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Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

The Past, the Present and the Lessons of History: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiographical Method in Three Guineas

Le passé, le présent et les leçons de l’histoire : La méthode historiographique féministe de Virginia Woolf dans Three Guineas
Jane de Gay

Résumés

Dans Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf s’appuie sur sa connaissance approfondie de l’histoire et du passé littéraire pour interroger les préoccupations contemporaines pressantes que sont la guerre, la montée du fascisme et la marginalisation des femmes. Pour construire son argumentation, Virginia Woolf établit des liens entre des exemples tirés de sources aussi disparates que les classiques occidentaux tels qu’Antigone et la Bible, les lectures de toute une vie en matière de littérature, d’histoire et de biographie, ainsi que la propagande politique récente et les articles de journaux, qu’elle décrit comme « l’histoire à l’état brut ». Ce chapitre montrera comment Woolf établit des liens entre ses exemples en utilisant des méthodes historiographiques spécifiques pour mettre en relation différentes périodes historiques et démontrer l’impact du passé sur le présent. L’approche de l’histoire par Woolf dans Three Guineas reflète deux principes clés qui influencent sa compréhension et sa représentation du passé tout au long de sa carrière : son rejet d’un récit linéaire de l’histoire en tant que progrès et l’importance qu’elle accorde à la vie des gens ordinaires, en particulier des femmes. Son écriture de l’histoire échappe également aux frontières génériques, car elle fait appel à des techniques qu’elle a utilisées dans ses romans ; elle a également utilisé ses romans pour explorer des questions sur l’histoire. Ce chapitre commence par examiner ces pratiques et principes tels qu’ils sont utilisés dans un certain nombre de ses écrits, avant d’explorer la manière dont Woolf les utilise dans Three Guineas, en montrant comment elle rejette les récits de progrès des Whigs afin de démontrer à quel point la situation des femmes n’a guère changé au cours des siècles.

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1In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf draws on her extensive knowledge of history, biography and past literature in order to address pressing contemporary concerns about war, the rise of fascism, and the marginalisation of women. In building her case, Woolf points to similarities between examples taken from such disparate sources as Western classics like the Antigone and the Bible, literature, history books and biographies, as well as recent political propaganda and newspaper reports, which she describes as ‘history in the raw’ (3G 92, 191). As this chapter will show, Woolf makes connections between her examples by using specific historiographical methods to set different historical periods in relation to one another and demonstrate how the past impacts upon the present.

2Woolf’s approach to history in Three Guineas reflects two key principles that inform her understanding and representation of the past seen across her career: her rejection of a linear account of history as progress and her emphasis on the lives of ordinary people, particularly women. Her writing of history also elides generic boundaries, for it engages techniques that she used in her fiction; she also used her fiction for exploring questions about history. This chapter will begin by examining how Woolf puts these ideas into practice in a range of her writings. Woolf’s scepticism about progress can be seen in an early short story, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), where Joan, a young woman in the fifteenth century writes that ‘for all I can see, we are not worse now than we have always been; and we in Norfolk today are much the same as we were in the days of Helen, wherever she may have lived.’ (CSF 68) The phrases ‘not worse’ and ‘much the same’ reject ideas of progress, while Joan’s dismissive ‘whenever she many have lived’ suggests that place is insignificant. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf queries the idea of progress even as she presents her manifesto for change, for she surveys the development of literary history and concludes that ‘all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle’ (Essays 4 157). In her last novel, Between the Acts (1941) Woolf has Lucy Swithin speculate that there were no such people as the Victorians: ‘Only you and me and William dressed differently’ (BA, 125). These three texts also exemplify how Woolf saw history in the lives of ordinary people, often women: in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ Woolf focuses on the lives of Joan and her mother, who keep the home while their menfolk travel to London on business amid rumours of civil war in the wider world; in ‘Modern Fiction’, she urges writers to focus on ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (Essays 4 160); and in Between the Acts, she focuses on a day in the life of a village community in June 1939, with only hints towards the developments in Europe.

3Woolf’s approach to history broadly reflects the modernist rejection of the progress-narratives of Whig historians, and the turn from the Whig emphasis on constitution and nation, church and state, empire and war, towards uncanonical sources and obscure lives (Bentley 2005). As Leena Kore Schröder (2008) has convincingly shown, Woolf had a personal influence for this approach, for Frederic W. Maitland, who is often seen to epitomise this change in focus (Bentley 2005, 7), was a close family friend and the biographer of Leslie Stephen. As Kore Schröder notes, Maitland saw the relationship between different historical periods ‘in terms of sameness rather than difference’ and his ‘source material consists of dealings between people, in matters of family and community relationship’. Woolf takes these ideas forward in Three Guineas, where she pointedly critiques patriarchal institutions like parliament, the universities, the legal profession, the church and the financial sector, focusing instead on the lives of women, who had been excluded from these bodies and whose lives were lived in private. Like Maitland, Woolf focuses on family and community, showing especially how the role of women was forged by the relationship of daughters to fathers, and brothers to sisters in the private house, which her historical examples show to have been a perennial problem, as patriarchal pressures seen across history continue to keep women in subjection in the present: Woolf emphasised ‘sameness’ over ‘difference’ by recognising that there had been little progress in the position of women.

