Virgina Woolf (1882 - 1941)
Virginia Woolf understood the intellectual and practical value of the female academy. She believed that women needed a place to think and write in order to develop their creative potential so they could take a full and independent role in their societies. Her well-known book, A Room of One’s Own (1929), is preoccupied with these ideas: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’.
Woolf’s potential was not nurtured at university, however, and she resented this. She was largely self-taught and her education was unsystematic. Her engagement with ‘the academy’ was also, for the most part, either vicarious or sporadic. Her only formal study was in Greek when she attended a few classes at King’s College in London in her mid-teens. As a young woman she was educated at home for two hours every day by her father, Leslie Stephen, who had once been a Cambridge don. Her mother, Julia Duckworth, nee Jackson, supported Virginia in her habit of voracious reading and was the model for Mrs Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). However, in 1895 when Virginia was thirteen, Julia died leaving Woolf’s education in the hands of Leslie Stephen. By 1900 Janet Case, who was one of the first women to pass through Girton College, Cambridge (established in 1869 as the first residential college for women) was Woolf’s teacher.
This educational background gave the young Virginia a varied, if unstructured, approach to study. As Lyndall Gordon’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography explains, Woolf had the advantage of daily supervisions that ‘were all the better for their informality’. This approach nevertheless had its limitations, and her studies were further complicated by her father’s contradictory attitudes to female education. In theory, Leslie Stephen hated “to see women’s lives wasted simply because they…[had] not been trained well enough to take an independent interest in study”. In practice, Virginia was quick to notice that he snubbed his niece Katherine Stephen (who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge) for presuming to be intellectual.
Virginia’s experience of the academy was not limited to these influences however. Her brother, Thoby Stephen, was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Sharing his sister’s literary enthusiasms, he introduced Virginia to his like-minded university friends who included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, who became Virginia’s husband. It was from these early relationships that the Bloomsbury group emerged.
Virginia understood that her educational background and position as the ‘daughter of an educated gentleman’ placed her in a female ‘Society of Outsiders’ a label she employed in Three Guineas (1938). Speaking from this perspective in 1928, she gave two lectures to women students at the Arts Society at Newnham College and at Girton, under the title ‘Women and Fiction’, and these formed the basis of A Room of One’s Own. The lectures and the subsequent book were an attempt to construct a counter-history for women, a female tradition that acknowledged the unnoticed contribution of women to society and their untapped potential. A lively depiction of the different histories of the men’s and women’s colleges in a fictional ‘Oxbridge’ are also included, and there are astute comments about the economic plenitude of the first and the relative poverty of the second. A lavish lunch at a men’s college, for example, is depicted in sharp contrast to a meagre dinner in an unnamed female academy. Fictional as this women’s college was, its inclusion in Woolf’s book was enough to prompt Muriel Bradbrook (an undergraduate at Girton who ultimately became its principal in 1968) to remark that the lunch in Woolf’s honour on the day of her Cambridge lecture, ‘had been exceptional; for even the most opulent men’s college does not serve crème brûlée every day.’
The female academy was not simply the forum for Woolf’s lectures and the genesis of her book. It was, as Laura Marcus points out, ‘a crucial imaginative arena for Woolf’s feminism.’ Virginia urged her female audience to ‘rewrite history’, constructing a separate story of women’s historical and literary development by patient research and by thinking back through their ‘mothers’.
A Room of One’s Own has since become famous and is particularly influential for literary feminism. In reality, its beginnings, and particularly the lectures, were awkward. The responses of several of the 200 hundred or so women students that attended Woolf’s talk are testament to this. Kathleen Raine, for instance, recalls that ‘A Room of One’s Own made claims on life far beyond mine: a room and a small unearned income were, to me, luxuries unimaginable.’ A second young woman recalls that Woolf ‘made a striking figure, quite coming up to my expectations of what a distinguished writer should be.’ But, she adds, ‘I must admit that her appearance made a much more lasting impression on me than anything she said’. Hermione Lee notes that one of the younger girls wrote in her diary at the time: ‘Had a lecture by Mrs V. Woolf – very boring.’
Woolf recorded her own impressions of these pioneering young women in her diary and they make interesting reading. With a mixture of admiration and condescension, she writes that these early female undergraduates seemed ‘starved but valiant women…Intelligent eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals.’ There is an unmistakable hint of regret in Woolf’s comments that, by comparison, she felt ‘elderly’; nobody, she writes, ‘respected me.’
In 1928 it seemed unlikely that Woolf’s lecture would be of far-reaching significance. As Bradbrook noted in That Infidel Place, ‘we undergraduates enjoyed Mrs Woolf, but we felt that her Cambridge was not ours.’ In fact, this was a statement with more truth in it than Bradbrook knew; Woolf was never assimilated into university life and she rejected all academic honours, even if A Room of One’s Own would be forever associated with women’s creativity and the early progress of the female academy.
