In A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. In A Room of One's Own, she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women's creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas, however, Woolf argues that women's historical exclusion offers them the chance to form (...) a political and cultural identity which could challenge the drive towards fascism and war. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

In Three Guineas, first published in June, 1938 Virginia Woolf set about answering three questions. How should war be prevented? Why does the government not support education for women? Why are women prevented from engaging in professional work? Many at the time saw the matter of how best to prevent war as entirely unconnected with “women’s issues”; Woolf linked together the answers, and connected them too with discussions of such matters as social class, in what has come (...) to be acknowledged as a landmark both of feminist and of anti-war writing. Included in the first and other early editions—and integral to the work—was a series of five photographs of men of high position wearing garments that mark their status . Unlike most editions available today, this facsimile edition includes the illustrations as well as the text of the original. (shrink)

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.' According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.' One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of (...) subjects, with all the craftsmanship, substance, and rich allure of her novels. This selection brings together thirty of her best essays, including the famous 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', a clarion call for modern fiction. She discusses the arts of writing and of reading, and the particular role and reputation of women writers. She writes movingly about her father and the art of biography, and of the London scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. Overall, these pieces are as indispensable to an understanding of this great writer as they are enchanting in their own right. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Examines how Virginia Woolf used frames in her fiction, including windows, thresholds, and mirrors.

Le Carnet de Virginia Woolf se termine par ces mots, qui font suite à la lecture d’Ajax de Sophocle : « Probablement, si je pouvais lire comme un Grec, je ne trouverais pas la fin si dispersée » (p. 213). « Lire comme un Grec » : c’est bien à cela que s’est essayée V. Woolf dans son carnet, composé des notes prises au cours de ses lectures grecques et latines réalisées entre 1907 et 1909. Virginia (...) Stephen a tout juste vingt-cinq ans lorsqu’elle débute son carnet, quelques mois après le retour... (shrink)

As a critic, Virginia Woolf has been called a number of disparaging names: "impressionist," "belletrist," "raconteur," "amateur." Here is one academic talking on the subject: "She will survive, not as a critic, but as a literary essayist recording the adventures of a soul among congenial masterpieces. . . . The writers who are most downright, and masculine, and central in their approach to life - Fielding or Balzac - she for the most part left untouched....Her own approach was (...) at once more subterranean and aerial, and invincibly, almost defiantly, feminine." In other words, Virginia Woolf is not a critic; how could she be? She is a woman. From its beginning, criticism has been a man's world. This is to say not only that males have earned their living as critics but, more importantly, that the conventionally accepted ideals of critical method are linked with qualities stereotypically allotted to males: analysis, judgment, objectivity. Virginia Woolf has had a poor reputation as a critic not merely because her sex is female but because her method is "feminine." She writes in a way that is said to be creative, appreciative, and subjective. We will accept this descriptive for the moment but will later enlarge on it, and even our provisional acceptance we mean to turn to a compliment. Barbara Currier Bell has written articles on critical theory and modern poetry and has served as a consultant on women's education at both Vassar and Hampshire Colleges. She is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. Carol Ohmann is the author of Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman and several articles on English and American fiction. She coedited Female Studies IV: Teaching about Women with Elaine Showalter and is chairman of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. She has contributed, with Richard Ohmann, "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye , and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" .See also: "The Masculine Mode" by Peter Schwenger in Vol. 5, No. 4; "The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief of Love: A Woolfian Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs" by Mark Spilka in Vol. 5, No. 4. (shrink)

