Virginia Woolf was born in London, daughter of Leslie Stephen, the late Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer and scholar. She grew up as a member of a large and talented family, educating herself in her father's magnificent library, meeting in childhood many eminent Victorians, learning Greek form Walter Pater's sister. After her father's death in 1904 she settled with her sister and two brothers in Bloombsbury, that district of London which later was to become associated with her and the group among whom she moved. The "Bloomsbury group" included Lytton Strachey, the biographer; J.M. Keynes, the emiment economist. Roger Fry, an art ciritc; and E.M.Foster. When her sister Vanessa married Clive Bell, an art cirtic, in 1907, she and her brother took together another house in Bloomsbury, and there they entertained their literary and artistic friends at evening gathering where the conversation sparkled. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, jornalist, essayist, and political thinker; together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 -a press which published some of the most interesting literature of our time, including an early volume of Eliot's poems (1919) and his "Homage to John Dryden" (1924) as well as her own novels. Her suicide in March, 1941, resulting from her fear that she was about to lose her mind and become a burden on her husband, first revealed to the public that she had been subject to periods of nervous depression, particularly after finishing a book, and that underneath the liveliness and wit so well known among the Bloomsbury group lay disturbing psychological tensions.
Virginia Woolf came naturally into the profession of writing. Moving among writers and artists, her world was from the begining the cultured world of the middle-class and upper-middle-class London intelligentsia. She rebelled aganinst what she called "materialism" of such novelists as Arnold Bennett and John Gabworthy, and sought a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay. After two novels cast rather cumbersomely in traditional form, she developed her own style, which handled the "stream of conciousness" with a carefully modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and the imagery of lyric poetry. The action and contemplation, between specific external events in time and delicate tracings of the flow of consciousness where the mind moves between retrospect and anticipation, were collected in "Monday or Tuesday" (1921). These were techinical experiments, and they made posssible those later novels where her characteristic method is fully developed -"Jacob's Room" (1922); "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), the first completely successful novel in her "new" style; "To the Lighthouse" (1927); "The Waves" (1931), the most stylized of her novels; and "Between the Acts" (1941), published after her death. Virginia Woolf was a skilled exponent of the "stream of conciousness" technique in her novels, exploring with great subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change, and memory for human personality. The delicate lyrical prose of her finest novels was a remarkable achievement.
She also wrote a great many reviews and critical essays, collected in "The Common Reader" (1925) and "The Second Common Reader" (1932); informal and personal in tone, her criticism is suggestive rather than authoritative and has an engaging air of spontaneity. She is equally concerned with her own craft as a writer and with what it was like to be a quite different person living in a different age.
Virginia Woolf was much concerned with the position of women, specially professional women, and the constrictions they suffered under. She wrote several cogent essays on the subject, notably in "A Room of One's Own" (1929) and "Three Guineas" (1938). Her novel "The Years" (1937) was originally to have included reflections on the position of women interspersed amid the action, but she later decided to publish them as a separate book, which became "Three Guineas".#

"The Norton Anthology of English literature", by Abrams, M. H., edited by W. W. Norton, New York, 1979.
 

WHAT ABOUT HER WRITINGS?

Virginia Woolf got back to Literature through women's problems. Problems like kinds of works and their salaries. Problems that she dealt with in "Night and Day", there she stood up for her sisters in order to get equal salaries between men and women.
Virginia Woolf, feminist in her acts but against the term: "feminism", was convinced that women were superior to men; so she got interested in women writers particularly ("The Common Reader", "The Death of the Moth", "A Room of One's Own".) In "A Room of One's Own" (1928) she gave a unique account of why a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write fiction. (It became a classical statement of feminism.)
Virginia Woolf recognized that in Post-war England old social hierarchies had broken down, and that literature must rediscover itself in a new and altogether more fluid world; the realist novel must be superseded by one in which objective reality is replaced by the impressions of subjectiv conciousness. A new way of writing appeared, it was the famous "stream of Conciousness": It was developed a method in order to get the character through its conscience's states; the character is understood by the way it moves, talks, eats, looks, and everything it does.
Although the term "stream of conciousness" is rightly applied to the work of Virginia Woolf, it was first borrowed in 1918 from William James to describe the novels of Dorothy Richardson. Richardson described her work as an attempt to "produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism".
The method was more and more used in English Fiction.

