Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN AND

THREE GUINEAS

ANNA SNAITH is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000), Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London 1890-1940 (2014), and editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Years (2012) and Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (with Michael Whitworth 2007).

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

VIRGINIA WOOLF

A Room of Ones Own

and

Three Guineas

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by ANNA SNAITH

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Introduction, Select Bibliography, Explanatory Notes © Anna Snaith 2015 Biographical Preface © Frank Kermode 1992 Chronology © David Bradshaw 2000

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CONTENTS

Biographical Preface Introduction

Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Virginia Woolf

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN THREE GUINEAS

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Explanatory Notes Bibliography of Works Cited in Three Guineas

BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE

VIRGINIA WOOLF was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her father, Leslie Stephen, himself a widower, had married in 1878 Julia Jackson, widow of Herbert Duckworth. Between them they already had four children; a fifth, Vanessa, was born in 1879, a sixth, Thoby, in 1880. There followed Virginia and, in 1883, Adrian.

Both of the parents had strong family associations with literature. Leslie Stephen was the son of Sir James Stephen, a noted historian, and brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished lawyer and writer on law. His first wife was a daughter of Thackeray, his second had been an admired associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, and also, like her first husband, had aristocratic connections. Stephen himself is best remembered as the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and as an alpinist, but he was also a remarkable journalist, biographer, and historian of ideas; his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) 1s still of great value. No doubt our strongest idea of him derives from the character of Mr Ramsay in 7o the Lighthouse; for a less impressionistic portrait, which conveys a strong sense of his centrality in the intellectual life of the time, one can consult Noél Annan’s Leslie Stephen (revised edition, 1984).

Virginia had the free run of her father’s library, a better substitute for the public school and university education she was denied than most women of the time could aspire to; her brothers, of course, were sent to Clifton and Westminster. Her mother died in 1895, and in that year she had her first breakdown, possibly related in some way to the sexual molestation of which her half-brother George Duckworth is accused. By 1897 she was able to read again, and did so voraciously: ‘Gracious, child, how you gobble’, remarked her father, who, with a liberality and good sense at odds with the age in which they lived, allowed her to choose her reading freely. In other respects her relationship with her father was diffcult; his deafness and

melancholy, his excessive emotionalism, not helped by successive bereavements, all increased her nervousness.

Stephen fell ill in 1902 and died in 1904. Virginia suffered another breakdown, during which she heard the birds singing in Greek, a language in which she had acquired some competence. On her recovery she moved, with her brothers and sister, to a house in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury; there, and subsequently at several other nearby addresses, what eventually became famous as the Bloomsbury Group took shape.

Virginia had long considered herself a writer. It was in 1905 that she began to write for publication in the Times Literary Supplement. In her circle (more loosely drawn than is sometimes supposed) were many whose names are now half-forgotten, but some were or became famous: J. M. Keynes and E. M. Forster and Roger Fry; also Clive Bell, who married Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, who once proposed marriage to her, and Leonard Woolf. Despite much ill health in these years, she travelled a good deal, and had an interesting social life in London. She did a little adult-education teaching, worked for female suffrage, and shared the excitement of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910. In 1912, after another bout of nervous illness, she married Leonard Woolf.

She was thirty, and had not yet published a book, though The Voyage Out was in preparation. It was accepted for publication by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth in 1913 (it appeared in 1915). She was often ill with depression and anorexia, and in 1913 attempted suicide. But after a bout of violent madness her health seemed to settle down, and in 1917 a printing press was installed at Hogarth House, Richmond, where she and her husband were living. The Hogarth Press, later an illustrious institution, but at first meant in part as therapy for Virginia, was now inaugurated. She began Night and Day, and finished it in 1918. It was published by Duckworth in 1919, the year in which the Woolfs bought Monk’s House, Rodmell, for £700. There, in 1920, she began Jacobs Room, finished, and published by the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press, in 1922. In the following year she began Mrs Dalloway (finished in 1924, published 1925), when she was already working on Zo the Lighthouse (finished and published, after intervals of illness, in 1927). Orlando, a fantastic ‘biography’ of a man— woman, and a tribute to Virginia’s close friendship with Vita Sackville- West, was written quite rapidly over the winter of 1927-8, and published, with considerable success, in October. The Waves was written and rewritten

in 1930 and 1931 (published in October of that year). She had already started on Flush, the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog— another success with the public—and in 1932 began work on what became The Years.

This brief account of her work during the first twenty years of her marriage 1s of course incomplete; she had also written and published many shorter works, as well as both series of The Common Reader, and A Room of One’ Own. There have been accounts of the marriage very hostile to Leonard Woolf, but he can hardly be accused of cramping her talent or hindering the development of her career.

The Years proved an agonizingly diffcult book to finish, and was completely rewritten at least twice. Her friend Roger Fry having died in 1934, she planned to write a biography, but illnesses in 1936 delayed the project; towards the end of that year she began instead the polemical Three Guineas, published in 1938. The Years had meanwhile appeared in 1937, by which time she was again at work on the Fry biography, and already sketching in her head the book that was to be Between the Acts. Roger Fry was published in the terrifying summer of 1940. By the autumn of that year many of the familiar Bloomsbury houses had been destroyed or badly damaged by bombs. Back at Monk’s House, she worked on Between the Acts, and finished it in February 1941. Thereafter her mental condition deteriorated alarmingly, and on 28 March, unable to face another bout of insanity, she drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Her career as a writer of fiction covers the years 1912-41, thirty years distracted by intermittent serious illness as well as by the demands, which she regarded as very important, of family and friends, and by the need or desire to write literary criticism and social comment. Her industry was extraordinary—nine highly-wrought novels, two or three of them among the great masterpieces of the form in this century, along with all the other writings, including the copious journals and letters that have been edited and published in recent years. Firmly set though her life was in the ‘Bloomsbury’ context—the agnostic ethic transformed from that of her forebears, the influence of G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, the individual brilliance of J. M. Keynes, Strachey, Forster, and the others— we have come more and more to value the distinctiveness of her talent, so that she seems more and more to stand free of any context that might be thought to limit her. None of that company—except, perhaps, T. S. Eliot, who was

on the fringe of it—did more to establish the possibilities of literary innovation, or to demonstrate that such innovation must be brought about by minds familiar with the innovations of the past. This is true originality. It was Eliot who said of Jacob's Room that in that book she had freed herself from any compromise between the traditional novel and her original gift; it was the freedom he himself sought in The Waste Land, published in the same year, a freedom that was dependent upon one’s knowing with intimacy that with which compromise must be avoided, so that the knowledge became part of the originality. In fact she had ‘gobbled’ her father’s books to a higher purpose than he could have understood.

Frank Kermode

INTRODUCTION

VIRGINIA WOOLF is iconic amongst twentieth-century British writers. A Room of Ones Own, her 1929 essay on gender and writing, did much to consolidate that status. The title phrase continues to resonate in popular culture, its legacy seen in the names of bookshops, bands, journals, and films. It echoes in book titles ranging from a ‘shed’ to a ‘chateau’ of one’s own. The idea that the production of art depends upon material circumstances, or that the woman writer needs money (£500) and space (a room), has become a central trope of modern feminism.

But with such popularity comes simplification. Woolf worried she would ‘settle into a figure’ when the first critical monograph on her by Winifred Holtby appeared in 1932.! Ironically, the narrator of Woolf’s essay warns her audience early on not to expect a ‘nugget of pure truth’, and the supposedly central argument about the room and the £500 makes only the briefest appearance. With its freewheeling and digressive style, A Room of One’s Own covers a myriad of issues concerning women and creativity. Interconnection is central to Woolf’s feminism. She eschews a feminist politics focused on a single issue—such as the vote—or on a single sex. Following the lead of Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792) or Olive Schreiner (Woman and Labour, 1911), Woolf argues that the exclusion of women from social, political, and creative spheres has detrimental effects on society as a whole. A Room of One's Own was not only radical in the 1920s as arguably the first literary history of women writers, but its prescience endures in the value it places on writing as a way of responding to the world. A thriving and diverse literary culture, however, depends upon ‘intellectual freedom’ which, in turn, is inseparable from questions of education, economics, class, and gender. A Room of One 5 Own troubles the idea that artistic genius emerges irrespective of social circumstance. Women, like working-class men, have not had a ‘dog’s chance of writing poetry’ as they have ‘always been poor’ (p. 81). In A

Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas, published nearly a decade later in 1938, Woolf explores the causes and effects of the long history of discrimination against women and the ways in which they have battled against exclusion. Together these essays represent the most sustained and explicit expression of Woolf’s feminist politics.

Three Guineas was initially conceived as a sequel to A Room of Ones Own. Woolf’s continued concern with gender and society took on a new urgency in the context of the rise of fascism at home and abroad in the 1930s. The connections between the essays are clear. Both consider the educational and financial inequalities between the sexes and _ the psychological or unconscious causes and effects of such differences. But Three Guineas also emerges out of a context of increased militarization and is her most explicit expression of a deeply held pacifism. While this position became increasingly rare as the implications of Nazism became clearer, even more surprising was Woolf’s insistence that war and tyranny had their roots in the power dynamics of the home and the gender inequalities of the public sphere. Women’s outsider position, she argued, meant they were best placed to see these links and to think differently. Three Guineas is the product of a specific pre-war moment, but is also about pervasive militarism more generally. Perhaps even more than A Room of Ones Own, this essay is still uncannily relevant in its treatment of issues such as military intervention, working motherhood, and the place of women in the Church, the professions, the press, and the government.

Another link between these essays is their origin in talks Woolf gave to audiences of young women who were taking advantage of the educational and professional opportunities now open to them. 4 Room of Ones Own started life as lectures in October 1928 at Newnham and Girton, the two women’s colleges at Cambridge, and Three Guineas in a talk on ‘Music and Literature’ given with the composer Ethel Smyth in 1931 to the London and National Society for Women’s Service (L&NSWS, originally a suffrage organization). Ad Room of Ones Own begins in medias res. The reader arrives mid-sentence; the ‘but’ signals contradiction or a swerving away, as well as an ongoing conversation. From the outset, Woolf blurs the spoken and the written, just as she points out that tracing the history of women’s writing necessitates an openness to different kinds of ‘texts’, many of them unpublished. Three Guineas is explicitly structured through dialogue: triggered by a letter sent to the narrator from a pacifist society asking for

her support. The text is her response, delayed by three years and composed only after other epistolary exchanges with societies supporting women’s education and entry to the professions. This motif of delay suggests the ‘gulf so deeply cut’ between men and women that the narrator can only attempt to answer her interlocutor after much consideration and research (p. 90). At all times, Woolf relates social critique to the politics of voice, genre, and tone.

While both of these essays blur the distinction between fact and fiction, Three Guineas started life even more deliberately as a generic hybrid: a novel-essay called The Pargiters. The hyphenation became a more decisive split and, after a long gestation, the project became a novel (The Years, 1937) and an essay (Three Guineas, 1938). Both essays exhibit self- consciousness about the status of ‘fact’ at the same time that they are based, particularly Three Guineas, on years of research. Reading these essays puts paid to the notion common in the decades after the Second World War that Woolf was an apolitical, elitist, or 1vory-tower writer. Many of the concepts and concerns of modern feminism (including questions about the obsolescence of the term) are, in fact, prefigured in these pages. The richness and density of Woolf’s prose means that her writing, prism-like, catches the light differently on each rereading. Their specificity and yet their openness to alternative viewpoints make them fascinating examples of political conviction without dogma. They also balance different modes and registers: the celebratory with thoroughgoing critique, the utopian and the materialist, fiction and polemic. Rarely are polemic and pleasure so artfully combined.

