References and notes
- Woolf , Virginia . 1973 . Three Guineas , New York : Harcourt Brace . Harbinger Paperback), 170—hereafter TG. First published by Hogarth, London, and Harcourt Brace, New York, in 1938. The paperback does not reprint the photographs from the original editions, which were so central to the book's argument. In May and June, 1938, the Atlantic Monthly published a condensed version under the title “Women must weep—or unite against the war,” which clearly identified it as an anti‐fascist document written from a feminist and pacifist point of view. The contributors’ column stated that “her essays, especially A Room of One's Own, have endeared her to all militant members of the gentle sex.”
- 1942 . The Death of the Moth , 176 – 186 . New York : Harcourt Brace . “Middlebrow"—letter written but not sent to the New Statesman;
- Woolf , Leonard , ed. 1954 . A Writer's Diary, , New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich .
- Woolf , Virginia . 1967 . Collected Essays, , Edited by: Woolf , Leonard . 4 vols. , New York : Harcourt Brace’ . Since, in the cases noted in this essay, the editor did not always choose to reprint the last revised version of the author's essays nor to supply the necessary information about original publication, the reader is advised to check earlier collections of essays as well as the periodical in question
- West , Rebecca . 1913 . “Autumn and Virginia Woolf,” . In Ending in Earnest , 208 – 213 . New York : Doubleday .
- Bell , Quentin . 1972 . Virginia Woolf: A Biography , Vol. II , 186 New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich .
- Pacificism and Violence. A Study—in Bourgeois Ethics , New York : Oriole Chapbooks . ). Quentin Bell in Bloomsbury sees pacifism as an aesthetic as well as an ideology as the one defining characteristic of the group. See also
- Parkes , H. B. 1936 . “The tendencies of Berg‐sonism,” . Scrutiny , : 407 – 424 . for a discussion of Bergsonism as a philosophy which may be used to justify withdrawal from life; the discussion is of Proust, and Bergsonism as “the philosophy of an invalid,” but as Woolf was much influenced by this philosophy through her reading of Jane Harrison, this study is applicable
- John , Christopher St. 1959 . Ethel Smyth , 233 London : Longmans Green .
- 1891 . The Fortnightly Review , : 677 Millicent Garrett Fawcett in “The Emancipation of Women,” an answer to Frederick Harrison's earlier essay which had called for better educated housewives, wrote: “In the time of Mrs. Hannah More, it was unwomanly to learn Latin; Sidney Smith tried to reassure the readers of the Edinburgh eighty years ago that the womanly qualities in a woman did not really depend on her ignorance of Greek and Latin, and that a woman might even learn mathematics without “forsaking her infant for a quadratic equation.”
- See the Winter, 1977 complete issue of The Bulletin of the New York Public Library for revaluations of The Years by several critics including two whose work is collected here, as well as Woolf's galleys of the novel cancelled at the last moment and an essay on “The Pargiters,” the unpublished first version of the novel with the interspersed documentary chapters.
- 1935 . “Lady Novelists and the Lower Orders,” . Scrutiny , : 112 – 132 . The “snub” to Queenie Leavis ascribed to Woolf in AWD as the cause of her vicious personal attack on Three Guineas and its author, was Woolf's refusal to answer Mrs. Leavis’ letter praising her introduction to Life As We Have Known It and enclosing a copy of a review in Scrutiny. Woolf sent it to Margaret Llewelyn‐Davies on September 6, 1935, saying “I don't know her, but am told that she and her husband represent all that is highest and dryest at Cambridge. So I rather feel from reading her article; but I suppose she means well, and I'm glad that she should feel sympathetic in her high and dry way to our book.” (Manuscripts of V. W.‐M. Llewelyn‐Davies correspondence, Sussex University Library, courtesy of Quentin Bell, Nigel Nicolson, Lord Llewelyn‐Davies and A. N. Peasgood). In, Queenie Leavis asks why books about the working class haven't “resulted in technical originality and locally authentic writing?” “No amount of observation of the district‐visiting kind, however conscientious and however creditable to the industry and heart of the novelist, will produce a convincing substitute for adequate response to the quality of working‐class life.” She praises Grace Lumpkin's 1933 To Make My Bread as “better propaganda because better literature” and compares the novels under review with passages from the cooperative working women's letters. The novels have a “nauseating sentimentality” because they only see the workers as symbols of capitalist exploitation while Woolf as an artist responded to the quality of life in the writing of real workers. She praises Woolf for recognizing the rich language and culture of the British working class but like Woolf in The Years she sees the dangers which threaten it in the cinema and the loudspeaker. Later that year, reviewing Dorothy Richardson (p. 330) Mrs. Leavis called Woolf's feminism dated and A Room of One's Own crude. “The demand for mass rights” she wrote “can only be a source of embarrassment to intelligent women, who can be counted on to prefer being considered as persons rather than as a kind. … “ The Leavises and Scrutiny have been responsible for forming the taste of several generations of readers. The false choice demanded by pitting Lawrence against Woolf, the reiteration of Woolf's snobbery and elitism and denial of her appeal to ordinary readers on the basis of her birth has deprived many of the experience of finding pleasure in the radical politics, moral strength and aesthetic experimentation of Woolf's fiction
