Abstract
This chapter considers an overlooked context for the writing of Jacob’s Room, namely Cambridge women’s struggle for degrees and full membership to the university in the early 1920s. Drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts, Zink demonstrates that the debate was systematically couched in spatial terms, documenting what some saw as women’s deplorable encroachment on male space. This context adds to readers’ understanding of Woolf’s critique of built space as bound up with gender ideologies. Jacob’s Cambridge room configures not only a formative space inaccessible to women but also the values connecting male education to militarism and war. Zink relates this to Woolf’s symbolic silencing of Cambridge women, as suggested by the excision of Angela Williams’s Cambridge room from the textual space of the novel.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Bishop, one text in particular, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920), drew Woolf’s attention to the significance of the spatial layout of the text (“Mind the Gap” 34). Hope Mirrlees was known to the Woolfs especially as Jane Ellen Harrison’s companion during the last years of the scholar’s life. On 12 December 1922, Mirrlees wrote to Woolf from Paris to congratulate her for Jacob’s Room, a text in which, as she put it, Woolf “solve[d] for the first time the dilemma of modern literature” (Daugherty , “Letters from Readers” 27).
- 2.
Both published in Alpha and Omega, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915.
- 3.
The name of the author is only given in initials (R.A.C) at the end of the article.
- 4.
B. A. Clough was the niece of Anne Jemima Clough, first Principal of Newnham. Woolf read Blanche Athena Clough’s A Memoir of Anne Jemima Clough in preparation for The Pargiters (Snaith , Virginia Woolf 105).
- 5.
The untitled section of the newspaper which features this selection speaks of the “wide interest created by recent articles […] on the question of the admission of women to membership of the University of Cambridge” and “the many letters which correspondents have addressed to us on the subject” (12).
- 6.
In the words of M. E. Henn, a student at the time, recorded in Phillips, Ann (ed), A Newnham Anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 150.
- 7.
Quoting The Student’s Handbook to Cambridge 1934–5, Woolf echoes the Principal of Newnham Miss B. A. Clough’s remark about the cap on female student numbers.
- 8.
In Midgley’s words, “[l]ike the medieval university, which saw learning as part of the grand narrative of Christian redemption, the modern university encouraged ‘the pursuit of truth’ as part of a grand narrative of human progress” (150).
- 9.
See “Apostolic Mind and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf’s Discourse of Alterity,” 72.
- 10.
For a discussion of Woolf’s feminist use of the dog metaphor, see Jane Goldman, “Ce Chien Est à Moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog”, Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 49–86.
- 11.
A more detailed discussion of Thomas’s letter can be found in Chap. 6 of this study.
- 12.
Commenting on the fact that the holograph draft contained more rooms than the published version of the novel, Edward L. Bishop notes “that Woolf is using rooms as an index of characters” (Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room xii).
- 13.
Sue Roe links the irreverence in this passage with an episode in Woolf’s life, namely her “disappointment in G. E. Moore” (164). Moore, an important influence on the Bloomsbury circle, is described in the diary entry of 23 June 1920 as somewhat diminished and not the “dominator and dictator of youth” she had imagined: “He has grown grey, sunken, toothless perhaps. His eyes small, watchful, but perhaps not so piercing as of old. A lack of mass, somewhere” (D2: 49).
- 14.
As critics have noted, Woolf makes her narrator’s sexual identity explicit in the scene in which Jacob sees Florinda “upon another man’s arm” (JR 127).
- 15.
All the page numbers quoted here refer to Edward L. Bishop’s Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room : The Holograph Draft.
- 16.
Benjamin Harvey links the significance of Macaulay’s name with the latter’s contribution to canon-making, as illustrated by his History of England (108). Macaulay was also “a trustee of the British Museum during the period of the Reading Room’s construction” (108) and a friend of “Sir Anthony Panizzi, the museum’s Principal Librarian at the time” (103). Thus, in Harvey’s words, “More than any other of the nineteen names, Macaulay’s suggests both the self-supporting logic of the canon of which he is part and the foreclosing of this charmed circle to – arguably more deserving – names” (108).
- 17.
Citation from The Times of 31 October 1907, the day of the Reading Room’s reopening.
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Zink, S. (2018). Trespassing: Spaces of Learning in Jacob’s Room . In: Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2_5
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