A Room of Ones Own

On 20 October 1928, Virginia Woolf, accompanied by her husband Leonard, her sister Vanessa, and her niece Angelica, spoke to the Arts Society at Newnham College, Cambridge. The following day, she dined at King’s College with her friend George ‘Dadie’ Rylands, along with Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. From this experience, and the stark contrast between the catering on offer at the women’s versus the men’s college, came the germ of A Room of Ones Own. Writers, the narrator notes, ‘seldom spare a word for what was eaten’ (p. 8). The famous juxtaposition of roast partridges and overflowing wine glasses with the

gravy soup and prunes served at Fernham, Newnham’s fictional alter ego, triggers a meditation on the reasons behind such disparity and the ways in which hunger and poverty impact on creativity. The sumptuous meal stands metonymically for luxury, wealth, position, and advantage: all those things found lacking at Fernham. But with wealth comes the stultifying effects of power.

The following week, Woolf spoke at Girton, the other women’s college at Cambridge, accompanied by her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. Given that Orlando, dedicated to Vita, had been published just days earlier, it was an ‘outing’ of sorts, in line with the queer politics of the essay she eventually published. Transcripts of the lectures have not survived, but the talks became an essay, “Women and Fiction’, published in Forum magazine in March 1929. That same month, and at great speed, she drafted A Room of One's Own. The essay is an excavation of the terms ‘women’ and ‘fiction’. Rather than offering ‘a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontés [...] a respectful allusion to George Eliot’, the narrator wants to investigate the genealogy of the terms themselves (p. 3). Before dwelling on the life and works of specific writers, she has to explore the obstacles to female creativity, the ways in which women have been written, and the oxymoronic relationship between ‘woman’ and ‘artist’. The narrator has to turn to two repositories of knowledge—Oxbridge and the British Museum—before she can turn to women writers themselves. The literary history of women’s writing begins in earnest only in Chapter IV, a delay which parallels the historical delay in the emergence of a body of professional women writers, as well as the trope of delay or interruption in individual women’s lives, creative expression coming second to domestic duties and child rearing.

Woolf’s narrator, trespassing on the grass and asking to see Milton’s manuscripts in the library, is a transgressive presence. The figure of the female student was a particularly threatening one in the 1920s as heated debates about women’s position at Cambridge were fresh in the memory. While the two women’s colleges at Cambridge, Girton and Newnham, were founded in 1869 and 1871, only in 1923 could women graduates be awarded degrees. As Woolf notes in Three Guineas, in 1921 when the issue was put to a vote, male undergraduates stormed the gates of Newnham with a hand cart (p. 115). So the presence of women in the quadrangles and the lecture rooms, let alone at the podium, raised violent protest. In these

essays, Woolf explores the violent and defensive response to female emancipation. It is no wonder, then, as Brenda Silver has argued, that Woolf’s image is prevalent in popular culture at moments of particular anxiety about women’s presence in the public sphere.”

Woolf knew Cambridge well. After her father’s death, she had convalesced there in 1904 at the home of her Quaker aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen whose financial legacy lies behind reference to the £500 left by Mary Beton, the aunt in A Room of Ones Own. Many of the men Woolf knew were products of a Cambridge education: her father, brothers, and many Bloomsbury Group associates. Her husband, Leonard, was the first Jewish man to be elected to the Cambridge Apostles, a secretive and exclusive society. Woolf also had close links with many pioneering women involved in the struggle for educational reform. She was friends with Ray Strachey (née Costelloe), Lytton’s sister-in-law, whose book The Cause (1928) was a key source text for Woolf on the women’s movement. The night before her lecture at Newnham, Woolf stayed with the College’s principal, Pernel Strachey, sister to Lytton. Woolf’s own cousin, Katherine Stephen, had been principal of Newnham between 1911 and 1920. She read scores of memoirs, biographies, and accounts of the history of women’s education, research which appears more openly in Three Guineas but underpins the account of the struggle to establish Fernham, the women’s college in A Room of One’ Own. Prior to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, when any funds or earnings went to husbands, ‘to raise bare walls out of bare earth was the utmost they could do’ (p. 18). She is interested here in the self-perpetuating culture of donation, wealth, and privilege.

While A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas document the struggle for women’s access to higher education and repeatedly underline the importance of education for women, both essays are deeply critical of the university system. The narrator’s perambulations around the university are marked by exclusion and prohibition. She sees the effects of centuries of wealth and tradition, and the elevation of male creativity and scholarship achieved through the exclusion of women (and historically working-class, Jewish, and Catholic men). These essays are key texts in a strain of radical pedagogy that runs through Woolf’s oeuvre: a pedagogy that eschews the vanity, passivity, and hierarchical dynamics involved in lecturing, rote learning, and systems of examination. As explored in her novel Jacobs

Room (1922), the public school and university systems train young men in patriotism, competition, and domination—which in turn send them to war and out as agents of empire. In 1932, Woolf would decline an invitation to deliver the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, which were inaugurated by her father. Through her talks to the women’s colleges, she enters the university, but maintains her outsider status.

As the narrator approaches Fernham, the women’s college, in the dusk, it exhibits a ghostly beauty. The students are ‘half guessed, half seen’ (p. 13). One of these figures is the classical scholar and archaeologist Jane Ellen Harrison (‘J H. ”), student and then lecturer at Newnham. Harrison was not only one of the first female career academics, but she also revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture? Woolf had met Harrison in 1922, and published her Reminiscences of a Students Life at the Hogarth Press in 1925. She also draws on Harrison’s own writings for her central arguments. In her essay ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’, Harrison uses the phrase ‘a home of her own’, and her arguments about the intellectual emancipation of women revolve around space: ‘woman is beginning to demand a study’. Harrison’s presence is an elegiac nod to her death in 1928, but it also points to the complex temporality of 4 Room of Ones Own. Her ghostliness suggests return or resurrection and the idea of communal endeavour articulated so clearly at the close of the essay. A Room moves constantly between individual stories and _ collective engagement, and between past, present, and future.

But even the narrator’s lyrical description of wind-blown bluebells is interrupted mid-sentence by the reality of gravy soup: ‘there was nothing to stir the fancy in that’ (p. 14). Repeatedly in the essay, moments of reverie, celebration, and freedom of thought are curtailed or impinged upon by the quotidian. A Room of Ones Own segues between pragmatism and a utopian or even messianic tone.

Woolf’s ambivalent depiction of the university stems in part from her own experience of exclusion. Watching her brothers being sent to public school and then Cambridge, Woolf educated herself in her father’s library. For many years, in part as a result of her own diary comments, she was seen as an autodidact with a small amount of private tuition and a few courses in Greek at King’s College London. After being invited to give the Clark Lectures, she wrote: ‘This, I suppose, is the first time a woman has been asked; & so it is a great honour—think of me, the uneducated child reading

books in my room at 22 H. P. G—now advanced to this glory.’? We now know, however, that her studies at King’s Ladies’ Department in Kensington consisted of courses in German, History, Latin, and Greek taken between 1897 and 1901. She even took exams in German. Woolf was surrounded and taught there by pioneering women educators and her peers would have been a mixture of matriculated students studying en route to a University of London degree and women studying for pleasure. Woolf and her sister Vanessa were ‘allowed’ to attend the College because it was round the corner from their home at 22 Hyde Park Gate. At the cost of a guinea (£1.05) per term, the annual cost per subject may have influenced the choice of Woolf’s title Three Guineas.

From Cambridge, the narrator returns to London and the British Museum, another bastion of learning and truth. With its domed ceiling inscribed with the names of male writers, the Round Reading Room suggests not only a ‘huge bald forehead’ but also the sanctity of male scholarship (p. 21). Power and knowledge are spatially demarcated and encoded. The Round Reading Room opened in 1857 with two desks ‘For Ladies Only’, but contemporary cartoons depicted female readers as an inappropriate and contaminating presence, overflowing their allotted space and using the library for non-scholarly activities. The narrator’s research uncovers a history of writing by men about women. Fiction, she finds, is full of strong, interesting women: ‘Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant’ (p. 34). Any ‘transient visitor to this planet’, she argues, would see that ‘England is under the rule of a patriarchy’ (p. 26). And this imbalance of power creates distortions and hostilities on both sides. Economic dependence produces a looking-glass effect in which women flatter and reflect men back at themselves in inflated proportions. On the other hand, power breeds competition and anger: ‘the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually’ (p. 30). Of the money and the vote, Woolf opts for the money: ‘No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds’ (p. 29). Financial autonomy means the ability to write freely without resentment or hatred. It means spatial autonomy as well—the time and space required for intellectual freedom. At the close of Chapter II, when the narrator reaches her ‘own doorstep’, it becomes clear that the text we are reading is itself a product of its own argument.

From here the emphasis moves from social and economic contexts constraining women writers to those women who did write and publish. Woolf’s narrator begins her history of women writers, and where the traces are scarce, she has to improvise. The ordinary Elizabethan woman is glimpsed only momentarily on the margins of the lives of great men. So the narrator has to ‘bring her to life [...] poetically and prosaically’ (p. 34). This is exactly what Woolf does, in the form of Shakespeare’s sister, the hypothetical Judith, ‘extraordinarily gifted’, ‘adventurous’, ‘imaginative’ but ultimately let down by the expectations and constraints placed on her due to her gender (pp. 36—7). Judith Shakespeare becomes pregnant and commits suicide at the Elephant and Castle. This aspect of the essay has gained a life and cultural currency of its own. In fact Shakespeare had a daughter, Judith, and in fact Woolf was not the first writer to come up with this conceit. The South African writer Olive Schreiner imagines just such a female sibling for the bard in From Man to Man (1926) and Cicely Hamilton asks in Marriage as a Trade (1909) why there are no female Shakespeares (chs. 14-16). Woolf’s central argument that books are not solitary births applies to her own text, often seen as anomalous or ahead of its time rather than, in part, a product of contemporary feminist thought.

From here Woolf starts documenting the ever-increasing body of women’s writing, always keeping the production and reception of these texts at the fore. She offers us Lady Winchelsea, Margaret Cavendish, Dorothy Osborne, all writing despite the loneliness, lack of education and ‘the sneers and the laughter’ (p. 45). Then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Woolf argues, a sea change occurs: ‘the middle-class woman began to write’ and earn money (p. 49). Woolf anticipates the revisionist history so crucial to second-wave feminism: ‘which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses’ (p. 49). What may seem commonplace to us now, was, in the 1920s, a radical redefinition of a historiography focused on elite, male culture. Woolf also reconfigures assumptions about what constitutes appropriate subject matter for fiction and the sites associated with creativity. Women have ‘sat indoors all these millions of years’ and their rooms are “permeated by their creative force’ (p. 66).

More recent feminist scholarship has now produced a very different picture of women writers in the early modern period. Women like Anne

Clifford, Mary Wroth, and Eleanor Davies were writing in a range of genres —letters, diaries, poetry, plays—although often their writing was unpublished. Woolf has been taken to task for perpetuating the myth that the history of women’s writing starts in the eighteenth century and that the early modern woman writer is a doomed, crazed individual.° Woolf acknowledges, however, that the issue is recovery rather than production, and she urges the women in her audience to participate in the recuperative project: ‘why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?’ (p. 34). A Room of One’ Own paves the way for recent recoveries, or the resurrection that Judith represents. From her own room, the narrator writes of those women who had to hide their art through pseudonyms or in the pages of other books, or who had to write in odd moments after the children were in bed or the dishes done.

As the narrator moves into the nineteenth century, she focuses on the ways in which material constraints and misogyny breed anger and bitterness, which in turn distorts the writing, she argues, of women like Charlotte Bronté. In Jane Eyre, anger and indignation make the imagination ‘swerve’ (p. 55). But of course Woolf’s narrator displays moments of anger: the doodle in the library, for example. She is careful not to set herself apart. In Austen, however, she finds a writer with the freedom of mind she finds in Shakespeare’s texts: ‘writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching’ (p. 51).

After ‘think[ing] back through her mothers’, the narrator comes to living writers, pulling at random Mary Carmichael’s Lifes Adventure from the shelf. Again Carmichael (the pen name of Marie Stopes) is both specific and communal. She stands in for writing which, at last, tells the truth about women’s lives, and breaks the sentence in order to do so. The novel shines a light on those unrecorded gestures, the ‘infinitely obscure lives’ and ‘it lighted on small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all’ (pp. 67, 70). But not only that—the novel includes the remarkable words ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ (p. 62). Here Woolf settles on a particular aspect of those unrecorded lives: relationships between women unmediated by men.

