like –
well, some sort of {large shiny} beetle.
It was {in a way} rather fine: not too much
light: so that the room seemed very│●
<After that he He said, “I like power.”
suddenly ate, {And then} {he looked across the room}
[illeg.] the ●│Then he talked to the woman on his other side.
[?flesh?] round But that Elvira thought, meant that the
his plate, very man on Maggies other side│●
fast,> He talked to the woman on the other side, she said.
<& That meant, Elvira concluded, that
Maggie the other man, the man on Maggies left
[illeg.]> {said something} {went} {began [?asking?] again}
Appendix B
An Extract from ‘1910’ in the Holograph of

The Years
The following appendix supplies a transcription of pages 56–67 of the fourth

volume of Woolf ’s eight-volume Pargiters manuscript (M.42) held at the Henry
W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the
New York Public Library. These pages are drawn from Woolf ’s first draft of
the after-dinner scene in ‘1910’, in which Maggie and Elvira (‘Sara’) sit down
to discuss their day. The scene follows the sisters’ lunch with their cousin Rose
Pargiter, after which Elvira accompanied Rose to a suffrage campaign meeting.
All direct references to suffrage were omitted from the published version of
‘1910’, but here Maggie and Elvira debate the subject at length as they consider
their dissatisfaction with patriarchal society. The draft contains strong echoes
of ‘1901’/‘1907’.
[4: p. 56] we all know what the Prime Ministers promises are.”
She set the cheese on the table.
●│And then, Maggie; there was a rush of air;
The room darkened & in came a lady robed in jewels,
dressed in starlight. {“Kitty, said E.”}
Only I havent got the quotation right.” she added,
Kitty” said E. And Mr. [?Ferman?] drew out his
chair to admit the presence of the British peerage.│●
Bobby was the one who got into trouble in the
Boer war said Maggie
And then there’s a rush of air, & in comes Kitty
clothed in starlight.
I dont altogether agree, said Maggie, at last.
She pulled the vase of flowers {by} towards her
& began pulling about the flowers.
{Yes?} {said Elvira:} {[illeg.]} {I see what you mean,}
154 An Extract from ‘1910’ in the Holograph of The Years
{[illeg.]. Any fool could}

I mean, she added, Rose comes here & says
{What are you doing?} {Rose {means} says,}
{Theres this meeting Rose says} – Come along, &
& get a vote. That {was} what they were saying
<that wa> wasnt it
{I was coming to that,} said Elvira.
{But} <well, perhaps,> suppose we had votes, then we should be
Englishwomen. Do we want to be Englishwomen?
I dont.’
[4: p. 57] Yes, but if one had a vote, one would be an Englishwoman.
I dont want to be an Englishwoman.”
She got up and threw the crumpled petals into the
fireplace. “Eton & Harrow match & all that”
she said coming back to her place again.
{M} Please Maggie, said Elvira, tell the whole
of that story from the beginning. You remember?
You came in {dressed in white satin} from the party.
And it was a hot summer’s night. And I
was looking out of the window, {at the moon.}
{How,} <&> I was saying to myself, {am I} how am I
going to make one coherent story out of {that}
at least six {different kinds} of {movement} <stars>;
{the moon being still; the} irreconcilable &
opposite forces <[illeg.]>; when I looked round & there
you were sitting on the bed; {& we you said,}
in white satin & you said, The man next me
leant back in his chair, putting one hand
there & the other there & said “Power,
Miss Pargiter, power”, being all dressed in gold
lace: ●│& then you said, I cant imagine
anything more detestable, except indeed the
Eton & Harrow match: & I said, Cheer up
Maggie, imagine you’re floating down a
river.│● And then in came Mama. <We heard>
{What was odd,} {It was odd} – {hearing the}
music when she came in.
●│She danced, said Maggie.
An Extract from ‘1910’ in the Holograph of The Years 155
Go on from It was a hot summer’s

night” said Elvira.
{Yes} She danced, said Elvira. <But> Go on
from “It was a hot summer’s night …
It was a hot summer’s night – Maggie
began.│●
Go on from there. “Power” he said,
[4: p. 58] being all dressed in gold lace.
Power he said being all dressed in gold lace,
Maggie repeated after her. She laughed.
Elvira waited. “He was large; he was fat,”
she prompted her. “{Rather} <Yes>” said Maggie.
And then he turned to the lady next him?”
Yes. “Who was extremely beautiful, with
diamonds in her hair?” “Yes.”
Elvira waited again.
But as {there was} they had finished dinner,
& it was now necessary to make the coffee,
Maggie {said no more.} got up, & went into the
kitchen. She came back with her hands
full of clothes. She made the coffee & began
to sew. For some time nothing was heard but the
drip of the coffee, as it {it ran through} the
water fell through the strainer, & the little
tap that Maggie’s scissors made, as she
{cut} laid it on the table. She was
cutting out a dress, apparently. Elvira
lay back on the sofa, {reading,} now & again in
a book which she opened & shut.
But perhaps we are Englishwomen” she said
at length. ●│Perhaps we’re born English” {she}
Perhaps we cant help ourselves:
Perhaps we’re born English.
{Mama was half Spanish, half French” said Maggie.
But we havent taken the oath,} said Maggie
{Not if we’re women” said Maggie, because
then you dont.│● {It may be something you cant
help.} {How d’you know Maggie?}
British [?in birth?], passport what about those?