When Ann Banfield argued in The Phantom Table1 that the debate about modernism should take into account its revolutionary conception of the objects of sensation, and turned to Bertrand Russell’s 1914 theory of knowledge to do so, she challenged on the one hand the critics’ near ignorance of the Cambridge Apostles’ influence on Bloomsbury, and on the other, the “assumption of contemporary understanding of modernism—that the only philosophy of relevance to twentieth-century art and literature is continental.”2 Following her example, daunting (...) as it may be, I will challenge this last assumption and argue that the philosophy of relevance to the understanding of Woolf’s work is not necessarily continental but British.My .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virginia Woolf, Time, and the RealJane DuranCritical appraisal of the work of Virginia Woolf has tended to focus on feminist concerns, or on issues revolving around the actual facts of her upbringing and the extent to which she might have been thought to be a victim of abuse. Although some commentators have noted that Woolf's high modernist style lends itself to a number of (...) readings with respect to sense of self, the passage of time, and a sort of phenomenological reflection, philosophical concerns have, in general, not played a large role in Woolf scholarship to date.In this article I shall argue that some of Woolf's best known work—especially To the Lighthouse—exemplifies a concern for time, reality and a sense of interior life-as-lived that is overtly philosophical in its construction, and even somewhat didactic. Furthermore, I will claim, it is part and parcel of modernism as it is ordinarily conceived to address these issues in some fashion, even if, in many cases, they are not addressed as thoroughly as they are in Woolf's work. Even if we can be certain that a great deal of Woolf's mental disturbance, or mental illness, was the result of childhood abuse, or even inherited tendencies, it still does not detract from the power with which she was able to use depictions of inner turmoil to give us a sense of the fleeting and transitory nature of the real. Indeed, such a sense is one of the hallmarks of Woolf's work and is acknowledged by most of her critics, even if it is not termed a philosophical concern. I will analyze constructs of time and the chronological through a view of To the Lighthouse.IA number of philosophers have offered conceptions of time; these efforts range from those of antiquity to the more technical articulations [End Page 300] of the twentieth century. One of the most haunting evocations of the power of time is in the work of one whose thought is seldom cited in this regard, Simone de Beauvoir. In Old Age, she offers a phenomenological account of the passage of time that reflects an emphasis on the internally-felt disparity between the past and the present that is a frequently-remarked upon aspect of old age.1 There is a paucity of experience-of-the-present among the very elderly, and a reliance upon the past. Concomitantly, there is a foreshortening of the future. As Beauvoir writes: "How far does memory allow us to retrieve our lives? The images... are far from possessing the richness of their original object. An image is the seeing of an absent object by means of an organic and affective analogue" (p. 147). Despite the fact that these images may lack the richness of the original, the somewhat paradoxical effect of being older is that these images predominate.In To the Lighthouse, Woolf plays with time in a way that allows for a development of the internally-sensed structure of time on the parts of the various characters. Although many have remarked upon the well-known middle section, "Time Passes," this aspect of the felt sensation of time as an internal phenomenon, and one on which her characters seem to draw at regular intervals, is a somewhat little remarked feature of the rest of the book. It is present from the outset: James's first thoughts about the trip to the lighthouse highlight time in a sort of reversal of the way that Beauvoir has indicated for the elderly; James's conception of the passing of time is altered in another sense, since he is only six. He has projected himself forward so intently to the trip to the lighthouse that everything else has seemed somewhat unreal. As Woolf writes, "he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed...."2Although the differences between the felt constructions of time between, for example, childhood and old age might seem to partake of the commonplace, Beauvoir is among those philosophers who have used the notion of the truncation of time and the foreshortening of the future among the elderly to make philosophical commentary. By the same token... (shrink)

In Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves, one of Bernard's many becomings – his ‘becoming-savage’ – reveals a point of intersection between Woolfian aesthetics and Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Moreover, a triangulation of Woolf's ‘moments of being’, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘worlding’, and coloniality provides a new and productive node for examining the debates surrounding imperialism in these thinkers’ works, and an insistence that Woolf, read alongside Deleuze and Guattari, offers an alternate and precisely ethical way of (...) being in the world. (shrink)

This book introduces Virginia Woolf as a nondualist and process-oriented thinker whose ideas are strikingly similar to those of her contemporary, Alfred North Whitehead. The author argues that in their respective fields, the two thinkers criticized the materialist turn of their time and attempted to undermine long-rooted dualisms.