Virginia Woolf's novels show perfectly her theories about the liberation and the fiction updating. She rejected the excessive declarations like the ones in the 18th century, making the ones of the19th century public, ("Night and Day", "The Waves" (1931), "The Years"). The new way of writing had several difficulties. She wanted to show the world of impressions, the world of personalities' analysis, ...... she had the will of a method from the point of view of the feelings and memories.
Before Sally Seton, Peter Walsh or Richard Dalloway told about them, they emerged of the "Mrs. Dalloway"'s memory through the view of Peter Walsh; and Mrs. Ramsay through the eyes of her husband, her son and her environment ("To the Lighthouse" (1927)). Even her first novels gave the proof of the effort of the innovation. "The Voyage out" or "Night and Day" have traditional elements of fiction, young people in love, ...... we are talking about Terence and Rachel in the first one, and Ralph and Katharine in the second one; around them there's nothing that reveals the limits of the novel in its classical form or psichology.

The character of Virginia Woolf evolved out of the opened ways by her predecessors. Belonging all of them to bourgeoisie, to a distinguished class (like Katharine Hilbery and, naturally, Dalloway), their interests are placed in the level of the spirit things. They frequent the British Museum, Cambridge (Jacob) or Oxford (Edward in "The Years"). One is fond of Mathematics (Katharine); other writes poems (Mr. Camichael); another writes an English Literature Essay (Miss Allen).
Everyone of them devote their spirits to the best sources: Spinoza, Spencer, Marlowe and Shakespeare. None of them doubt that these interests determine too much between them and determine strongly the original character of their lives and their personality.
But Virginia Woolf's characters don't accept to be categorized. Lovers of the loneliness, they feel the necessity of the breakout; the necessity of getting closed to nature (like Jacob) seems to gain access to their truth.
A great feeling of loving the life appears in the writings of Virginia Woolf. Life was her real religion, because her production has a lack of religious feelings, she didn't mind God. Mrs. Swithin ("Between Acts"), practicing and kind woman (the only one), doesn't obscure to Doris Kilman, surly and staunch devout woman.
Through the characters of Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay or Eleonor Pargiter, Virginia Woolf condemn what, from her point of view, breeds only hypocrisy and sadness.

Finally, Virginia Woolf's writings are going to be classified in three sections:

1. The most important and the first one, due to the number, the quality and its influence, is: "The Voyage Out", 1915; "Night and Day", 1919; "Jacob's Room", 1922; "Mrs. Dalloway", 1925; "To the Lighthouse", 1925; "Orlando", 1928; "The Waves", 1931; "The Years", 1937; "Between Acts", 1941; "Kew Gardens", 1919; and, "A Mouse", 1943.
2. The second one is compound by her essays and critic writings; between them we have to emphazise: "The Common Reader", 1925; "Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Women", 1926; "A Room of One's Own", 1929; "A letter to a young poet".
3. The last one is compound by some biographies, and we must mention between them: "Flush".

"BLOOMSBURY" AND BEYOND: STRACHEY, WOOLF, AND MANSFIELD.

Woolf's'significant forms', shaped from glancing insights and carefully placed and iterated details, are to some degree echoed in the work of her New Zealand-born contemporary, Katherine Mansfield (the pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, 1888-1923). If Mansfield's success with reviewers and readers seems to have stimulated Woolf's jealousy rather than critical generosity (Woolf generally found Mansfield 'inscrutable'), both writers can be seen as developing the post-impressionist principle of suggestiveness and rhythm from a distinctively feminine point of view. Mansfield worked determinedly on a small scale, concentrating on carefully pointed, delicately elusive short stories. Her succinct narratives, collected as "In a German Pension" (1911), "Bliss, and other Stories" (1920), and "The Garden Party, and other Stories" (1922), are brief triumphs of style, a style which serves both to suggest a pervasive atmosphere and to establish a series of evanescent sensationes (creaks, yawns, draughts, cries, footfalls, bird-calls, and cats' miaows). Where "In a German Pension", conveys a fastidious dislike of Teutonic manners and mannerisms (though Mansfield declined to have the volume reprinted during the Great War), her later stories move towards a grater technical mastery and to a larger world-view. She draws significantly on the landscapes and flora of her native New Zealand (in, for example, 'The Aloe'), she attempts to explore the responses of a wide spectrum of social types, and, by means of a style which takes on a yet more shimmering elusiveness, she endeavours to describe the mysterious 'diversity of life... Death included'. Her own untimely death from tuberculosis cut short a remarkably innovative career.

The traditional position for the Victorian woman as far as her public life was concerned had been established by the first Reform Act of 1832 which , by employing the term "male person" for the first time in English history, expressly debarred women from exercising the franchise it created. James Mill, the architect of the Act, stated in 1832 the principle on which such legislation was based:

"One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those other individuals may be struck off from political rights without inconvenience... In this light also women may be regarded, the interests of almost all of whom is involved either in that of their fathers, or in that of their husbands."

