Abstract
This chapter approaches Woolf’s iconic “room of one’s own” from the angle of previously unexplored readers’ responses to the text. The surviving Monk’s House letters provide fascinating insights into how Woolf’s contemporary readers engaged with the powerful spatial trope and the arguments expressed in the essay. The letters also document the text’s unexpected reverberations in the lives of readers whose political views resonated with Woolf’s. Drawing on evidence from the National Froebel Foundation Archive, the chapter tells the story of one such reader, Mary Geraldine Ostle, whose two “fan letters” hint at affinities between Woolf’s writings and her own work and ideas, as illustrated by Ostle’s editing of The Note Books of a Woman Alone, a working-class woman’s reading notes.
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Notes
- 1.
A recent example is Alexandra Ganser’s Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (2009).
- 2.
The phrase refers to Woolf’s note that “My circle has widened” in relation to her readers’ response to Three Guineas (D5: 193). For more on this, see Anna Snaith’s discussion of the Three Guineas letters in Virginia Woolf: Private and Public Negotiations, especially pages 124–5.
- 3.
As Michèle Barrett points out, the apparent contradiction in Woolf’s attitude towards the text expressed here “gives its readers space to decide for themselves how they want to take it and how they want to read it, and the openness of the text in this regard has probably been the key factor in its endurance” (Imagination in Theory 43–4).
- 4.
One respondent to the essay, Wanda Fraiken Neff, writing to Woolf on 12 January 1930 from New York, formulates the tension captured by MacCarthy’s simile as “the deadly weapons of poetry, wit, and irony which compel the male reader to swallow unpalatable truth as if it were sugar” (Daugherty, “Letters from Readers” 76).
- 5.
Letter 40 from Lois Jarred, dated 4 December 1929. Unless stated otherwise, all the page numbers cited in relation to the letters in this section refer to Daugherty “Letters from Readers,” Woolf Studies Annual 12 (2006).
- 6.
Beth Rigel Daugherty points out that Margaret E. Thomas “was one of the young women responsible for inviting Woolf to speak at Cambridge” (“Letters from Readers” 62). For a more detailed discussion of the circumstances in which the Cambridge lectures took place, see S. P. Rosenbaum, “Towards the Literary History,” xv–xix.
- 7.
Thomas’s view was not shared by all the young women present at Woolf’s lectures. As S. P. Rosenbaum documents, Woolf’s “bleak view of their academic life and prospects did not persuade some of the readers of A Room of One’s Own who had heard the original papers that theirs was an underprivileged gender” (xvii–xviii).
- 8.
For a discussion of the intersections between the categories of “fan” and “reader,” and the specific story of one of Woolf’s fans/readers, see Melba Cuddy-Keane’s “From Fan-Mail to Readers’ Letters: Locating John Farrelly,” Woolf Studies Annual 11 (2005): 3–32.
- 9.
See Anna Snaith, “Wide Circles” and Beth Rigel Daugherty, “You see you kind of belong.”
- 10.
Here, Snaith refers to the Three Guineas letters in particular.
- 11.
Cf. the editors’ biographical notes about the respondents, as well as the information offered in some of the letters by the readers themselves.
- 12.
In the essay “Women and Fiction” published in The Forum in March 1929, Woolf expresses the same idea, underscoring the extent to which women’s work “has […] been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art” (E5: 28).
- 13.
James Allan Mackereth, one of the two male readers who wrote to Woolf in response to the essay, saw in her notion of androgynous mind “a real and central truth,” arguing that “[t]he truly creative artist, while at work, is unconscious of sex as of morals. He or she will work from the sum of themselves, − man-cum-woman, embodying in perfect poise the virtues, powers, and weaknesses of both” (79).
- 14.
See A Room of One’s Own, Chapter V: “and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated” (116).
- 15.
This is how she pictures prescriptive interventions into common readers’ practices—“how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read”—in “ How Should One Read a Book?” linking authority with dress as she does, very explicitly, in Three Guineas (E5: 573).
- 16.
Ostle’s 1929 letter features in Daugherty “Letters from Readers” and her 1938 letter in Snaith “Three Guineas Letters.” Therefore, the passages and page numbers cited here refer to the corresponding volume of Woolf Studies Annual .
- 17.
