VIRGINIA WOOLF: TITLE COMMENTARY

A Room of One's Own

ELLEN BAYUK ROSENMAN (ESSAY DATE 1995)

SOURCE: Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. "Difficulties and Contradictions: The Blind Spots of A Room of One's Own." In "A Room of One's Own": Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity, pp. 103-16. New York: Twayne, 1995.

In the following essay, Rosenman explicates inconsistencies in Woolf's thought at key points in A Room of One's Own, suggesting that some of the central issues raised by the essay remain disputed.

Thus far I have been taking A Room of One's Own at its word, explicating its intentions and presenting it as a coherent, persuasive whole. But the essay does present the reader with certain difficulties. At key points Woolf's thought is in conflict with itself, revealing ambivalence about some of the essay's central issues. It is no insult to suggest that some of the essay's issues remain unresolved or in dispute. To begin with, it is arguably the first feminist literary history, and we could hardly expect it to reflect the feminist thinking that would come after it. While what is often called the second wave of modern feminism, begun in the early 1970s, rescued the essay from obscurity, it has also brought new considerations to bear that Woolf's essay, not surprisingly, did not anticipate. Moreover, many of these issues are thorny ones. The idea of androgyny, for instance, has undergone considerable revision in the last 30 years, going in and out of fashion. The gaps between second-wave feminism and Woolf's essay, along with fluctations in recent feminist thinking, confirm her notion that intellectual and artistic labors are culturally conditioned and historically specific; they change over time as their contexts change. Finally, A Room of One's Own is one of Woolf's first political arguments. She is still in the process of working out and working through difficult issues. It makes sense to regard A Room of One's Own as a transitional work in which Woolf begins to divest herself of cultural beliefs about the transcendence of art—traces of which still color her thinking.

The most dramatic problem presented by A Room of One's Own is this: despite Woolf's insistence on a gender-specific tradition, she undercuts that notion in several ways. Two comments are widely quoted. One is about Mary Carmichael: "She wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself" (93). What can Woolf mean by this? Why is the path to womanhood unconscious of gender? This is an odd assertion in an argument that takes gender identity so seriously and sees its characteristics as socially constructed. Does Woolf assume that there is an innate femininity lodged in the unconscious that can only be retrieved through forgetfulness? We might wonder, too, what value her own book would have according to this quotation. So much of its purpose is to clarify women's consciousness of their sex and to undo repression. Should the woman writer then forget what she has learned, hoping that her unconscious has somehow assimilated this knowledge and will give it back to her in a more artistic form, without her being aware of it? My questions are meant to suggest how difficult it is to reconcile this passage with the very conscious emphasis on gender in Woolf's essay. Surely no one would imagine that A Room of One's Own was written by someone who had forgotten she was a woman.

A second, similar passage occurs toward the end of the essay, its importance underlined by the fact that it is the "very first sentence" that the narrator plans to write on the subject "Women and Fiction": "It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death" (104). Once again the writer is advised to be unconscious, although perhaps in a more narrow way. In this sentence, to speak consciously as a woman is to express a grievance. Perhaps we can interpret this as a rejection of polemic: Woolf does not want women writers to make speeches in their novels. But her essay often demonstrates the difficulty of not laying stress on a grievance and the unhealthy role of repression in maintaining equanimity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARCUS ON WOOLF'S APPROACH TO THE LECTURE CIRCUIT

It is amusing to imagine what Virginia Woolf would think of an MLA meeting. We know that she despised lectures and did not believe that literature should be taught to middle-class students. She herself lectured only to women and working-class people. She gave lectures to women students and fellow professional women, to the Workers' Education League, and to the Working Women's Cooperative Guild. She refused offers to lecture to men, to men's colleges and universities, and to male-dominated institutions. While she was in Italy, studying Mussolini's fascism firsthand, she refused, with a simple and defiant No, her government's offer of a Companion of Honour, wanting no companionship whatever with the concerns of the British Empire. She refused a degree from Manchester University and, much to the horror of the editor of her letters, Nigel Nicolson, she even refused quite proudly to give the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge, despite the fact that she was the first woman invited to do so. Her editor feels that this act "only weakened the cause of women in general" and confesses he cannot understand why the only prize she ever accepted was a woman's prize, the Femina vie Heureuse prize for To the Lighthouse.