I dont think {you} <we> can help it Maggie, we
talk English.
Oh technically, I daresay” said Maggie.
Birth, marriage, death certificates – But what I
[4: p. 59] say is – she continued, {cut} {measuring} putting pins all
down a hem, if you dont take a bribe, you needn’t be an
ass.
What Maggie says is, Elvira repeated, {scribbling} <lazily>
<a little man, {if you d} {the words in the margin of her book}
does [illeg.] if you dont take the bribe you needn’t be an
with bribery ass. Like Papa” she added.
[illeg.]:> Yes, or Edward, or – {well who would go &
sit in an office all day in order to become
the guardian of the}
or – Elvira prompted her,
well, any of the {people} <[?toadies?]> one meets at parties
●│The toady, the buffer, man <on your left> who turned to
the duchess & said..│●
The toady, sitting on your left, then turned to the
Duchess & said…? Have you seen
Rejane in Madame Sans Gene?1
{Oh yes,} & then they have to go off to
offices. Ah, said the duchess, casting her eyes to heaven,
My dear <what a> Lady, {I have only} [illeg.] as I am
to have your society says the toady, I have
only five & twenty minutes in which to write
two columns of dramatic criticism for tomorrows
paper. And off {they drive} to their offices in
the City. ●│Give us votes says Rose: & I’ll
serve the country.│● No says the Prime Minister:
Whereupon Rose says, Give us a vote & I’ll
run the country. Whereupon the Prime Minister
says, – now Maggie, how would he put it!
{though} speaking privately to the beautiful
woman all in diamonds. … I suspect
theres a little {room} anteroom, leading
out of the drawing-room, with two shaded
lamps, arm chairs, & one soft & convenient

sofa. D’you think he began by taking
off his boots?
[4: p. 60] gold lace & so on” {she added.} Eton & Harrow match,” she
mumbled, for she was keeping a reserve of pins
between her lips.
And then he turned to the lady in diamonds” said
Elvira: “& opening out of the big drawing room
where you sat talking to the gentleman, was a
little room, with shaded yellow lamps: & {there was}
two chairs, & one convenient sofa. And he
began pulling off his boots. wh. I dont blame him.
W. should I, if I sat all day in an office
governing the British Empire? And the Toady,
the man who sat on your left, turned to the
Duchess & said Have you seen Rejane in Madame
Sans Gene..? Too wonderful, just divine, he said,
& the Duchess was about to reply, when the
toady, laying his right hand on his left side, {said}
exclaimed [illeg.] duchess; – or wd. he say
{my} dear Lady! – but I’ve only five & & twenty
minutes in which to write one & a quarter
columns for tomorrows paper. And so made off.
Now what Rose was saying today at the
meeting – but Maggie whats the use of my
telling you about the meeting if you at once go into
the next room {in order to find} & rummage about
in the chest of drawers in order to find…”
All right, said Maggie, I’m listening.
She had {brought in} fetched a piece of yellow
silk; which she laid on her knee; & began to
{cut} measure.
And she came in like <clothed with> starlight” Elvira
<how it goes – that>
murmured: I cant {get the} remember the quotation.”
{Go on about} <Rose said> the meeting” said Maggie.
I had a little bit of paper somewhere, said
Elvira, but I’ve lost it. Never mind. Rose you
see was sitting with her back to me, talking.

She [illeg.]: very square; very solid.
[4: p. 61] ●│ [illegible passage, 4 lines] │●
whole table; [illeg.], petal by petal I
fall: & the stream comes: night comes: the
damp & the {[illeg.]} & the treeless avenues.
<Rose> {she} wants a vote; yes, said Maggie.
{W} {you} want Maggie: {to which} The old man {replied}
then replied, {according to Rose} ——thats where her
{[illeg.] – she bites her lip;
What about the yellow sofa in the duchess’s drawing room?}
unlacing his boots, which are tight, patent leather,
●│well whatever Prime Ministers do say, when the
Duchess is folded to their arms, – well, in│●
[illegible line]
put big speeches <even> into the mouths of kings, [illeg.].
●│And Rose spent 5 pounds 10 on her coat, skirt
in the Westbourne Grove” said Maggie│● so
Rose bites her lip
{thats why he wont give her a vote” said Maggie}
I see, said Maggie
{But I said to Rose, Elvira continued}
We have the Prime Minister in the yellow
drawing room with the lady” said Elvira
Well but look here, Maggie said Elvira,
Suppose you’re the Prime Minister; or any other
high official: like Papa for example;
with a little red box & a sword:
pirouetting about in front of a
looking glass; governing the British Empire,
you dont want a serge skirt that cost
£5 10. in the Westbourne Grove.”
[4: p. 62] “I dont blame him in the least” said Maggie.
If I sat in an office all day long.
That was the very substance of what I went on to
say to Rose – & should have said, had there been
an opportunity. What I said was, taking Rose
by the scruff of her heavy hot coat which cost
5 pounds ten in the Westbourne Grove, Rose my

