The novel is the least concentrated form of art. (p.134)
Virginia Woolf’s writings about women, women and writing, women and fiction, are deeply felt and often inspiring, even if you’re not a woman or a writer of fiction. The one caveat is that, after you’ve read a certain number of her essays on the same subject, you find the same examples, anecdotes and arguments recurring. Bit samey. But then this is true of many other essayists. And if they’re good arguments and examples, why not?
Women and fiction
David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.
- Reading and Writing
- Life-Writing
- Women and Fiction
- Looking On
This blog post summarises and comments on five of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’. The exception is ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931), which I summarise in a separate post.
- The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
- Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
- Women and Fiction (1929)
- Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
- Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
- Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]
Obviously there is a strong feminist tone to Woolf’s essays about women and women writers and women and fiction but in my opinion none of the six are as powerful as Woolf’s book-length essay Three Guineas. Guineas is so seismic because it brings together such a wealth of scandalous evidence demonstrating the deep-rooted sexism and misogyny operating at every level of British society, not only in the dark Victorian days, but right up to its date of publication in the late 1930s. Reading it permanently changed my view of the plight of so many women in the Victorian century and on into Woolf’s time.
1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905: 2 pages)
W. L. (William Leonard) Courtney (1850 to 1928) was a philosopher, journalist and sometime fellow of New College, Oxford. He wrote a book called ‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’. You can read it online. This is very short review of the book which Woolf published the Guardian, 25 January 1905 i.e. right at the very start of her career, when she was just turning 23.
On page one of his book Courtney says there is a feminine note in fiction and studies eight women writers of the day to show it, but Woolf quickly points out that he doesn’t, in fact, succeed. (The women writers in question are Mrs Humphrey Ward, Gertrude Atherton, Mrs Woods, Mrs Voynich, Miss Robins, Miss Mary Wilson, along with the diaries of six other women from history.) And anyway:
Is it not too soon after all to criticise the ‘feminine note’ in anything? And will not the adequate critic of women be a woman?
She summarises some of Courtney’s propositions, that women:
- are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work – disproved by Sappho and Jane Austen
- excel in ‘close analytic miniature work
- are more happy when they reproduce than when they create
- ‘s genius is for psychological analysis
Woolf says this is all very nice but there have been too few successful women novelists to tell; we’ll need to come back in 100 years to see if any of it is true.
Courtney is surprised to find the women novelists in his study to be so varied, which is laughable.
He makes the characteristically stupid intellectual argument that his age is one of special and particular decline, the same thing idiot writers have claimed in every year of recorded history. Thus he says that more and more novels are written by women for women and that, as a result, the novel as a work of art is disappearing. What an arse, one of the legion of clever misogynist idiots Woolf cites to such powerful effect in Three Guineas.
To all of which Woolf (still a very young woman) sensibly replies:
The first part of his statement may well be true; it means that women having found their voices have something to say which is naturally of supreme interest and meaning to women, but the value of which we cannot yet determine.
The assertion that the woman novelist is extinguishing the novel as a work of art seems to us, however, more doubtful.
It is, at any rate, possible that the widening of her intelligence by means of education and study of the Greek and Latin classics may give her that sterner view of literature which will make an artist of her, so that, having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she will in due time fashion it into permanent artistic shape.
So this short review is really notable for this last bit, for her already feeling the need for art and artistry and ‘permanent artistic shape’ in the novel, things she was, of course, to go on and try to give it.
2. Women Novelists (1918: 3 pages)
Reginald Brimley Johnson (1867 to 1932) was a literary critic, editor, author and publisher. In 1918 he published a book titled ‘The Women Novelists’. This is Woolf’s review of it, published in the Times Literary Supplement.
She praises it. She says Johnson has read more novels by women than anyone had heard of. Also he doesn’t make sweeping generalisations, but is very cautious in his conclusions. She calls Fanny Burney the mother of English fiction. She laments the way the burden of proof remained with women authors to justify herself, and the practical difficulties they laboured under: Jane Austen slipping her papers under a book whenever anyone came into the drawing room; Charlotte Bronte leaving off work to pare the potatoes.
When she notes the criticisms of immorality George Eliot laboured under and how they continue to constrict women writers in the preset (1918) you realise it wasn’t that long since Eliot died. George Eliot died in 1880, just two years before Woolf was born. This essay is from over a hundred years ago. Many women, like Woolf, were alive who had been born in the reign of Victoria and still remembered the terrible stifled life women led.
She makes the point that Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot didn’t just adopt men’s names so as to get published; but also to free their own minds from the matrix of restrictions placed not just on women’s social, legal and financial freedom, but on their imaginative freedom.
She repeats a point made in A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas which is that, above and beyond the suppression of women, it’s making women authors self conscious of themselves as women which so often undermines their efforts to produce art. The truly independent artist is sexless; the issue of their sex doesn’t enter into it. They just create art.
She agrees with Johnson that all women’s writing must be marked as feminine but wonders what ‘feminine’ actually means. She thinks Johnson is wise in not reaching a conclusion about this but accepting that women writers radically differ. She quotes several of Johnson’s generalisations which all feel like sexist rubbish:
- Women are born preachers and always work to an ideal.