Woolf’s potential was not nurtured at university, however, and she resented this. She was largely self-taught and her education was unsystematic. Her engagement with ‘the academy’ was also, for the most part, either vicarious or sporadic. Her only formal study was in Greek when she attended a few classes at King’s College in London in her mid-teens. As a young woman she was educated at home for two hours every day by her father, Leslie Stephen, who had once been a Cambridge don. Her mother, Julia Duckworth, nee Jackson, supported Virginia in her habit of voracious reading and was the model for Mrs Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). However, in 1895 when Virginia was thirteen, Julia died leaving Woolf’s education in the hands of Leslie Stephen. By 1900 Janet Case, who was one of the first women to pass through Girton College, Cambridge (established in 1869 as the first residential college for women) was Woolf’s teacher.
This educational background gave the young Virginia a varied, if unstructured, approach to study. As Lyndall Gordon’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography explains, Woolf had the advantage of daily supervisions that ‘were all the better for their informality’. This approach nevertheless had its limitations, and her studies were further complicated by her father’s contradictory attitudes to female education. In theory, Leslie Stephen hated “to see women’s lives wasted simply because they…[had] not been trained well enough to take an independent interest in study”. In practice, Virginia was quick to notice that he snubbed his niece Katherine Stephen (who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge) for presuming to be intellectual.
Virginia’s experience of the academy was not limited to these influences however. Her brother, Thoby Stephen, was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Sharing his sister’s literary enthusiasms, he introduced Virginia to his like-minded university friends who included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, who became Virginia’s husband. It was from these early relationships that the Bloomsbury group emerged.
Virginia understood that her educational background and position as the ‘daughter of an educated gentleman’ placed her in a female ‘Society of Outsiders’ a label she employed in Three Guineas (1938). Speaking from this perspective in 1928, she gave two lectures to women students at the Arts Society at Newnham College and at Girton, under the title ‘Women and Fiction’, and these formed the basis of A Room of One’s Own. The lectures and the subsequent book were an attempt to construct a counter-history for women, a female tradition that acknowledged the unnoticed contribution of women to society and their untapped potential. A lively depiction of the different histories of the men’s and women’s colleges in a fictional ‘Oxbridge’ are also included, and there are astute comments about the economic plenitude of the first and the relative poverty of the second. A lavish lunch at a men’s college, for example, is depicted in sharp contrast to a meagre dinner in an unnamed female academy. Fictional as this women’s college was, its inclusion in Woolf’s book was enough to prompt Muriel Bradbrook (an undergraduate at Girton who ultimately became its principal in 1968) to remark that the lunch in Woolf’s honour on the day of her Cambridge lecture, ‘had been exceptional; for even the most opulent men’s college does not serve crème brûlée every day.’
The female academy was not simply the forum for Woolf’s lectures and the genesis of her book. It was, as Laura Marcus points out, ‘a crucial imaginative arena for Woolf’s feminism.’ Virginia urged her female audience to ‘rewrite history’, constructing a separate story of women’s historical and literary development by patient research and by thinking back through their ‘mothers’.
A Room of One’s Own has since become famous and is particularly influential for literary feminism. In reality, its beginnings, and particularly the lectures, were awkward. The responses of several of the 200 hundred or so women students that attended Woolf’s talk are testament to this. Kathleen Raine, for instance, recalls that ‘A Room of One’s Own made claims on life far beyond mine: a room and a small unearned income were, to me, luxuries unimaginable.’ A second young woman recalls that Woolf ‘made a striking figure, quite coming up to my expectations of what a distinguished writer should be.’ But, she adds, ‘I must admit that her appearance made a much more lasting impression on me than anything she said’. Hermione Lee notes that one of the younger girls wrote in her diary at the time: ‘Had a lecture by Mrs V. Woolf – very boring.’
Woolf recorded her own impressions of these pioneering young women in her diary and they make interesting reading. With a mixture of admiration and condescension, she writes that these early female undergraduates seemed ‘starved but valiant women…Intelligent eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals.’ There is an unmistakable hint of regret in Woolf’s comments that, by comparison, she felt ‘elderly’; nobody, she writes, ‘respected me.’
In 1928 it seemed unlikely that Woolf’s lecture would be of far-reaching significance. As Bradbrook noted in That Infidel Place, ‘we undergraduates enjoyed Mrs Woolf, but we felt that her Cambridge was not ours.’ In fact, this was a statement with more truth in it than Bradbrook knew; Woolf was never assimilated into university life and she rejected all academic honours, even if A Room of One’s Own would be forever associated with women’s creativity and the early progress of the female academy.
