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Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

From Women’s History to Gender History: Rethinking (Literary) History with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

De l’histoire des femmes à l’histoire du genre : Repenser l’histoire (littéraire) avec A Room of One’s Own de Virginia Woolf
Valérie Favre

Résumés

Au troisième chapitre de A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf suggère à ses lectrices et lecteurs si ce n’est de tout à fait réécrire l’histoire de lui ajouter un supplément. Cette suggestion a depuis été reprise par de nombreuses critiques littéraires et historiennes féministes qui ont contribué à établir les domaines de l’histoire (littéraire) des femmes, en rendant bien souvent hommage à l’autrice moderniste, tantôt érigée en figure tutélaire, tantôt en précurseuse de ce nouveau champ d’étude. De fait, A Room of One’s Own est un texte hautement performatif dans lequel Woolf met en pratique ce qu’elle semble simplement suggérer, et au gré des va-et-vient de la persona woolfienne dans les rayonnages de bibliothèque, l'histoire (littéraire) se voit réécrite. Il apparaît cependant que le changement de paradigme critique et historiographique qui a permis au concept de genre de s’imposer comme une « catégorie utile d’analyse historique » (Joan W. Scott) n’a pas encore été appliqué à la conceptualisation de l’histoire (littéraire) esquissée par Woolf. Cet article propose de retracer la réception de A Room of One’s Own en tant que texte phare de l’histoire (littéraire) des femmes avant de faire place au concept de genre (gender), pour relire l’essai woolfien et montrer que sous ce qui est présenté comme une réflexion sur « les femmes et la fiction » qui a jusqu’ici surtout été lue comme une esquisse d’histoire (littéraire) des femmes, c’est bien au prisme de ce que nous nommons désormais le genre que Woolf repense à la fois l’histoire et l’histoire littéraire.

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1In her article ‘Women and Fiction’, published in March 1929 in the North American magazine The Forum, Virginia Woolf states ‘very little is known about women. The History of England is the history of the male line, not of the female’, before evoking the idea of ‘turn[ing] history wrong side out’ (Woolf 1979, 44). Woolf further developed this idea in A Room of One’s Own, which she was writing at the time ‘Women and Fiction’ was published. In this essay Woolf’s persona, Mary Beton, famously asserts that women are ‘the most discussed animal in the universe’ (Woolf 2015, 21) due to their presence, as objects of discourse, in the works of ‘[p]rofessors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists’ and in those of ‘men who [have] no qualification save that they [are] not women’ (22). Yet this long list of professions excludes that of historians and, indeed, Mary Beton soon discovers that women remain quite tellingly absent from their works. This leads her, in the third chapter of the essay, to come up with the following suggestion:

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? (35)

2This idea has been taken up since the 1970s by feminist literary critics, historians and literary historians who have contributed to establishing the fields of both women’s history and literary history, many of whom acknowledged their debts to Woolf herself as both a foremother and an early practitioner. For A Room of One’s Own is a highly performative text in which Woolf puts into practice what she seems to be merely suggesting, and, indeed, as Mary Beton goes through the library shelves, both history and literary history are being rewritten.

3Numerous critics have rightly considered this historical sketch to be a highly feminist take on history and on the history of literature, one that focuses on women’s absence from both fields and calls for a ‘supplement to history’ while subtly, and rather ironically, pointing to the more radical necessity to rewrite history. Feminist literary critics have thus focused on Woolf’s foregrounding of a female literary tradition to question the literary canon and to uncover women’s past writings, while historians have established the British modernist author as one of the tutelary figures of women’s history. Quite remarkably, in an article first published in 1983, entitled ‘Women’s History’, Joan W. Scott, the North American historian who was to become one of the major voices of gender history, asserts: ‘During the last decade, Virginia Woolf’s call for a history of women . . . has been answered’ (Scott 1999, 15), thus affiliating A Room of One’s Own to women’s history, and not to what historian Laura Lee Downs has since called ‘its more ambitious daughter, gender history’ (Downs 2010, 182).

  • 1 Incidentally, in her recent monograph on Woolf and the writing of history, Anne Besnault offers a h (...)