- Women is the moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any ideal of art, but of sympathy with life.
- George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine.
- Women are humorous and satirical rather than imaginative.
- Women have a great sense of emotional purity than men but a less alert sense of honour.
This is why I think no-one should every generalise about the sexes: it’s impossible not to sound like an idiot.
She thinks you can immediately tell the difference between a male and a female author and, after all, this might have been true in the 1920s. She thinks as soon as they start to describe a character you can instantly tell whether it’s a male or female author.
The motive of criticising men may have motivated many women writers to take up authorship.
There are sides of each sex which are only really seen and know by the opposite sex.
3. Women and Fiction (1929: 8 pages)
Why did women suddenly start writing fiction in the mid-18th century? Why did they start producing classic after classic of English literature?
A difficulty answering this is that history is about men so that ‘very little is known about women’.
But we do know that it requires special circumstances to be able to write, time, freedom from practical worries, a space or room of one’s own, and all these for most of human history most women have lacked or, to be clearer, have been deprived of.
And then motherhood: of the four great nineteenth century women writers – Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot – none had children and two were unmarried.
Why did they all write fiction, not epic poems or plays? Easy: ‘The novel is the least concentrated form of art’ (p.134). Readers are free to pick up and put down novels in a way you can’t do to poems or plays and the same is true of their authors, and she repeats the anecdote of Austen slipping her writings under a book or blotting pad when anyone came into the room or Charlotte Bronte breaking off writing to peel the potatoes.
Banned from undertaking any profession or work, middle class women were trapped in the home where they had precious little to do except observe the minutiae of each other’s behaviour. In other words, women were trained to become novelists.
She compares the maturity of George Eliot, disapproved of by society and locking herself away in St John’s Wood, with the wild life of Leo Tolstoy, soldier, playboy, traveller, thoroughly prepared by his society to be a novelist of astonishing breadth. (The Austen, Bronte and Eliot points are all made in A Room of One’s Own; they were obviously stock examples for Woolf.)
Being women writers led, in Woolf’s view, to impurity. What she means is that reading good women’s novels you’re always aware of an element of special pleasing; they protest against restrictions and lobby for the independence of their sex. However politically valid, this compromises their artistry, the work’s integrity. It needed a very strong mind to resist ‘the temptations to anger’ at women’s wholesale oppression, a feat only achieved by Jane Austen, whose work is pure and unsullied by resentment and grievance.
And so Woolf thinks the great change that has come over women’s writing in her days is the women are no longer angry and indignant. But many challenges remain.
One is the structure of language itself, which is male, made by men for men. The male sentence is ‘too lose, too heavy, too pompous’ for a woman’s use.
Then, men and women have different values, so that the very subject of the book, all its related smaller topics, descriptions and so on, are liable to clash with the values promoted by a male society. So that male critics are likely to find what women writers write about ‘weak or trivial or sentimental’ (p.136).
Nineteenth century women’s writing was likely to be skewed and impurified by special pleading for their sex and, in the same way, tended to by autobiographical, driven by the author’s need to share her suffering. Now, Woolf reckons, having passed through this phase, women are writing more about other women.
And in so doing she discovers that so much of women’s lives has been ephemeral, the meals cooked, the clothes washed, the children raised. Looking back there are no records or monuments. Thus women’s experience is like a dark continent, unexplored.
At the same time as this is being begun, legal impediments to women in the professions were being lifted and so current women novelists have this whole new subject to record: women coming in out of the shadows and entering the male world.
Thus she sums up contemporary women’s writing as brave, sincere. It is not bitter as the writing of the nineteenth century could be, and does not insist upon its femininity.
Again the essay ends with a description of her own practice. She says now women have won the vote and are allowed to enter the professions and earn a living, some women writers will become more socially conscious and critical and political. But there will be an equal and opposite reaction by which other women writers will reject the outside world altogether and cultivate their poetic facility. Be butterflies rather than gadflies.
Then she lets herself down a bit, and indicates the weakness of her position by saying this poetic turn will lead them to ‘examine the wider questions which the poet tries to solve – of our destiny and the meaning of life’ (p.138).
It’s odd that she’s so progressive in her analysis of the sociological situation of women and yet, when questioned on her artistic goals, steps right back into the nineteenth century, venerating a notion of The Poetic, The True and The Beautiful which hasn’t changed since the death of Keats in 1821.
She ends by saying more and more women have the leisure time and little money to write and out of this will hopefully come, fiction writing that is more poetic, but also women having the time to train for slightly more demanding genres such as essays, criticism, history and biography.
4. Professions for Women (1931: 5 pages)
In 1931 Woolf was invited to address the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service. This is her talk.
She was invited to talk about her experiences in her profession. But her profession is an odd one, literature. So many women have been successful writers because there is such a low bar to entry: all you need to make a start is a pen and some paper.
She spends a couple of pages describing how the one thing she’s really proud of is killing the Angel of The House. This was the name of a hugely popular poem by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore which, as the name suggests, depicted the stereotypical Victorian wife: selfless, kind, self-denying, retiring, modest, meek and pure. Woolf’s point is that when she began reviewing books she heard the voice of the Angel whispering over her shoulder, telling her to be modest, to respect the male author, not to say anything unbecoming an angel.