A Room of One’s Own is a queer text. Its genesis is intertwined with the publication of Orlando and Woolf’s appearance at Girton with Vita, but Woolf also alludes deliberately in this passage to her part in the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Woolf was

one of forty witnesses called to testify in defence of the novel, and she turned up on 9 November 1928 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court whereupon the witnesses were dismissed by Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron. Just like Jane Eyre, her text contains an abrupt break as she stops herself in case Biron is lurking behind the red curtain. The manuscript of A Room of One’s Own reads as follows: ‘the pages had stuck; while fumbling to open them there flashed into my mind the inevitable policeman; the summons; the order to attend the court; the dreary waiting; the Magistrate coming in with a little bow; the glass of water; the counsel for the prosecution; for the defense; the verdict; this book is eatted obscene; & flames rising’.’ Carmichael’s novel represents possibility as well as the continued limitations of internalized and external forms of censorship.

In the phrase ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ lies not only the possibility of sexual relationship, but also a sea change in perspective. Women have not only been ‘seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex’, anticipating much later work in feminist film theory about the assumed male gaze in popular cinema (p. 62). In Carmichael’s writing the narrator finds the freedom to ‘think of things in themselves’ that comes with freedom from gender consciousness or grievance (p. 30). With a lack of insistence on gendered experience can come the freedom to write honestly about women’s experience: ‘she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman’ (p. 70).

Woolf also connects creative freedom with androgyny, emblematized in the final image of the couple getting into a taxi. Readers of A Room of Ones Own have long debated the intricacies of Woolf’s reference to androgyny and the text’s oscillation between gender difference and its transcendence. William Empson, in an early review, wrote: “when you have said, as Mrs Woolf does say, that every complete author must be spiritually hermaphrodite, you seem to have quelled this aspect of the sex war as vehemently as you called it into being’.® But for Woolf it was never a ‘sex war’—such opposition is one of the effects of systemic inequality: ‘It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people [...] are driven by instincts which are not within their control [...] the patriarchs, the professors [...] their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own’ (p. 30). Winifred Holtby, in 1932, focused on the centrality of androgyny to Woolf’s vision and Carolyn Heilbrun, decades later in 1973, wrote: ‘Bloomsbury consciously rejected the Victorian

stereotypes of “masculine” and “feminine” in favour of an androgynous ideal.’? In some ways, Woolf seems to have it both ways: focusing on women’s difference but also advocating a man-womanly ideal. But to recover and understand the history of women’s exclusion is, the narrator seems to suggest, to move towards difference without opposition. As Jane Harrison wrote: “To face the facts and the problems of life [...] we need the binocular vision of the two sexes.’ She calls on men and women to work together ‘a thing bisexed’ and four-eyed.!°

Some critics, such as Elaine Showalter, have read androgyny and the room as a kind of escape, ‘deadly’ and ‘disembodied’ from the material circumstances of women’s lives. ‘The ultimate room of one’s own is the grave,’ she argues.'' For Rachel Bowlby, Woolf uses the language of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to describe the birth of art, but ‘real babies as babies do not count for much; or rather, they count negatively, as a poor exchange for the female imagination that their existence, like other commonplace disadvantages of women’s domestic lives, is bound to stifle’? Certainly, the language of the chapter seems to reinforce heterosexual union with its metaphors of childbirth, fertilization, and marriage of opposites. What kind of ‘women’ does the essay speak for and to?

The narrator gestures at the end to those ‘women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed’ (p. 85) but women of colour seem to fall outside its implied audience. The reference to the ‘very fine negress’ and Woolf’s suggestion that women, unlike men, are not trained in the desire to colonize, doesn’t account for the possibility that the black woman might be British (p. 39). This passage has generated much critical debate and controversy. Alice Walker asks how Woolf’s ideas resonate for the black woman artist, constrained not just by patriarchy but by the conditions and legacy of enslavement. Walker thinks back through her mothers, creating an alternative tradition of women’s writing and literally inserting herself into the conversation. She simultaneously suggests 4 Room’s relevance but also its limitations. She considers the life of African American poet Phillis Wheatley through the prism of Woolf’s text: ‘ “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert “eighteenth century,” insert “black woman,” insert “born or made a slave”’] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her

days in some lonely cottage [...] feared and mocked at” ’.!> Walker attends to those writers who have managed to create despite the violent conditions of slavery and its legacy, inserting Zora Neale Hurston in place of Emily Bronté. But Walker also emphasizes, like Woolf, alternative modes of expression—song, storytelling, domestic arts—handed down through generations.

The intersection of race and gender is one of the text’s blind spots. Another is the question of class and money. The Dominican writer Jean Rhys alludes to this in her novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Its protagonist, Sasha, also inherits a legacy from her aunt and has a room off the Gray’s Inn Road. Unlike Woolf’s room, however, the space is coffin- like, suggesting that without other kinds of financial or social systems of support, the temporary bedsit can be a space of anxiety and doubt rather than an outlet for creativity. Woolf, unlike Rhys, never feared destitution. Critics have debated the value and implications of the £500 (somewhere around £25,000 in today’s money) and the kinds of assumptions it contains. Woolf’s own legacy was £2,500 in 1909; the interest gave her less than the £500. She felt uncomfortable about the legacy: ‘Ness and Adrian each have £100: I have £2500 ... It is miserable for Nessa; still worse for Adrian. I am determined to make him share mine.’!* In terms of money earned (the desirable source of income in A Room), only in 1926, after the publication of Mrs Dalloway, did Woolf earn £500 a year from book sales and journalism.!° The proceeds from A Room literally turned into space. On completing her work, she wrote: ‘I am summoning Philcox next week to plan a room—I have money to build it, money to furnish it.’!© This turned into a two-room extension to Monk’s House, the ground floor of which became her bedroom. Hermione Lee calls A Room Woolf’s ‘own disguised economic biography’.!’ With Three Guineas, right from the title onwards, Woolf fills her text with figures and sums. Reading for money is another way to expose inequality, and of course women aren’t supposed to talk about money.

A Room emphasizes process rather than finality, possibility rather than absolute amounts. The essay traces inheritance, outlines the contemporary state of affairs, and prefigures the future in a utopian, even messianic, final image of resurrection. This temporality is emphasized in the complex polyvocality of the essay. Woolf uses the Scottish ballad ‘Mary Hamilton’,

about four ladies-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots all called Mary. The speaker is about to kill herself after becoming pregnant by the King, suggesting the fate of Judith Shakespeare. The Marys correspond to the female figures in the text: the College secretary (Mary Seton), the aunt (Mary Beton), and the writer (Mary Carmichael). Woolf’s narrator is a composite, communal speaker who is also both subject and object of the narrative. If the speaker in the ballad, Mary Hamilton, is the speaker at the close of A Room (‘I will end now in my own person’) then Woolf rewrites the narrative of suicide found in the song. The essay also allows space for its audience, as the narrator anticipates criticisms and suggests projects of recovery and rewriting for her female students. Above all, she urges them to write: not only fiction but ‘books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science’ (p. 60). This immediately extends the essay beyond any kind of boundary; it invites trespass.

Three Guineas

The night before Woolf was due to speak to a group of young working women (the Junior Council of the L&NSWS) in January 1931, she had a eureka experience: ‘I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book, a sequel to A Room of Ones Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps—Lord how exciting!’!* Interestingly, the posthumously published version of the talk, ‘Professions for Women’, turns not on the trope of maternal inheritance, as in A Room, but matricide. The woman writer must kill the ‘angel in the house’, the figure of the dutiful, self-sacrificing mother who encapsulates the expectations placed on women and inimical to art. Sexual life notwithstanding, Woolf wanted in this new project to explore the continued obstacles to women’s full entry into the public sphere, the ideological barriers to emancipation, despite the fact that many closed doors had been opened and women could now vote and enter the professions.

The following year, in October 1932, the project turned into a novel- essay called The Pargiters, which follows and analyses the fortunes of an extended family in order to trace the changes in British society from the Victorian to the modern period. By February 1933, she had decided to fold the essay sections into the novel—the generic distinction no longer held up.

Woolf wanted to ‘give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts as well as the vision [...] And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on.’!? This writing project became The Years (1937), arguably Woolf’s most overtly political novel with its treatment of Irish Home Rule, suffrage, homosexuality, and class relations. After all, she was writing during a decade marked by political, constitutional, and economic crisis. Woolf had been reading scores of memoirs, biographies, histories of Britain, always focused on the social position of women. She had also started her own mass observation project compiled in three scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, quotations, photographs on contemporary Britain. Much of her research and reading can be traced directly to Three Guineas (particularly in the footnotes).

In 1935, after finishing the first draft of The Years, she conceived of an essay to be called ‘On Being Despised’.*” The novel-essay became a novel and an essay, although they were always intertwined in her mind: ‘lumping the Years & 3 Gs together as one book—as indeed they are’.?! What started out as a project about women became one about the ways in which women could help prevent war. Several events helped to crystallize the project. In October 1935 at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton the pacifists (led by George Lansbury) were defeated by Ernest Bevin over the issue of rearmament. It was ‘the breaking of that dam between me & the new book’.?? She also heard from E. M. Forster that the London Library had refused to allow women onto its organizing committee.*? She was writing in earnest in January 1937 and the project was complete by the end of the year. Three Guineas was published on 2 June 1938 but a much-excised version was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly titled ‘Women Must Weep’ during May and June of that year.

The premise of the essay is a letter from a barrister asking a woman how to prevent war. This letter, she writes, is “perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented?’ (p. 89). Ostensibly, addresser and addressee come from the same class, but educational and financial differences create radically divergent perspectives. Ostensibly too, women have the vote and can enter the education system and the

professions, but Three Guineas is about exploring the long-term effects of deep-rooted inequality. A Room of Ones Own focused on impediments to creative expression, whereas the emphasis here is on the way similar obstacles impede political agency. Before the narrator can respond to the barrister’s requests, she not only needs to investigate why men go to war, but she also has to see how the public world looks to those women who are just starting to enter it in significant numbers.

Three Guineas begins with this motif of delay, when, as Woolf worked on these intertwined texts during the 1930s, the political situation grew increasingly urgent. Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party came to power in 1922 and invaded Abyssinia in 1935. Hitler became German chancellor in 1933 and in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws made the anti- Semitism of Nazism all too clear. The project was germinating when Hitler’s troops marched into the Rhineland in 1936 and Woolf was correcting proofs in March 1938 when he invaded Austria. But Woolf also knew about fascism’s emergence much closer to home. In 1932, Oswald Mosley’s New Party became the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Harold Nicolson, husband of Vita Sackville-West, was editor of the New Party’s journal Action in 1931 but severed ties with the party when Mosley travelled to Italy to meet Mussolini. By 1934, when the BUF had 50,000 members, she wrote: ‘They think Mosley is getting supporters. If so, I'll emigrate.’** Married to a Jewish man, she was clearly alarmed by her proximity to fascism and its clear agenda at home and on the Continent.

With characteristic interest in their social and political environment, both Virginia and Leonard set out to inform themselves. In 1933, they had published Mussolini’s essay The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism in the Hogarth Press’s Day to Day pamphlet series, alongside a counter-text about communism. Not only that, determined to see what was happening in Europe at first hand, they travelled to Germany in 1935 against the advice of their friends. Woolf worried about ‘concealing Leonard’s nose’, but also knew that she would be targeted by association: ‘people say we might be unpopular as we are Jews’ (my emphasis).”° They consulted a friend at the Foreign Office who advised them not to get mixed up in any Nazi Party demonstrations, which was exactly what they did do. Caught up in a reception for Goring, they, along with their pet marmoset Mitz, received Nazi salutes. Alarmingly, Leonard was detained at the border, surrounded by swastikas. This was a bizarre intimation of the horror that was to come

and they hurried away from the ‘stupid mass feeling’.*° Leonard would go on to write his anti-fascist text Quack, Quack!, in which he analyses fascism as a ‘revolt against political reason’.*’ Interestingly, like his wife, he includes photographs in order to highlight the place of spectacle in the machinery of fascism.