4As such, it appears that the historiographical shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ which occurred in the late 1980s has not yet been applied to Woolf’s essay,1 which is why I offer to examine how beneath what is showcased from the start of the essay as a reflection on ‘women and fiction’ (Woolf 2015, 3), and what has mostly been read as a sketch of women’s (literary) history, Woolf actually rewrites both history and the history of literature through the lens of gender. To do so I will delineate a history of A Room of One’s Own’s reception amongst historians and literary historians, first highlighting the text’s appropriation as a landmark text of women’s (literary) history, before switching the critical focus from women to gender to examine this conceptual and historiographical shift of paradigm. I will then offer a re-reading of A Room of Own’s Own and of Woolf’s rethinking of history that will use gender as a ‘useful category of historical [and literary] analysis’ (see Scott 1999).

A Room of One’s Own and the Writing of Women’s (Literary) History

5In her 2006 essay entitled Rooms of Our Own, the North American feminist literary critic Susan Gubar writes:

We had rewritten history, found and recorded the lives of the obscure as well as the eminent, filled the empty shelves with tomes of rare worth so as to make our knowledge of the past less lopsided. . . . We had published all sorts of books, hesitating at no subject, however trivial or however vast. (Gubar 65)

6Gubar thus sums up more than two decades of research led by feminist critics, both in the fields of history and literary history. By strongly echoing Woolf’s prose, this riff on Woolf’s words puts to the fore A Room of One’s Own’s status of blueprint for feminist historical research as well as the text’s impact on the writing of women’s (literary) history. Indeed, when exploring the output of these numerous academic works one cannot fail to notice the tutelary status both Woolf and A Room of One’s Own repeatedly acquire, not only for feminist (literary) critics but also in the works of (literary) historians.

  • 2 On these precursors and practitioners of women’s history, see Alberti.

7Though not a historical treatise or an academic work, A Room of One’s Own is thus referred to as an inspirational text and Woolf herself as one of the foremothers of women’s history in the works of many historians (including Downs, Pomata, Scott, Thébaud), who both answer and pass on Woolf’s call for the inclusion of women into history. These historians mostly refer to the aforementioned passage in which Mary Beton suggests rewriting history, yet one may wonder why Woolf is given such a distinctive status when early-20th-century women historians such as Alice Clark, Ivy Pinchbeck, or Mary Ritter Beard,2 whose works also focused on women’s places and roles in history, could be referred to and thus gain more visibility. Here, besides the sheer potency of Woolf’s words and of the historiographical reasoning they carry, history itself may provide an answer to the question of Woolf’s prominence, as the rise of women’s history in the 1970s and early 1980s coincided with the reassessment by feminist literary critics of Woolf’s works and politics, in general, and of A Room of One’s Own, in particular.

  • 3 On Judith Shakespeare and her significance for women’s history, see Planté.

8But beyond Woolf’s influence on specific women historians and historians of women, the influence of A Room of One’s Own on the re-writing of women’s history, at large, is no less striking. Indeed, Woolf’s critique of a ‘traditional’ conception of history epitomised by George Macaulay Trevelyan in his History of England (published three years before Woolf’s essay) and her investigating and denouncing of women’s absence from history through the metonymic empty shelves her narrator repeatedly looks upon in the third chapter of the essay, or via the figure of William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister,3 seem to have struck a chord with the project to make women visible and to fill in the silences of history. Indeed, the women’s history, or ‘herstory’ that developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s shared many of the concerns expressed by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. As such, herstory’s compensatory dimension was an attempt at supplying ‘a mass of information’ (Woolf 2015, 34), at making history less ‘lop-sided’ (35), at reversing the fact that, if not for ‘an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady’ (34), ‘history scarcely mentions [women]’ (34), but also at transforming ‘the historian’s view of the past’ (34) by turning ‘the girl behind the counter’ (68) and ‘the average woman’ (82) into subjects worthy of history, and of historians’ attention.

  • 4 See ‘[A Literature of Their Own] took some ammunition from A Room of One’s Own with its desire for (...)
  • 5 For an overview of A Room of One’s Own’s influence over Gilbert’s and Gubar’s critical endeavour, s (...)