4However, as Michael Bentley also notes (2005, 7), the Whig approach to history did not disappear entirely in the early twentieth century and, as we will see, Woolf often played with ideas of progress and with periodisation and watershed years for rhetorical effect. Her famous statement that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’ (Essays 3 420) in her essay ‘Character in Fiction’ is an example of this. Here, Woolf gives 1910 significance as a point of social and cultural change: as critics have pointed out, Edward VII was succeeded by George V that year, while December saw Roger Fry’s First Post-Impressionist exhibition. The year therefore symbolically demarcates modernism, and it has been taken as a marker for several studies of the era. However, Woolf’s qualifier ‘on or around’ casts doubt on the possibility of setting dates so precisely while, conversely, the exaggerated statement that ‘human character changed’ denies steady progress, collapsing time-scales by imagining change happening very suddenly.

5Woolf’s approach to history was therefore highly imaginative, for she saw history and fiction as interrelated discourses. Woolf’s thinking bears out Beverley Southgate’s insight that we should concentrate less on the ‘separateness and distinctiveness of history and fiction and the boundaries between them’, emphasising instead ‘their interrelatedness and interdependence and the borderlands they share’ (2009, 20). In representing history, Woolf used techniques and principles seen in her novels and short stories, for her ideas about how to represent life in fiction were pertinent to the question of how to write about the past. This approach was established in her earliest short stories where, as Anna Snaith has argued, Woolf was ‘reconceiving generic boundaries’ by using the form for the ‘specific purpose’ of ‘rethinking women’s history and the writing of women’s lives’ (2004, 126). Significantly, Woolf focused on women’s biography as a way of understanding the past, and of telling stories that had been occluded by conventional narratives. ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, and ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ were written at a time when Woolf was also making an intensive study of history and using her journals to practise writing about her own daily life. These stories interweave fiction with metafictional questions about how to speak the truth about lives and about the past. Woolf begins ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’ by asserting that ‘as such portraits as we have are almost invariably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade’. (CSF 27). This metaphor of lives hidden in shadows or darkness is one that Woolf would use throughout her work; she continues it here by saying that novelists and historians have begun to cast ‘partial light’ on the ‘dark and crowded place behind the scenes’ occupied by women (CSF 27). ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ has the frame narrative of a modern historian, Rosamond Merridew, who discovers and then presents extracts from the diary of a young woman living in fifteenth-century Norfolk. As Kore Schröder (2008, 21) notes, the story cuts thus across the temporalities: Merridew’s own position, as a female historian excluded from a largely male academy, parallels Joan’s situation as a girl in a feudal, patriarchal world. ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ takes the fictional biography of Miss Willatt by her friend Miss Linsett to ask questions about ‘why lives are written’ (CSF 91) and how much the biographical form, with its conventional expectations, can really tell us about its subjects.

6Woolf’s modernist manifesto ‘Modern Fiction’ contributed significantly to this understanding of how fiction and history overlap, for here she argued that the popular writings of her day had failed to capture life and that a new approach was needed in order to convey it. Woolf questioned the ready-made narrative formulae of plot, drama, tragedy, comedy and love interest, just as her approach to writing history rejects grand narratives and her approach to biography eschews the conventional milestones in the life story. Proposing a change of emphasis in writing—‘the accent falls not here but here’—Woolf speculates that the focus would shift towards ‘the dark places of psychology’ (Essays 4 162). As Woolf developed these principles in her fiction, she sought to capture ways in which the past comes to light in the present moment, noting how our present moment influences our perception of the past, while the past informs the experience of the present: while working on drafts of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf discovered the importance of carving out ‘beautiful caves’ behind her characters, giving them greater depth by giving them memories, and she continues to draw on her metaphor of darkness and light as the adds that ‘[t]he caves shall connect & each comes to daylight in the present moment—Dinner!’ (Diary 2 263). Woolf would use this method to write about her own life in her late memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’, for which she adopted the formula of basing each recollection in the present day, then looking at her personal and family past to see how it had a bearing on her present, noting that ‘the past is much affected by the present moment. What I write today I should not write in a year’s time’ (MB 87).

