Retailing the Female Intellectual

Abstract

‘Our press arrived on Tuesday’, Virginia Woolf writes to her sister Vanessa Bell in April 1917. ‘We unpacked it with enormous excitement, finally with Nelly’s help, carried it into the drawing room, set it on its stand’ (Letters 2: 150). Consider, if you will, the import. Well before the Mmes Brown, Dalloway, or Ramsay, well before A Room of One’s Own, ‘Women and Fiction’, and ‘Professions for Women’, Woolf violates the sanctity of the drawing room, that symbolic locus of middle-class domesticity, by installing a printing press. The inkpot hurled at the Angel in the House some 14 years later in ‘Professions for Women’ seems, by comparison, positively quaint. Indeed, the angel’s death recorded there, ‘The Angel… so tormented me that at last I killed her’, ought to be read as a rather belated habeas corpus (CE 2: 285). The founding of the press, I argue, is an act at least as lethal as the angel’s figural strangulation and, in effect, is more empowering.