9As for women’s literary history, the partly fictional, highly speculative, and at times erroneous (see Ezell) sketch of a female literary tradition Woolf developed in A Room of One’s Own has had a tremendous impact on the conception of women’s literary history during the second half of the twentieth century—an endeavour best epitomised by a sentence that became one of the formulae of feminist literary criticism: ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women’ (57). Indeed, as Beth Rosenberg notes: ‘Feminist scholars have concentrated on defining a woman-centred literary history, often using Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as precedent for their own theories’ (Rosenberg 2000, 1112). A Room of One’s Own thus paved the way for numerous critics who attempted to make women writers visible and to reappraise their works by exploring and delineating a ‘literary herstory’, such as Patricia Spacks and her Female Imagination (1976), Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976) and, as noted by Jeanette Todd,4 Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s numerous volumes of criticism as well as their Norton Anthology of the Literature by Women (see Gilbert and Gubar 1979; 2000; 1985).5

10Literary historian Margaret Ezell has since come to deplore the overwhelming influence that Woolf’s formulations, and unattested speculations, have had on the writing of women’s literary history, declaring: ‘[Woolf] is a great novelist, an inspired analyst of the process of literary creation––but she is not a great historian and it is unfair to demand that she act in such a role’ (Ezell 1993, 49). Yet, this brief overview of A Room of One’s Own’s influence on the writing of women’s (literary) history strongly links Woolf with the first historiographical phase in the feminist attempt to rewrite both history and the history of literature, which established both women’s history and literary history as proper but mostly separate fields of study—a connection that Joan Scott emphasised in 1983 while assessing the accomplishments of women’s history:

During the last decade, Virginia Woolf’s call for a history of women . . . has been answered. . . . Bookshelves are being filled with biographies of forgotten women, chronicles of feminist movements, and the collected letters of female authors. . . . This feminist effort] culminates in the set of questions raised so tellingly by Woolf: can a focus on women ‘add a supplement to history’ without also ‘rewriting history’? Beyond that, what does the feminist rewriting of history entail? (Scott 1999, 15–17)

11This assessment of the impact of women’s history on the writing of history at large, as well as the questioning of both the methods and the objects of women’s history would eventually lead Scott to initiate a change of historiographical paradigm thanks to her landmark article entitled ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ (Scott 1999), in which she argued that the rewriting of history actually entailed moving beyond women’s history, towards gender history.

From Women’s (Literary) History to Gender as ‘a useful category of historical [and literary] analysis’

12The move towards gender history was intended by Joan Scott and its other proponents to do away with the central epistemological issue raised by women’s history or ‘herstory’, namely, the isolation of women as a ‘special and separate topic of history’ (Scott 1999, 20). It was also expected to have a profound impact on the writing of history, as British historian Johanna Alberti states:

By the early eighties the American historian Joan Scott was dissatisfied with what she saw as only the faint impression made by historians of women on the wider discipline. She became convinced that the way to go beyond adding women to the content of history . . . was to make use of the concept of gender. (Alberti 14)

  • 6 For an overview of the tensions that marked that historiographical and paradigmatic shift, see Sang (...)

13This paradigmatic shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ took place amidst harsh debates: women’s history was accused by some of essentialism and of lacking theoretical grounding while gender history was perceived by others as erasing, yet again, women from history.6 Nowadays many historians tend to perceive the two fields as different but complementary, as French historian Françoise Thébaud states in Écrire l’histoire des femmes et du genre:

  • 7 ‘La génération pionnière—celle de Michelle Perrot ou d’Yvonne Knibiehler en France, celle de Gerda (...)

The pioneering generation—that of Michelle Perrot and Yvonne Knibiehler in France, Gerda Lerner in the United States, or Sheila Rowbotham in the United Kingdom—asserts it nowadays and I do agree with them, just as Karen Offen does: let’s practice, depending on the themes and objects we address, gender and women’s history, one or the other, or both, in order to be more intelligible.7

  • 8 See Kelly and Davis.