The longstanding critical refrain that Virginia Woolf's fiction represents a turn "inward" to the vagaries of the inner life has more recently been countered with an "outward" approach emphasizing Woolf's interest in the material world, its everyday objects and their social and political significance. Yet one of the most curious and pervasive features of Woolf's oeuvre is that characters are so frequently wrong in their perceptions. This essay consolidates the inward and outward approaches by tracing the (...) trope of misperception in Woolf's fiction as well as in her conceptions of the work of author and reader. For Woolf, the modern literary experience derives from the nature of the faculties of perception, the tenuous points of connectionand disjunctionbetween the inner and the outer worlds. (shrink)

Works of literature represent stories, characters, and events: these are the contents of a work. Often, the contents of literary works are fictional; however, it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary “voice.” In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might have for (...) our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art. While I.. (shrink)

This essay raises the question of gender in relation to the question of intellectuals in Britain, commenting on the gender blindness that made their exclusion so automatic in Collini's study. It looks at some women who might have been included, focussing particularly on Virginia Woolf as one who was not only a very significant public intellectual, but who in her essays entitled 'The Common Reader' also provided a definition and analysis of the role of an intellectual which is (...) very different from that suggested by Collini. Rather than offering expert advice, Woolf sought to help readers to develop their own critical insights. (shrink)

A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from a new direction. Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. This book makes a daring claim: that (...) a return to 'pure' experience is sufficient to demonstrate, for the contemporary imagination, the irreducibly mystical contents of everyday life: and, therefore, the enduring appropriateness of theological conversations. Lazenby reveals how these atheist thinkers offer crucial spiritual-intellectual advice for our times: a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of our selves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place. (shrink)

The visibility of pregnancy in contemporary societies through various forms of medical imaging has often been interpreted by feminist critics as negative for the autonomy and experience of pregnant women. Here, I consider the representation of pregnancy in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando, and Sally Potter’s film of the same name arguing that, despite limited critical attention to Orlando’s pregnancy, these texts offer a productive interpretation of gestation that counters conventionally reductive cultural images of that embodied state. In particular, (...) I argue that Potter’s translation of Woolf’s novel to the screen gives us a useful model for thinking through the new visibility of pregnancy in contemporary Western culture. (shrink)

In the growing body of academic literature on biography that has developed in the last few decades, Virginia Woolf's essay, "The New Biography,"1 has come to occupy a central place—mentioned, discussed and quoted from, I would estimate, more often than any other piece of writing on the subject. Virginia Woolf's distinctive view of the nature and limitations of biography has thus had, and continues to have, a deep and wide-ranging influence on the way the genre is (...) discussed by critics and theorists. My aim in this essay is to present a detailed analysis of Virginia Woolf's thinking about biography in order to make clear why I believe its influence on contemporary theorising about biography is, on the whole, a misfortune. As is often pointed out, Virginia Woolf's views on biography are closely connected with—indeed, to an extent that I hope to make clear, they are simply an application of—her views on fiction. In the light of this, I have tried to trace some of the most striking features of her thinking about biography back to her earlier thoughts on fiction, as presented in both her novels and her essays. The result, I hope, will be that, while the attractions of her way of looking at fiction and biography are recognised and revealed, the manifest flaws in her thinking on these subjects are clearly exposed. (shrink)

This essay raises the question of gender in relation to the question of intellectuals in Britain, commenting on the gender blindness that made their exclusion so automatic in Collini's study. It looks at some women who might have been included, focussing particularly on Virginia Woolf as one who was not only a very significant public intellectual, but who in her essays entitled 'The Common Reader' also provided a definition and analysis of the role of an intellectual which is (...) very different from that suggested by Collini. Rather than offering expert advice, Woolf sought to help readers to develop their own critical insights. (shrink)

Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf's disloyal daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question (...) their academic careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf's cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance. (shrink)

The visibility of pregnancy in contemporary societies through various forms of medical imaging has often been interpreted by feminist critics as negative for the autonomy and experience of pregnant women. Here, I consider the representation of pregnancy in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando, and Sally Potter’s film of the same name arguing that, despite limited critical attention to Orlando’s pregnancy, these texts offer a productive interpretation of gestation that counters conventionally reductive cultural images of that embodied state. In particular, (...) I argue that Potter’s translation of Woolf’s novel to the screen gives us a useful model for thinking through the new visibility of pregnancy in contemporary Western culture. (shrink)