7Woolf was aware that the process of recalling the past was both personal and historical. As Gabrielle McIntire has argued, ‘the boundary between memory and history is slight in Woolf’s writings’, for she ‘persistently conflates her own personal past with the cultural and public domain of capital “H” History’, seeming to understand herself as ‘continuous not simply with her own family heritage, but with English history and cultural memory’ (2008, 133). Woolf did this through the imaginative act of making the past vividly present and reanimating figures who were long dead. Reading books was one trigger for this. As she observed in her early journal: ‘I read some history: it is suddenly all alive, branching forwards & backwards & connected with every kind of thing that seemed entirely remote before’. She notes that this history explains her present: giving as an example ‘Napoleons influence on our quiet evening in the garden’, she speculates that we are part of a ‘common mind’ (PA 178). Another trigger was hearing stories: in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, historian Rosamond Merridew hears the present-day Mr Martyn speak of his ancestors and thinks that ‘Grandfathers of the time of Elizabeth, nay Grandmothers of the time of Edward the Fourth, were just, so to speak, brooding round the corner’ (CSF 62–63). Place could be a further trigger: in a diary entry on visiting Vita Sackville-West at her ancestral home of Knole, Woolf recalls seeing a cart going with wood to be chopped and Vita saying that it was ‘something that had gone on for hundreds of years’. Woolf has a vision:

All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed; affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily. (Diary 3 125)

8This scene with Sackville-West (which inspired Orlando) also exemplifies what McIntire has identified as the intimate connection between memory and desire: a longing for the past and desire for Vita. All these examples show that history remains present, exemplifying what McIntire describes as ‘Woolf’s writing of memory as an approach to a tangible order to which we may again connect ourselves’ (2008, 144; original emphasis).

9There are important feminist implications to the process by which the past is recalled in, and shaped by, certain situations. Patriarchal history has occluded many women, but lost narratives and forgotten women of the past are recovered by the desire of the female historian to find a history that explains her present-day situation. Commenting on Woolf’s statement in A Room of One’s Own that ‘the book has somehow to be adapted to the body’ (Room 59), McIntire notes: ‘We might say that she is also speaking of the book and the text of history, proposing that we need to learn how to conjoin so-called objective history with the interiority of bodily experience and desire’ (2008, 134). Woolf’s invention of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, in A Room of One’s Own epitomises this process, for she ends that essay by reminding her audience of young women that their effort is needed in order to give such figures ‘the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh’ (Room 86).

10Recognising the existence of the past in the present proposes a very different understanding of time from narratives of progress for, as Kore Schröder (2008, 20) argues, to ‘understand history in interrelated social and psychic terms avoids explaining it teleologically’. Woolf practises this kind of history in three fictional works that deal with her good friends and their relationship with history, starting with ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ which, as Kore Schröder (2008, 12) has shown, was a ‘half-tribute, half-joke’ written for Maitland: someone known to Woolf herself, and whose methods she adopts. She took a similar approach in Friendship’s Gallery, a comic life of her friend Violet Dickinson, and Orlando, a fantasy based on the life of Vita Sackville-West and her ancestors. In these works, Woolf uses fictional accounts of her friends’ life stories to tell history through biography, playing with chronology to tell profound truths about their identity and relationship to history.

11In Friendship’s Gallery Woolf parodies the convention of the exemplary life to poke gentle fun at Violet’s piety as a devout Quaker. The narrator resists placing Violet’s life within a particular biographical structure or historical background: we are told, for example, that her first season took place during a year ‘when trade was worse or better than it had ever been’, a phrase that satirises and rejects Whig notions of progress. Woolf emphasises instead the incidents that were important to Violet as an individual, giving them historical significance: we are told that the year she bought her cottage at Welwyn was ‘one of the most significant’ in the ‘different cycles of our century’. This ‘seemingly irrelevant scene’, Woolf says, stands for ‘chapters of picturesque history’ (FG 284–285). Woolf takes advantage of the freedom of fiction to play with timescales. Describing Violet’s landscaping of her cottage garden, she notes that a sacred grove that had been inhabited by fauns has gone: ‘Within six months or perhaps a year, a religious service was being held where the wood had been; and wild beauty was reclaimed forever to the service of the domestic writers, friendship and the Christian religion . . . There was a Cottage; and the trees were gone’ (FG 289). Violet’s house-move is not bound to the historical moment in which it took place, but it is an outworking of what is normally regarded as a much earlier historical shift: the arrival of Christianity to supplant paganism. Woolf does not see the rise of Christianity as a particular historical movement, then, but an ongoing process in which Violet participated. Through this fiction, Woolf was able to express profound truths about Violet and her spirituality.