Marcus, Jane. Excerpt from "Storming the Toolshed." In Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988.

We recall that the narrator avoids a sense of grievance at Oxbridge by internalizing injunctions against women's presence: having been banished from the grass and the library, she has "no wish" to enter the chapel (8). But this lack of desire is a dead end: she has simply acquiesced to patriarchal prohibitions—an act that would hardly free her to write without being conscious of her sex. Throughout much of A Room of One's Own, to be a woman is to be aggrieved, and with good reason. How do we judge the works of the women writers Woolf discusses, almost all of whom express anger at their plight? Are they all "doomed to death," unable to "grow in the minds of others" (104), as Woolf claims? Has only Jane Austen survived?

When Woolf introduces "conscious bias" into the passage she further complicates the issue. These terms are not equal; there is a slippage between consciousness of a particular identity, grievance "with justice," and bias. Gender identity, with its distinctive perspective, has degenerated into a distorted perception. Ironically, in this passage Woolf seems guilty of the same kind of misreading that patriarchy has always given women, as when the redoubtable Desmond MacCarthy calls Rebecca West "that arrant feminist" for saying that men are snobs—which Woolf calmly characterizes as "a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex" (35). In this kind of misreading, women's protests against male authority are conveniently dismissed as hysterical, distorted, dogmatic, and self-serving. Women's focus on their own experience, including their grievances, is a kind of special pleading, while men's protests against women, in contrast, take on the status of fact. Having deconstructed the notion of objectivity in the British Museum chapter, Woolf seems to reintroduce it in this passage as an appropriate criterion for women's writing.

From these passages it seems clear that Woolf cannot completely divest herself of a belief in the value of transcendence in art even in the face of her more sustained gender-specific and materialist assumptions. In part, Woolf's aesthetic tastes underwrote this contradictory belief. In the essay "Modern Fiction" she praises the Russian writers as "spiritualists" rather than "materialists" (the label she gave her antagonist Arnold Bennett), because they capture "life or spirit, truth or reality" rather than focusing on the physical and historical details of their stories and characters.¹ According to Woolf, spiritualists reject the depiction of the lives of people as they are embedded in a particular society and focus instead on more abstract philosophical questions: Does life have meaning? What makes us human? Of what does spiritual life consist? In the essay Woolf imagines a kind of primordial state of consciousness that is articulated into lived experience: "The mind receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall,… they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday" (154).

As a novelist, particularly in the period before the publication of A Room of One's Own, Woolf obviously attempts to capture the shower of atoms and lets the life of Monday or Tuesday recede into the background—or, rather, she shows the process by which they shape themselves into the particularities of time, place, and individual experience. Woolf's love of the Russian novelists and her own philosophy as expressed here derive from a search for what transcends the here and now.

This viewpoint is clearly at odds with a focus on anything as specific as gender identity as historically constituted. The desire for transcendence runs as an undercurrent throughout A Room of One's Own. In her ideal representations of creativity, Woolf frequently uses metaphors of light. When she describes the inspirational effects of the Oxbridge meal, I have said that these metaphors point back to embodied experience. Elsewhere, however, their intangibility suggests a desire to escape from material life. Shakespeare, the ideal artist, is "incandescent" (56); his mind has consumed all impediments to a kind of perfect impersonality, much like that which T. S. Eliot describes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The "fire of genius" and the "inner light" that produce and discern great art are also part of the vocabulary of disembodied creativity (72).

Woolf likens the works of "these great artists" to messages written in invisible ink that become clear when held to the light. Somehow they contain what every reader has "felt and known and desired" (72). In place of a distinctive perspective Woolf posits a universal wisdom; in place of the broken sentence and sequence of Mary Carmichael's novel she envisions a kind of ur-truth that is perfectly, wonderfully, and almost mystically intelligible because it is, in some sense, already known, as if it were part of the human genetic code. The narrator's struggles with Mary's novel, her groping attempts to decide whether the novel is original or merely clumsy, drop out of sight. One might argue that Mary's novel has not attained the ideal of great art, otherwise it, too, would evoke this magical response, but Woolf works with an entirely different set of assumptions in these two versions of reading.