This meant that for almost a century women's political function was to continue as an indirect one of influence rather than participation, in parallel with their legal and economy dependency. They were, in all respects, relative creatures, particularly after marriage in which their property, earnings, liberty and conscience belonged to their husbands, as did their children.

Opposition to this state of affairs and support for it were the poles of the debate concerning women. At one extreme were writers like William Thompson or Harriet Martineau; they didn't agree with the role which women were playing. But in contrast were writers like Mrs. Ellis or Mrs. Oliphant.

Within this political context were the more localized debates concerning women's education, their role in marriage, their position if unmarried, their interaction with the working classes, and their scope and responsabilities if they became writers. During the early Victorian period, partly because of the Reform Act and partly bucause of new ideas flowing from post-Revolutionary France, there was an awareness that Women were facing changes, that, like working-class men, they had become a focus for ideological conflict between democratic notions on the rights of individuals and traditionalists views on the "natural" spheres and orders of society. For the woman writer at the time of the accession of Queen Victoria the effect of those controversies was to be a significant widening of her activities: new fields for enquiry, new causes to espouse, new moralities to expound and, above all, a new self-consciousness about her role, particularly as a novelist.

The Evangelical Revival of the period 1780-1830, as a new 'religion of the heart', intensified this movement in its stress on marriage not only as a gateway to respectability and stability and an organizing factor in the development of middle-classness, but also as a sacramental union enshrining familial intimacy and domestic virtue. This new formalation served to enhance the position of women. Within this context it was inevitable that the expected province of the eighteenth-century woman writer, particularly the novelist, should be that of romantic sentiment. Of course, women wrote Gothic novels. Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" (1800) and "The Absentee" (1812) can be described as 'social-protest' novels, and there were the religious and 'useful' tracts of women like Hannah More, Mrs Barbauld and Mrs Mareet, but essentially the substance of women's writing in the pre-Victorian period was the story of a young woman's courtship, as far as the novel was concerned, and a woman's domestic behaviour as maiden, wife or mother in respect of non-fiction.

The Victorian novelist was overwhelmingly to retain this romantic interest as at least a framework for her fiction; those who did not use a love-and-marriage story as their basic narative structure were unusual. The significant developments from this eighteenth-century inheritance were the greater infusion into the love story of social commentary of a serious and more or less didactic nature, and a strong sense that the wider social scene was of concern to women. The skill and versatility with which women writers developed an interplay between the romantic and the socio-political interests in their novels led not only to the 'classic' social-problem novel such as "North and South" but also to the more diffused social seriousness of "Middlemarch" and Mrs Humphry Ward's Marcella and to the passionate polemicism of Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley" and Olive Schreiner's "The Story of an African Farm". Essentially, the domestic comedy of manners of a Jane Austen type became enlarged, throughout the century, to include all the serious social issues of the day. In spite of their politically marginalized position, and their presumed enclosure within the home, middle-class women, and especially women writers, increasingly expected to look outwards to their industrial society, to the problems of poverty, urban overcrowding, chid exploitation and prostitution. The Victorian heroine's love-life, and her expectations of marriage, became, as it were, the woof of the material of the woman's novel, of which the warp was the Condition of England, including the condition of women in England.

This widening sphere of women's interests was also, and not surprisingly, evident in their non-fiction writings; women became some of the most daring of social commentators and even when they remained content to write of the domestic sphere, or to endorse a traditionalist view of women's role, this was done with a greater political awareness and sense of the potential alternatives.

For the woman writer who wanted to engage with the issues of her time, there was ample opportunity to do so in the phenomenal growth in periodical literature during the early years of the nineteenth century. Whith the founding of the "Edinburgh Review" in 1802, the great age of the serious journal, literary and political in its orientation, began, and by 1830 with the "Quarterly Review" and the "Westminster Review", "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine", the "Examiner", the "Athenaeum" and the "Spectator" in existence, the reading public was feasted with facts, opinions and comments. Such an expansion offered the woman writer a serious outlet for her thoughts, paid her well, and provided an intellectual and psychological stimulus for women in general and perhaps particualrly for novelists.

A woman who exemplified the trends of female writing of the early Victorian period was Harriet Martineau (1802-76). She was also a powerful influence on many of her successores. Martineau's first literary publications were, significantly, "Female writers on Practical Divinity" and "On Female Education" for the Unitarian 'Monthly Repository' in 1822 and 1823. In the first of these she pointed to the success women had had, particularly the admired Hannah More, in promoting virtue and bringing 'the spirit of religion into company', and in the second she argued for a greater equality in the educational treatment of girls and boys. The two articles demonstrate her belief in the intellectual capabilities of women and they also declare her didactic intentions as a writer.