Referring to Woolf’s vision of a more egalitarian society in Three Guineas, Ostle writes: “I shall not see it in my life time […] I am 57 […] but I think your two books will be the best help women have ever had towards their fight for justice” (18).
- 18.
As Anna Snaith writes, many of Woolf’s readers were involved “in suffrage, the W.S.P.U., women’s journalism, the league of Nations Union, as well as socialist and pacifist groups” (“Wide Circles” 7).
- 19.
I am indebted to Jane Read, Head of Year Three BA/BSc Early Childhood Studies, School of Education, Roehampton University , who, in her email of 28 January 2010, pointed out the existence of the obituary.
- 20.
The two Froebel bodies were to merge in 1939, giving rise to the National Froebel Foundation (NFF) whose “first efforts […] centred on the dissolution of the old NFU and Froebel Society and the constitution of the new organization from the best parts of both” (Nawrotzki 220).
- 21.
The Finance Committee, the Library and Magazine Committee, the Propaganda Committee (a name extended to “Propaganda, Agency and General Purposes Committee” in 1924).
- 22.
In the Minutes of the Library and Magazine Committee of 1 December 1924, her name is accompanied by the title “Librarian.”
- 23.
Cf. Minutes of the Finance Committee held on 20 October 1922 and 5 February 1923.
- 24.
As the letterhead of Ostle’s 1929 letter to Woolf indicates, the offices in 4 Bloomsbury Square housed both the “Lending Library” and the “Scholastic Agency for Teachers and Governesses” (Daugherty, “Letters from Readers” 63). According to Kristen D. Nawrotzki, “the Froebel Society’s lecture series and summer schools for teachers, parents, headmasters, governesses, school inspectors and nursery nurses in the 1910s and into the 1920s offered people in London and in the provinces a rare chance to interact with a broad array of new and innovative ideas in the field of education and child health, appealing to wide and even international audiences” (211).
- 25.
Child Life, 27.135 (1925): 84–6.
- 26.
Child Life, 28.136 (1926): 24. This lecture is also mentioned in the Minutes of the Propaganda, Agency and General Purposes Committee meeting of 27 November 1925.
- 27.
Child Life, 32.146 (1929): 7. In 1932, Ostle’s “Sharing Makes a Feast: a Christmas play for children and adults” was published by Alexander Moring, London, showing her ongoing interest in children’s literature.
- 28.
Letter acknowledged at the Council Meeting of 8 October 1931, nearly five months after Ostle’s resignation.
- 29.
Cf. the Froebel Society’s minutes of 1924–6.
- 30.
Cf. Council Meeting of June 9, 1932.
- 31.
As shown later, Geraldine Waife’s contribution to The Note Books extends beyond the introduction.
- 32.
In the title of the English edition, “note books” is spelt as two separate words, unlike in the American edition.
- 33.
The practical reasons put forth by Ostle are the availability of the citations “in other anthologies” in the case of the classical sources and “difficulties of copyright” with the poetry (“Note by the Editor” xiii).
- 34.
Cf. “Introduction” by Geraldine Waife, ix.
- 35.
The twelve headings are as follows: I. Women: Their Work, Their Homes; II. Society: Manners, Dress; III. Children and Family Life; IV. Money; V. Vision and Bewilderment; VI. Pain; VII. Books; VIII. Friends and Enemies; IX. Old Age; X. Illness; XI. Death; and XII. The End of Eve’s Story. Remarkably, some of these categories suggest a quasi-sociological approach to the literary text.
- 36.
These titles feature in the index but not in the respective chapters. Anecdotally, contradicting the Index on pp. 297–303, the prelude to Chapter X. “Illness” (268–9) is followed by the initials “G. W.” for Geraldine Waife, which would raise to three the number of preludes authored by Waife. In the copy of The Note Books of A Woman Alone in my possession, signed by Ostle and/or Waife, the initials “G. W.” are crossed out in blue ink and replaced with “Eve”. This mistake is one of several others corrected in blue ink by what looks like the same hand as in the inscription at the beginning of the book (“Alice Ogden from her friends Geraldine Waife and MG Ostle 1949”).
- 37.
It is safe to assume that this is the same Geraldine Waife, author of two novels, both published in London by Chapman & Hall: Colleagues. A Novel, etc. (1923) and The Scrap Heap (1924).
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Zink, S. (2018). The Woman’s Room: A Room of One’s Own and Its Contemporary Readers. 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_6
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