As war seemed increasingly inevitable, the question of resistance became more urgent. How should writers respond to military crisis? Three Guineas grows out of Woolf’s deliberations on how best to oppose war. She has a reputation as a non-joiner, someone ambivalent about political activism, but she writes in her diary: ‘Every day almost I get rung up and asked to sign this, subscribe to that [...] I sign and I protest and so on.’*® During the 1930s, Woolf did give her support to a number of anti-fascist organizations; she sold the manuscript of Three Guineas to raise money for the Refugees Society and signed copies to support the League of Nations.”? She signed a letter which appeared in the New Statesman and Nation on 11 May 1935 in support of the International Association of Writers in Defence of Culture and supported ‘For Intellectual Liberty’, the British wing of the Comité de Vigilance, a French anti-fascist organization. The organization’s name, proposed by Leonard, and its recruitment letter, resonate throughout the third part of Three Guineas in the phrase ‘to protect culture and intellectual liberty’ (p. 165). The barrister requests three things from the narrator: her signature on a manifesto for intellectual liberty, membership of ‘a certain society ... whose aim is to preserve peace’, and a donation to that society. The essay complicates political allegiance which is hasty or purely financial: ‘To scribble a name on a sheet of paper is easy’ (p. 96). Investigating the workings of militarism and patriotism will have longer lasting effects: ‘thinking is my fighting’, she wrote.*? And at the heart of Three Guineas 1s the withholding of a signature in the narrator’s refusal to join the barrister’s peace society. She donates a guinea, and signs his petition, but feels that “We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in co-operation with its aim’ (p. 216).

As war looked increasingly inevitable, Woolf’s pacifism isolated her from her contemporaries. Many of those who had been conscientious objectors in the First World War felt that military action was an appropriate response to fascism. Many young men of the Auden generation, including

Julian Bell, had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War; Leonard Woolf would go on to publish The War for Peace (1940). That said, Woolf was not alone in her fervently held pacifism. Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, for example, both published pacifist pamphlets in 1936. During the First World War, the suffrage movement had been divided over the question of militarism; in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Women’s Co- operative Guild, with which Woolf was involved, remained committed to international pacifism.

But before the narrator can get to the question of war, she has to respond to the treasurer of the women’s college’s rebuilding fund, based on a similar request Woolf received from Newnham College. Nearly a decade on from A Room of Ones Own, she asks why it is that women’s colleges are still so lacking in funds and women in Cambridge are still denied degrees. But here, in their outsiderness, is the potential for a more radical pedagogy, an education system which discourages those values that drive people to war. The narrator advises the treasurer to build ‘an experimental college, an adventurous college. Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions’ (p. 118). The narrator’s utopian imaginings are interrupted by the reality of the situation: while the education may be imperfect, it is far better than the education of the private house and if it leads to women’s independence, then it will allow them to use their influence to prevent war. Woolf presents a multiplicity of approaches to the problem, from the utopian, to the anarchic, to the pragmatic. The first guinea is given.

The next unanswered letter is from a society for women and the professions, based on the L&NSWS, whose treasurer was Woolf’s friend, Philippa Strachey (sister of Pernel and Lytton). Woolf joined the society in 1932, the year after her talk to its members. The one cause Woolf did sign up to unequivocally during this period was the Women’s Service Library (now the Women’s Library). The library was set up in 1926 by the L&NSWS to preserve the history of the women’s movement and to provide material on social, economic, and political issues to support newly enfranchised women in the public world. In January 1938, Woolf was involved in a new campaign to raise funds for the library. Her name was on campaign publicity, she signed donation request letters, and gave money and books. She wrote, ‘I think its almost the only satisfactory deposit for

stray guineas, because half the readers are bookless at home, working all day, eager to know anything and everything, and a very nice room, with a fire even, and a chair or two, is provided.’*! Not only did Woolf support the library, but she used its collections for research while writing Three Guineas. We know that she was borrowing books on Mary Astell, Sophia Jex Blake, Josephine Butler, Dorothea Beale, Octavia Hill, and on the position of women in Europe, particularly in Germany, in 1937 and early 1938.2 Quotations from these books, and many others, provide the supporting evidence in Three Guineas. She also wrote to the librarian, Vera Douie, for information on endowments for Cambridge colleges, women in the Civil Service, women’s salaries, and lists of peace societies. In addition, the narrator advocates use of the library as a crucial resource on the position of women: ‘you have a library, and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up’ (p. 145). The library is an alternative site of education and history.

The request from the L&NSWS prompts exploration of the battles women have fought to enter the medical profession, the Civil Service, and the university, and the misogyny they continue to face in these organizations. Why are the statistics relating to the numbers of professional women so disheartening? Why is it so rare for women to earn £250 a year? Women are underrepresented, underpaid, and underpromoted. Woolf investigates these questions—all still topical issues—and how discrimination works. Supposedly objective systems of evaluation— examinations, promotion boards—are subject to ‘atmosphere’: ‘one of the most powerful, partly because it is one of the most impalpable, of the enemies with which the daughters of educated men have to fight’ (p. 135). With the help of Freud, she investigates the psychology of power, specifically the ‘infantile fixation’ through which patriarchs and society at large have kept women in the home. So the narrator offers her second guinea, but with the condition that the L&NSWS will help ‘all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour’ to enter the professions and that they will attempt to keep them free from ‘unreal loyalties’, such as patriotism, imperialism, greed, and vanity (p. 159). Otherwise, entering the professions means joining the procession towards war.

Here we come to one of the most radical, and controversial, aspects of Three Guineas. Written in the face of very specific and immediate conflicts, it seeks to step back and confront war or militarism in general. While the

text refers to Il Duce and the Fuhrer—the dictators appearing each day in the newspapers—tt links these figures not only to fascism in England but to the patriarch in the private house: ‘it is our duty to catch Hitler in his home haunts’.*? Nazi propaganda about women’s place in the home resonates with comments pervasive in the British media objecting to women’s entry into the public sphere. It is an old cry: from St Paul’s epistles, to Creon’s tyranny over Antigone, to those who force-fed suffragettes in Holloway Prison. A cry opposed by the women who ‘forced open the doors of the private house’ (p. 211), women like Josephine Butler, Sophia Jex-Blake, and Gertrude Bell. This creates collective responsibility; the enemy is not out there on the Continent but here in our midst, at the heart of the family structure. Again Woolf was not alone in making these connections, or in focusing on the gender politics of fascism. Jane Harrison’s ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism’ written during the First World War makes a similar argument: “How, then, can war be slain? [...] by slaying the spirit of Kaiserism that is in the very bones of each one of us—this spirit of competition [...] We are bred up on competition. ’>4

As in A Room, Woolf argues that economic freedom is vital in order that women are free to voice their opinions, crucially here about war. The narrator’s donation of the guineas highlights that the money is hers to give, but she also asks whether giving money, or paying someone else to speak or act on your behalf, is an abdication of responsibility. In a text littered with pound signs, Woolf resists the notion that women are tainted or prostituted when they speak about or work for money. She launches an extended debate about the correlation between social and economic value as she investigates who has money and what they do with it: ‘the daughters of educated men are paid very little from the public funds for their public services; the second [fact] is that they are paid nothing at all from the public funds for their private services; and the third is that their share of the husband’s income is not a flesh-and-blood share but a spiritual or nominal share’ (p. 139). Like Friedrich Engels, who equated women’s unpaid domestic labour with slavery, Woolf enters into interwar debates about state allowances for mothers: ‘among all those salaries there is no such salary as a mother’s [...] wives and mothers and daughters who work all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work your sons, sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever’ (p. 136).

Woolf’s choice of currency here is deliberate too. In the 1930s, the guinea was no longer in circulation as a coin but was a unit of currency (£1.05) used for professional services such as doctors’ or lawyers’ fees and paid for by cheque (as depicted on the original cover of the book). Woolf was interested in the denomination’s class associations, as mirrored in the phrase ‘daughters of educated men’, but also perhaps in its links with guinea gold and the slave trade. In 1661, the Royal Mint coined gold pieces for the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Guinea Coast of West Africa.*> As a guinea ship was another name for a slave ship, this is a reminder of the intertwined history of feminist and abolitionist discourse. The guinea is a unit of money that represents hidden violence and the history of humans bought and sold in the interests of capitalist modernity, just as Three Guineas attends to women’s relationship to a nation that has treated her ‘as a slave’ (p. 185). Men are trained, she argues, in imperial as well as patriarchal values: ‘Mustn’t our next task be the emancipation of men?’*°

Another aspect of the materialism of Three Guineas is its engagement with the visual manifestations of power through uniform and ceremonial dress. Again Woolf starts not with fascist spectacle but with public life in England. Gowns, gaiters, wigs, hats, ribbons, tabards—all serve ‘to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer’ (p. 105). By including photographs of public figures instantly recognizable to readers in 1938 but labelling them with generic titles, she again connects the topical and the general, just as Hitler stands metonymically for ‘the dictator’. The photographs are taken out of their original newspaper contexts, thereby ironizing and defamiliarizing the everyday display of power, and suggesting continuity between the soldier and the public male more generally. This not only connects battlefield and home front, but also extends her argument into peacetime. These are systemic issues rather than a function of a particular conflict. The images of the Fuhrer and Duce are described rather than included (p. 214).

Other absent photographs are those of bombed houses and dead children sent from Spain. Three Guineas is a product of the build-up to war, but of course the war which is a backdrop to the essay is the Spanish Civil War. On 20 August 1936 Leonard and Virginia signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph opposing the coup: ‘At the present moment in Spain a constitutional Government, elected by the people, is being attacked by a

junta of generals, who, with the aid of Moorish troops, have declared their intention of destroying Parliamentary democracy in that country, and of setting up in its place an authoritarian, military Government on the Fascist model.’ In June 1937, Woolf spoke, alongside W. H. Auden and Paul Robeson, at a meeting in the Albert Hall organized by the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief to raise money for Basque refugee children. Only days before she had been moved by the sight of a procession of Spanish refugees: “Somehow brought tears to my eyes [...] impelled by machine guns in Spanish fields to trudge through Tavistock Sqre [...] clasping their enamel kettles.’*’ Then in July 1937, her nephew Julian was hit by a shell while driving an ambulance in Spain. Woolf was one of the sponsors of the exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica at Burlington Gallery in 1938. Its central weeping woman echoes the title of Three Guinea’s American serialization: ‘Women Must Weep: Or Unite Against War’.

By not including the Spanish photographs, Woolf acknowledges the horror of war and the devastating grief it produces but instead steps back from the instant, emotional response such images would generate, to consider the wider, social and cultural causes of war. She has to do her work with words. She had received ‘a packet of photographs from Spain all of dead children, killed by bombs’ before she started writing.** These were most likely photos of children killed in the German air raid on Getafe on 30 October 1936 during the Siege of Madrid.*” Woolf may also have had in mind the photos of Spanish children’s bodies printed in the Daily Worker on 12 November 1936.4? These photos, regardless of their provenance, used images of dead bodies to shock viewers into opposing the embargo on arms to the Republican forces. Were they included, Three Guineas would become the kind of propagandist text she was arguing against. The omission of the photos urges the reader to question their significance as ‘simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye’ (p. 96). They cannot be an objective, documentary record of atrocity; they are selected and framed and rely on the anonymized and representative position of deceased individuals. As Susan Sontag has argued, calling into question Woolf’s homogenizing account of responses to war photography, they may induce ‘A call for peace. A cry for revenge.’*! By the end of the essay, the Spanish photos have been replaced by a word-image of the dictator. Whereas the reader might be able to separate him- or herself from the horror of dead and

mutilated bodies, when confronted with the man in uniform: we ‘are ourselves that figure’ (p. 215).