- Llewelyn‐Davies , J. , ed. 1904 . The Workingmen's College 1854–1904, , London : Macmillan . “By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride of nationality—religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride—Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchment; refuse to fill up the forms” (TG, 80). Woolf also demands “that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession” (TG, 80). Some things will take care of themselves, for “we can scarcely doubt that our brothers will provide us for many centuries to come, as they have done for many centuries past, with what is so essential for sanity, and so invaluable in preventing the great modern sins of vanity, egoism and megalomania— that is to say ridicule, censure and contempt.” (TG, 82). She warns women of the dangers of professional life: loss of the senses, competition, greed. The professional who has lost his humanity is “only a cripple in a cave”. Woolf describes with an outsider's knowledge what “uneasy dwelling places,” what “cities of strife” are the old and rich universities for both women and the working class. Their new college should teach “Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital” (TG, 34).) for similarities between Woolf's ideas on education and those of F. D. Maurice
- Contemporary reviews of Three Guineas are worth a study in themselves. I quote in full Time and Tide's defense, because Woolf wrote to Margaret Llewelyn‐Davies that it had saved her the trouble of preparing her own response. (June 25, 1938, 887–888):
- “Mrs. Woolf's best‐seller, Three Guineas, descending on the peaceful fold of reviewers, has thrown them into that dreadful kind of internal conflict that leads to nervous breakdown. On the one hand there is Mrs. Woolf's position in literature: not to praise her work would be a solecism no reviewer could possibly afford to make. On the other hand there is her theme, which is not merely disturbing to nine out of ten reviewers but revolting. There are things which should be ignored and she has not ignored them. There are faces that should remain behind a veil—or at any rate a yashmak—and she has dragged the veil away. A terrible sight. Indecent, almost obscene.
- The appalling struggle of most of the reviewers to combine respect and loathing is only too evident in their phrases. On the whole, I award the palm to Mr. Graham Greene for his review in The Spectator. While paying all the obligatory lip service to Mrs. Woolf's genius, he contrived to slip in a suggestion that her thesis was out of date, her voice shrill, her outlook provincial and her experience over sheltered.
- The only reviewer, as far as my reading goes, who gave up the struggle and frankly went all out in two columns of sheer passionate exasperation was Mr. G. M. Young in the Sunday Times. Mr. Young's exasperation was buttressed by page references calculated to induce readers to believe that he could substantiate each point of his attack in detail. Well—I looked them all up. Inaccurate, said he, quoting Mrs. Woolf as making statements she never could or would have made, besides perverting into literalness flights which were obviously intended to be figurative and symbolic. “Belated sex‐egoism,” he exclaimed, “a pamphleteer of 1905; agnostic, radical, pacifist and feminist,” He, at least, has got it out of his system. I should think he is in no danger of a nervous breakdown.”
- Greene , Graham . 1938 . The Spectator , June 17 : 112
- John , K. 1938 . ("The New Lysistrata,” . New Statesman and Nation , June 11 : 995 – 996 . ) pokes fun at Woolf's analysis of “woman's influence” as a refined form of prostitution, saying “It is all a little reminiscent of that good man who would rather have given his daughter poison than a copy of The Well of Loneliness.” He is absolutely mystified by the fact that she does not regard chastity as woman's highest virtue and is genuinely dismayed by a woman's refusal to see that physical chastity is her real virtue. More interesting to modern readers, however, are the responses of women, to whom the book is addressed.
- Bogan , Louise . 1938 . New Republic , September 14 : 164 – 165 . ) praises the book but feels that most women don't “deserve all these bouquets” and that many women are not pacifists by nature; some have the violence of Queen Victoria in them and some are even fascists. “There is no questioning the justice of Mrs. Woolf's demands, or the beauty of her gospel,” she writes but feels that she is too bitter on lecturers as “personal charm” is one of Woolf's own best qualities.
- 1921 . TLS , January 27 : 58 ) titles her piece “The Ladies and Gentlemen” and noble as Woolf's motives are, the elegance of style and class of the writer are to be questioned. “Upper‐middle‐class Englishwomen, thus fenced off, are to erect, upon the class‐consciousness and class education dinned in to them from the first moment they were dandled before the nursery fire, a moral pattern so severe that it has never been adhered to by anyone who was not by nature an artist or a saint.” She asks Woolf to forget that she is a lady and “go on being an artist,” for her position has allowed her, unlike the rest of us, to concentrate on pure ends, not means. 13. Virginia Woolf's own attitude toward revolution may be found in a review of T. D. Beresford's novel Revolution in, which is not in Collected Essays. “If the reader finds something amiss—he will probably blame the subject. He will say that revolutions are not a fit subject for action. And there he will be wrong—He means that to write a book about what is going to happen in England when Isaac Perry proclaims a general strike and the army refuses to obey its officers is not a novelist's business—Yet the fault cannot lie with revolutions. Tolstoy and Hardy have proved, revolutions are fine things to write about if they have happened sufficiently long ago. But if you are impelled to invent your own revolution, half your energy will be needed to make sure it works… . We find ourselves tempted to suggest alternatives, and seriously wish to draw Mr. Beresford's attention to the importance of the cooperative movement which he appears to overlook. … As Lady Angela plays we cannot help thinking about a possible policy for the left wing of the Labour Party. We want Mr. Beresford to turn his mind to that problem, directly the Chopin is over. In short, we want him to give us facts, not fiction.”