The invisibility of the ink suggests the degree to which Woolf's ideal leans toward a disembodied, ahistorical, transcendent version of art, represented as a private, esoteric transaction between writer and reader. On the other hand, Mary Carmichael's authorship, figured in the female rider taking a fence in a crowd of patriarchs, is thoroughly grounded in gender, history, the body, and society. It is not that Mary Carmichael's novel is not as good; it is that Woolf has changed the rules. Thinking of Milton's bogey and of Charles Lamb's incredulity that Lycidas was a product of fallible human effort rather than divine inspiration, one wonders whether even the greatest author can blot a line in invisible ink and still work his magic.

With these considerations in mind, it is interesting to return to one example of distorted women's writing—Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—because the issue of anger presents another conflict between Woolf's transcendent and materialist beliefs. The narrator criticizes Brontë for allowing her anger to show; because of this slip, her novel is not the incandescent work it ought to be. We might question, however, whether this criticism is too simple, for the narrator's own anger was an important source of insight for her in the British Museum. While Woolf's disappointment with Brontë seems genuine, we should also be alert to the possibility of reading these awkward breaks in a different way. Rather than being only technical flaws, perhaps they are also gateways to a distinctively female point of view. The narrator complains about the "jerk" in the novel when Jane delivers an extended speech about women's need for freedom and hears the laugh that she thinks is the servant Grace Poole's but really belongs to Rochester's mad wife, Bertha, whom he has imprisoned in his house (69). The narrator says that "the continuity is disturbed" by this "awk-ward break"; Jane's speech has run away with Brontë because it expresses her own grievance about her narrow life, and she must wrest her narrative back on track (69). In constructing this passage Woolf assumes that there is no connection between Jane's speech and the laugh, but, even granting room for the possibility of different interpretations, we might still suggest that Woolf has missed the point of the passage.

In fact, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979, 349) have argued, the juxtaposition of Jane's speech and Bertha's laugh is thematically crucial; it contrasts the young girl's articulate but naive dreams of freedom with the sardonic and inarticulate yet powerful comment by the incarcerated mad wife, whose place Jane will shortly be asked to take when Rochester proposes. Brontë's "jerk" sharpens the irony of their relationship as both foils and doubles of each other. Jane Eyre is very much a cover story, like A Room of One's Own, encoding subversive messages about patriarchy and marriage in the figure of the mad wife. It is perhaps unfair to expect Woolf to deliver a particular interpretation of a novel, but it is certainly ironic that Woolf proves her own point with a critical lapse: she has missed the significance of the passage in Jane Eyre precisely because Brontë has disturbed the continuity or, to use Woolf's expression, has broken the sequence. Perhaps Woolf was distracted by the vexing issue of anger that the passage from Jane Eyre clearly represents, both in Jane's resentment and Bertha's madness. In any case, her insistence on an art free from grievance has led her to misread a now-classic example of women's writing as technically flawed rather than formally and ideologically meaningful.

Woolf's treatment of Jane Eyre obliquely and perhaps inadvertently suggests this. Woolf quotes Jane's angry speech at such length that its point commands our attention; in a sense, Woolf turns the stage over to Jane's anger even though she criticizes it. As Mary Jacobus says, this passage "opens up a rift in her own [Woolf's] seamless web. What she herself cannot say without a loss of calmness (rage has been banned in the interests of literature) is uttered instead by another woman writer. The overflow in Jane Eyre washes into A Room of One's Own. "² Jacobus implies that Woolf's ambivalence about female anger acts itself out in this passage: She displays Jane's outburst as a covert way of expressing the resentments of the female writer without leaving herself open to charges of personal grievance. As is often the case in this essay, it is difficult to reduce Woolf's "real" point of view to a single attitude. The essay suggests both that Brontë's anger disfigures her writing and that anger is a legitimate, essential source of female self-expression.