12Woolf repeats the device of writing a close friend into wider historical movements in Orlando. Where Woolf had foregrounded religious history as a context for Violet, she stresses family, ancestry and place for Vita. Orlando has many of Vita’s traits, but as s/he lives through 350 years, s/he also undertakes roles such as diplomat and writer that had been fulfilled by Sackville ancestors. Orlando’s house is closely modelled on Knole and Woolf draws closely on Vita’s work, Knole and the Sackvilles, in which she had placed herself and her ancestral home in the historical narrative. Where Woolf placed Violet in the ongoing movement of Christianity, Woolf paints Vita into the Renaissance, writing in the tradition of Walter Pater, J.A. Symonds and Vernon Lee to see the Renaissance as a ‘founding yet also renewable movement’, in Sally Greene’s words (1999, 24). Woolf writes Orlando and Vita into the literary past, by showing how writers remain alive in the imagination. Orlando peers down the Long Gallery of her home ‘to a point where the light almost failed’, like a ‘tunnel bored deep into the past’, and sees ‘the great men she had known; Dryden, Swift, and Pope’, the Elizabethans and the Tudors, then the ‘older, further, darker’ figure of a monk (O 291).

13However, Woolf also employs a contrasting strategy in Orlando that is also important to her historical method, for she sometimes uses periodisation to caricature an era and to distance Orlando from historical forces she finds uncongenial. The nineteenth century is announced as a cataclysmic change: ‘All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun’ (O 206), and yet, Woolf goes on to deny that a new era can bring about such change by showing Orlando’s resistance to the Victorian Spirit of the Age, arguing that ‘it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable’ (O 222). Here, again, Woolf suggests that women’s relationship with literary and historical periods works on a different timescale from those described in standard histories.

14In Three Guineas, Woolf employs techniques developed over her earlier works to articulate the relationship between the past and the present-day situation of 1938: she disputes linear histories and progress narratives, blurs generic boundaries, presents history as an act of memory by which the past can be summoned into the present, and foregrounds the ordinary lives of women. Since Woolf was writing at a time of political crisis, against the background of the Civil War in Spain, the rise of Fascism and growing tensions across Europe it is unsurprising that notions of progress are inappropriate. However, Woolf also points to the failure of progress in the lives of women. As in ‘Character in Fiction’ Woolf exaggerates historical change when she says that marriage had been the only ‘profession’ open to women ‘since the dawn of time until the year 1919’ (3G 92). Woolf is here alluding to the Sex Disqualification Removal Act, which opened the legal profession, the Civil Service and accountancy to women. However, by not naming the Act, and by making an absurd juxtaposition between a precise date and the exaggerated ‘from the dawn of time’, she casts doubt on progress narratives. Although Woolf notes that the nature of influence that women can exert has changed as a result (3G 99–101), what she emphasises in the essay is how little has actually changed: women were still denied higher positions and wealthier salaries, and they were still excluded from ordination in the Church of England (which Woolf describes as ‘the highest of all the professions’ [3G 199]), as well as the Stock Exchange and the diplomatic service.

15Three Guineas blurs generic boundaries because, although Woolf uses the word ‘fact’ over 200 times across the essay, her approach is strongly imaginative. The entire essay is based on an invented scenario: it is set out as a letter to a fictional barrister who has written to request her support for a society for protecting culture and intellectual liberty and preventing war. On the opening page she sets the scene by providing a character-sketch of her correspondent: he is middle-aged, with thinning grey hair, and an expression that is not ‘parched, mean or dissatisfied’. From the sketch, we also learn that he is prosperous, has a wife and children, has been educated at ‘one of the great public schools’ and university, and is socially and politically active (3G 89). He owns land in Norfolk, recalling both ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ and the fifteenth-century Paston family, whose letters Woolf had discussed in her essay ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’ and whom Woolf mentions on the next page. This is important because, as Woolf says, ‘[w]ithout someone warm and breathing on the other side of the page, letters are worthless (3G 89).

16Woolf wrestles with the irony that an educated man has asked the opinion of a woman on a matter of political importance. She later offers a comic scene to explain the absurdity of the situation:

Suppose that the Duke of Devonshire, in his star and garter, stepped down into the kitchen and said to the maid who was peeling potatoes with a smudge on her cheek: ‘Stop your potato peeling, Mary, and help me to construe this rather difficult passage in Pindar,’ would not Mary be surprised and run screaming to Louisa the cook, ‘Lawks, Louie, Master must be mad!’ That, or something like it, is the cry that rises to our lips when the sons of educated men ask us, their sisters, to protect intellectual liberty and culture. (3G 165)

17Woolf uses a fictional technique to demonstrate the complexities of her argument that women need financial and intellectual independence if they are going to be able to protect culture and oppose war. She structures her essay as a framed narrative, for Woolf’s letter to the barrister incorporates replies to the treasurers of two other organisations—one for rebuilding a women’s college and one for improving women’s entry to the professions—so that, as in the short stories, the narrative frames serve to juxtapose different situations to show the parallels between them.