And so, in order to become herself, to become intellectually and imaginatively independent, she had to murder the Angel inside her.
Next she describes the demanding state a novelist has to cultivate:
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. She has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. She wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. She wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while she is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which she 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. (p.143)
The second big challenge she faced was writing truthfully about women’s physical experiences, ‘the truth about my own experiences as a body’, and she stumbled here. The problem is the severity of men’s criticism of such honesty. With the result that whenever she goes near the subject she can feel her censor kicking in. She still hasn’t solved the problem of honestly describing women’s physical experiences.
And she brings the talk back to her audience of young professional women by saying the obstacles she faced, which she’s just described, were psychological, the internalisation of society’s male values which she had to combat in her head. How much must her audience of young women, the first generation moving into the male-dominated professions, also be confronting their inner obstacles. That is why it is so important for them to share their stories and experiences.
6. Why? (1934)
In 1934 women undergraduates at Somerville College, Oxford, one of the two relatively new women-only colleges, launched a new magazine titled Lysistrata. (The name refers to the play of the same name by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in which the women of the Greek city states, sick of the endless Peloponnesian War, go on a sex strike i.e. deny their men sex till they agree to make peace. Which makes me think of the contemporary 4B movement, originating in Korea which has spread to the US.)
Anyway, the editor of Lysistrata asked her to contribute a piece and here it is. What is it going to be about? Well here Woolf indulges one of those flights of fancy which you either find charming and beautiful, or irritating and obtuse, depending on taste.
The whole little essay turns out to be premised on the idea that, like most people these days (1934), Woolf is constantly assailed by questions, but couldn’t find any place to ask them until she received this invitation from Lysistrata for an article. At which point, she says, a fleet of questions thronged her head all clamouring for expression. From this throng she chose one relevant to the start of a new term at a university, namely: why lecture and why be lectured?
Unlike the other essays, it almost feels as if she’s being paid by the word in this one. It feels like she’s writing any old rubbish to fill the space (2,000 words). Anyway, she spends the middle of this little text sharing a memory of attending a lecture on the French Revolution in some non-descript public building. The account is chiefly notable for the way she describes being bored and wandering off, losing the thread of the lecture and becoming distracted by details, the look of the room, the appearance of other students and then a fly buzzing around. (As she so often does; exactly as she describes losing interest in the speeches of the women at the English Women’s Co-operative Guild in the preceding essay.)
And this is exactly the kind of easily distracted, wandering attention she attributes to the female protagonists of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse (Mrs Ramsay) and The Years (Eleanor Pargiter) and Between the Acts (Lucy Swithin). It seems fairly obvious – from the way it occurs in all those characters and that you meet it in so many of the essays – that she was describing herself in those characters.
And her description of it made me think of the over-diagnosed modern condition, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The central attribute of this is ‘having a short attention span and being easily distracted’. QED.
Anyway, back in the argument about lectures, Woolf’s description of how bored she becomes in lectures turns into a plea that universities should drop lecturing altogether. She tells us that at the start of every term writers like her, and experts in every field, are bombarded with requests to come a deliver a lecture to this or that college. But she hates it. Doing so sets you up as an expert, a personage on a stage, and lures you into writing a long discourse with all the formal trimmings, guaranteeing it will be staggeringly dull.
So: why not abandon lectures. Why not invite speakers down from the stage and onto the floor among the audience and talk like ordinary men and women?
Good. Sorted. But she has more space to fill so she reverts to contrived metaphor that she is assailed by flocks of questions and has to choose just a few of them to include in this lecture, and chooses another one. This one is: Why learn English literature at universities when you can read it for yourself in books?
Instead of answering this in a logical way, Woolf takes a characteristically oblique and anecdotal approach by recalling a visit to a friend who is a publishers’ reader and who assailed her with a diatribe against students learning English. Does anyone write better for it, no. In fact, in her friend’s opinion, the big increase in teaching of English literature and writing books about English literature means all the manuscripts she’s sent end up sounding the same. In the long term it will end up by killing English literature off altogether.
Did that happen? No. More books, more novels and all other types of creating writing are published now, in 2025, than 90 years ago, despite the explosion in the teaching and studying of English literature, let alone the explosion of creative writing classes over the last half century. So it’s a snapshot of a grumpy woman from 90 years ago, grumpy and opinionated as any red-faced colonel at the bar of his club blustering about “young people these days”. Sort of interesting as social history; worthless as contribution to any debate.
This was by far the worst of the essays in this section because Woolf phoned it in. She was just going through the motions. It feels like she just cobbled together some fatuous ‘questions’ and made no serious effort to answer them. The conceit of being bombarded by questions and having to select a few is sort of interesting and maybe had the potential to be genuinely interesting, but felt squandered.
This little squib was only written for a student magazine but still, it feels weak.
Credit
‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction can be read on Amazon.
Related links
- Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf on Planet Gutenberg (a different selection)
- The Virginia Woolf Society
Books & Boots 