This conflict was very much on Woolf's mind as she wrote the essay. On the one hand, writing A Room of One's Own was therapeutic for her: "I seem able to write criticism fearlessly. Because of a R. of ones Own I said suddenly to myself last night" (Diary, 4: 25). This comment implies that Woolf does not need to disguise her opinions or her emotions. At the same time, the multilayered, allusive narrative also protected Woolf from sensitive material. In a letter to a close friend she writes, "I'm so glad you thought it good tempered—my blood is apt to boil on this one subject … and I didn't want it to" (Letters, 4: 106). She worried that "if I had said 'Look here, I am uneducated because my brothers used all the family funds'—which is a fact—'Well,' they'd have said, 'she has an axe to grind.'"³ Woolf explained that she "forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious, legendary," to avoid the charge of personal grievance.⁴ Woolf's ceremony of investiture is not entirely symbolic; as a woman writer she shares the conflicts of her narrator.

While Woolf may have legitimate reason to fear expressing anger, her desire to mask her boiling blood beneath a good-tempered facade smacks of the advice of the Angel in the House. The essay's ambiguous use of anger as the source of both artistic blemishes and political insight reflects Woolf's ambivalence about her uncensored self-expression. While Woolf's "I" at the end of the essay has presumably worked through all the issues of the preceding pages, the issue of anger and writing remained unresolved for Virginia Woolf herself. Her sophisticated narrative succeeds perhaps too well in pulling its punches, as contemporary reviews that praise its charm and lightness suggest. Woolf encodes her own anger so completely that it almost disappears, fictionalized and absorbed into the narrator. A Room of One's Own can be seen as Woolf's own cover story, distancing her from dangerous material and deflecting her uneasiness as a politicized woman writer into a series of stories about dead and imaginary writers. Given Woolf's fame as a writer, we might regard this phenomenon as a testimony to the power of her insights. If a writer of her stature fears exposure, how might lesser writers feel?

Probably the most controversial aspect of A Room of One's Own is its treatment of androgyny—a subject related to the tension between the materialist and transcendent threads in Woolf's argument. Woolf describes an androgynous mind that is more complete and resourceful than a purely masculine or feminine one. While the biological sex determines the dominant gender of the mind, the mind ideally consists of male and female halves. Woolf does not trace out her idea systematically, so it is difficult to tell exactly what she has in mind. Given the unflattering portrait of the masculine mind in her discussion of Kipling, we might wonder what would happen when it meets with its feminine counterpart. Will the mind then be composed of masculinity plus femininity—two self-contained entities that will interact productively with each other? How would such opposites interact except in conflict? Or would each gender dilute the other, so that rather than have "the Flag" on one side of the mind and "Anon" on the other, the androgyne would speak with an assertive but flexible, empathic voice. The generality of Woolf's vision has left the essay subject to reevaluation according to changing perceptions of androgyny. Whether her vision perpetuates the reified gender categories of masculine and feminine or attempts to create a new identity has been at issue since the second wave of feminism recovered the essay in the first place.

Whether the essay is conservative or radical in its formulation of androgyny, the very presence of the idea runs counter to much of Woolf's argument. Having spent so much time and effort constructing a distinctively female style, self, and tradition, she seems to demote such achievements as provisional and imperfect when she promotes a selfhood that goes "beyond" female identity, which is subsumed in the androgynous ideal. Woolf's notion of a single-sex artistic creation as "a horrid little abortion," like her comment that gender consciousness is fatal, flies in the face of her valorization of women's writing (103). One wonders whether Jane Austen, that exemplary inventor of the female sentence, would pass the test of androgyny. Like the passage about the fatality of sex-consciousness, this one is hyperbolic enough to raise a question in the reader's mind about what is at stake. Woolf's strong language seems designed, perhaps unconsciously, to compromise her feminist leanings, to dilute her emphasis on the particularities of gender and creativity. Although the placement of her comments on androgyny toward the end of the book suggests that it represents the culmination of her thinking, it deflects her emphasis on women into a different argument altogether.

Woolf's treatment of androgyny raises other questions as well. In its emphasis on mental faculties, it also erases the body. It disconnects the "nerves that feed the brain" and the gendered body from the imagination, now composed of abstract properties that enter into a mysterious communion (78). Even Judith Shakespeare, prisoner of her body in life, undergoes a sublimation in death, when she is transmuted into a mystical body that women writers bring into being with their achievements. Both Judith Shakespeare's corporeal body and the actual bodies of future women writers disappear beneath the symbolic weight of such a mystical incarnation. It is as if this is the only resolution Woolf can find to the female body's vulnerability, despite her insistence that it forms the foundation of women's authorship. Because of the cultural meanings that are deeply inscribed within it, the body remains an ambiguous source of inspiration. Woolf must insist on its reality, both to retrieve women from Victorian stereotypes of purity and to undo women's oppression. At the same time, however, the body remains haunted by disability and danger, and Woolf longs to escape from its complications. The book's final image, of the woman writer putting on and taking off the body of Judith Shakespeare, figures the essay's vacillation between embodiment and transcendence.

Woolf's construction of androgyny also has the disquieting effect of exalting heterosexual relations. A surprising vision inaugurates the section: a man and a woman enter a taxicab together, prompting the narrator to observe, "One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness" (98). However one might feel about this instinct in one's own life, it is difficult to reconcile with the unions of men and women that appear in the essay: authoritarian fathers and rebellious daughters; cavalier theater managers and their pregnant, despairing mistresses; selfish kings and their discarded—if not beheaded—wives. The language of the androgyny passage relies heavily on metaphors of sexuality, childbirth, and marriage—hardly instances of female happiness throughout the essay. In the face of the image that comes to the narrator's mind in the previous chapter—that of a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother—it is disappointingly conventional in terms of both narrative and politics. We are back to "boy meets girl." The image is also conventional in relation to the subtext of lesbianism. One wonders how Woolf's writing of Orlando, inspired by her lover Vita Sackville-West, or the writing she did with Sackville-West's advice and encouragement could find a place in this theory of creativity.

Above the conflicts and inequities of the real world, the androgynous mind withdraws to "celebrate its nuptials in darkness" (104). Woolf imagines this mental life as magically exempt from patriarchy, a consummation of the taxicab scene and the narrator's belief that, despite its part in the oppression of women, heterosexuality is best after all. Perhaps, like the mystical body of Judith Shakespeare, these nighttime nuptials represent an attempted resolution as well as a contradiction, transposing heterosexuality into an abstract and imaginative power in order to rescue it from its dangerous, even fatal, consequences for women. It may also be exactly what Woolf says it is: "a profound if irrational" investment in the very social structures she sets out to criticize, reminding us how difficult it is to think of one's self out of one's culture.

Critics have raised two other significant objections to A Room of One's Own, both of which reflect changing ideas in contemporary literary criticism. First, it has been argued that Woolf's depiction of a female literary tradition is inaccurate and incomplete. No one could fault Woolf for not knowing about women authors and varieties of female experience that were unknown in her age, of course. The problem is that Woolf's essay has been so influential that it has shaped modern accounts of women's writing even in the face of contradictory evidence. Woolf tells a story of women's literature that consists of little but silence and suffering through the Renaissance; that barely begins until the eighteenth century, with Aphra Behn; and that posits an evolution in women's writing that depends in part on very specific criteria, such as commercial publication, the use of particular genres such as the novel, and public success.

According to Margaret Ezell, these assumptions are difficult to maintain in the light of modern scholarship.⁵ For one thing, efforts to recover women writers before the eighteenth century have succeeded beyond Woolf's imagination, although contemporary collections such as The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women continue to regard earlier periods as relative wastelands of women's literature.⁶ For another, Ezell argues, earlier women writers were prolific practitioners of forms such as religious essays, advice books, and prophetic writings, along with the diaries and letters that Woolf acknowledges, and that these forms had more prestige in their era than in ours. Imposing twentieth-century notions of which genres "count" is anachronistic. And even if these kinds of writing never enjoyed the status of the epic poem, we might still question the wisdom of applying a traditional hierarchy of importance to women's writing given Woolf's emphasis on difference. To judge it by the same standards is to misread it.

Woolf's essays on traditionally "minor" women authors as well as A Room of One's Own betray an allegiance to conventional standards, even as they set out to revise them. Woolf's ambivalence about figures such as the Duchess of Newcastle or Lady Winchilsea suggests that, while she wishes to acknowledge female achievement wherever it appears, she remains uneasy about promoting work that has traditionally been considered second-rate. As one critic says, "Woolf's own excavations [of forgotten women writers] were marked by a cultural wariness of and palpable disdain for 'minor' literary achievements."⁷

Moreover, Ezell, argues, many women writers of the Renaissance wrote poetry for circulation among a coterie of intellectuals and not for publication as we know it, just as their male counterparts did. In such circles manuscripts, not publications, are the index of achievement. Because Woolf focused on writing as a means of economic empowerment, she may have been less open to the value of other, less professionalized contexts for writing. She may also have underestimated the extent to which these women participated in literary culture. Judith Shakespeare may not be entirely representative of women writers in the Renaissance, isolated and silenced. Ironically, according to Ezell, because A Room of One's Own has achieved such fame, it has carried more authority than it deserves in shaping our modern understanding of women's writing in the past.