fine fellow, ●│Rose you indomitable {& silent}
but silent conspirator,│● I daresay in five or ten or
even hundred years; but not now: thinking to myself
every patriarch has his prostitute: thinking to myself
of all the yellow couches in little drawing rooms; ★
how for generations, – but all the same, I added,
●│whats to come doubles trebles in fact multiplies
the past a million times & you wont reach the
sum of the future: this past is nothing to│●
time to come: so I said to Rose, Go on,
●│Dont you be {despondent, for} downhearted,
for {no} if you doubt│● fill up your forms
or whatever it is you’re doing at the long table,
{for unless} in the name of the {generations & let us
hope, I added, that} makes revolutions of the
years. You know Cleopatra’s needle on the
Embankment, Maggie? A rose leaf on the top of
that is the past; ●│{the} whats to come is the pillar.
And why not, I said abolish yellow
drawing rooms, & all the rest of it?
She was│●
fill up your forms, or whatever it is that you
may by doing – If I hadn’t lost that
<scrap> piece of paper, Maggie, I could be more exact,” –
in the interest of generations yet unborn; time to come;
{And then the meeting} {broke up. And} ●│And she
said “Are you coming to help us, or are you
honestly bored? {Not at all, I said:}│●
And I replied, – <She stopped.>
[4: p. 63] ●│“I could have told you <all> that,” said Maggie
<from what she
{After all} said at lunch>
“Now I shall write to Rose, {say – ”} <said Elvira & explain …>
{Elvira}
{throw me a pen, Maggie: Now wheres the paper got to?}
{& explain the position.}
{I shall begin,} My dear Rose:│●
In short,
{all right, said Elvira.} I’ll put it into
If you havent taken the bribe, Elvira repeated,
you needn’t behave like a fool. {But, Maggie,
when you write a letter you have to wrap things up in}
Very well: where’s my pen? {Now} I’ll write {it} & tell her
My dear Rose, she paused, with her pen in her hand,
●│{But} {Poor Rose, she said.} there she was, she
murmured, sitting with her back to me at the table, very
square very solid:│● {My dear Rose}, – & I
●│shall therefore adopt a manner that is square &
[illeg.]: My dear Rose, {no} when I left you
this afternoon, I said, & it was entirely true,
how pleased & indeed excited I was: that was true;│●
we are of opinion, Maggie & I, very
But you cant put things brusquely like that,
What you must do is {to} this: here we are
sitting after dinner in our room: Maggie & I:
She’s sewing, – {what are you} making? –
<I need [illeg.]> Well, <I can> leave that out. Here we are, Rose,
Magdalena, Elvira Pargiter, & {when you
say to us,} considering the matter, with the aid
{of Whittakers,} we conclude, that though
we thank you, for the offer, – {that of trying}
to become Englishwomen – {we} we conclude,
that the disadvantages & indeed dangers of this
<position> {proceeding}, – far outweigh the benefits.
– thats the {way} style, Maggie: we
[4: p. 64] {We gather that} we should become liable to honours
●│which we deplore, & to services which we abominate.
{We sho} {It} – {that’s to say, Maggie,} we might
{become Deans, or of} meaning by that, {[?birthplace?]},
degrees, titles, & {can} shooting savages with
muskets. In our opinion, the acceptance of a
vote implies {further agreement with this}│●
In our opinion the acceptance of a vote makes us
liable to honours we deplore, & to services
which we abominate – meaning by that
{degrees,} titles, <degrees> & shooting savages with muskets.

Moreover, {if I} {there is the} it would be
<surely,> incumbent on us – unless we [illeg.] – to
accept the {teaching} <[illeg.]> of the Church of England;
{to which we are not prepared to do: &}
to baptism, marriage & burial according to its
decrees – & with regard to baptism, marriage,
{burial} & the conduct of the immortal soul,
which we are not prepared to do. {&}
{Please direct the Prime Minister’s attention
[illegible line]}
Since, {as far as we} to the best of our knowledge,
we have {offered} them two or three hundred
years, to {[illeg.]} made a fair offer to the
state these 2 or 300 years, which offer
has been always refused <[illeg.]>, we now {wish} to
{withdraw some &} withdraw it, & consider
the matter closed. {As for our educa}
{Had} {We are} Nothing in short
{N} would induce us, Maggie & Elvira
Pargiter to become
[4: p. 65] “I shall now take a drink of coffee & begin a
new paragraph. Its very exhausting, being Rose”
She threw herself back on the sofa <& lay> with her
hands behind her head. <in an [?unbearable?]>
<the Pargiters> “Marching on, marching {on}, she said, its a wonderful
procession, from one end of time to the other. And time
<wh. is from past is but a rose leaf on the top of Cleopatra’s needle:
[illeg.] {compared with times to come.} {time to come the pillar.}
through the Our generation, Maggie, is merely the thickness of a
thickness of the rose leaf: we’re bound on an infinite voyage:
pillar> so that in twice twelve thousand years a man [illeg.]
<into this den, looking in at this window & {seeing us would} <will> hold
this cave> his nose & say Pah they stink. Savages; {that’s} <barbarians>
<She sneezed> {what we are, in the eyes of the future.} {But to
return.} To blow one’s nose in a pocket handkerchief
he’ll say is an impossible outrage upon the [illeg.]
of {civilisation} <[illeg.]>. {My dear Sir, I say to that man,}
{And I shall say,} {she {ble} sneezed}