18Woolf’s imaginative approach enables her to create rounded characters and situated viewpoints for her three fictional correspondents, articulating the issues they face in order to ground the debate in the real world. She interacts with her correspondents, imagining her second female correspondent reacting to the first draft of her letter with ‘an expression, of boredom was it, or was it of fatigue?’ (3G 127). The essay comes to life as dialogue, so that debate is dramatised. So, for example, when Woolf notes that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s assertion that women make good civil servants is not borne out by women’s salaries as evidenced by Whitaker’s Almanac (a quintessentially factual work), she imagines a court case of Baldwin vs. Whitaker and invites her barrister correspondent to conduct the trial (3G 132).

19Woolf uses this fictionalising, dramatising technique to animate women from the past, interpolating their voices into her dialogue with the barrister and bringing their situations to bear on the position of women in 1938. We see this from the opening page where Woolf seeks to explain the difficulties she faces as a woman trying to work with an educated man: lost for words in trying to bridge the ‘gulf’ between her own experience and that of the barrister, she turns to the explorer, ethnographer and travel writer Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) to fill the gap. She does not so much quote Kingsley as summon her as a witness: ‘Let us then ask someone else—it is Mary Kingsley—to speak for us’ (3G 91). After quoting Kingsley’s statement that her only paid-for education consisted of German lessons, Woolf adds that ‘Mary Kingsley is not speaking for herself alone; she is speaking, still, for many of the daughters of educated men’ (3G 90). The phrase ‘speaking, still’ demonstrates graphically that Kingsley, who had been dead for 38 years, can contribute to current debates; the phrase ‘speaking . . . for’ suggests a commonality between Kingsley and women across the generations.

20Woolf demonstrates how little has changed over time by linking Mary Kingsley’s experience of inequality in the 1870s with Arthur’s Education Fund from Thackeray’s Pendennis from 1850, showing that they were part of a problem that had persisted for many centuries into the present day: ‘Ever since the thirteenth century English families have been paying money into that account. From the Pastons to the Pendennises, all educated families from the thirteenth century to the present moment have paid money into that account’ (3G 90). In identifying the unchanging nature of the relationship between men and women within families, Woolf denies narratives of historical progress.

21Woolf explains this further through the use of psychology, consciously bringing her skills as a novelist to bear on this to detect an ‘odour’ or an ‘atmosphere’ in men’s reactions to professional women (3G 134), and noting that ‘we are using our psychological insight (for that is our only qualification) to decide what kind of qualities in human nature are likely to lead to war’ (3G 140). As she saw the past impinging upon the present through personal memory in Mrs Dalloway and through personal memory and historical consciousness in Orlando, so she envisages a collective memory—different for men and women—that shapes present-day experience. In Three Guineas, Woolf continues to practise what McIntire identified in A Room of One’s Own as a quest to ‘conjoin so-called objective history with the interiority of bodily experience and desire’ (2008, 134). Woolf explains this further in Three Guineas by examining how the profound differences between men and women have been shaped by different cultural traditions, which engender different understandings of the body and a different memory-set:

It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that ‘we’—meaning ‘we’ a whole made up of body, brain and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential respects from ‘you’, whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition. (3G 102)

22Woolf therefore constructs different histories for men and women, providing contemporary women with the ‘tangible order to which we may again connect ourselves’ that McIntire describes (2008, 144). Unlike the positive tone of Orlando, where Woolf’s desire for Sackville-West and Knole led her to celebrate Vita’s connections with family and place by connecting her with the Renaissance spirit, Three Guineas is prompted by the different, more traumatic memory of an oppressive past recalled in a present-day state of crisis.

23Woolf develops her history of women by making connections between individual life-stories, for Mary Kingsley’s is the first of many biographies and autobiographies that Woolf draws on in Three Guineas. Anna Snaith’s bibliography to Three Guineas attests to the range of Woolf’s reading of women’s lives: Mary Astell, Dorothea Beale, Gertrude Bell, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Josephine Butler, Mary Butts, Anne Clough, Margaret Collyer, Emily Davies, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Amelia Earhart, Elizabeth Haldane, Octavia Hill, Sophia Jex-Blake, Laura Knight, Mary Countess Lovelace, Margaret Oliphant, Baroness St Helier, Monica Salmond, George Sand, Helena Swanwick, and Nellie Weeton, as well as Ray Strachey’s portraits of figures in the Woman’s Movement from the eighteenth century onwards (including Florence Nightingale) in The Cause, and George Ballard’s companion to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers and scholars, Memories of Several Ladies of Great Britain (3G 290–294).