Finally, and extremely important, is the critique that women of color have made of Woolf. Woolf's inspiring model of a coherent, collective female voice, symbolized by Judith Shakespeare, has also effaced difference. Once again the point is not to blame Woolf for her failure to anticipate changes in modern feminist criticism but to note the ways in which the blind spots of this influential essay have moved others to continue its project of re-vision. Woolf herself may have been a powerful foremother for some writers, but her economic, class, and racial privilege make her a problematic ancestor for writers of different backgrounds. Woolf's critique of Empire has not erased all traces of racism, for example. When she praises women for not wishing to make an Englishwoman out of a "very fine negress," she implies that her reader is white and the Negress remains other—perhaps already commodified by the adjective "fine," often applied to the accoutrements of expensive living, such as fine wine and fine china.⁸ While Woolf's woman writer might not want to colonize the black woman, neither does she identity with her. The flexible selfhood of women writers does not, apparently, extend to other races.

The African-American writer Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, addresses this difficulty in her famous essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens." In many ways Walker's essay deliberately parallels Woolf's. Walker also seeks female creativity in unusual places in order to connect her artistic aspirations with the past. Like Woolf, Walker reevaluates forgotten women, including her own mother, whose gardens were the envy of everyone who saw them. Walker quotes A Room of One's Own directly, showing her sense of inheritance from Woolf as a woman writer and historian of creativity. At the same time, however, she revises Woolf's text by inserting her own race-specific additions. Considering the case of Phillis Wheatley, the eighteenth-century African-American poet, she writes,

Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis, that "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert "eighteenth-century," insert "black woman," insert "born or made a slave"] would certainly have gone crazed.…For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add "chains, guns, the lash, ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion"], that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty."⁹

With these insertions, Walker tells the story of the African-American woman writer, whose experience in slavery intensifies and alters the dynamics of oppression and repression that Woolf describes. There will be both common ground and divergence in the experiences of black and white women writers. Woolf argues that male standards have masqueraded as universal ones and that they leave out the story of women writers. Walker says that the standards of white women have masqueraded as universal ones for women, absorbing or marginalizing the works of African-American women just as British patriarchy silences women. Ironically, we find Virginia Woolf in the position of Arthur Quiller-Couch, arguing for an expanded understanding of the material conditions of creativity but leaving out a significant set of voices and experiences because of her own blind spot.

Thus while Woolf's essay has been deeply influential and is frequently cited as a classic text of feminist thought, it continues to inspire discussion and controversy. The essay's fame makes it worth fighting over, and with. It remains a text to be reckoned with, whatever its contradictions and blind spots. In many ways A Room of One's Own has set the agenda for modern feminist criticism. Therefore it is continually renewed, not by some mystical force that annoints masterpieces but by the sustained interest its historical significance provokes for women, and men, who enter the conversation from their own points of view and social positions.

Notes

1. "Modern Fiction," in The Common Reader (1925; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1953), 153; hereafter cited in text.
2. Mary Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 35.
3. Christopher St. John, Ethyl Smyth (London: Longmans Green, 1959), 229, 230; quoted in Jane Marcus, Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), 112-13.
4. Jane Marcus, "'No More Horses,'" in Art and Anger, 113.
5. Margaret J. M. Ezell, "The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women's Literature," New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 21 (1990): 579-92.
6. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
7. Bradford K. Mudge, "Burning Down the House: Sara Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, and the Politics of Literary Revision," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (1986): 231.
8. Elizabeth Abel, "Matrilineage and the Racial 'Other': Woolf and Her Literary Daughters of the Second Wave," paper read at the Third Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, Jefferson City, Mo., 13 June 1993.
9. Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), 235; my ellipses.