The narrator ultimately decides to give three guineas, reinforcing the significance of the ‘sacred sixpence’. She is using the money that she has earned and choosing where to send it. But she decides not to join the peace society, preferring to offer her allegiance to the Outsiders’ Society, which operates without leaders, laws, honours, or ceremony. Women’s history of exclusion has a key benefit: their ability to see differently. While of course women have been complicit in patriotism and the glorification of war, their inability in Woolf’s day to bear arms and fight for ‘their country’ creates an opportunity to imagine new possibilities. They will work in cooperation with the barrister but ‘by finding new words and creating new methods’ (p. 215). Their outsiderness can be maintained through poverty (defined as just enough to be independent), chastity (not selling one’s brain for money), derision (refusing advertising), and freedom from unreal loyalties (pride of family, nationality, college, religion). Women can avoid the procession of conformity, here depicted as encircling ‘the mulberry tree, the sacred tree, of property’ (p. 156). Woolf herself made a practice of refusing honours, but readers have pointed out the complications involved in realizing such a position of both disinterestedness and involvement. Woolf seems to ask women to hold on to their marginalization, or the very sign of their oppression. We now have details of the vigorous marketing of Three Guineas itself to professional, feminist organizations and activists by Norah Nicholls at the Hogarth Press. Ironically, Nicholls’s advertising and publicity campaign added ‘prized guineas to the Hogarth coffers’ .47

Readers have also debated the politics of Woolf’s denunciation of patriotism and nationalism. The oft-quoted phrase, ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (p. 185), can be read as a form of neo-imperialism. Woolf, benefiting from the luxurious option of national belonging, can easily renounce such categories of affiliation whereas for women from colonized nations, national identity may be a basic starting point of emancipation. In terms of class too, of course, Woolf was very much an insider, but she also seeks in this essay to explore the ways in which gender complicates the conventional designators of class status. She decides to focus her essay on the experience of the ‘daughters of educated men’, a clunky term as she acknowledges, but one which highlights that women differ ‘so profoundly

in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie—capital and environment’ (p. 218). The phrase also foregrounds the limitations of the fathers’ education if it doesn’t lead to an enlightened position regarding their daughters. The main barrier to the education and employment of these women is likely to be the irrational misogyny of their fathers.

But Woolf’s decision to speak only for her own class troubled and annoyed some readers. Q. D. Leavis, in an early review, argued that Woolf was ignoring huge swathes of the female population and objected to the implication that mothering and thinking were mutually exclusive activities.*? Another kind of response to Woolf’s class politics appears in the letters Woolf received after the publication of Three Guineas. The text itself refers to twelve letters, but that epistolary exchange was widened by the numerous letters sent to Woolf by fans and friends, letters she referred to as ‘My own, now numerous, semi-official 3 Gs letters’.44 Readers wrote in to correct Woolf on various points, to tell her about their own experiences of sexism or their outsider activism, and to thank her for the book. Amongst the eighty-two letters that have survived is a lengthy response from a working-class woman in Yorkshire, Agnes Smith. Smith objects to the phrase ‘daughters of educated men’, arguing that many of the arguments apply equally to her situation.*° She objects particularly to Woolf’s notion that working-class women have the power to withdraw their labour. As Smith notes, she would starve. The letter is a kind of autobiography and Smith did go on, as Woolf suggested, to publish a memoir. The two women continued to correspond until Woolf’s death in 1941, although Woolf’s replies have not survived. Smith continues and widens the dialogue started in Three Guineas; as Woolf wrote, ‘My wide circle has widened.’*°

Responses to Three Guineas were mixed. She was called ‘the most brilliant pamphleteer in England’, while Graham Greene found her argument ‘a little shrill’.4’ Her feminism was, as usual, the sticking point. But with nowhere near the prominence of A Room, the topicality of this essay has continued, particularly in the context of increased militarism. Woolf was literally writing under the shadow of German aircraft: ‘The public world very notably invaded the private at MH. last week end. Almost war: almost expected to hear it announced. And England, as they say, humiliated. And the man in uniform exalted. Suicides. Refugees turned

back from Newhaven. Aeroplanes droning over the house.’*® In that

moment, what mattered most to Woolf was not only the freedom to voice her opposition, but an active and critical readership. These essays demand just such a reader.

' Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, iv, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1982), 85.

? Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999).

Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 162.

4 Jane Harrison, Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915), 117, and 128. See Sowon S. Park, ‘Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf’s Discourse of Alterity’, Women: A Cultural Review, 22/1 (2011), 69-78.

? Woolf, Diary, iv. 79.

. Margaret J. Ezell, ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature’, New Literary History, 21 (1990), 579-92.

’ Virginia Woolf: Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 114.

® William Empson, ‘Virginia Woolf’, in Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (eds.), Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 306.

Carolyn Heilbrun, Zowards Androgyny (London: Victor Gollanz, 1973), 126.

'0 Harrison, Alpha and Omega, 141-2.

'l Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Bronté to Doris Lessing (London: Virago, 1999), 297.

Rachel Bowlby, 4 Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12.

'3 Alice Walker, ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: Phoenix, 2005), 235.

'4 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, i, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 391.

'S Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 557.

'6 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, iii, ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 219-20.

7 Lee, Virginia Woolf, 556.

'8 Woolf, Diary, iv. 6.

'° Woolf, Diary, iv. 151-2.

20 Woolf, Diary, iv. 271.

*! Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, v, ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press,1984), 148.

2 Woolf, Diary, iv. 346.

3 Woolf, Diary, iv. 297.

= Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, v, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press,1979), 273.

= Woolf, Diary, iv. 298 and Letters, v. 388. 6 Woolf, Diary, iv. 311. 7 Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack! (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 43.

°8 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vi, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 21.

a Woolf, Letters, vi. 314, 319.

a Woolf, Diary, v. 285.

3! Woolf, Letters, vi. 232.

32 See Anna Snaith, ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’, Literature and History, 12/2 (2003), 16-35.

33 Woolf, Letters, vi. 372.

34 Harrison, Alpha and Omega, 256. See also Catherine Marshall’s Militarism and Feminism (1915) and her discussion of ‘the profound enmity between militarism and feminism’. For writing on gender and war from the 1930s, see Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation (1935), Storm Jameson, The Challenge to Death (1934), Naomi Mitchison, We Have Been Warned (1935), Phyllis Bottome, This Mortal Storm (1937), and Katherine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937).

35 Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 176. 36 Woolf, Letters, vi. 379.

37 Woolf, Diary, v. 97.

38 Woolf, Letters, vi. 85.

39 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 323.

a Woolf, Diary, v. 32; Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 65-6.

41 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 13.

4 Alice Staveley, ‘Marketing Virginia Woolf: Women, War, and Public Relations in Three Guineas’, Book History, 12 (2009), 295-339, at 299.

a Q. D. Leavis, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!’, Scrutiny, 7 (1938), 203-14.

a Woolf, Diary, v. 173.

= Agnes Smith, ‘Letter to Virginia Woolf’, in Anna Snaith (ed.), “Wide Circles: The Three Guineas Letters, Woolf Studies Annual, 6 (2000), 1-168, at 99.

46 Woolf, Diary, v. 193.

47 Orlo Williams, ‘Women in a World of War’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1938; Graham Greene, The Spectator, 17 June 1938, p. 1112.

48 Woolf, Diary, v. 131.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

A Room of One's Own started out as two lectures given by Virginia Woolf in October 1928 at each of the women’s colleges at Cambridge, Newnham and Girton. A version of these talks appeared in March 1929 in an American magazine, Forum (see The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. v, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2009) ).

The first British edition was published simultaneously on 24 October 1929 by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press (3,040 copies) and in America by Harcourt Brace (4,000 copies). The Hogarth Press had printed 14,650 copies by March 1930.

If readers wish to know more about the composition process of A Room, they should consult S. P. Rosenbaum’s annotated transcription of the manuscript, which was discovered, misfiled, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1990 (Woolf, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)). It had been donated by Leonard Woolf. The typescript of A Room is held in the Monks House Papers at Sussex University (MHP B.15.1). The page proofs of A Room were acquired by the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, in 2010. For more details about variants from the published version see Isaac Gewirtz, ‘ “With Anger and Emphasis”: The Proof Copy of A Room of Ones Own’, Woolf Studies Annual, 17 (2011), 1-76.

Three Guineas started out as a speech given by Woolf to the Junior Council of the London and National Society for Women’s Service (originally a suffrage organization) on 21 January 1931. She spoke alongside the composer Ethel Smyth on the topic of ‘Music and Literature’. A version of this speech was published as ‘Professions for Women’ in The Death of the Moth (1942). It can be found in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. vi, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2011) and the manuscript of the speech is published in The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, ed. Mitchell A. Leasks (London: Hogarth Press,

1978). Woolf sold the manuscript of Three Guineas in 1939 to raise money for Spanish Civil War refugees. It is now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

The first British edition was published on 2 June 1938 (16,250 copies) and on 25 August 1938 in the USA by Harcourt Brace (7,500 copies). An excised version was published in the Atlantic Monthly in May (161/5) and June 1938 (161/6) under the title ‘Women Must Weep’.

The photographs that Woolf included, but which were dropped from some later editions, are reproduced here in their original position in the text. While we now know who appears in the photographs (see Alice Staveley, ‘Name That Face’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 51 (1998), 4-5, and Explanatory Notes, pp. 272—3), we do not know their provenance or where the originals are now. Woolf conducted extensive research for Three Guineas, and its companion novel 7he Years, during the 1930s. This included reading notes taken in her usual fashion. For details of these see Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). In addition, she also compiled a different kind of research project: three scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, quotations, and photographs. These are held in the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex (MHP B16.f 1-3). They can also be accessed, along with Woolf’s manuscripts and notebooks, on Major Authors on CD-Rom: Virginia Woolf (ed. Mark Hussey, Primary Source Media, 1997). Much of Woolf’s research appears in her endnotes to Three Guineas. These appear here indicated by superscript Arabic numerals, whereas Anna Snaith’s explanatory endnotes are indicated by asterisks. Editorial notes are occasionally appended to Woolf’s endnotes, initialled “AS’ and placed within square brackets. Woolf additionally composed some footnotes to Three Guineas and these appear at the foot of the relevant page, cued with daggers.

The texts of both A Room and Three Guineas in this edition are based on the first British editions with minor corrections to typographical errors. This edition makes minor adjustments to hyphenation, word division (‘tomorrow’, ‘tonight’, ‘someone’, etc.), “1ze’ for ‘ise’, the dropping of the full point after ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’, and the use of single rather than double quotes, in order to be consistent and to follow current standard usage.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford for permission to reproduce the photographs from the first edition of Three Guineas (27001 e.1360, pp. facing 37, 39, 43, 113, and 220). I am grateful to the following friends and colleagues for assistance with research for the Explanatory Notes: Stuart N. Clarke, Lizzie Eger, Mary Horgan, Maggie Humm, Clara Jones, Lizzie Scott-Baumann, and Suzana Zink. I am indebted to all previous editors of these essays, especially Naomi Black, Michele Barrett, and Hermione Lee. Above all, it has been an honour to continue the work of Morag Shiach, whose 1992 edition set the bar so very high.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Autobiographical and Biographical Sources

Briggs, Julia, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005).

Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996).

Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vols. i—v, ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-84).

— The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vols. i—vi, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1975-80).

Reference

Hussey, Mark, Virginia Woolf A to Z (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

McNees, Eleanor (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (Sussex: Helm Information, 1994).

Snaith, Anna (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

General Criticism

Allen, Judith, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Beer, Gillian, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

Bowlby, Rachel, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

Cuddy-Keane, Melba, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Fernald, Anne, Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006).

Goldman, Jane, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Marcus, Jane, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

Randall, Bryony, and Goldman, Jane (eds.), Virginia Woolf in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Sellers, Susan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Silver, Brenda R., Virginia Woolf: Icon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999).

Snaith, Anna, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).

Whitworth, Michael H., Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Zwerdling, Alex, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

On A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas

Berman, Jessica, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

Black, Naomi, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

Bowlby, Rachel, A Child of One's Own: Parental Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Brosnan, Leila, Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays and Journalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

Carlston, Erin G., Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Daughtery, Beth Rigel, ‘Letters from Readers to Virginia Woolf’, Woolf Studies Annual, 12 (2006), 1-212.