24Woolf’s choice of biography is deliberate for, as she notes, it is ‘concerned with the private life’ in other words, concerned with the private realm to which women had traditionally been confined; history is, by contrast, ‘the record of the public life’ made up, she notes with heavy irony, of ‘the considered opinions of bodies of educated men’ which have traditionally excluded women (3G 112). Woolf is interested in these Lives as sources of ‘facts’, but she interprets this term not as dates and statistics, but as the views and impressions that reveal the reality of people’s lives. Significantly, then, Woolf uses the books from her extensive reading-list not primarily for the purpose of information but as a set of imaginative spaces in which she can engage with figures from the past: she describes a personal library as a place of living history ‘where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers’ (3G 145). Countering Carlyle’s adage that ‘[t]he History of the World is but the Biography of great men’ ([1841] 1906, 28), which Jacob discusses as an essay topic at Cambridge in Jacob’s Room, Woolf creates an alternative history: an understanding of the present through the biographies of women of the past.

25Woolf uses the lives of actual women of the past in Three Guineas, as in Friendship’s Gallery and Orlando, rather than the hypothetical Judith Shakespeare of A Room of One’s Own or fictional characters from her short stories. However, she uses fictional devices to bring these stories to life and highlight their contemporary relevance. The first biography she uses in this discussion is that of Sophia Jex-Blake, who led the campaign for women to have a university education when she enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh. Woolf presents Jex-Blake’s story as the Battle of Harley Street to exemplify the many ‘wars’, ‘fought on much the same plan, and by the same combatants, that is by professional men v. their sisters and daughters’ (3G 145–146). Woolf articulates Jex-Blake’s story as a lively story, starting with the argument she had with her father over the right to accept payment for teaching. Woolf bases her account on letters in Margaret Todd’s biography of Jex-Blake, but she does not cite this as her source, and she reduces a correspondence that takes up several pages in Todd’s book to a pithy dialogue (3G 146). Woolf presents Thomas Jex-Blake speaking with outrage that ‘I have only this moment heard that you contemplate being paid for the tutorship’ (letter of 28 January 1859, Todd 1918, 67), and Sophia answering him ‘Why should I not take it?’ and arguing that her brother Tom was allowed to accept a fee for his work (3rd February, Todd 1918, 69), followed by her father’s riposte that Tom’s situation was different from hers (4th February, Todd 1918, 70–71). When Woolf moves on to narrate Jex-Blake’s attempt to join the Royal College of Surgeons, she identifies her quotation as coming from a newspaper report (Courant 19 November 1870; Hollis 1979, 102): although this serves the purpose of evidencing her claims, she nonetheless enlivens the description by adding that ‘the medical students howled and sang songs’. She ends her account of Jex-Blake by bringing the story up to the present day with men ‘singing the same old song’ of ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree . . . of property’ (3G 147). This detail rounds off the vignette with an ensemble reminiscent of the ending of a scene in a revue: in doing so, Woolf elides different periods of history, as the medical students of 1870 join with the men of 1938 in a chorus that excludes women.

26Woolf dramatises her own research process when she describes her difficulties in finding biographies of professional women. Addressing her second female correspondent, she notes that ‘there would seem to be a gap in your library, Madam. There are no lives of professional women in the nineteenth century’ (3G 156), thus cautioning, as she had done in ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’, that women’s lives remain obscure even in the genre of biography. Woolf again uses her metaphor of searching in the darkness to describe her efforts to find isolated examples of women whose work may be classed as professional. Identifying the governess as a professional, she turns to the diary of the early nineteenth-century governess Nellie Weeton, written in 1807–11 and recently published in 1936. Woolf renders Weeton’s words as speech. She quotes, ‘Oh! how I have burned to learn Latin, French, the Arts, the Sciences, anything rather than the dog trot way of sewing, teaching, writing copies, and washing dishes every day’, and then invites us to hear it: ‘That comment upon the lives of governesses, that question from the lips of governesses, reaches us from the darkness’. Continuing the metaphor, she notes, ‘Let us go on groping; let us pick up a hint here and a hint there’. As a result of this search, we ‘find Anne Clough’, ‘we find Josephine Butler’, ‘we find Gertrude Bell’ (emphasis added). Clough was the first Principal of Newnham College; Butler campaigned for the Contagious Diseases Act; and Bell, whom Woolf calls a ‘pseudo-diplomat’ was a travel-writer and archaeologist who had a major influence on the politics of Iraq in the 1920s. Woolf brings Clough to life particularly vividly, again using a quotation from memoirs as dramatic speech when we ‘find’ her training, reading her brother’s books and exclaiming, ‘if I were a man I would work for my country’ (3G 157).