14As such we now often come across the phrase ‘women’s and gender history’, and the once clear-cut historiographical shift from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ history is nowadays perceived as ambivalent and equivocal—although many historians, including Joan Kelly and Natalie Davis,8 already argued in the 1970s that scholars of women’s history had always studied women in relation with men. This idea is notably present in one of the landmark editorial endeavours of women’s history: Michelle Perrot’s and Georges Duby’s History of Women in the West, the preface of which states: ‘[T]his series is intended to be not so much a history of women as a history of the relation between the sexes. Therein lies the crux of the problem . . .’ (Perrot and Duby 1992, xix). Indeed, Joan Scott states in ‘Women’s History’ that ‘[a]ttempts to conceptualize gender [were], of course, also part of the history of women’s history’ (22).

15However, the same cannot entirely be said when considering the history of literature. Developed throughout the 1980s by feminist literary critics, ‘literary herstory’ mostly focused on the specificities of styles and imageries developed by women writers, it drew connections between women authors, and emphasised the idea of a specific and autonomous female literary filiation. The publication of many anthologies dedicated to women’s writings enabled their works to reach a larger audience by creating what can be characterised as a supplement to literary history, not by establishing a more encompassing account of the literary tradition. This limit was notably highlighted by Shari Benstock in an article published in 1986, entitled ‘Women’s Literary History: To Be Continued’, in which Benstock argued for a non-exclusionary rewriting of literary history: ‘Women writers (like women) do not have a separate history’ (Benstock 166)—a case which has since been made by various literary critics and historians, such as Christine Planté, Martine Reid, or Ina Schabert, who calls for an ‘integrationist’ move in order to build up a more inclusive literary history:

  • 9 On the necessity to establish a literary history in which both men’s and women’s literary endeavour (...)

By now, the time has come to transcend the model of ‘a literature of their own’ and to inquire into the influences, interconnections and processes of cooperation between men and women. Ideally, future literary histories would trace patterns of heterosocial interaction. (Schabert 2014, abstract)9

  • 10 On the use of gender in the rewriting of literary history, see also Reid.

16In other words, new histories of literature should, according to Schabert, ‘take gender as one of their main organizing principles’ (Schabert 2009, 162)10 and, I would add, make use of gender as ‘a useful category of historical [and literary] analysis’ (See Scott 1999).

  • 11 See ‘As the 1990s draw to a close, “gender” seems to have lost its ability to startle and provoke u (...)

17It may of course seem superfluous to linger over the concept of gender, which is nowadays extensively present in scholarly endeavours. And yet, its multiple definitions and its many different uses, notably, as Joan Scott remarked more than twenty years ago, as a synonym for women or a euphemism for sex,11 invites feminist and gender studies scholars not to gloss over its meaning, but to (re)define gender in order to maintain its critical and heuristic potency (see Scott 2009). Here, because of its impact on the writing of gender history and of its ongoing relevance, Joan Scott’s landmark 1986 definition provides a generative starting point. Scott’s definition articulates two premises: ‘gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (Scott 1999, 42). Scott’s first point distinguishes gender from any preconceived notions about the so-called ‘sexes’ and, as such, enables her to highlight the necessary rejection of essentialism: gender is a complex social, cultural, and historical construct which involves four interacting elements: ‘symbolic representation’, ‘normative concepts’, ‘subjective identities’, and ‘social institutions and organizations’ (43–44); a construct which is anchored in both a time- and space-bound context and which, therefore, cannot be considered as set and is prone to change. The second part of Scott’s definition highlights the hierarchisation gender operates and its social repercussions, while pointing to the necessity to interpret gender relations, as much as class or racial relations, in terms of power.

18Yet, if gender has become both the object of historical analysis and a tool which enables to question (literary) history and historical discourses, what can it bring to a re-reading of Woolf’s thinking on and writing of history in A Room of One’s Own? And how can an essay devoted to ‘women and fiction’ be read as pointing to a conception of (literary) history that would be informed by gender?