- London: L. & Virginia Woolf, 1931; with introduction by Virginia Woolf. The editor of the Yale Review (xliv) describes Woolf as the author of A Room of One's Own who “turns her mind here to women of the working class.” In a footnote he gives the membership of the English Women's Cooperative Guild in 1930 as 70,000.
- Woolf praises the working class women in her introduction, “not downtrodden, envious and exhausted, they are humorous and vigorous and strongly independent.” In the Woolf‐Davies correspondence cited above, Woolf's concern, politically and morally with the Cooperative Women's Guild is demonstrated. She arranged lectures on venereal disease, wondering to her friend why some working women objected and some wept since they were the class most affected by it. Woolf explained her “impertinence” in writing Three Guineas to her fellow feminist (July 4, 1938) “to sit silent and acquiesce in all this idiotic letter signing and vocal pacifism when there's such an obvious horror in our midst—such tyranny, such Pecksniffism— finally made my blood boil into the usual ink‐spray.” She answered Miss Davies’ objection to “verbosity” “One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.” She was glad she roused G. M. Young's rage and said the book was for the “common” “reluctant” and “easily bored” reader, not for the convinced. She praised the Coop women for a much more radical stance than the Labour Party. As early as 1920 Woolf read Mrs. Layton, one of the writers in Life As We Have Known It, praising the style except when it was “too like a book” and a feeling that “she hushes things up a little.” (July 21, 1920). In July 1930 she still had grave doubts about her own paper on the Guild being suitable for an introduction to the book. She asked for permission to change the names to make it fictional for the Yale Review since the editor had said Americans were “in the dark” about cooperation. “Can you trust me to make the thing blameless? I don't suppose any Guildswoman is likely to read the Yale Review.” On July 27 she wrote that Leonard had given his oath that “it will be quite all right about America,” that she would rewrite the essay for the book and asked what the women felt, “Do they want their things to appear in print? Are they all alive?” On September 14 she sent a revised version back to Miss Davies, saying that she would withdraw her essay if it would “give pain and be misunderstood;” “The difficulty with impressions is that if you once start altering from the best of motives everything gets blurred and out of proportion.” On October 10 she responded to the working women's criticism of her essay: “Vanity seems to be the same in all classes. But I swear that Mrs. Burton shall say exactly what she thinks of the appearance of me and my friends and I wont [sic] think her unsympathetic. Indeed I wish she would—what fun to hand her a packet of our letters and let her introduce it.” Woolf was appalled by “the terrific conventionality of the workers. “I don't think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so. If they can't face the fact that Lilian smokes a pipe and reads detective novels, can't be told that they weigh on an average 12 stone—which is largely because they scrub so hard and have so many chilidren [sic]” then, Woolf felt, they weren't facing reality. She was depressed that the workers were taking on the “middle class respectabilities” which artists had worked so hard to throw off “One has to be ‘sympathetic’ and polite and therefore one is uneasy and insincere.” In February 1931 she offered her royalties to the Women's Guild as the Yale Review had paid her “handsomely” “I should only feel I was paying my due for the immense interest their letters gave me.” Most importantly, she confessed that she had now when reading proof, come round to Miss Davies’ view that she had “made too much of the literary side” of her interest. “I tried to change the tone of some of the sentences to suggest a more human outlook,” and she added the sentence about cigarettes, “a little blue cloud of smoke seemed to me aesthetically desirable at that point.” In June Woolf wrote that she was relieved by the “generous” and “appreciative” letters of the working women but she agreed with Margaret Llewelyn‐Davies’ sister‐in‐law that she was the wrong person as a writer to “get people interested in the women's stories.” The Yale Press rejected the book for America as “rather far from the experience and interest of possible readers here,” but Woolf said that young English intellectuals found the letters “amazing.” She reported much later (July 1937) that there were 395 copies left, “I wish we could bring out another volume. The young are all on the side of the workers, but naturally know nothing whatever about them.” Leonard Woolf may perhaps have only remembered the fuss and printed the first version of the essay, but I think it may be argued that the essay itself became a cooperative venture and the last version was Virginia Woolf's own best version.
- Woolf , Leonard . 1967 . A Calendar of Consolation , London : Hogarth . he quoted the proverb, “Go down the ladder when you choose a wife, up when you choose a friend,” and Gorky on Tolstoy's determination to tell the truth about women only when he had one foot in the grave
- 1948 . “The Leaning Tower,” . In The Moment and Other Essays , 154 New York : Harcourt Brace .