27Through this dramatising process, Woolf makes a temporal and spatial connection between figures from different eras, as she did with the Long Gallery in Orlando, to build up a composite picture of the condition of women over the centuries. Woolf continues her search to ‘find’ obscure women—wives, mothers, sisters and daughters—‘between the lines’ of educated men’s biographies (3G 158). Although she notes that it is difficult to extract these figures—we have to ‘lump them and their lives together behind their husbands’ and brothers’, and leave them to deliver their message to those who have the time to extract it and the imagination with which to decipher it’ (3G 158)—she nonetheless suggests that we can learn of the obscure lives through studying lives that have been written: ‘if we mass the lives of the obscure’ behind less obscure women whose lives have been written, we can build up a picture of women’s education and professional lives. Using language that evokes a Morality Play, Woolf notes how these women ‘were all educated by the same teachers’: the abstract values of poverty, chastity, derision, and ‘freedom from unreal loyalties’ (3G 159). This image builds into a metaphor for women’s history as Woolf uses these biographies to develop a collective memory that shapes present-day experience.

28Woolf shows how the past continues to exert its pressure through the persistence of attitudes and models, and she demonstrates how this justifies her aligning contemporary sources with historical examples. She considers this process of alignment very carefully from the start of the essay, when discussing photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses, the results of Fascist violence in the Spanish Civil War. She firstly notes that the photographs are ‘not an argument’ but ‘simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye’ (3G 96) suggesting that these are discrete events whose particularity should be respected, and not set within narrative and argument. However, she then points out that it is inevitable that connections will be made: the eye is linked to the brain and nervous system, she says, and that ‘system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling’ (3G 96). These contemporary events, which may seem unique and uniquely violent, are part of a much wider system of the oppression of women for wars have been waged by men, while women are powerless to change the political landscape because they have been excluded from the universities and the professions.

29Woolf develops this point in the final part of the essay when she takes her psychological observations further by drawing on contemporary research into the pathology of misogyny, using the Freudian concept of ‘infantile fixation’, a term that underscores the fallacy of progress by describing regression to childhood. Woolf again makes connections across time—now delineating a history of men—by showing how this relatively recent complex can provide a retrospective diagnosis in many patriarchs: she explains that the ‘ancient and obscure emotions’ found in Creon and St Paul have lately been ‘brought to the surface’ by psychologists and labelled ‘infantile fixation’ (3G 204). She builds up this history by identifying this trait in three Victorian fathers: Thomas Jex-Blake in his attempts to prevent Sophia from earning a living, and Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street and Rev Patrick Brontë, who tried to prevent their daughters from marrying. These situations demonstrate an ‘extreme force of emotions’ among men, within society, which ‘it seems, was a father, and afflicted with the infantile fixation too’ (3G 208–209). Woolf demonstrates that these forces have persisted into the present. She quotes Creon as a representative of historical patriarchy and current dictatorship in his speech that ‘[w]homsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in things just and unjust’. She argues that he is representative of the current violence that is evidenced in the photographs of dead bodies: Creon buried his sister Antigone alive, as the British government sentenced suffragettes to Holloway Prison, and the Fascists were sending victims to concentration camps. Once more, Woolf blurs historical boundaries to show how these forces remain in power:

It seems, Sir, as we listen to the voices of the past, as if we were looking at the photographs again, at the picture of dead bodies and ruined houses that the Spanish Government sends us almost weekly. Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. (3G 214)

30In the final section, Woolf particularly stresses the role played by religion in preserving the gender divide over the centuries. Organised religion is a powerful force for shaping memory and tradition: Woolf shows that it was used by Fascist dictators to enforce their power and preserve traditional gender roles. Yet she also shows how these powers were at work in the Church of England, making a lengthy discussion of the 1936 Commission on the Ministry of Women that had ruled that it would continue to exclude women from the priesthood (the concept of ‘Infantile Fixation’ was discussed in an Appendix to the Commission’s report). Woolf shows how the exclusion of women was enforced by the power of written patriarchal history to suppress women: she argues that, although Christ had had female disciples, the epistles of St Paul had enforced female suppression, and that these Pauline texts were used by the early church to construct a tradition of male priesthood.

31However, Woolf uses this discussion to propose an alternative history by delving further back into pre-history, to identify the ancient prophetess, who gave proof of a female spirituality that had been superseded by the orders of bishops, priests and deacons. Their spirit is still alive, she writes, in Emily Brontë (3G 198). Like Judith Shakespeare, then, the female prophetess can be brought to life in the present. The more hopeful trajectory of this essay, then, is that women can potentially envisage a better future for themselves and for society by envisaging a more positive history for themselves. This history would need to be distinct from the histories and traditions of patriarchal institutions, which would involve women remaining outside the institutions of academia, the professions, and the church, in a movement that Woolf designates the ‘Outsiders’ Society’.