A Room of One’s Own as Gender (Literary) History

19If A Room of One’s Own foregrounds women in order to turn them into proper historical and literary subjects, it appears that in her emphasis on the category of ‘women’ Woolf maintains a highly relational perspective which enables her to problematise what has now become known as gender. As such, Woolf does not consider ‘women’ as an autonomous, unequivocal and fixed entity but in its evolving relationships with that of ‘men’. A Room of One’s Own thus questions gender relations, gender roles, and the gender binary, by highlighting the issue of gendered hierarchies and distribution of power and by reflecting upon gender’s construction, while adopting a historicised perspective.

20Woolf’s relational approach to history echoes the method which was constitutive of the first studies in gender history, which ‘consist[ed] of comparing women’s situation implicitly or explicitly to men’s’ (Scott 1999, 23). This comparative method is given prominence from the incipit of A Room of One’s Own in which juxtaposed depictions and textual repetitions and variations lead to more or less straightforward comparisons between women’s and men’s social positions and economic situations. From the foundation of King’s College, followed by that of Fernham—Newnham’s and Girton’s fictional avatar (see Woolf 2015, 7, 15, 16)—, to Mary Beton’s lunch at King’s, followed by her dinner at Fernham (see 8, 9, 14) far from focusing on ‘the woman question’, the first chapter of the essay establishes Woolf’s multiscale comparative analysis, as her narrator considers with the utmost care both the contents of one’s meals and the constructions of one of the oldest and most prestigious colleges in Britain and of its fictional female counterpart. Pointing both to high and low concerns, and relying equally on the grotesque and the poetic, Woolf’s comparisons anchor the social concerns of the essay, as they lead her narrator to ponder on ‘the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other’ (19). These comparisons also play a central role in the general economy of the essay as they initiate the narrator’s tackling of the issue of men’s and women’s history in the following sections of A Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf’s persona establishes that gender hierarchy is not only historically grounded but that it equally grounds the history of literature.

21Indeed, Woolf’s comparative approach to history extends to her subjective, non-exhaustive, and partly fictional sketch of literary history. If A Room of One’s Own has been read as sketching the outline of a women’s literary tradition from Lady Winchilsea to the fictional Mary Carmichael, I contend that Woolf’s multiplication of masculine counterpoints throughout the essay calls for a reading of the text that highlights its sketching of a gender literary history. As such, although most readings of A Room of One’s Own eschew this aspect of the text, Mary Beton introduces Judith Shakespeare’s tale by first sketching out for her audience and readers the particulars of what William Shakespeare’s life could have been—education, freedom of movement, literary success—before highlighting what Judith Shakespeare’s life would have entailed: family chores, unwanted pregnancy, and suicide. This juxtaposition of male and female destinies, beyond the dramatic effect which enables Woolf to highlight the tragic destiny of her heroine, is in keeping with Woolf’s comparative method; while the sketches of William’s imaginary life and of his imaginary sister’s life stress how the hierarchical binary of gender can act, depending on one’s place in the gender system, as an enabler or an inhibiter of creativity and literary accomplishment.

22Woolf thus points out how gender deeply influences the history of literature and history itself, an idea which is perhaps best epitomised in Mary Beton’s following assertion:

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. (28)

  • 12 As soon as 1918, in a review of Reginald Brimley Johnson’s The Women Novelists, Woolf highlights th (...)

23Beneath its highly humorous and sarcastic overtones, this passage underlines how gender—as a mutually constructed relationship grounded in power struggle—is, according to Woolf, one of the driving forces of history which turned Neanderthals into Modern men and women. And, as Woolf articulates throughout A Room of One’s Own history to literary history,12 she equally underlines how literary history is the product of gender. To Woolf, women’s literary production highly depends on their position in patriarchal society. She disqualifies the idea that women cannot write the works of Shakespeare because of their so-called nature and highlights material issues and immaterial drawbacks which are both caused by the gender system. The materialist side of the argument stresses how women writers have, historically, been denied the proper material conditions which would have enabled them to make their entrance in the literary world, such as ‘a room of [their] own’ (3) or ‘five hundred pounds a year’ (82). The immaterial side of the argument puts to the fore how normative conceptions of gender roles—which Woolf notably epitomises in her essay ‘Professions for Women’ in the figure of ‘the Angel in the House’ (Woolf 1979, 58–60)—and, more broadly speaking, misogyny, have hindered women’s creative endeavours and silenced them:

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? (Woolf 2015, 40)

24Yet if women writers share the influence that gender, in its material and immaterial dimension, has had on their literary production, Woolf points out that gender equally influences men’s literary works. As such, the essay establishes that the literary endeavours of both men and women can be perceived as the outcomes of their lives’ experiences, lives either limited by gender roles—as is the case for instance of Jane Austen who was constrained by ‘the narrowness of life that was imposed on her’ (51)—or enriched and empowered by them, as Woolf illustrates when considering Leo Tolstoy and implicitly contrasting his destiny to that of George Eliot:

At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world’, however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace. (53)

25Both history and literary history are thus presented in A Room of One’s Own as the products of gender relations, hierarchy, and roles. But Woolf further underlines that what is now considered as gender is both a product of history and a historical construct. As such, gender is not set in stone but prone, or even bound, to evolve, as bills—such as the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, or the Representation of the People Acts of 1918 and 1928—are fought for and passed, as the entrance of women into the professions is fought for and gained and as historical events and changes are brought about and lived through. As the essay unravels, in a somewhat chronological order, Woolf pays attention to the evolution of gender relationships and roles, thus historicising gender. Starting with the first chapter of the essay, in which Woolf points to the First World War as a watershed moment which altered the relationships between the sexes. Evoking Christina Rossetti’s and Alfred Tennyson’s poetry as emblems of the pre-war period, she underlines how the war modified gender and hetero-social and -sexual relationships, as well as the ideals of courtship and romance:

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? . . . 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. (12)

  • 13 See ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively (...)
  • 14 It should be noted that parts of the essay do not match, at least upon a first reading, this interp (...)

26A Room of One’s Own thus strikingly exposes how gender and gender relations are paradoxically both historical facts and fictitious constructs, mere ‘illusions’. As such when Woolf’s persona offers that: ‘[O]ne could perhaps go a little deeper into the question of novel-writing and the effect of sex upon the novelist’ (53), her main concern is not biological sex but what has been constructed as (pertaining to) biological sex, what we would nowadays—after both Judith Butler’s foundational Gender Trouble13 and the performative turn it initiated—refer to as ‘gender’.14 A case in point here would be Woolf’s treatment of chastity and how she turns the attribute of a so-called feminine nature into a historically constructed gendered performance, the evolution yet persistence of which she delineates in order to highlight how chastity influenced the history of literature, first by preventing women from signing their works: ‘Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’ (38), and then from signing them as women:

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. (38)

  • 15 The notion of androgyny Woolf invokes in the last chapter of A Room of One’s Own partly points in a (...)

27Yet Woolf does not consider what she calls the ‘sense of chastity’ as a biological or natural trait, but, quite ironically, as ‘a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons’ (38), and, as the word ‘relic’ implies, as a normative gendered performance and symbolic construct susceptible to disappear, along with many other normative gendered constructs, such as the gender binary itself:15

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. . . . All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared . . . 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 to-day’, 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. (31)

Conclusion

28And while Mary Beaton opened her door, it appears that Virginia Woolf led the way for reappraising and rewriting both history and literary history. However, the impact of A Room of One’s Own on the development of women’s (literary) history should not prevent us to pay attention to Woolf’s foregrounding of what could now be called a gender (literary) history Indeed, Woolf develops throughout the essay a relational approach to history and to the history of literature which enables her to highlight how both history and literary history are products of gender, but also how gender is, paradoxically, both a historical and a fictitious construct. As such, Woolf sketches out a (literary) history through the lens of gender while initiating a critique of gender as both, to refer to Joan W. Scott again: ‘a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ and ‘a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes’ (Scott 1999, 42). If Woolf’s 1929 essay has long been perceived and characterised as one of the first texts of feminist literary criticism, and as the initiator of many critical endeavours and historical research, especially in the fields of women’s (literary) history, it thus appears, as we approach its centenary, that as Christine Planté argues, ‘we must keep reading A Room of One’s Own . . . for it still has surprises in store’ (Planté 2014, 61—my translation).