{But to return: Rose} Nasty things, noses, <[illeg.]> hands,
finger nails,” She held up her hand & looked at it.
<sewing> <sewing>
●│And there you sit {making a curtain} by {the light of}
{the moon} on the 6th of May nineteenhundred &
ten, stitching curtains:│●
{But to return}
{Its to be a dress, said Maggie}
{And she} came in like starlight lit with
jewels,” {she added looking at her sister}
{well} <Its not a curtain, its a> I’m making a dress, said Maggie.
For a party? Elvira asked.
Yes, tomorrow,” said Maggie.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,”
But to return to {this generation} the letter, <she took it up & read>
“It would be incumbent on us, were we
[4: p. 66] Englishwomen to accept the teaching of the Archbishop
of Canterbury with regard to baptism, marriage, &
burial, & the nature & conduct of the soul
both here & hereafter. And that, I may say
with the utmost emphasis, we are not
prepared to do.” {Full stop.} Well?
{Now Maggie,} {to continue} what next <[illeg.]>
“We hope Uncle Abels gout is better; & send him
<then sign our best love. {Elvir <[illeg.]> Your affectionate cousin,}
your name> Elvira Pargiter” said Maggie.
{No, no, no, Maggie: there must be some transition,
said Elvira:}
●│No, no Maggie: the art of writing, which is a
very wonderful art,│●
Elvira dipped her pen in the ink.
“We hope…” she began.
●│God knows, Maggie, its a complicated
business, she began <broke off>, {putting one sentence after
another.} {That is,} <[illeg.]> the moment I put my pen to
the paper, & say, as you suggest, we hope Uncle Abels
gout is better – I {at once} see myself taking part in
the procession, through the desert, with nothing but

a clump of trees on the horizon; & the spears of savages;
<& we & hyena howling. {Very well} {What <Now> right have we}
come to to break off from the procession; – from one end of
a rock> time to the other? {Here we break} At
{the front, I say, come to the rock} here, {I say,}
we, Magdalena & Elvira Pargiter, stop & say to
the Pargiters, Here we {take our} break off. Here
we {make our own line through the desert,} leave you…│●
She began & stopped Its {really} a
tremendous {affair, she said}, exciting affair” she
said, we hope Uncle Abel’s gout is better.
[4: p. 67] We hope Uncle {Abels} gout {is better}” she wrote,
added
{But my dear Elvira, said Maggie}
Well if you feel like that said Maggie, I should
put P.S: {we said} {have offered} {As we have offered
our reply} {we} As our offer was repeatedly refused
we now withdraw it & consider the matter closed.
by
Holding her hand up in front of her she lay for a time, silent.
Maggie went on sewing.
<She said> And she came in like starlight clothed with …
I cant remember how it goes… {However, now for}
the letter,” She took up the page she had
written & read over:
You see, [illeg.] Maggie, what I intend to say is, we
have followed you … <formidable
now we are come to this rock: here: this & craggy
mountain>
<blow them a {where,} you & I Maggie, turn rubbing our eyes,
kiss> <wave our hands to the assembled company>
taking a look round {say,} make off on a track of our
own.”
She lit a cigarette. Her sister made no reply.
The long strips were being stitched together, to make a
{curtain} skirt.
{Finish the story of the party, Maggie,} Elvira coaxed
her – what did the man in gold lace say

to the lady on his left when you went to
the party Maggie? –
They said nothing.
Note
1 Woolf here refers to the popular French actress Gabrielle Réjane, who starred in
a production of Victorien Sardou’s Madame Sans-Gêne (1893) in London in the
mid-1890s (see Shaw, 1948, 1: pp. 177–8).
Appendix C
An Extract from the Holograph Draft of

Three Guineas
The following extract is taken from pages 6–8 of a 90–page holograph draft of
Chapter 3 of Three Guineas held at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection
of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. This draft,
written from 21 September 1937, is collected in the folder catalogued M.28.
Over the course of these pages Woolf experiments with the tone of address that
her female narrator will adopt to her male correspondent and debates whether,
and with what provisos, she will donate a guinea to his anti-fascist and anti-war
campaign ‘to protect culture & intellectual liberty’ (M.28, p. 6). These pages
also contain Woolf ’s famous claim that it is time to destroy the word ‘feminist’
(M.28, pp. 7–8).
[p. 6] That then is the {best} <only> answer that we can make
to your {<the>} question, how we can help you to protect
culture & intellectual liberty. {There only remains
then the} {now the} {And} {Finally} Now there remains
<your> {the} final {question:} request: for one guinea. You too
it seems are a supplicant, {& thus might perhaps}
an honorary Treasurer, asking for money to further
the aims of his society. {& thus,} {like the other
Honorary Treasurers} Thus it might be
possible, as {we found} in the other two cases,
of Honorary Treasurers asking for guineas,
to bargain & impose terms. But what are
the aims of your society? They are to prevent war,
{by} <to> protect{ing} intellectual liberty & our inheritance of
<the right culture: to protect also individual liberty: to
of free ‘defy dictators’; to {ensure} ‘ensure that
speech> the democratic ideals of {l} equal opportunity for all
166 An Extract from the Holograph Draft of Three Guineas
●│all {shall} without” to oppose dictatorships to

ensure that the democratic ideal of equal
opportunity for all {to enjoy} “to shall be
respected…” but there is no need to quote further. │●
[p. 7] What you are asking is for one guinea with which to defy
tyranny, dictatorship, slavery {whether of mind or body:}
with which to protect liberty, & {equality,} fraternity,
{Then} {It is unnecessary to} there is no need to
{bargain or haggle over this guinea, Sir} {There is}
{There is nothing} {The guinea is yours, on the
understand} If these are your aims, & if, as it
{then} {would be} <is> impossible to doubt, you {are} honest{ly} {in}
{believing} mean to do what you can to achieve them,
then there is no further need of bargaining between us.
Let {us} <me> make this quite plain. The guinea is yours
{without} without any return on your part.
I am not asking you for any ‘request’ or privilege, I am [illeg.]
not giving it on condition that you <your class, the sons> will admit {me}
our class, the d[aughter]s of educated men, to the Church of
England; or to the Stock Exchange; or to the
diplomatic service: or [?again?] that you will
make us “Englishwomen” on the same terms that
{Engl} {your sex are} <our fathers> {your class} are Englishmen.
{now} I do not claim or wish to receive any
honour; <or title or seat> {such as a seat upon} {though presumably}
upon any Board or Commission, {or [illeg.]}
where public money is spent upon pictures or [illeg.] objects
music or books: for {if} though public money is
presumably supplied by the daughters as well as the sons,
the sons are so much richer that they {are} have more
right to {[illeg.]} say how their own money shall be
spent. Happily for us, Sir, the one right
that is of paramount importance, the right to
earn ones own living, {has} {was} is already won
{& therefore the whole of} what used to be called
the “feminist” movement is a thing of the past,
& the word “feminist” by which is meant, the
An Extract from the Holograph Draft of Three Guineas 167
dictionary says, “one who champions the rights of