Gewirtz, Isaac, ‘ “With Anger and Emphasis”: The Proof Copy of A Room of One’s Own’, Woolf Studies Annual, 17 (2011), 1-76.

Gualtieri, Elena, Virginia Woolf's Essays: Sketching the Past (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

Humm, Maggie, ‘Memory, Photography and Modernism: The “Dead Bodies and Ruined Houses” of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas’, Signs, 28/2 (2003), 645-64.

Hussey, Mark (ed.), Virginia Woolf and War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991).

Marcus, Jane, Virginia Woolf, Cambridge and A Room of One’s Own: ‘The Proper Upkeep of Names’ (London: Cecil Woolf, 1996).

Park, Sowon S., ‘Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf’s Discourse of Alterity’, Women: A Cultural Review, 22/1 (2011), 69-78.

— ‘Suffrage and Virginia Woolf: “The Mass Behind the Single Voice” ’, Review of English Studies, 56/223 (2005), 119-34.

Pawlowski, Merry M. (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Fascism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001).

— ‘The Virginia Woolf and Vera Douie Letters: Woolf’s Connections to the Women’s Service Library’, Woolf Studies Annual, 8 (2002), 3-62.

Rosenberg, Beth Carole, and Dubino, Jeanne (eds.), Virginia Woolf and the Essay (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, A Room of Ones Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity (New York: Twayne, 1995).

Saloman, Randi, Virginia Woolf's Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Snaith, Anna, ‘ “Stray Guineas”: Virginia Woolf and the Fawcett Library’, Literature and History, 12/2 (2003), 16-35.

— (ed.), ‘Wide Circles: The Three Guineas Letters’, Woolf Studies Annual, 6 (2000), 1-168.

Staveley, Alice, ‘Marketing Virginia Woolf: Women, War, and Public Relations in Three Guineas’, Book History, 12 (2009), 295-339.

— ‘Name That Face’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 51 (1998), 4—S.

Wood, Alice, Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Woolf, Virginia, Woman and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts, ed. Frank Kermode. — Flush, ed. Kate Flint.

Jacobs Room, ed. Kate Flint.

—— The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, ed. David Bradshaw. — Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw.

— Night and Day, ed. Suzanne Raitt.

— Orlando, ed. Michael H. Whitworth.

Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw.

To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw.

— The Voyage Out, ed. Lorna Sage.

— The Waves, ed. David Bradshaw.

— The Years, ed. Hermione Lee, with notes by Sue Ashbee.

1882

1895

1896

1897

1898

1899

1900

1901

Life (25 Jan.) Adeline Virginia Stephen (VW) born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London.

(5 May) Death of mother, Julia Stephen; VW’s first breakdown occurs soon afterwards.

(Nov.) Travels in France with sister Vanessa.

(10 April) Marriage of half-sister Stella; (19 July) death of Stella; (Nov.) VW learning Greek and history at King’s College, London.

(30 Oct.) VW’s brother Thoby goes up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he forms friendships with Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and others of the future Bloomsbury Group (VW’s younger brother Adrian follows him to Trinity in 1902).

A CHRONOLOGY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

Historical and Cultural Background

Deaths of Darwin, Trollope, D. G. Rossetti; Joyce born; Stravinsky born; Married Women’s Property Act; Society for Psychical Research founded.

Death of T. H. Huxley; X-rays discovered; invention of the cinematograph; wireless telegraphy invented; arrest, trials, and conviction of Oscar Wilde.

Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband Wells, The Time Machine

Death of William Morris; Daily Mail started.

Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; Tate Gallery opens.

Stoker, Dracula

James, What Maisie Knew

Deaths of Gladstone and Lewis Carroll; radium and plutonium discovered. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Boer War begins. Births of Bowen and Coward.

Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature

James, The Awkward Age

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

Deaths of Nietzsche, Wilde, and Ruskin; Daily Express started; Planck announces quantum theory; Boxer Rising.

Conrad, Lord Jim

Death of Queen Victoria; accession of Edward VII; first wireless communication between Europe and USA; ‘World’s Classics’ series begun.

Kipling, Kim

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

VW starts private lessons in Greek with Janet Case.

(22 Feb.) Death of father, Sir Leslie Stephen. In spring, VW travels to Italy with Vanessa and friend Violet Dickinson. (10 May) VW has second nervous breakdown and is ill for three months. Moves to 46 Gordon Square. (14 Dec.) VW’s first publication appears.

(March, April) Travels in Portugal and Spain. Writes reviews and teaches once a week at Morley College, London

(Sept. and Oct.) Travels in Greece. (20 Nov.) Death of Thoby Stephen.

(7 Feb.) Marriage of Vanessa to Clive Bell. VW moves with Adrian to 29 Fitzroy Square. At work on her first novel, ‘Melymbrosia’ (working title for The Voyage Out).

(Sept.) Visits Italy with the Bells.

(17 Feb.) Lytton Strachey proposes marriage. (30 March) First meets Lady Ottoline Morrell. (April) Visits Florence. (Aug.) Visits Bayreuth and Dresden. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (Jan.) Works for women’s suffrage. (June— Aug.) Spends time in a nursing home at Twickenham.

End of Boer War; British Academy founded; Encyclopaedia Britannica (10th edn.); TLS started.

Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns James, The Wings of the Dove

Deaths of Gissing and Spencer; Daily Mirror started; Wright brothers make their first aeroplane flight; Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union.

Butler, The Way of All Flesh

James, The Ambassadors

Moore, Principia Ethica

Deaths of Christina Rossetti and Chekhov; Russo-Japanese War; Entente Cordiale between Britain and France. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Conrad, Nostromo James, The Golden Bowl

Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity; Sartre born

Shaw, Major Barbara and Man and Superman

Wells, Kipps

Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread Death of Ibsen; Beckett born; Liberal Government elected; Campbell- Bannerman Prime Minister; launch of HMS Dreadnought.

Auden born; Anglo-Russian Entente. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World Conrad, The Secret Agent Forster, The Longest Journey

Asquith Prime Minister; Old Age Pensions Act; Elgar’s First Symphony. Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale Forster, A Room with a View

Death of Meredith; ‘People’s Budget’; English Channel flown by Bleriot.

Wells, Zono-Bungay

Masterman, The Condition of England Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto

Deaths of Edward VII, Tolstoy, and Florence Nightingale; accession of George V; Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edn.); Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition. Bennett, Clayhanger

1911

1912

1913

1914

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

(April) Travels to Turkey, where Vanessa is ill. (Nov.) Moves to 38 Brunswick Square, sharing house with Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf.

Rents Asheham House. (Feb.) Spends some days in Twickenham nursing home. (10 Aug.) Marriage to Leonard Woolf. Honeymoon in Provence, Spain, and Italy. (Oct.) Moves to 13 Clifford’s Inn, London.

(March) MS of The Voyage Out delivered to publisher. Unwell most of summer. (9 Sept.) Suicide attempt. Remains under care of nurses and husband for rest of year. (16 Feb.) Last nurse leaves. Moves to Richmond, Surrey.

Purchase of Hogarth House, Richmond. (26 March) The Voyage Out published. (April, May) Bout of violent madness; under care of nurses until November.

(17 Oct.) Lectures to Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Regular work for TLS.

(July) Hogarth Press commences publication with The Mark on the Wail. VW begins work on Night and Day.

Writes reviews and Night and Day; also

Forster, Howards End

Yeats, The Green Helmet

Wells, The History of Mr Polly

National Insurance Act; Suffragette riots. Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Wells, The New Machiavelli

Lawrence, The White Peacock

Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition; Suffragettes active; strikes by dockers, coal-miners, and transport workers; Irish Home Rule Bill again rejected by Lords; sinking of SS Titanic; death of Scott in the Antarctic; Daily Herald started. English translations of Chekhov and Dostoevsky begin to appear.

New Statesman started; Suffragettes active. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

Irish Home Rule Bill passed by Parliament; First World War begins (4 Aug.); Dylan Thomas born.

Lewis, Blast

Joyce, Dubliners

Yeats, Responsibilities

Hardy, Satires of Circumstance

Bell, Art

Death of Rupert Brooke; Einstein, General Theory of Relativity; Second Battle of Ypres; Dardanelles Campaign; sinking of SS Lusitania; air attacks on London.

Ford, The Good Soldier

Lawrence, The Rainbow

Brooke, 19/4 and Other Poems Richardson, Pointed Roofs

Death of James; Lloyd George Prime Minister; First Battle of the Somme; Battle of Verdun; Gallipoli Campaign; Easter Rising in Dublin.

Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Death of Edward Thomas. Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele); T. E. Lawrence’s campaigns in Arabia; USA enters the War; Revolution in Russia (Feb., Oct.); Balfour Declaration.

Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations Death of Owen; Second Battle of the

1919

1920

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

sets type for the Hogarth Press. (15 Nov.) First meets T. S. Eliot.

(1 July) Purchase of Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex. (20 Oct.) Night and Day published.

Works on journalism and Jacob's Room.

Ill for summer months. (4 Nov.) Finishes Jacobs Room.

(Jan. to May) Ill. (24 Oct.) Jacobs Room published. (14 Dec.) First meets Vita Sackville-West.

(March, April) Visits Spain.

Works on ‘The Hours’, the first version of Mrs Dalloway.

Purchase of lease on 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury. Gives lecture that becomes ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. (8 Oct.) Finishes Mrs Dalloway.

(23 April) The Common Reader published.

(14 May) Mrs Dalloway published. III during summer.

(Jan.) Unwell with German measles. Writes To the Lighthouse.

Somme; final German offensive collapses; Armistice with Germany (11 Nov.); Franchise Act grants vote to women over 30; influenza pandemic kills millions. Lewis, Zarr

Hopkins, Poems

Strachey, Eminent Victorians

Treaty of Versailles; Alcock and Brown fly the Atlantic; National Socialists founded in Germany.

Sinclair, Mary Olivier

Shaw, Heartbreak House

League of Nations established.

Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Lawrence, Women in Love

Eliot, The Sacred Wood

Fry, Vision and Design

Irish Free State founded.

Huxley, Crome Yellow

Bonar Law Prime Minister; Mussolini forms Fascist Government in Italy; death of Proust; Encyclopaedia Britannica (12th edn.); Criterion founded; BBC founded; Irish Free State proclaimed.

Eliot, The Waste Land

Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

Joyce, Ulysses

Mansfield, The Garden Party Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Baldwin Prime Minister; BBC radio begins broadcasting (Nov.); death of K. Mansfield.

First (minority) Labour Government; Ramsay MacDonald Prime Minister; deaths of Lenin, Kafka, and Conrad.

Ford, Some Do Not

Forster, A Passage to India

O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock

Coward, The Vortex

Gerhardie, The Polyglots

Ford, No More Parades

Huxley, Those Barren Leaves

Whitehead, Science and the Modern World General Strike (3-12 May); Encyclopaedia Britannica (13th edn.); first television demonstration.

Ford, A Man Could Stand Up Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

1927

1928

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

(March, April) Travels in France and Italy. (5 May) 7o the Lighthouse published. (5 Oct.) Begins Orlando.

(11 Oct.) Orlando published. Delivers lectures at Cambridge on which she bases A Room of Ones Own.

(Jan.) Travels to Berlin. (24 Oct.) A Room of One's Own published.

(20 Feb.) First meets Ethel Smyth; (29 May) Finishes first version of The Waves.

(April) Car tour through France. (8 Oct.) The Waves published. Writes Flush.

(21 Jan.) Death of Lytton Strachey. (13 Oct.) The Common Reader, 2nd series, published.

Begins The Years, at this point called ‘The Pargiters’.

(May) Car tour of France and Italy. (5 Oct.) Flush published.

Works on The Years. (9 Sept.) Death of Roger Fry.

Rewrites The Years. (May) Car tour of Holland, Germany, and Italy.

Lindburgh flies solo across the Atlantic; first ‘talkie’ films.