Charlotte Elizabeth (Mrs Tonna) (1790-1846) differed from Harriet Martineau in the extreme Evangelicalism of her religious views and in her pronounced acceptance of female inferiority: 'We repudiate all pretensions to equality with men [except in] the underlying principle of a spiritual existence... Let us, then, contentedly bear our impressive designation as "the weaker vessel"'. Yet being 'a weaker vessel' did not prevent her from writing the same kind of fictionalized documentary as Martineau's "Illustrations" and also producing in 1841 a pioneering and highly influential novel, "Helen Fleetwood", aimed at improving the lot of women. (Charlotte Elizabeth disclaimed that it was fiction at all). The 'cause' she embraced was the need for adequate legislation to regulate the employment of women and children in the manufacturing industry; she also attacked the Poor Law Commissioners and the practice of luring impoverished rural families into factory work and urban degradation. Her method in "Helen Fleetwood" is to follow the fortunes, or misfortunes, of a not untypical poor family, the Widow Green and her four grandchildren and adopted grandchild Helen, from the country, where they are dispossessed of their cottage by the Poor Law Commissioners, to Manchester Where each of them falls victim to the factory system, the family is dispersed, and the saintly, persecuted Helen dies of consumption. She addressed her word to women and attributed its success to the persuasive exertions of a reform-minded female audience. As she never ceased to point out to her readers, to be 'wilfully ignorant [or industrial abuses], or to know that they exist, and to take no decided step towards putting them away... is a matter between the English Lady and Him to whom she must give account'.

Frances Trollope (1780-1863) had a much greater taste for fictional extravangance than Charlotte Elizabeth. Several of Trollope's thirty-four novels have detective-story plots and are also full of comic, sensational or satiric incidents. This is true of her two social-protest novels, "Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy" (1839) and "Jessie Phillips" (1844). "Michael Armstrong", based on real-life sources and written in support of the Ten Hours Movement, makes use of a female investigator, Mary Brotherton, who uncovers the 'crime of child exploitation whilst also acting as the middle-class conscience in the novel; "Jessie Phillips" is a protest against the new Poor Law, particularly the bastardy clauses whereby no claims could be made against the supposed father of an illegitimate child, but the novel also contains a love-story and is something of a whodunit. Mrs Trollope was nos skilful enough as a novelist to blend the fictional and the documentary elements into a coherent and plausible whole, as Elizabeth Gaskell was later to do, but nevertheless both novels are powerful indictments of current abuses and, like Charlotte Elizabeth's work, are written with readable vigour with the intention of mobilizing middle-class opinion, particualrly that of the women of the wealthy manufacturing families who were guilty of an 'extraordinary degree of ignorance' concerning the working-classes.

Being a wise woman in the 1850s was also a buoyant, if less richly endowed, experience because this decade marked the beginning of the Women's Movement. Feminism to that point had been a matter of individual and often oblique protest expressed in such writings as Mrs Jameson's "Characteristics of Women" (1832) and her "Athenaeum" articles of 1846, or Lady Morgan's "Woman and her Master" (1840), Mrs Hugo Reid's "A Plea for Women" (1843) and Anne Righelieu Lamb's "Can Women Regenerate Society? (1844). Such writings were on the increase during the 1840s and their main thrust was towards the better, more practical education of women and a proper, informed use of their influence. But during the 1850s feminism began to harden from isolated discontents into, as Ray Strachey calls it, The Cause, or, more accurately, a number of Causes: female suffrage, the admission of women into higher education, the marriage and property laws, and the plight and prospects of the unmarried woman. The more aggressive tenor of the decade was epitomized in three pieces of writing: an article by Harriet Taylor (1807-58) for the "Westmister Review" in 1851, Barbara Leigh Smith's 'Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women' (1854) and her pamphlet 'Women and Work' (1857).

The basis of Harriet Taylor's article was a report in the New York Tribune of a Women's Rights Convention 'claiming equality in education, in industrial pusuits, and in political rights'. This American example, Taylor says, will be followed in Britain, indeed, the first step has already been taken in a women's franchise petition, drawn up at a public meeting in Sheffield and presented to the House of Lords by the Earl of Carlisle.

Where Harriet Taylor expresed a whole philosophy of women's rights, Barbara Leigh Smith (1827-91) focused on two specific issues, women's legal position and their right to work. As a founding member of the Langham Place Group, Barbara Leigh Smith was one of the most active feminists of the mid-century. Her 'Brief Summary...', written to promote a Married Women's Property Bill, sold for a few pence and was widely read; it exposed the Common Law position whereby a woman's person and property belonged entirely to her husband in whom was submerged her legal identity. "Women adn Work", less cogently argued and more controversial, even among feminists, claimed for women the right to do whatever work they were competent to do.