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Bibliographie

Alberti, Johanna, ‘Women as a Force in History’, Gender and the Historian, London: Longman, 2002, 120.

Benstock, Shari, ‘Women’s Literary History: To Be Continued’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.2 (1986): 165–83.

Besnault, Anne, Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories, New York: Routledge, 2022.

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990.

Davis, Natalie, ‘“Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies 3. 3/4 (1976): 83–103.

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Notes

1 Incidentally, in her recent monograph on Woolf and the writing of history, Anne Besnault offers a highly generative and significant reflection on Woolf’s feminist vision of history which lays emphasis on the ‘woman question’ while leaving aside the question of gender history (see Besnault 179).

2 On these precursors and practitioners of women’s history, see Alberti.

3 On Judith Shakespeare and her significance for women’s history, see Planté.

4 See ‘[A Literature of Their Own] took some ammunition from A Room of One’s Own with its desire for a rewriting of history’ (Todd 1988, 27)

5 For an overview of A Room of One’s Own’s influence over Gilbert’s and Gubar’s critical endeavour, see Favre.

6 For an overview of the tensions that marked that historiographical and paradigmatic shift, see Sangster.

7 ‘La génération pionnière—celle de Michelle Perrot ou d’Yvonne Knibiehler en France, celle de Gerda Lerner aux États-Unis, celle de Sheila Rowbotham au Royaume-Uni—le souligne aujourd’hui et j’y souscris tout à fait, comme Karen Offen par exemple : faisons, selon les thèmes et les sujets, et de l’histoire des femmes et de l’histoire du genre, l’une ou l’autre, ou les deux, pour plus d’intelligibilité’ (Thébaud 208 ; my translation).

8 See Kelly and Davis.

9 On the necessity to establish a literary history in which both men’s and women’s literary endeavours take centre stage, see Planté (2003).

10 On the use of gender in the rewriting of literary history, see also Reid.

11 See ‘As the 1990s draw to a close, “gender” seems to have lost its ability to startle and provoke us. It has, in the United States, become an aspect of “ordinary usage”, routinely offered as a synonym for women, for the differences between the sexes, for sex’ (Scott 1999, xii).

12 As soon as 1918, in a review of Reginald Brimley Johnson’s The Women Novelists, Woolf highlights the idea that the question of women’s literary history is ‘[a] question . . . not merely of literature, but to a large extent of social history’ (Woolf 1992, 11).

13 See ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990, 25).

14 It should be noted that parts of the essay do not match, at least upon a first reading, this interpretation of the text. See, for instance, Woolf’s distinction between a man’s sentence and a woman’s sentence (57) or the issue of feminine values (56)—although it could also be argued that Woolf does not refer here to the notion of a feminine or of a masculine nature but points, again, to a constructed conception of masculinity and femininity.

15 The notion of androgyny Woolf invokes in the last chapter of A Room of One’s Own partly points in a similar direction; however it lies beyond the scope of this article as, contrarily to most of the considerations developed in the essay, Woolf’s conceptualisation of androgyny appears to be trans-historical, in so far as it is detached from any kind of historical observation and reasoning.

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Valérie Favre, « From Women’s History to Gender History: Rethinking (Literary) History with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 68 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2025, consulté le 16 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16417 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/141gn

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Valérie Favre

Valérie Favre is an associate professor in English at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a member of the Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne. Her research focuses on Virginia Woolf and the reception of her work in England, North America, and France. She has published several articles and book chapters on Woolf’s heritage, including: ‘The Token Woman of 1922? Virginia Woolf and the Gendered Battles of Anglo-American Modernist Criticism’ (Études Anglaises, 75.3, 2022), and ‘(Un)Framing the Madwoman in the River? The Questions of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Madness’ and Suicide in her Feminist Reception’ (Woolf Studies Annual, 30, 2024). With Shilo McGiff, she has coedited issue n°99 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, entitled ‘Portmanteau Woolf’ (2022). She is currently writing a monograph dedicated to the literary, critical, and feminist heritage of A Room of One’s Own.

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