32Furthermore, Woolf shows that women need to maintain a different way of writing history. She demonstrates this by occasionally testing progress narratives of women’s liberation and considering their inadequacies. One example is Woolf’s account of the development of women’s colleges at Cambridge: here, she uses the word ‘history’ 12 times in just four pages, over a quarter of the instances of this word in the whole essay. The history is told in collective terms, driven not by individual aspirations but by a common need: ‘By the middle of the nineteenth century’ the desire to build a women’s college ‘became so strong that a house was taken at Cambridge to lodge the students’. The funds were ‘collected laboriously from private purses’; Woolf does not name the ‘one lady [who] must be for ever remembered because she gave £1,000’; many of the donors, she notes, were ‘Anon’. The result was that ‘by hook or by crook, the day came at last, history tells us, when somebody passed an examination’ (3G 113–114). But this history meets a dead end, in that women were not allowed to be awarded with degrees. Once again, it is not a matter of progress but of unchanging attitudes: asking why women could not put ‘BA’ after their names, Woolf comments that ‘[t]o that question history supplies no answer; we must look for it in psychology, in biography; but history supplies us with the fact’ (3G 114).

33Woolf’s second example warns that women’s entry into the public sphere could lead them into a masculine world that promotes war. This example concerns women’s liberation from the private house during the First World War, a movement that many accounts of women’s history see positively as an important driver for women gaining the vote. Woolf describes it as the amazing outburst in August 1914, when the daughters of educated men who had been educated thus rushed into hospitals, some still attended by their maids, drove lorries, worked in fields and munition factories, and used all their immense stores of charm, of sympathy, to persuade young men that to fight was heroic, and that the wounded in battle deserved all her care and all her praise (3G 123).

34This sentence posits a date—as Woolf had done for December 1910—when a great changed took place. However, Woolf shows that very little had changed, for women were still using the ‘immense stores of charm, of sympathy’: qualities that she identified with the Victorian Angel in the House. The sentence also reminds the pacifist reader that these women were emerging from the home only to take part in the war effort as drivers and factory workers, and to encourage men to fight.

35A third example concerns a force that Woolf refuses to label, describing it simply as ‘the force which in the nineteenth century opposed itself to the force of the fathers’. She describes this too as a variegated collective effort, in which individual women reacted differently to different restrictions:

All we can safely say about that force was that it was a force of tremendous power. It forced opened the door of the private house. It opened Bond Street and Piccadilly; it opened cricket grounds and football grounds; it shrivelled flounces and stays; it made the oldest profession in the world . . . unprofitable. . . . The fathers, who had triumphed over the strongest emotions of strong men, had to yield. (3G 211)

36Even though this is the strongest feminist progress narrative offered in the essay, Woolf nonetheless instantly warns that it was not a triumph: it was a victory in the private house, but women are still made unwelcome in the public world. She therefore breaks off this progress narrative, too, concluding that women are better off not participating in the public world.

37Having thus made it clear that the histories of men and women need to remain distinct, Woolf is able to conclude her essay by pinpointing what she can offer her correspondent in terms of a common future. He has asked a landmark question ‘in the year 1938’ (3G 165) by asking a woman to support a man in a pacifist effort, and she concludes that men can work for peace from their side, as her correspondent does in public with his organised Society, and women can work from theirs, in private as part of the Outsiders’ Society. Woolf envisages a space in which women and men can participate in a common movement and, to do this, she circles back to an earlier stage in her argument, by returning to Josephine Butler. As we have seen, Woolf had first introduced Butler as an example of a professional woman, and she later celebrates Butler as someone who championed the importance of women and men working together for a common cause:

‘Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only;’—it is Josephine Butler who speaks—‘it was larger and deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’ (3G 180)

38Woolf commends Butler to her barrister correspondent: ‘The words are the same as yours; the claim is the same as yours’. Here Woolf reverses her metaphor of the past being shrouded in darkness, for she says that the ‘cloud has lifted from the past too. What were they working for in the nineteenth century—those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls? The very same cause for which we are working now (3G 179–180). The past can be redeemed because it has never fully gone away. In the closing lines of Three Guineas, Woolf repeats the quotation from Butler, but now anonymised, to adopt Butler’s words for both herself and her correspondent: ‘That aim is the same for us both. It is to assert “the rights of all—all men and women—to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty”’ (3G 216). Woolf therefore invites the barrister to take his place in the history of women that she had outlined—now redefined as a history for both women and men of goodwill. In doing so, Woolf writes her own efforts into the history of gender relations and the history of pacifism. Three Guineas does not only discuss and narrate history; it participates in it too.

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Bibliographie

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Jane de Gay, « The Past, the Present and the Lessons of History: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiographical Method in Three Guineas »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 17 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16401 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141gm

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Jane de Gay

Revd Professor Jane de Gay is Professor of English Literature at Leeds Trinity University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh UP, 2019) and Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh UP, 2006). She has also contributed chapters to Sentencing Orlando edited by Elsa Högberg and Amy Bromley (Edinburgh UP, 2018); The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Fernald (Oxford UP, 2020), and Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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