Although strictly not of the decade, Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley" (1849) sets the tenor of the debates Taylor and Leigh Smith were conducting and, as a fiction, anticipates their campaigns. More than any previous novel it articulates male-female antagonisms, mistrust of marriage, and yet also a fear or singleness. Although it concludes as a comedy with a brace of weddings, its residual tone is gloomy with regard to sexual relations. It also takes a more despairing view than the other novels discussed here so far on women's ability to influence the course of social, and particularly industrial, events.

The nature of the male-female antagonism breaks down largely into contempt for women on the part of men, and women's fears and half-acceptance of this contempt, their fear of men themselves and yet their need of them: 'bondswomen and slaves', Caroline calls herself and Shirley. Men's contempt for women ranges from Joe Scott's opinion that 'women are a kittle and a froward generation' through Mr Helstone's incomprehension of them as 'a different, probable a very inferior, order of existence' to Robert Moore's insensitivity and condescension towards Caroline and Louis Moore's ardent mastery over Shirley as 'younger, frailer, feebler, more ignorant than I'. As for women's fate in marriage, the novel seems to be offering vindication of Hariet Taylor's statement that 'numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other occupation for their feelings or their activities'. Mrs Pryor confesses that 'if I had not been so miserable as a governess, I should never have married', and her belief is that marriage 'is never wholly happy'.

There are, of course, male monsters of a female making in "Shirley" too: the dried pedant Helstone, the fools of curates, the brute that Mrs Pryor's husband is presumed to be. The difference is that these have power whilst the women, however a monstrous an image men may attribute to them, are powerless in effect.

Yet to live in the power of men is preferable to single, life, especially a single life without work. It is on behalf of the 'redundant' women of England that Caroline makes her most impassioned plea.

Caroline's painful questioning of the role of the single women in "Shirley" is answered by the semiautobiographical "The Experience of Life" (1853) by Elizabeth Sewell (1815-1906). Sally, its plain little heroine, is devoted to religious duty, family commitments, friends, and the setting up of a small school; her life is confined within an uneventful domestic environment unrelieved by romantic incident.

There are some parallels between "The Experience of Life" and "Rachel Gray" (1856) by Julia Kavanagh (1824-77) in that both are concerned with drab and unromantic lives, but "Rachel Gray" as a story about a seamstress faces the social scene more squarely than Sewell's book and it has little of her cheerful resignation.

It was part of Charlotte Brontë's understanding of the powerless and dependent plight of women that, unlike Charlotte Elizabeth of Mrs Trollope, she addressed her plea on behalf of single women in "Shirley" to men and not to women. In this she recognized that whatever women's influence, the actual effecting of reform lay within male control. But Charlotte Brontë's despair goes further than this in her denial not only of the direct power of women but of their influence also. "Shirley" demonstrates that women are marginal to the main interests of a man's life; even an affectionate family-man like Mr Yorke had been preparated to reject the passion of his youth for business interests.

One of Harriet Taylor's complaints in her "Westminster Review" article was against 'the literary class of women' whose anxiety to please men in the world of publishing and reviewing made them unsympathetic towards the women's cause.

Although George Eliot does not neatly fit Harriet Taylor's description of a 'literaty class of woman', her ambivalence towards the Women's Movement has frequently been remarked on. Her attack on women writers in 1856, also in the "Westminster Review", exhibits a characteristically complex reponse to the question of women's sphere and capabilities. "Silly novels by Lady Novelists" was written by someone not yet a professional novelist who objected to the lack of professionalism in the women novelists of her time. George Eliot (or Marian Evans, as she still was, although the review was anonymous like most periodical reviewing of the period) was deliberately distancing herself from the 'busy idleness' which produced a 'trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature', and her article expresses the anxiety of someone who fears contamination from her sex and whose attitude towards her membership of it is contradictory. In a sense, Marian Evans in this article was clearing the ground for her future as George Eliot. Her statement that 'Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men... women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest - novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience', while it champions women's literary difference, has a qualifying uneasiness of tone which accords with her decision to publish her own novels under a male pseudonym, a surrogacy which informs the narrational attitudes of her (first) two fictional works of the 1850s.

