Abstract
The single most dramatic departure in literary studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century has been the recovery of women as readers and as writers. Literary studies in the late twentieth century have been characterised by women’s awareness of themselves not as surrogate male readers, but as women readers. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, first published in 1929, with its insistence on the conditions which have governed women’s relation to the written word, and its impassioned plea for a rewriting of history and culture along the female line, now looks like a prophetic foreshadowing of late twentieth-century feminist activity.1 Its sequel, Three Guineas (1938), written under the shadow of encroaching war in Europe — a much more virulent attack on patriarchy as the catalyst to the Second World War — proposes a banding together of outsiders, men and women, against the dominant culture of their time. These two works grew from long meditations on the relation of women to culture, which were in evidence from the outset of Woolf’s writing career as a journalist in the first decade of the twentieth century, through the publication of the two volumes of The Common Reader (in 1925 and 1932).
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Notes
Jane Marcus, ‘Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own’, in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington, 1987): 163–87.
Cf. Margaret S.M. Ezell, ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature’, NLH, 21, 3 (1990): 579–92, pp. 583–5.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. I (New Haven 1987), 196, and vol. III (New Haven, 1994): 3–56 passim
Louise A. DeSalvo, ‘Shakespeare’s Other Sister’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (1981): 61–81. Susan M. Squier and Louise A. DeSalvo (eds), ‘Virginia Woolf’s [The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn]’, Twentieth Century Literature, 25, 3/4 (1979), 237–64;
Beth C. Schwartz, ‘Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare’, ELH, 58:2 (1991), 721–46.
Nelly Furman, ‘Textual Feminism’, in Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman (eds), Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York, 1980): 45–54, p. 50.
The first ‘novel-essay’ in the draft novel, The Pargiters, was based on this speech, of which the full draft, with author’s alterations, is printed at the beginning of The Pargiters, ed. by Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth Press, 1978): xxvii–lxliv.
Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being (Sussex, 1976), p. 129.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4: 1931–35, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 25. All quotations from Virginia Woolf’s Diaries from 1915–1941 are taken from this 5-volume edition.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Anon’, in Brenda Silver (ed.), ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’, Twentieth Century Literature, 25, 3/4 (1979), 356–9, pp. 382–9. Besides the two essays Silver also transcribed the manuscript of Woolf’s ‘Notes for Reading at Random’, which I use in this study.
Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, (Boston, 1977): 137–64;
Lillian S. Robinson, ‘Sometimes, Always, Never: Their Women’s History and Ours’, NLH, 21, 2 (1990): 377–93.
See Alice Fox’s pioneer study of Woolf’s Renaissance criticism in relation to her fiction, Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance (Oxford, 1990).
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 66.
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (1986), p. 45.
Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr. (eds), Her Immaculate Hand (Binghamton, NY, 1983).
Woolf, ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, The Common Reader: First series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1984), p. 43.
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of Medusa’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (Hemel Hempstead, 1981): 245–64, p. 250.
Margaret M. McGowan, Montaigne’s Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais (1974), p. 146, describes ‘Montaigne’s distrust, and even hatred, of the professional’.
Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York, 1965), p. 184.
Diary; Hyde Park Gate 1903?, in Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (1990), p. 178.
For Lady Anne Clifford’s self-definition in a patriarchal society see Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer’, in The Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991): 87–106, pp. 86–97.
Mario Schiff, Marie de Gournay (Paris, 1910), p. 2;
Marjorie Henry Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance (The Hague, 1963), p. 17;
Alan M. Boase, The Fortunes of Montaigne (1935), p. 53.
Marie le Jars de Gournay, Grief Des Dames (1626), reprinted in Schiff, Marie de Gournay, p. 91.
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1984), Preface, p. 1.
Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Criticism: A Polemical Preface’, Critical Inquiry, 1 (1974): 361–71, discuss Woolf’s politicising of her own critical discourse, but take Woolf’s ‘common reader’ for a straight reproduction of Johnson’s ungendered judicious reader.
Cf. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996), pp. 415–17.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, in Selected Essays (1932): 23–34, p. 24.
S.P. Rosenbaum, ‘An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group’, in Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds), Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays (1983): 32–56, p. 43; Lee, Virginia Woolf p. 71.
Leslie Stephen, ‘The Novels of De Foe’, Hours in a Library (1917), I. 1–43, p. 1.
Elaine Showalter, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (1986): 125–43, p. 131.
Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), The Flight of the Mind The Letters of Virginia Woolf vol. 1: 1888–1912 (Virginia Stephen) (1975), 140. All quotations from Virginia Woolf’s letters are from this edition.
‘Report on Teaching at Morley College’, July 1905, original typescript Monks House Papers/A 22, reprinted as Appendix B in Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Volume I: Virginia Stephen 1882–1912 (1972): 202–4, p. 203.
Bell, Virgina Woolf: A Biography, I. 6–7. Cf. Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 66–8. Virginia Woolf, ‘Caroline Emelia Stephen’, The Guardian, 21 April 1909, reprinted in Essays, 1. 267–9.
Catherine F. Smith, ‘Three Guineas: Virginia Woolf’s Prophecy’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury (1987): 225–41, pp. 228–9.
RO, p. 76. For an exploration of this theme in Woolf’s thought, see Jane Marcus’s seminal essay, ‘Thinking Back through Our Mothers’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus, Ohio, 1988): 73–100.
From Light Arising: Thoughts on the Central Radiance, p. 75, quoted in Woolf, ‘Caroline Emelia Stephen’, Essays, 1. 268, and 269, n5; see Jane Marcus, ‘The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered Imagination’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1983): 7–26;
Cf. S.P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury (1987), p. 23.
Virginia Woolf, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, transcribed and edited by S.P. Rosenbaum (Oxford, 1992), pp. 3–4.
Merry E. Weisner, ‘Women’s Defense of Their Public Role’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse, 1985): 1–27, pp. 11–12.
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Printing and the People’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987): 189–226, pp. 192, 214, 213.
Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington, 1989), p. 13.
James Raven, Judging New Wealth, (Oxford, 1992), p. 5.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 151, 24–30, 45.
Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), p. 50.
Richard C. Newton, ‘Jonson and the (Re)-Invention of the Book’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben (Pittsburgh, 1982): 31–55, p. 36.
Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990), pp. 53, 119, 234–7, 138, 136–7.
See Ruth Hughey (ed.), The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus, Ohio, 1960).
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), pp. 111–12.
Mary E. Gaither, ‘The Hogarth Press 1917–46’, in J. Howard Woolmer, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946, (Revere, Pennsylvania, 1986), p. xvii.
John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs (1978), p. 70.
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 165.
Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Oxford, 1982), p. 3.
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (British Library, 1986), p. 16.
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© 1997 Juliet Dusinberre
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Dusinberre, J. (1997). Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Amateurs and Professionals. In: Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25644-0_1
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