Abstract
“Why are women poor?” asks Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.1 Among the reasons she cites is the fact that “in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned” (23). When Woolf published this book in 1929, the Married Women’s Property Act was nearly fifty years old, the professions had been opened to women for ten years, and they had been given the vote nine years previously. As she herself notes, “the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good” for women’s advancement (117).
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1929), p. 28.
David Dowling, Mrs. Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), pp. 21–23.
Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 27.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1938), p. 3.
Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 18.
Christy L. Burns, “Re-dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” Twentieth Century Literature 40.3 (1994), 342. Woolf, of course, uses biographical techniques throughout Orlando, as I will discuss later.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), pp. 7–8.
Denise Delory, “Parsing the Female Sentence: The Paradox of Containment in Virginia Woolf’s Narratives,” in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 101.
Elizabeth Abel, “Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 107.
Lisa Coughlin McGarry, Orts, Scraps, and Fragments: The Elusive Search for Meaning in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Lanham, MD: University Press of American, 2007), p. 114.
Emily Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 173–179.
Jody R. Rosen, “Deviation and Acceleration: Time in the Story and Narrative of Orlando,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 70 (2006), 29.
Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 107.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 10.
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© 2012 Sally A. Livingston
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Livingston, S.A. (2012). Virginia Woolf’s Women, Trapped and Freed. In: Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_7
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