The 1860s saw an increase in the formal organization of the Women's Suffrage Movement and, with the defeat in 1867 of J. S. Mill's amendment to the Reform Bill to extend the franchise to women, the decade also saw the first of many parliamentary disappointments that were to frustrate the progress of the suffrage campaign for the next sixty years. The 1860s were also the years when women's entry into higher education began to be realized with the founding of Girton and Newnham Colleges in Cambridge in 1870 and 1871 respectively. The issues of the vote and education came to dominate the Woman Question during this period and were to do so for the rest of the century, although always accompanied by the related issue of the fate of the single woman. It is interesting to see this network of interest, which really condense into the right of the middle-class woman to direct participation in the legislative procedures of the country and to equality of cultural and professional opportunities, being debated by women of apparently opposing sides like Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) and Margaret Oliphant (1828-97). In 1868 Cobbe, a tireless worker for female suffrage, wrote an article for "Fraser's Magazine" on 'Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors' which is a trenchant plea, in the wake of J. S. Mill's parliamentary failure, for female franchise. Earlier in the decade she had arghued with equal eloquence for the right of single women to enjoy respect as useful citizens and to have access to degrees and professions. But how much more useful would such women be if eligible to train professionally as doctors and nurses, doing scientifically and for payment what they already do without proper knowledge and for free. But Cobbe's brave advocacy of female independence was, nevertheless, subject to a belief that 'Marriage was manifestly the Creator's plan for humanity' and that 'the great and paramount duties of a mother and wife once adopted, every other interest sinks, by the beneficent laws of our nature, into a subordinate place in normally constituted minds'. Indeed, it is Cobbe's idealism about the potential of marriage that fuels her feminism and makes her so strong a supporter of enlightenend celibacy as preferable to the debased versions of matrimony she saw around her, the unsatisfactory nature of which she attributes to the infantilization of women which men encourage.
Margaret Oliphant, on the other hand, was no supporter of women's suffrage or the women's movement at all, as her articles for "Blackwood's Magazine" in the late 1850s and the 1860s testify. The most vehement of these, "The Great Unrepresented", was written in opposition to J. S. Mill's intention to enfranchise that group of women to which she herself belonged. Oliphant's rejection of representative equality for this group is clear enough: 'We are content with that place in the world's economy which God has given us... and Mr. Mill must pardon us if we decline to seek another place'. Yet her reasons for this refusal are as contradictory as Cobbe's support for celibacy; her satisfaction with things as they were arose from something very close to contempt for legislative procedure and a sense of women's certain difference from, and probable superiority to, men.
The fatigues and disillusionments of Oliphant's own arduous life, much of it spent 'propping up' inadequate men, show through in the unromantic and slightly disingenous conservatism of this article. The novel she published the same year, "Miss Marjoribanks" (1866), although one of the funniest books of the period, displays a similar rather cynical obstinacy about the need for change. It is the story of Lucilla Marjoribanks, 'a large girl' who has learnt about 'political economy and things' at Mount Pleasant School, and who has the energy, determination and organizing ability of a general or a prime minister, yet who spends her young womanhood 'being a comfort' to her father and managing the petty affairs and intrigues of the little town of Carlingford. Lucilla is both an amusing and a formidable character, but neither her self-delucions nor her frustrations are explored, and when she marries at the end of the novel, with unseemly fictional haste and unlikelihood, there is the sense that deliberate limitations have been placed on the depiction of this spirited and powerful woman, that she has been sacrificed to conformity, to the need to be 'content with that place in the world's economy which God has given us'.

Elaine Showalter finds in the phenomenal success of women's sensation fiction of the 1860s a challenge to the doctrine of renunciation and submission that informed earlier women's fiction. But, of course, 'conventional' women characters were still being created by women writers.
A novelist who had long held the notion of women's dependent position, yet who had somewhat contradictorily been not only a prolific writer but also a successful editor of several religious magazines and an independent financier of philanthropic schemes, was Charlotte M. Yonge (1823-1901). Like all Yonge's novels, the best-selling "The Heir of Redcliffe" (1853) and "The Daisy Chain" (1856) are coloured by High Church religious feeling, by reverence for a certain type of military manhood and by a belief in women's ideal sphere as a domestic one under the protection and guidance of a sensible man. These ideas inform one of her best novels of the 1860s, "The Clever Woman of the Family" (1865), in which the 'clever', fatherless Rachel Curtis, determined to remain single, frets at the constraints of her position and, in terms which anticipate Dorothea Brooke's frustrations in "Middlemarch", cannot content herself with 'the quiet Lady Bountiful duties that had sufficed her mother and sister [and which] were too small and easy to satisfy a soul burning at the report of the great cry going up to heaven from a world of sin and woe'. Rachel's inexperince and gullibility lean her into many humorous and also some tragic consequences and, suitably chanstened, she must eventually admit to her own foolishness and need for loving supervision.