women” is obsolete. Let us write it
[p. 8] sheet of paper & burn it. Let us {pound} <[bang]> the ashes into a
a mortar, & {consider} <[illeg.]> that any one who in future uses
that word daubs herself with mud. {& obscures the}
defiles the water of [illeg.] with {an} decomposing matter.
<cover>
<That is to say> is merely taking {shelter} behind a word {which, like so many} such
<or let us {words, allows the user to} with the intent to annoy, without
bang it in a {having the courage to be} having the courage to make a
mortar definite charge which can be met definitely. {But}
& smear ●│Now {that we have} destroyed the word feminism, {however,}
that dirty the air is already considerably clearer. {For} {not only}
water upon> It was a bad word;│● We have need to be this
emphatic in the destruction of {this} <the> word, {because}
‘feminist’ {because} {not only} {because its was} [illeg.] been
always an imperfect word, {[illeg.]}
{at the} {carrying what is called} a pejorative meaning,
{slightly poisoned,} liable in careless hands to
inflict wounds, but because it obscured the real
name of that nineteenth century movement
for which it has hitherto stood. It is now
perfectly plain that it was an Anti-Fascist
movement. These d[aughter]s of ed[ucated] men who
called themselves or were called, “Feminists” were in
fact the advance guard of your own movement;
{called} That is an obvious remark, but it is one that
can usefully be made at this moment; because
it proves that by giving you a guinea now, Sir, to
further the aims of your movement, the d[aughter]s of ed[ucated] men
are merely carrying on the fight which their
mothers & grandmothers fought so valiantly
{not} for so many years. The aims are precisely the
same. There can be no question of haggling &
bargaining between us.
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Index
‘Angel in the House’ 41–2, 61n. 12, 89–90, Clarke, Stuart N. 125
144 commodity capitalism 35, 37–9
Antigone 82 Communist Party of Great Britain
anti-Semitism 5, 71, 97, 112, 113 (CPGB) 117
Artists International Association (AIA) Comstock, Margaret 91
116–17, 118, 119 Conrad, Joseph 36
‘Auden Generation’ 5–7, 8, 107 see also Coombes, B. L. 133
Hynes, Samuel Cramer, Patricia 53, 91
Auden, W. H. 2, 3, 5, 72, 141 Cunningham, Valentine 6–9, 16
VW’s responses to 8, 11, 115, 120
Austen, Jane 57–8, 121, 122 Daiches, David 24n. 8, 28, 104, 109
Ayers, David 9 Daily Worker 117, 118–19, 135n. 18
Davies, Margaret Llewellyn 53, 60n. 11, 68
Beer, Gillian 15, 104, 112, 136n. 21 Day-Lewis, Cecil 2, 6, 72, 115, 141
Bell, Anne Olivier 116 Dowson, Jane 8
Bell, Julian 86, 117
Bell, Quentin 14, 116 editing, of VW 15, 16, 20–1, 22, 26n. 23,
Bell, Vanessa 72, 86, 117 64, 99n. 1, 112
Bellemin-Noël, Jean 18, 19, 33 Leonard Woolf as editor 22, 24n. 10,
Bennett, Arnold 10 25n. 14, 30, 110, 111–12
Bennett, Joan 104 Eliot, T. S. 2, 6, 8, 120, 126, 137, 139,
Biasi, Pierre-Marc de 22 147n. 5
Bibesco, Elizabeth 70 as late modernist 105, 140, 142, 148n.
Bishop, Edward 21 6
Black, Naomi 74, 79, 80, 81, 82 Englishness 105–6, 126, 129–30, 133, 142
Bloomsbury Group 11, 17, 109, 116 see also patriotism
Bowers, Fredson 18 Esty, Jed
Bowlby, Rachel 39 Englishness 105, 108, 142
Bradshaw, David 34, 72–3 late modernism 3, 28, 105, 138,
Briggs, Julia 3, 10, 16, 21, 66, 111 139–40, 142, 143
Englishness 105, 108 pageantry 105, 126–7, 142
feminism and pacifism 68
links between Y and TG 64–5 fascism 5, 50, 78, 118–19, 129
British Empire 105, 121, 142 anti-fascist activity and organizations
Empire Day 126, 127 70, 72–3, 80, 113, 116–7,
Empire Exhibition (1924) 37, 126 118–19
see also imperialism and patriarchy 70, 78, 80, 97
British Union of Fascists 5 see also Germany; Spanish Civil War;
Brosnan, Leila 41 World War II
Butler, Judith 15 Flint, Kate 10
Folios of New Writing 120, 133, 135n. 19
Carey, John 16 For Intellectual Liberty (FIL) 72–3
184 Index
Fordham, Finn 21 Hynes, Samuel 3, 4, 5–6, 16

