What is to Console Us?: the Politics of Deception in Woolf’s Short Stories

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s short stories have frequently been viewed as lyrical fiction that is experimental in form and concerned with a quest for reality.¹ This approach, however, denies a political vision which shapes most of the short fiction just as it does Woolf’s feminist essays and her novels. As in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Woolf’s political analysis of social experience in the short stories is presented through female characters whom she considers a society of outsiders. Because they are denied social and class privilege, women reveal the destructive nature of a classbound society and its effects on individual consciousness and interpersonal relationships.