The view that women are a responsibility that men must shoulder and that to be a husband is really to be a father is very diffenten from the depiction of sexual relations in a novel nearly contemporary with "The Clever Woman of the Family", Elizabeth Gaskell's "Sylvia's Lovers" (1863). In Joseph Kestner's view, "Sylvia's Lovers", with George Eliot's "Felix Holt, the Radical" (1866), represents the summation of the social-protest novel by women. Both novels have a lesson to teach about the Condition of England, but they do so with a diffused and mediated didacticism that no longer advocates a single solution, such as the Ten Hours Bill, as earlier social-protest novels had done. Instead both novels make sophisticated investigations of current social, political and sexual abuses through and 'historical picturing... that might help the judgment greatly with regard to present and future events... the working out in detail of the various steps by which a political or social change was reached... brief, severely conscientious reproductions in their concrete incidents, of pregnant movements in the past'. In "Sylvia's Lovers" the 'pregnant movement' is the transition beginning in the last years of the eighteennth century from the spontaneous life-styles depending on agricultures and seafaring to the new commercial, entrepreneurial spirit of a dawning industrial age; in "Felix Holt" the movement is the triumph of liberalism in the period around the Reform Act of 1832. The suffering and vulnerability of the female characters in each novel, Sylvia and Mrs Transome particularly, are a poignant reminder of history's failure at such vital, 'pregnant' times to secure justice and freedom for women; they also point to the parallels between past and present, to how little women's situation has changed in the intervening years. Both novels use the condition and treatment of women as an index to the general state of the nation's health.

In describing her 'Choice of a Craft' Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) records her personal ambition as an advanced young woman of the later Victorian period and the direction her ambition took. The craft she chose, that of social investigator, represents the fulfilment of a prime motivation of the social-protest novel: the collection and dissemination of information about the working-classes with a view to legislative reform through the prompting of both individual and collective conscience. Beatrice Webb often mentions being 'tempted' or 'haunted' by the attractions of fiction and if she had lived at the time of Charlotte Elizabeth she would no doubt have written novels. But now, in the 1880s, the need is for a scientific approach to argue the case with more political direction and to transform personalized philanthropic feeling into a social programme.
But what made Beatrice Webb so effective a writer on these subjects and her artobiography "My Apprenticeship" one of the most readable of the centuty was her novelist's sense of character and location. Much of Beatrice Webb's investigative work was done amongst her 'sweated' trades of tailoring and dressmaking in the East End of London, the workshops where a 'woman by working very hard could earn 10s. a week, with 2s. deducted for silk... working from eight [a.m.] to ten [p.m.] without looking round, and master working up to two o'clock, and often beginning at five the next morning'. Webb also took over the management of an East End tenement, Katharine Bueldings, owned by a group of philanthropists led by Octavia Hill, to house the poor in cheap and sanitary conditions. This is the scene of one of the few social-protest novels written by women in the last part of the nineteenth century, "A City Girl: A Realistic Story" (1887) by Margaret Harkness (1854-1921), Webb's friend and cousin."A City Girl..." recombines elements of previous 'fallen woman' fiction by causing the seamstress-heroine, Nelly Ambrose, who lives with her unsympathetic famiily in an East End tenement, to be seduced by a married 'Radical and Gentleman' from the West End. Nelly is a good worker and can earn enough to keep herself and her family and she is also betrothed to George, the tenement caretakes. It is nos destitution or isolation that is the cause of her 'fall', but a desire for what she believes is more beautiful and cultured than anything her own life can provide. It is the same longing for superiority which stirs Hardy's Tess Durbeyfield. Nelly's lover takes her to a café to eat cake and hear music, to the theatre, to Dew Gardens, and all these experiences represent to her a world of middle-class romance and beauty which is not merely a holiday but a 'Paradise', for which she is prepated to abandon her work and her respectability. Although the ending of the novel, where George rescues and forgives Nelly, is, as John Goode says, evasive and trite, Margaret Harkness's understanding of the psychological forces which cause Nelly's downfall make her treatment of this topic the least sentimental, sensational of judgmental of any in the nineteenth century with the possible exception of George Moore's "Esther Waters". It is, of course, an indication of the greater freedom with which such a topic could be discussed at this time, particularly as far as women were concerned, that she could write about it in such a relatively untrammelled way.
At the time of writing "A City Girl..." Margaret Harkness, like Beatrice Webb was working in the East End, and both women were members of an informal grouping of socialists who were also feminists and which included Eleanor Marx (1855-98) and Olive Schreiner (1855-1920). To Eleanor Marx the problem of women was not really one to be considered apart from ideas concerning the total overhaul of economic and social relations.Eleanor Marx saw the end of women's oppression as a corollary to the 'tremendous social change' involved in a socialist revolution.
In "The Story of an African Farm" (1883), a work which powerfully influenced several generations of women and men Olive Schreiner attempted to fictionalize the related oppressions of class, sex and age. "The Story of an African Farm" tells of three children - proud, clever Lyndall, long-suffering Em and persecuted, philisophical Waldo - who are reared on a remote farm on the Karoo by ignorant and sadistic adults. The novel's distinctive power comes from its evocation of a drought-ridden landscape which reflects the thirsting spirits of the children, from its sharp sense of human cruelty in the figure of Bonaparte Blenkins and from the meditations upon injustice, power and love which the children engage in. For women readers Lyndall was, and still is, a particularly compelling character.
Olive Schreiner's Lyndall heralds the era of the New Woman. Although the label was not applied until 1894, the New Woman was identified as a type and by a variety of other names throughout the 1880s. She was better educated than her foremothers, inclined to be rather 'fast', 'wild' and 'manly' and above all, she was highly critical of the marriage institution. In part the New Woman was a media creation, the grotesque du Maurier figure of Punch who readily became transformed into the sluttish, neglectful woman of the suffragette cartoon, but there was a reality to her in the number of women who were attaching marriage and who in their life-styles were voluntarily choosing unorthodox relationships. Mona Caird's article on 'The Morality of Marriage' in the "Fortnightly Review" in 1890 was one of the first to formulate the anti-marriage principles of this new generation of feminists. Caird recommends instead of marriage a contract between two economically independent individuals. If women claimed lives and incomes of their own, 'marriage, as we now understand it, would cease to exist'.
For those women who opposed the New Woman and her feminist and anti-marriage philosophies, unlocking the closed door onto the 'terra incognita' of femininity would equally have seemed a vulgar and self-indulgent activity. Paradoxically, although they took their stand on the special sphere they believed women should occupy, writers like Mrs Humphry Ward, Eliza Lynn Linton and Margaret Oliphant defined this sphere in social terms, according to women's roles and influence as wives and mothers.
Women's activities outside the home should be confined to the social sphere, on School Boards, Boards of Guardians and in work with the sick and poor, areas which call upon the qualities of 'sympathy and disinterestedness' which the 'natural position and functions of women, as they are at present, tend to develop' and which would be diminished by active political life.
The vast majority of Mrs Humphry Ward's (1851-1920) novels are love-and-marriage stories and explore women's role and destiny. Such and understanding of sexual relations had, of course, remained the dominant one throughout the century and in essentials Mrs Ward's position in the 1890s differed little from Mrs Ellis's in the 1840s. But Mrs Ward was too acute a social observer and proselytizer not to realize that her novels must take account of women's changing life-styles and aspirations. Marriage must be shown as able to accommodate women's new ambitions to be socially significant whilst still maintaining its traditional pattern.

These are some notes Virginia Woolf wrote in order to read to the Women's service League. Virginia Woolf thought about he difficulties that a women writer had, later she told how she had got rid of them. And finally she told her audience that their fight hadn't already finished. Reading the following words is a good way to realize how women felt, thought about their position and role in the society of thir generation, etc.......

"When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true that I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage - fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago - by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot - many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was no broken by the scatching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare - if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

But to tell you my story - it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right - from ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all - to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month - a very glorious day it was for me - by a letter from an editor containing a check for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat - a beartiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbors.

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tomented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her - you may not know what I mean by The Angel of the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it - in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all - I need not say it - she was pure. Her purtity was supposed to be her chief beauty - her blushes, her great grace. In those days - the last of Queen Victoria - every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money - shall we say five hundred pounds a year? - so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must - to put it bluntly - tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object - a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is "herself"? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here - out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.

But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motorcar. And it was thus that I became a novelist - for it is a very stange thing that people will give you a motorcar if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the sorld as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist's state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure, she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The tance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers - they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first - killing the Angel of the House - I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful - and yet they are very difficult to define. Out wardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many projudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open - when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant - there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labor be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it - here in this hall surrounded by women practicing for the first time in history I know not how many different professions - is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labor and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for youselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers - but not tonight. My time is up; and I must cease."

This is going to be the end of my project. To sum up what I've just said I would rewrite my "First Paper" and I think it would be a right end; but I'm not repeating it and I'm going to recall all the ideas, more or less:

First of all, you have read the biography of Virginia Woolf, reading it everyone can suppose this woman was going to become a classic of English Literature, but if it has not been so, later your have the most important ideas about her works (so that you can realize the way she thought and wrote), in that section you can guess the way that novels are going to follow without reading them in order to get that you can choose any writing with a superficial knowledge about what you are going to read.

In the following part I have written about some Victorian women prose-writers, their thoughts and writings; mixed with all these ideas, you can see how women lived and how they developed their situation.

At the end of the work you can find some Virginia Woolf's thoughts about women prose-writers and their difficulties.