Forster, E. M. 6, 9, 69, 70, 72, 97, 105, 126,
142 imperialism 36–9, 47–8, 89, 91–2, 105,
France 18, 34, 113, 124, 135n. 12 121, 126–7, 134n. 3 see also
VW in 40, 84 British Empire
‘French feminism’ 14–15, 24n. 9 International Association of Writers
Froula, Christina 17 for the Defence of Culture
Fry, Roger 1, 13, 129 (IAWDC) 72, 113
International Peace Campaign (IPC) 79,
Galsworthy, John 28 80
Gandhi, Mohandas K. 98 Italy 5, 81, 97
genetic criticism 2, 18–21, 22–3, 58, 112, VW in 71
140
origins 18 Joannou, Maroula 8, 135n. 20
practices 20, 22 Joyce, James 1, 2, 6, 139, 147n. 1
principles 19–20, 112 Finnegans Wake 140
in Woolf studies 20–1 Ulysses 1, 99n. 1, 138, 143
Germany 5, 49–50, 71, 97, 144
Jews in 5, 71 Keynes, Maynard 38
military action in Spanish Civil War 5, Kingsley, Mary 86
81, 118–19 Kristeva, Julia 14–15
military action in World War II 1, 5,
112–13 Labour Party 71–2
refugees from 49–50, 113 Lansbury, George 71–2
rise of Nazism 5, 49, 71, 72–3, 116 late modernism 3–4, 9, 23n. 1, 28, 105,
VW in 71 139–46
women in 70, 80 and VW 11–12, 17, 28–9, 105, 138,
Good Housekeeping 11, 35–6, 38–9 139–46
Great Depression 1, 4–5, 38 Lawrence, D. H. 2, 139
impact on 1930s British literature 6–7, League of Nations 5, 118, 131
34, 120, 140–1 Leaska, Mitchell A. 29, 50, 55, 110, 111,
Greece, VW in 87–8 122, 124, 134n. 8
Greene, Graham 6, 12 Leavis, F. R. 139
Greg, W. W. 18 Leavis, Q. D. 65
Guiguet, Jean 24n. 8, 104, 112, 135n. 11 Left Review 117
Lehmann, John 6, 8, 110–11, 133, 135n.
Haldane, Elizabeth 81 19, 139, 147n. 1
Haule, James M. 28, 29, 52 VW’s responses to 8, 115
Hay, Louis 20 Lewis, Wyndham 2, 6, 11, 140
Hewart, Gordon, Lord 77, 100nn. 5–6 Life As We Have Known It 13
Hoffmann, Charles G. 24n. 12, 31 London and National Society for Women’s
Hogarth Press 8, 13, 71, 80, 115, 120, Service (L&NSWS) 27, 32, 59n.
134n. 4, 143 1, 79
Holtby, Winifred 8, 10, 85 Lucas, John 9
homosexuality, in VW’s works 48, 128–9
Hsieh, Lili 88, 96, 98–9 Mackay, Marina 3, 105, 106, 139–40, 142,
Hulle, Dirk van 19, 20 143, 148n. 6
Hussey, Mark 22, 106–7, 110, 127, 134nn. MacNeice, Louis 133
4–5 7–8 Mansfield, Katherine 1, 147n. 2
Huxley, Aldous 6, 33–6, 37–8, 40, 72, 120 Marcus, Jane 14, 16, 60n. 3, 100n. 5, 114
Index 185
Marx, Karl 37, 38 and Victorian social codes 56–7, 89,

Mass Observation 6–7 130
McGann, Jerome J. 18 and war 63, 67–8, 77, 114, 129
McKenzie, D. F. 18 patriotism 63, 76–7, 95, 97, 126–7 see also
McVicker, Jeanette 36 Englishness
Miller, Tyrus 3–4, 23n. 1, 29, 138, 139–40, Paulin, Tom 16
141–2, 143, 144, 145–6 Pawlowski, Merry M. 3, 17
Mirsky, Dimitri 109 Peach, Linden 3
modernism 1–2, 3, 6, 8–9, 28, 29, 105, Poole, Roger 132
137–47 Pound, Ezra 139, 140
canonization of 2, 138, 139–40, 147n. 1 Pridmore-Brown, Michele 122
and the literary marketplace 16 Priestley, J. B. 7, 13
new modernist studies 139, 147n. 3 propaganda 6, 88, 99, 114–23, 128–30
reactions against 1–2, 34–5, 140–1 cartoons 117, 118
visual arts 35 imperial 36–7
see also late modernism public letter form 80–1, 100n. 8, 115–6
Moi, Toril 144 wartime 67–8, 108, 125
Montaigne, Michel de 40, 89–90
Montefiore, Janet 8 Quennell, Peter 115–16
Moore, Madeline 28, 104
Morris and Redford, AIA: The Story of the Radin, Grace 15, 29, 43, 51–2
Artists International Association Robinson-Valéry, Judith 19, 26n. 22
116–17
Moscow Trials 113 Scott, Bonnie Kime 143–4
Scroogie, Edward 118
New Signatures 2, 8, 141 Shillingsburg, Peter 18
Nicolson, Harold 2, 71 Silver, Brenda R. 15, 16, 19, 29, 30, 65, 76,
nonviolence 98, 101n. 14 see also pacifism 99, 137
Simpson, Kathryn 38
Orwell, George 7, 13, 141 Six Point Group, The 80
Overy, Richard 6, 103, 132 Smyth, Ethel 53, 59n. 1, 113
Snaith, Anna 17, 65, 81, 106, 112
pacifism 67–9, 71–2, 98, 101n. 14, 117 Snaith and Whitworth, Locating Woolf 38
conscientious objectors 68, 69 Spanish Civil War 5, 81, 103, 113, 116,
pacifist organizations 72–3, 79, 80, 117
116–17 in the British media 5, 81, 118–19
of VW 12, 63, 65, 67, 68–9, 72, 86, Julian Bell’s death during 86
95–7, 98, 106, 119, 130–1 Spender, Stephen 2, 6, 14, 72, 113, 115,
and women 63, 67–8, 77, 91 141
see also Three Guineas under Woolf, Squier, Susan M. 91, 93–4
Virginia Strachey, J. P. (Pernal) 79
Patmore, Coventry 41 Strachey, Lytton 1, 10
patriarchy Strachey, Pippa 32, 79, 99
and the Church of England 57, 92 Suh, Judy 28
and education 47, 49, 55, 77, 83, 86,
90, 120 Tanselle, G. Thomas 18
and fascism 70, 78, 80, 97 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 89
and patriotism 63, 76–7, 95, 97 textual scholarship 2, 18, 25nn. 19–21, 99
and the professions 70–1, 79, 83, 85, 95 in Woolf studies 14, 19, 20–1, 29,
and symbolic clothing 47, 48, 49, 77–8 111–12
186 Index
see also editing, of VW; genetic essays and non-fictional prose