Death of Hardy; votes for women over 21. Yeats, The Tower

Lawrence, Lady Chatterley ’s Lover Waugh, Decline and Fall

Sherriff, Journey s End

Ford, Last Post

Huxley, Point Counter Point

Bell, Civilization

2nd Labour Government, MacDonald Prime Minister; collapse of New York Stock Exchange; start of world economic depression.

Graves, Goodbye to All That

Aldington, Death of a Hero

Green, Living

Mass unemployment; television starts in USA; deaths of Lawrence and Conan Doyle.

Auden, Poems

Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Waugh, Vile Bodies

Coward, Private Lives

Lewis, Apes of God

Formation of National Government; abandonment of Gold Standard; death of Bennett; Japan invades China.

Roosevelt becomes President of USA; hunger marches start in Britain; Scrutiny Starts.

Huxley, Brave New World

Deaths of Galsworthy and George Moore; Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Wells, The Shape of Things to Come Waugh, 4 Handful of Dust

Graves, J, Claudius

Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks Toynbee, A Study of History

George V’s Silver Jubilee; Baldwin Prime Minister of National Government; Germany re-arms; Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

(May—Oct.) Ill. Finishes The Years. Begins Three Guineas.

(15 March) The Years published. Begins Roger Fry: A Biography. (18 July) Death in Spanish Civil War of Julian Bell, son of Vanessa. (2 June) Three Guineas published. Works on Roger Fry, and begins to envisage Between the Acts.

VW moves to 37 Mecklenburgh Square, but lives mostly at Monk’s House. Works on Between the Acts. Meets Freud in London.

(25 July) Roger Fry published. (10 Sept.) Mecklenburgh Square house bombed. (18 Oct.) witnesses the ruins of 52 Tavistock Square, destroyed by bombs. (23 Nov.) Finishes Between the Acts.

(26 Feb.) Revises Between the Acts. Becomes ill. (28 March) Drowns herself in River Ouse, near Monk’s House. (July) Between the Acts published.

Death of George V; accession of Edward VIII; abdication crisis; accession of George VI; Civil War breaks out in Spain; first of the Moscow show trials; Germany re-occupies the Rhineland; BBC television begins (2 Nov.); deaths of Chesterton, Kipling, and Housman.

Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying Chamberlain Prime Minister; destruction of Guernica; death of Barrie.

Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

German Anschluss with Austria; Munich agreement; dismemberment of Czechoslovakia; first jet engine.

Beckett, Murphy

Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Greene, Brighton Rock

End of Civil War in Spain; Russo-German pact; Germany invades Poland (Sept.); Britain and France declare war on Germany (3 Sept.); deaths of Freud, Yeats, and Ford.

Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

Germany invades north-west Europe; fall of France; evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk; Battle of Britain; beginning of ‘the Blitz’; National Government under Churchill.

Germany invades USSR; Japanese destroy US Fleet at Pearl Harbor; USA enters war; death of Joyce.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN!

CHAPTER I

BUT, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney;* a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontés and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage* under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford;* a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell* and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that 1s written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how | arrived at this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At

any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex 1s that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham;* ‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the waste- paper basket and forget all about it.

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please*—it is not a matter of importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought— to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift 1t and sink it until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will

not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge* in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind—Saint Charles, said Thackeray,* putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s,* I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then

came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay —the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library* where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray’s Esmond* is also preserved. The critics often say that Esmond is Thackeray’s most perfect novel. But the affectation of the style, with its imitation of the eighteenth century, hampers one, so far as I can remember; unless indeed the eighteenth-century style was natural to Thackeray—a fact that one might prove by looking at the manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which —but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn morning; the leaves were fluttering red to the ground; there was no great hardship in doing either. But the sound of music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was going forward. The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door. Even the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like the recollection of sorrow than sorrow

itself; even the groanings of the ancient organ seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the verger might have stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of introduction from the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside. Moreover, it was amusing enough to watch the congregation assembling, coming in and going out again, busying themselves at the door of the chapel like bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur* on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. Old stories of old deans and old dons came back to mind, but before I had summoned up courage to whistle—it used to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor instantly broke into a gallop—the venerable congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapel remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of

reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and silver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses. Men with trays on their heads went busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of the gramophone blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to reflect—the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. The clock struck. It was time to find one’s way to luncheon.

It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion* began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by

degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company*—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.

If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat* pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only—here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:

There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’; And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’; The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’; And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’*

Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.*

Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?

There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things even under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing, and had to explain my laughter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It 1s a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes—you know the sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats.

This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into the afternoon. The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made secure for another night. After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I forget its name—which leads you, if you take the right turning, along to Fernham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was not till half-past seven. One could almost do without dinner after such a luncheon. It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road. Those words—

There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear—

sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. And then, switching off into the other measure, I sang, where the waters are churned up by the weir:

My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d shoot; My heart is like an apple tree ...

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet. For this reason—that my memory failed me—the argument flagged for want of material. But why, I continued, moving on towards Headingley, have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has Alfred ceased to sing

She is coming, my dove, my dear. Why has Christina ceased to respond

My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me?

Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For truth ... those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion? I asked myself. What was the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nine o’clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight—which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham.

As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told. Therefore it was still autumn and the leaves were still yellow and falling, if anything, a little faster than before, because it was now evening (seven twenty-three to be precise) and a breeze (from the south-west to be exact) had risen. But for all that there was something odd at work:

My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d shoot; My heart is like an apple tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit—

perhaps the words of Christina Rossetti were partly responsible for the folly of the fancy—it was nothing of course but a fancy—that the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would no one stop her?—and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J H * herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword—the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth—— Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-

miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers’ veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. Down corridors and up staircases the youth of England went banging and singing. And was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had no more right here in Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham or Christchurch*), to say, ‘The dinner was not good,’ or to say (we were now, Mary Seton and I, in her sitting-room), “Could we not have dined up here alone?’ for if I had said anything of the kind I should have been prying and searching into the secret economies of a house which to the stranger wears so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No, one could say nothing of the sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next corner—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them. Happily my friend, who taught science, had a cupboard where there was a squat bottle and little glasses—(but there should have been sole and partridge to begin with)—so that we were able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day’s living. In a minute or so we were slipping freely in and out among all those objects of curiosity and interest which form in the mind in the absence of a particular person, and are naturally to be discussed on coming together again—how somebody has married, another has not; one thinks this, another that; one has improved out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly gone to the bad—with all those speculations upon human nature and the character of

the amazing world we live in which spring naturally from such beginnings. While these things were being said, however, I became shamefacedly aware of a current setting in of its own accord and carrying everything forward to an end of its own. One might be talking of Spain or Portugal, of book or racehorse, but the real interest of whatever was said was none of those things, but a scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the earth. This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men—these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what was in my mind to the air, when with good luck it would fade and crumble like the head of the dead king* when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?

Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860*—Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored, I suppose, by the recital. And she told me—rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr won’t give a penny. The Saturday Review has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices? Shall we hold a bazaar? Can’t we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill* said on the subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the to print a letter? Can we get Lady to sign it? Lady is out of town. That was the way it was done, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the

utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together.! So obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. ‘The amenities,’ she said, quoting from some book or other, ‘will have to wait.’

At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some photographs on the mantelpiece. Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had gone into business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or a magnate on the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been—that was the snag in the argument—no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary think of that? There between the curtains was the October

night, calm and lovely, with a star or two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready to resign her share of it and her memories (for they had been a happy family, though a large one) of games and quarrels up in Scotland, which she is never tired of praising for the fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, in order that Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by a stroke of the pen? For, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children—no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, 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. It is only for the last forty-eight years* that Mrs Seton has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property—a thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange. Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of according to my husband’s wisdom—perhaps to found a scholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings,* so that to earn money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my husband.

At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady who was looking at the spaniel, there could be no doubt that for some reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very gravely. Not a penny could be spared for ‘amenities’; for partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books

and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls out of bare earth was the utmost they could do.

So we talked standing at the window and looking, as so many thousands look every night, down on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath us. It was very beautiful, very mysterious in the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very white and venerable. One thought of all the books that were assembled down there; of the pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the panelled rooms; of the painted windows that would be throwing strange globes and crescents on the pavement; of the tablets and memorials and inscriptions; of the fountains and the grass; of the quiet rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles. And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had not provided us with anything comparable to all this—our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St Andrews.

So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day’s work. I pondered why it was that Mrs Seton had no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them ran; and | thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laid asleep—prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand—not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late.

' This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa* at Girton in October 1928. The papers were too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded.

' “We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least.... It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys’ schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.—Lady STEPHEN, Emily Davies and Girton College (1927), 150-1.

> “Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be postponed.’—R. STRACHEY, The Cause (1928), 250.

CHAPTER II

THE scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaves were still falling, but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people’s hats and vans and motorcars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum. One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth. For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?—a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth. The day, though not actually wet, was dismal, and the streets in the neighbourhood of the Museum were full of open coal-holes, down which sacks were showering; four-wheeled cabs were drawing up and depositing on the pavement corded boxes containing, presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some other desirable commodity which is to be found in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern. The British

Museum was another department of the factory. The swing-doors swung

open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names. One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and .... . the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the MA degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frrvolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently—here I consulted the letter M—one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper. So, making a perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in the wire tray, and waited in my stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil of truth.

What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered, drawing cart-wheels on the slips of paper provided by the British taxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women; whether they were old or young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed—anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention, provided that it was not entirely bestowed by the crippled and the infirm—so I pondered until all such frivolous thoughts were ended by an avalanche of books sliding down on to the desk in front of me. Now the trouble began. The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into his answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who was copying assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much. But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question—Why are some women poor?—until it became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt frantically into mid-stream and were carried away. Every page in my notebook was scribbled over with notes. To show the state of mind I was in, I will read you a few of them, explaining that the page was headed quite simply, WOMEN AND Poverty, in block letters; but what followed was something like this:

Condition in Middle Ages of, Habits in the Fiji Islands of, Worshipped as goddesses by, Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of,

Greater conscientiousness of, South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among, Attractiveness of,

Offered as sacrifice to,

Small size of brain of, Profounder sub-consciousness of,

Less hair on the body of,

Mental, moral and physical inferiority of, Love of children of,

Greater length of life of,

Weaker muscles of,

Strength of affections of,

Vanity of,

Higher education of,

Shakespeare’s opinion of,

Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,

Dean Inge’s" opinion of,

La Bruyére’s opinion of,

Dr Johnson’s opinion of,

Mr Oscar Browning’s opinion of, ...

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say. what they think of women’? Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:

Most women have no character at all.” And here is La Bruyere: Les femmes sont extrémes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes—

a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon” thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite.! Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account.” Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe’ honoured them; Mussolini’ despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it

was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a serious contribution to the study of women and fiction that women have less hair on their bodies than men, or that the age of puberty among the South Sea Islanders is nine—or is it ninety?—even the handwriting had become in its distraction indecipherable. It was disgraceful to have nothing more weighty or respectable to show after a whole morning’s work. And if I could not grasp the truth about W (as for brevity’s sake I had come to call her) in the past, why bother about W in the future? It seemed pure waste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialize in woman and her effect on whatever it may be—politics, children, wages, morality—numerous and learned as they are. One might as well leave their books unopened.