criticism ‘Abbeys and Cathedrals’ 35
‘All About Books’ 80
unemployment 4, 7, 38, 120 ‘Anon’ 112
Upward, Edward 6, 7, 133 Character in Fiction’ 28, 90–1
Common Reader, The 9
Victorian aesthetics 144 Common Reader, The: Second Series
Vogue 35 11, 27
‘Docks of London, The’ 35,
Wall Street Crash 4, 34 36–40
Walpole, Hugh 2, 14, 120 ‘Great Men’s Houses’ 35, 36
Walter, Bruno 49–50 ‘How Should One Read a Book?’
Warner, Eric 53, 60n. 3 81
Whitaker’s Almanack 91, 144–5 ‘“I am Christina Rossetti”’ 19
Williams and Matthews, Rewriting the ‘Introductory Letter’ to Life As We
Thirties 8–9 Have Known It 13, 60n. 11, 80
Wisor, Rebecca 21, 64, 66, 74, 99n. 1, ‘Jane Austen’ (1913) 57–8
100n. 3 ‘Leaning Tower, The’ 11, 120–2,
Women’s Social and Political Union 123, 132
(WSPU) 85, 91, 93 Letter to a Young Poet, A 11, 27, 80,
women’s suffrage 53, 68, 72, 91, 93 115, 116, 129
in VW’s works 48–9, 50, 57, 83, 91–5 London Scene, The 35–6, 39–40, 52
Woolf, Leonard 22, 40, 71, 72, 110–12, ‘Modern Novels’ 143–4
113, 114, 146 ‘Oliver Goldsmith’ 50
and the Hogarth Press 8, 71, 134n. 4 ‘Oxford Street Tide’ 35
internationalism 130–1 ‘Plumage Bill, The’ 39
see also editing, of VW ‘Portrait of a Londoner’ 35
Woolf studies, overview 2–3, 14–17, 20–1 ‘Professions for Women’ 27, 30, 32,
Woolf, Virginia [VW] 41, 89, 144
anxiety about reception 1, 10, 33–5, ‘Reader, The’ 112
71, 110, 137, 138, 140, 146–7 Roger Fry 13, 86, 108–9, 110, 129
attitude to literature and politics Room of One’s Own, A 9–10, 11, 27,
8, 11–12, 13, 58, 80–1, 107, 40, 41, 49, 71, 132, 144
113–14, 114–23, 127–30, 131, ‘Sketch of the Past, A’ 67, 104
132–3, 142–3, 144, 146–7 ‘“This is the House of Commons”’
Between the Acts [BA] 35
art’s social role 127–30, 131, 133 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’
composition 108–9, 110–12, 123–5 122
critical reception 13–14, 104, 106, Three Guineas see under Woolf,
112, 132 Virginia
form 84, 109–10, 123–4, 126–7, 143 ‘Thunder at Wembley’ 37
innovation 109, 124, 138, 145 ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’
internationalist outlook 108, 125–6, 103, 116–18, 119, 123, 129
130–1, 132, 133 ‘Women Must Weep – Or Unite
pacifism 106, 130–1 Against War’ 87
violence 123, 128–30 in Europe 40, 71, 84, 87–8
contemporary responses to VW 1–2, experimentalism 1, 9–10, 12, 28–9, 31,
9–11, 12, 13–14, 27–8, 63, 69, 32, 35, 44–5, 52–3, 54, 58, 80–1,
99, 109, 115–16, 119, 138, 139 83–4, 88–9, 105, 106–7, 123–4,
death 1, 14, 104, 110–11, 112 137–8, 140, 142–4, 145–6, 147
Index 187
fiction research scrapbooks 54, 55, 75–82

Between the Acts see under Woolf, working titles for 69–71, 82
Virginia Years, The [Y]
Flush 10–11, 27, 43–4, 142, 145 critical reception 12, 27–8, 29,
Jacob’s Room 9, 10, 21 30–1, 52, 53, 91
‘Mark on the Wall, The’ 10, ‘Elvira/Sara Pargiter’ 45–9, 50, 51,
144–5 55, 57, 77, 91–5, 96, 132, 137
Mrs Dalloway 9, 13, 56, 106, 134n. form 27–8, 30–2, 44–5, 46, 50–8
6, 146 innovation 12, 28–9, 44–5, 46,
Night and Day 9, 28, 134n. 6 52–3, 54, 58, 138
Orlando 9, 33 relationship to TG 12, 27, 31, 45,
Pargiters, The: The Novel-Essay 50, 54, 63–5, 66, 87–8, 95, 99
Portion of ‘The Years’ 11–12, research scrapbooks 54–7
27, 29, 31, 41–3, 44, 55–6, 58, sexual politics 40–3, 46–9, 50–1,
89–90, 114, 130, 145 see also 56–7, 59
Years, The under Woolf, Virginia working titles for 40–1, 51, 58, 69
To the Lighthouse 9, 107 see also editing, of VW; homosexuality,
Voyage Out, The 9, 90 in VW’s works; late modernism;
Waves, The 10, 27, 32–4, 40, 43, pacifism; women’s suffrage;
109, 127, 140 World War II
Years, The see under Woolf, Workers’ Educational Association 120
Virginia World War I 67–8, 69, 107, 134n. 6, 144
mental health 14, 51–2, 74, 110–11 aftermath 4, 5, 6, 131
Three Guineas [TG] conscription 68
anti-fascism 70, 72–3, 78, 80, 82, and suffrage 68
86–7, 97 World War II 4–5, 103, 113, 142
critical reception 12, 63, 64, 65–6, air raids 1, 122
69, 88, 97, 99 Battle of Britain 112, 113, 122, 123
feminist-pacifism 12, 63, 65, 72, fear of German invasion 112, 135n. 12
76–8, 83, 88–9, 95–7, 98 VW’s responses to 1, 13, 108, 113,
form 65, 69–70, 73, 77, 78–81, 121–3, 127–8, 130–2, 143
82–3, 88–9, 96–7, 98–9, 145 Wortley, M. C. (Countess of Lovelace) 56
innovation 80–1, 88–9, 96, 138, Wright, Joseph 55, 76
142, 145
photographs 77–8 Yeats, W. B. 6, 131, 139
relationship to Y 12, 27, 31, 45, 50,
54, 63–5, 66, 87–8, 95, 99 Zwerdling, Alex 15

1.alice Wood - Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism

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Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism

Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand;

Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar

The Genesis of ‘The Years’, ‘Three

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2013

© Alice Wood, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

1 Introducing Late Woolf 1

2 Critiquing Patriarchy in the Years of The Years 27

3 The Evolution of Woolf ’s Feminist-Pacifism in Three Guineas 63

4 Writing Art in Times of Chaos in Between the Acts 103

5 Conclusion: Newness and Lateness in Woolf ’s Last Works 137

Appendix A: Extracts from ‘1907’ in the Holograph of The Years 149

Publishing Company. Excerpts from MOMENTS OF BEING by Virginia Woolf,

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century

AROO (1998a), A Room of One’s Own, in M. Shiach (ed.), ‘A Room of One’s

BA (2011), Between the Acts. Edited by M. Hussey. Cambridge:

D 1–5 (1977–84), The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by A. O. Bell with

E 1–6 (1986–2011), The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by A. McNeillie and

F (2000b), Flush. Edited by K. Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

HH (2003), A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by

L 1–6 (1977–82), The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by N. Nicolson and

MOB (2002), Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Edited by

MD (2000c), Mrs Dalloway. Edited by S. McNichol with an introduction

RF (1995), Roger Fry: A Biography. Edited by D. F. Gillespie. Oxford:

TG (1998b), Three Guineas, in M. Shiach (ed.), ‘A Room of One’s Own’

TP (1978), The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years.’ Edited by

VO (2001c), The Voyage Out. Edited by L. Sage. Oxford: Oxford

W (2000f), The Waves. Edited by K. Flint. London: Penguin.

Y (1999b), The Years. Edited by H. Lee. Oxford: Oxford University

Pre-publication texts discussed within Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism

Holograph and Typescript Drafts of Woolf ’s Speech to the

MATERIAL CAT. NO. LOCATION

Holograph and Typescript Material Relating to The Years

MATERIAL CAT. NO. LOCATION

Holograph and Typescript Material Relating to Three Guineas

MATERIAL CAT. NO. LOCATION

MATERIAL CAT. NO. LOCATION

Typescript Document Relating to ‘A Sketch of the Past’

MATERIAL CAT. NO. LOCATION

<word> = an authorial insertion.

In an attempt to convey something of the complexity of Woolf ’s revisions, these

Introducing Late Woolf

The decade in which contemporary critics once caricatured Woolf as apolitical

acceptance of Miller’s contention that high modernism, including Woolf ’s

British society and literature, 1931–41

of it, Europe in the 1930s became increasingly politically unstable. As Hynes

Hunger marchers demonstrated in London that autumn. […] In November,

Confidence in the League of Nations, the international governmental organi-

While Cunningham’s monograph and Williams and Matthews’s edited

Woolf in the 1930s and beyond

construction of language as ‘from a foreign land’ (1981, p. 166). Many Anglo-

Of course, many critics have challenged this politicized version of Woolf ’s

A genetic approach to Woolf

Drawing on the theories of structuralism and post-structuralism, genetic

A second hazard of close manuscript study that genetic criticism specifi-

to the voluminous and still largely unexplored archival materials relating to

J. W. Graham (London: Hogarth); (1978), The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of