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex.’ He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him, he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. Could it be his wife, I asked, looking at my picture? Was she in love with a cavalry officer? Was the cavalry officer slim and elegant and dressed in astrachan? Had he been laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl? For even in his cradle the professor, I thought, could not have been an attractive child. Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil

while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man—lI looked at the student next me—who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human nature, I reflected, and began drawing cart-wheels and circles over the angry professor’s face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet—anyhow, an apparition without human semblance or significance. The professor was nothing now but a faggot’ burning on the top of Hampstead Heath. Soon my own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these books there was always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often present and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. To judge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open. Whatever the reason, all these books, I thought, surveying the pile on the desk, are worthless for my purposes. They were worthless scientifically, that is to say, though humanly they were full of instruction, interest, boredom, and very queer facts about the habits of the Fiji Islanders. They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth. Therefore they must be returned to the central desk and restored each to his own cell in the enormous honeycomb. All that I had retrieved from that morning’s work had been the one fact of anger. The professors—I lumped them together thus—were angry. But why, I asked myself, having returned the books, why, I repeated, standing under the colonnade among the pigeons and the prehistoric canoes, why are they angry? And, asking myself this question, I strolled off to find a place for luncheon. What is the real nature of what I call for the moment their anger? I asked. Here was a

puzzle that would last all the time that it takes to be served with food in a small restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Some previous luncher had left the lunch edition of the evening paper on a chair, and, waiting to be served, I began idly reading the headlines. A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page. Somebody had made a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain” was at Geneva. A meat axe with human hair’ on it had been found in a cellar. Mr Justice commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news. A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid-air. The weather was going to be foggy. The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence.” He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women, had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he was angry. Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate to call them, might be

angry for that reason partly, but partly for one that lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were not ‘angry’ at all; often, indeed, they were admiring, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life. Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney —for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, ‘The arrant feminist!” She says that men are snobs!’ The exclamation, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost

them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? So I reflected, crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking at the people in the street. The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self- assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

But these contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject of the psychology of the other sex—it is one, I hope, that you will investigate when you have five hundred a year of your own—were interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill. It came to five shillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a ten-shilling note and he went to bring me change. There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away—the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it and there they are. Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.

My aunt,’ Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide’-—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it my self, my soul—all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. However, as I say, my aunt died; and whenever I change a ten-shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed off; fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control. They too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great. True, they had

money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out’ and plucking at the lungs— the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition’ which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives. Walk through the Admiralty Arch” (I had reached that monument), or any other avenue given up to trophies and cannon, and reflect upon the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch in the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are unpleasant instincts to harbour, I reflected. They are bred of the conditions of life; of the lack of civilization, I thought, looking at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge, and in particular at the feathers in his cocked hat, with a fixity that they have scarcely ever received before. And, as I realized these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

So thinking, so speculating I found my way back to my house by the river. Lamps were being lit and an indescribable change had come over London since the morning hour. It was as if the great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something very exciting and beautiful—a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath. Even the wind seemed flung like a flag as it lashed the houses and rattled the hoardings.

In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house painter was descending his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambulator carefully in and out back to nursery tea; the coal-heaver was folding his empty sacks on top of each other; the woman who keeps the greengrocer’s shop was adding up the day’s takings with her hands in red mittens. But so engrossed was I with the problem you have laid upon my shoulders that I

could not see even these usual sights without referring them to one centre. I thought how much harder it is now than it must have been even a century ago to say which of these employments is the higher, the more necessary. Is it better to be a coal-heaver or a nursemaid; is the charwoman who has brought up eight children of less value to the world than the barrister who has made a hundred thousand pounds? It is useless to ask such questions; for nobody can answer them. Not only do the comparative values of charwomen and lawyers rise and fall from decade to decade, but we have no rods with which to measure them even as they are at the moment. I had been foolish to ask my professor to furnish me with ‘indisputable proofs’ of this or that in his argument about women. Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change; in a century’s time very possibly they will have changed completely. Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shopwoman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared—as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men that one will say, ‘I saw a woman today’, as one used to say, ‘I saw an aeroplane’. Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors.

' « “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.” ... In justice to the sex, I think it but candid to acknowledge that, in a subsequent conversation, he told me that he was serious in what he said.’—Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 19 September 1773.

> ‘The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women, and accordingly consulted them as oracles.’—Frazer, Golden Bough (12 vols.; 1913), i. 391.

CHAPTER III

IT was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because—this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one’s head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dishwater. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say, in the time of Elizabeth.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word’ of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan’s History of England.” Once more I looked up Women, found ‘position of’ and turned to the pages indicated. ‘Wife-beating’, I read, ‘was a recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low.... Similarly,’ the historian goes on, ‘the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the “chivalrous” upper classes.... Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties

was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.’ That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. ‘It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so,’ Professor Trevelyan concludes, ‘neither Shakespeare’s women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.’ Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind,” one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare’s women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time—Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phédre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa," Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes —the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women ‘lacking in personality and character’. Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater.! But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards—a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headings that it meant

‘The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-field Agriculture ... The Cistercians and Sheep-farming ... The Crusades ... The University ... The House of Commons ... The Hundred Years’ War ... The Wars of the Roses ... The Renaissance Scholars ... The Dissolution of the Monasteries ... Agrarian and Religious Strife ... The Origin of English Sea-power ... The Armada ...’ and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey’ hardly mentions her. She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—1s a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of

those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie” upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should not mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to the public for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith,” let us say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably,—his mother was an heiress—to

the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat, loose-lipped man—guffawed. He

bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting’ —no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine

what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows—at last Nick Greene’ the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.”

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronté or a Robert Burns’ blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronté who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald,” I think, suggested who made the ballads and the folksongs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night.

This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had

made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational —for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand,” all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles,” himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est a moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee’ and other avenues; it may be a piece

of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress’ without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain. But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked? Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare’s state of mind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind® most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually and by chance that he ‘never blotted a line’.” Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began it.” At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. Their lives also were written, and their letters were printed after their deaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote The French Revolution; what Flaubert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats’ was going through when he tried to write poetry against the coming of death and the indifference of the world.

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers,

especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. ‘Mighty poets in their misery dead’’—that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since her pin money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which, even if 1t were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their families. Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard. To answer that question I had only to open the evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion—but really I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead’s opinion’ upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge’ says I will leave in peace. The Harley Street specialist may be allowed to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations without raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr Oscar Browning, because Mr Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and

Newnham. Mr Oscar Browning was wont to declare ‘that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man’. After saying that Mr Browning went back to his rooms—and it is this sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk and majesty—he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on the sofa—‘a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have the full use of his limbs.... “That’s Arthur” [said Mr Browning]. “He’s a dear boy really and most high-minded.” ’* The two pictures always seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do.

But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of important people must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. ‘See what Mr Oscar Browning says,’ he would say; and there was not only Mr Oscar Browning; there was the Saturday Review; there was Mr Greg—the ‘essentials of a woman’s being’, said Mr Greg emphatically, ‘are that they are supported by, and they minister to, men’ —there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for there have been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have some sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare’s sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women preaching. And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have the very words used again in this year of grace, 1928, of women who try to write music. ‘Of Mlle Germaine Tailleferre’ one can only repeat Dr Johnson’s

dictum concerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music. “Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” ’! So accurately does history repeat itself.

Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr Oscar Browning’s life and pushing away the rest, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman’s movement; that deep- seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I remembered, with all her passion for politics, must humbly bow herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower: ‘ notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so much on that subject, I perfectly agree with you that no woman has any business to meddle with that or any other serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask’d).’” And so she goes on to spend her enthusiasm where it meets with no obstacle whatsoever, upon that immensely important subject, Lord Granville’s maiden speech in the House of Commons. The spectacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation’ is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some young student at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory,—but she would need thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.

But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady Bessborough, had to be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. ! Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting- rooms—or is it only bed-sitting-rooms?—of your own to say that genius

should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it 1s precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he

had cut on his tombstone.’ Think of Tennyson; think—but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very fortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in

him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare’s state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare’s state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare— compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton—is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some ‘revelation’ which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s mind.

' “Tt remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena’s city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phédre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the “misogynist” Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare’s work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines’ names; and what male characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque,

Bérénice and Roxane, Phédre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?’—F. L. Lucas, Tragedy (1927), 114— 15.

"4 Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray (1924), 246. ' See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey (1928).

CHAPTER IV

THAT one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no woman could have written poetry then. What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I continued, carefully eschewing ‘the arrant feminism’ of Miss Rebecca West; but they appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write verse. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Bronté at that time would have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:

How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules, And Education’s more than Nature’s fools; Debarred from all improvements of the mind, And to be dull, expected and designed;

And if someone would soar above the rest, With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,

So strong the opposing faction still appears,

The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.

Clearly her mind has by no means ‘consumed all impediments and become incandescent’. On the contrary, it 1s harassed and distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the

‘opposing faction’; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do—which is to write.

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

They tell us we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play, Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire, Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime, Whilst the dull manage of a servile house

Is held by some our utmost art and use.

Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes will never be published; to soothe herself with the sad chant:

To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing, For groves of laurel thou wert never meant; Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Now and again words issue of pure poetry:

Nor will in fading silks compose, Faintly the inimitable rose.

—they are rightly praised by Mr Murry, and Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated those others:

Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain; We faint beneath the aromatic pain.

It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection.

She ‘must have’, I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly from melancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when we find her telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:

My lines decried, and my employment thought An useless folly or presumptuous fault:

The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and dreaming:

My hand delights to trace unusual things,

And deviates from the known and common way, Nor will in fading silks compose,

Faintly the inimitable rose.

Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay’ is said to have satirized her ‘as a blue-stocking with an itch for scribbling’.” Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trivia showed that ‘he was more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one’. But this is all ‘dubious gossip’ and, says Mr Murry, ‘uninteresting’. But there I do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more even of dubious gossip so that I might have found out or made up some image of this melancholy lady, who loved wandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so unwisely, ‘the dull manage of a servile house’. But she became diffuse, Mr Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the fine distinguished gift it was. And so, putting her back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her contemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage, ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms ...’” Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilize for human

use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges” complained of her coarseness—‘as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in the Courts’. She shut herself up at Welbeck’ alone.

What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote ‘the best bred women are those whose mind are civilest’” should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with. Here, I remembered, putting away the Duchess and opening Dorothy Osborne’s letters, is Dorothy writing to Temple about the Duchess’s new book. ‘Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.’

And so, since no woman of sense and modesty could write books, Dorothy, who was sensitive and melancholy, the very opposite of the Duchess in temper, wrote nothing. Letters did not count. A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene. Listen to her running on:

‘After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr B. com’s in question and then I am gon. the heat of the day is spent in reading or working and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow’s and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their voyces and Beauty’s to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a vaste difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those

could bee. I talke to them, and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the world, but the knoledge that they are soe. most commonly when we are in the middest of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow’s goeing into the Corne and then away they all run, as if they had wing’s at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay behinde, and when I see them driveing home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to retyre too. when I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the syde of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with mee ...’

One could have sworn that she had the makings of a writer in her. But ‘if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that’—one can measure the opposition that was in the air to a woman writing when one finds that even a woman with a great turn for writing has brought herself to believe that to write a book was to be ridiculous, even to show oneself distracted. And so we come, I continued, replacing the single short volume of Dorothy Osborne’s letters upon the shelf, to Mrs Behn.”

And with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid ‘A Thousand Martyrs I have made’, or ‘Love in Fantastic Triumph sat’, for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever. That profoundly interesting subject, the value that men set upon women’s chastity and its effect upon their education, here suggests itself for discussion, and might provide an interesting book if any student at Girton or Newnham cared to go into the matter. Lady Dudley, sitting in diamonds among the midges of a Scottish moor, might serve for frontispiece. Lord Dudley, The Times said when Lady Dudley died the other day, ‘a man of

cultivated taste and many accomplishments, was benevolent and bountiful, but whimsically despotic. He insisted upon his wife’s wearing full dress, even at the remotest shooting-lodge in the Highlands; he loaded her with gorgeous jewels’, and so on, ‘he gave her everything—always excepting any measure of responsibility’. Then Lord Dudley had a stroke and she nursed him and ruled his estates with supreme competence for ever after. That whimsical despotism was in the nineteenth century too.

But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in text-books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women—the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics —-was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at ‘blue stockings with an itch for scribbling’, but it could not be denied that they could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour’s discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontés and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and

George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter —the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time, I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry. The ‘supreme head of song’” was a poetess. Both in France and in England the women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Bronté? Did not Charlotte Bronté fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room—so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact, which Miss Emily Davies a little later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them?’ If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, —‘women never have an half hour ... that they can call their own’ —she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party.’! Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all

the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed