David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

1. Reading and Writing
2. Life-Writing
3. Women and Fiction
4. Looking On

This blog post summarises one of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’, titled ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931). For reference I list all 6 essays in the section. I reviewed the other five in a previous blog post. The essay is an introduction to a volume titled Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women‘, and it inspired me to go and read the whole book, which I have reviewed separately.

1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
2. Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
3. Women and Fiction (1929)
4. Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
6. Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

This is the longest and most complex essay in the section, at 14 pages. Well, maybe not complicated in structure, but complicated in 1) the eccentrically roundabout way in which Woolf addresses the subject matter and her own complicated responses to it, and 2) the multi-text nature of the book she’s introducing.

I’ll try to give a summary overview of the content, and then a description of my changing impressions as I read it through.

Summary

In 1931 Woolf was asked to write a preface to a collection of letters and photos written by members of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild and collected into a book titled Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women. The Guild was founded as far back as 1883 and Woolf was commissioned by one of its co-founders, Margaret Llewellyn Davies. The book was to be published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so it was very much an in-house project.

Woolf approaches the commission in a rather roundabout way and most of the introduction feels like a meandering digression. This is because she kicks off by describing two memories.

1) First of all, she casts her mind back to the annual Congress of the Guild she attended as long ago as 1913 and recalls, very vividly, being frustrated and bored. And also alienated by the fact that so many of the women speakers were solid working class and she found, to her dismay, that she had nothing in common with them, not even the language they spoke.

2) This is supplemented by a second memory, of going soon afterwards for a meeting with Davies at the head office of the Guild, in Hampstead, north London. Here Woolf raises the sense she had of being alienated from the predominantly working class membership of the Guild and frustration at not being able to break out of the prison of her class. She wishes the two classes of women could break through the class barriers, and simply share their experiences, talk and exchange experiences and ideas. But she fears that will never happen in her lifetime.

Although I’ve made it sound brisk and logical, that is not at all how it reads. I became quite irritated with Woolf’s alienated, detached self obsession, her inability to care about what any of the social and political issues the speakers at the Congress raised and discussed, her fatal tendency to drift off into her own world, focusing on what colour their dresses are, or inventing completely imaginary home lives for each of the speakers, rather than paying them the elementary respect of listening to what they were saying.

She tells us that it was at this point of the discussion in Hampstead that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the hundreds of letters she’d received from members of the Guild over the years, thanking her for giving them an opportunity to expand their horizons, to meet and talk and learn and gain the confidence to speak up and address political issues.

Woolf was immediately interested to read all these first-hand accounts and Davies promised to send them on but, for whatever reason, never did. Then the War came and a thousand other distractions and then the social confusion of the post-war period. So it was only years later that Davies got round to posting Woolf a big parcel packed with folders containing letters, notes and photographs from working class women, which she went through with fascination.

3) And this provides the third section of this little text, which is only three or four pages long but really vividly summarises the content of loads of those letters, one- or two-sentence summaries of the cramped, exploited, violent lives and abuse so many of these women suffered, for decades, for all their lives. It is shocking and sometimes harrowing evidence. Suddenly this short text bursts into colour, stops being about mimsy Virginia, becomes three-dimensional, acquires a completely different force from the idle, middle-class reveries which preceded it. It’s worth reading for this three-page summary alone.

These, of course, are some of the letters which were then included in the volume which Woolf was asked to write a preface to. Now the whole text comes full circle. Now you realise why she began with the apparently inconsequential and self-obsessed memories of attending the Congress. Crabwise, her introduction approaches the real core of the text – the working women’s experiences – so obliquely that when they arrive, the contrast with Woolf’s leisurely upper class existence – all opera and Shakespeare – is all the more shocking and dramatic.

So was it planned? Was this artful structuring? The self-description as a snobbish, alienated middle-class lady all a ploy to make the working class content, when it comes, more shocking? Or the much simpler result of Woolf’s artless self-absorption? Much the same question could be asked of her novels: to what extent they are artful constructions or, conversely, just the result of her letting her mind drift and then arranging the blizzard of details and sense impressions into a sort of order based grouped into a handful of characters and a vague plot…

Background

From the Yale Review archives is an introduction to this piece which must be out of date but is still useful.

These pages relating to the English Women’s Co-operative Guild are addressed to a former officer of this organization who had placed in Mrs Woolf’s hands a collection of letters written by its members. The Guild, which now has an enrolment of some 70,000 and is the largest association of its kind in England, was founded in 1883 to stimulate the ideas and activities of working women. It holds important annual Congresses, and it is of one of these which met at Manchester, in 1913.

We know the Yale text is out of date because it talks about the Guild in the present tense but we know that the Guild closed in 2016, according to the Co-operative Women’s Guild Wikipedia article.

No prefaces

This text is the Introductory Letter to a social history book called Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. She was actually invited to write a preface to the book by its editor, the founder of the Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies, but refused on principle, the principle being that a book should stand or fall by its content without loads of prefaces and other bric-a-brac surrounding it.

But you also quickly come to suspect it’s because Woolf couldn’t write that kind of thing. She couldn’t gracefully summarise the themes of a book, its content and the achievement of its author, that’s not how her mind worked. Not without subterfuge and artifice.

Instead of directly grappling with the content of the book or the issues it raises about working class women collaborating to improve their lives, Woolf starts by going off at a tangent. With characteristic solipsism, she approaches the book by asking what memories it prompts in her and goes on to share two in particular.

Out of her inability to concentrate, out of her tendency to lose track of what anyone’s saying, out of her tendency to drift off and look out the nearest window, daydreaming and noticing all kinds of inconsequential details, Woolf made a style, a magnificent style, a new approach to narrative which characterises her classic novels Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Years and Between The Acts. In the context of essays which are meant to be about something, it can make for a frustrating read.

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

So Woolf whisks us to a hot June morning in 1913 in Newcastle where she attended a meeting of, presumably (it’s not really made clear) the Women’s Guild. She describes the hall and the people as if in a novel and describes a succession of women who’ve come from all over the country to make their 5-minute speeches. She namechecks the issues of the day:

• reform of the divorce laws to allow women to petition for divorce
• taxation of land
• campaign for a minimum wage
• the Trades Board Act
• education of children over 14
• complete adult suffrage

She namechecks them but, of course, she doesn’t go into them. You have to turn to Bradshaw’s notes at the back of the OUP edition to find out more about any of them. Instead Woolf glories in her superficiality, dwelling on the mustiness of the room and the appearance of the ladies. She candidly admits that all these political issues leave her ‘in her blood and bones, untouched’. And explains why – it’s a matter of class. Woolf isn’t really engaged in any contemporary politics because she is a comfortably off, middle class lady.

If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not touch one hair of my comfortably capitalistic head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon-coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet, there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors. I sit here hypocritically, clapping and stamping, an outcast from the flock. (p.148)

This is the characteristic attitude of all her fictional characters: they all experience the sense of being outsiders, outside the conversations other people are having and, at their most delirious, of being outside their own lives, looking on. You can’t help thinking of her mental illness and repeated mental breakdowns.

Also Woolf is afflicted by a strong sense of what’s the point? None of these women or any of their resolutions will have any impact because it is 1913 and none of them have the vote. This one thought leaves her feeling ‘irritated and depressed’, as well it might, but with the rather more Woolfian threat of ‘boredom and despair’ lurking behind. See how it’s all about her, her and her mental problems?

So Woolf does what she always does and drifts away from the present and daydreams, fantasises, imagines the home life of some of the speakers, of Mrs Giles and Mrs Edwards, imagines the view from their windows (windows, that talismanic Woolfian image). In a pretty patronising tone she imagines what it must be like to be a working class woman, so very different from her own la-di-da habits of ringing up the opera to book tickets or lying in the garden enjoying sensitive reveries of Greece and Italy. Without speaking to a single working class woman she imagines their lives, and her position of irredeemable hauteur and snobbery comes out clearer and clearer.

Here is Virginia Woolf imagining the lives of the working class women of her time.

There were no armchairs, electric light, or hot water laid on in their homes, no Greek hills or Mediterranean bays in their lives. They did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but quite adequate seat at the Opera. If they travelled it was on excursion day, with paper bags and hot babies in their arms.

They did not stroll through the house and say, that cover must go to the wash, or those sheets need changing. They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes themselves. In consequence they had thickset muscular bodies. They had large hands; they had the slow emphatic gestures of people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed chairs.

They touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their faces were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines. It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual—on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief.

Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. They were not in the least detached and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot. Their very names were like the stones of the fields, common, grey, obscure, docked of all the splendours of association and romance.

Vivid enough, very vivid and persuasive, but at the same time so patronising and privileged. Back to the Congress, where Woolf dismissively reports that there were innumerable more speeches, exchanges of home-made jams and biscuits, songs sung and meals consumed, a new President elected, then it was over and everyone caught their trains home.

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s really rammed home why this text is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’. In another writer’s hands this might involve memories of other people, of what they were like, what they said and what they achieved. In Woolf’s hands everything is always about her and her sensitive perceptions and concerns.

In the inconsequential way which you either find charming or irritating, according to taste, Woolf doesn’t remember the substance of any of the conversations she takes part in at the Hampstead headquarters – instead she remembers that the Guild’s secretary, Miss Kidd, was stout and fierce and dressed in a deep purple dress.

Nowadays, if you’re a man, you’re likely to be criticised for judging women purely on their appearance instead of their character, thoughts and achievements. Yet this is exactly what Woolf does. Lacking the mental ability or interest in what anyone says, it is appearance and quirks which appeal to her most consistently. Presumably she’d have said this is the novelist’s eye. Forget issues. Enjoy characters.

Miss Lillian Harris who, whether it was due to her dress which was coffee-coloured, or to her smile which was serene, or to the ash-tray in which many cigarettes had come amiably to an end, seemed the image of detachment and equanimity.

Had one not known that Miss Harris was to the Congress what the heart is to the remoter veins—that the great engine at Newcastle would not have thumped and throbbed without her—that she had collected and sorted and summoned and arranged that very intricate but orderly assembly of women—she would never have enlightened one.

She had nothing whatever to do—she came to the office because an office is a good place in which to read detective stories—she licked a few stamps and addressed a few envelopes—it was a fad of hers—that was what her manner conveyed. It was Miss Harris who moved the papers off the chairs and got the teacups out of the cupboard. It was she who answered questions about figures and put her hand on the right file of letters infallibly and sat listening, without saying very much, with calm comprehension, to whatever was said. (p.151)

‘She had nothing whatever to do’. Yes. Again Woolf repeats her troubled sense of class superiority to most of these working women.

To expect us, whose minds such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. We have baths and we have money. Therefore, however much we had sympathised our sympathy was largely fictitious. It was aesthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and nerves.

This turns into a complaint about the way some of the working women who spoke at the Congress imitated and mocked the dainty speech of middle and upper class women. As you can imagine, Virginia didn’t like this, but she comes up with a principled reason. It’s because she found the working class speakers more authentic and real when they stuck to their own voices and concerns and despite the fact that ‘the range of expression is narrower in working women’.

So much does she like this authenticity that she wonders why they want to acquire money and become middle class and so lose the thing they have, their ‘contact with life’, ”facing facts’, ‘the teaching of experience’, call it what you will. Ah the bourgeois fondness for the dignity of labour, as long as it’s other people doing the labouring.

In among all this Woolf makes a claim which is so preposterously privileged it is laugh-out-loud funny, claiming that:

No working man or woman works harder with his hands or is in closer touch with reality than a painter with his brush or a writer with his pen. (p.152)

Yes, her sister, Vanessa, and all the Rogers, Quentins and Duncans in the Bloomsbury Group, they all knew far more about hard work than a coal miner! It’s precisely attitudes like this which gave the group its reputation for high-minded snobbery and condescension. And stupidity.

Woolf is painfully aware of being trapped in her upper-middle-class bubble, what she calls ‘shut up in the confines of the middle classes’. This first part of the essay records all the aspects of embarrassment and boredom and frustration which this plight triggers in her.

She finds many things to admire in ‘them’, these working class women, such as their robust sense of humour, their energy and, especially interesting for Woolf the writer, their way with words, the phrases which Shakespeare would have enjoyed (Woolf and all her characters endlessly invoke Shakespeare, in a thumpingly obvious way, as the absolute peak of poetic expression), their ‘shrewd sayings in the speeches at the Congress which even the weight of a public meeting could not flatten out entirely’ (p.153).

Finally she arrives at the frustrated wish that if only the classes could come together and remove the class barriers between them.

We are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middle classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans.

And they remain equally deprived. For we have as much to give them as they us—wit and detachment, learning and poetry and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or touched their foreheads with their forefingers enjoy by right. But the barrier is impassable.

And nothing perhaps exasperated us more at the Congress (you [Davies] must have noticed at times a certain irritability) than the thought that this force of theirs, this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them… but only when we are dead. (p.153)

Which prompts the question, Have class barriers been removed in modern England, 90 years after Woolf wrote this, 112 years after the Guild Congress which prompted it?

My impression is that these class barriers have substantially loosened, are not as absolutely impassable as they were in Woolf’s day, but they still remain. The chavs on the council estate round the corner are a slightly threatening mystery to me as I, with my civil service job and interest in the arts, might be for them. I think. The real point is that I don’t know. To a large extent everybody else is a mystery to me.

And also the entire question of ‘class’ has been ruptured and recast by the huge immigration which has changed the nature of English society over the last twenty years. In 2021 63.2% of London residents identified with an ethnic minority group. People identifying with the White ethnic group are now in a minority in London.

I grew up in an England where the main divide was between the middle and working classes and so leaned towards socialist politics on behalf of the downtrodden. But the advent of progressive or woke politics – the rise and rise feminism, the revelation of a dazzling range of gender identities, alongside the immigration of hundreds of ethnic groups which all retain their ethnic identities and allegiances – has  massively confused the sociology of England and the old politics. No wonder it (the old two-party system) can’t keep up.

In my opinion these sociological changes have permanently fragmented what used to be called the Left, not only here but all across Europe, leading to the rise of right-wing populist parties. I don’t really judge any of these changes, I’m just observing what I consider to be the biggest social and cultural issue of my time, which presses fairly heavily on all of us, and so colours my readings of political or social writings from the past.

Back to Woolf, my point is that her worry about trying to break down barriers between the unknown white working class women and posh white ladies like herself who go to the opera and understand Shakespeare, these concerns now seem quaint and charming. Of historic interest. Like watching an Ealing Comedy. It is an issue from an England which has disappeared.

Her clarion cry to break down the barriers of class between women is fine and inspiring but I don’t know what they’d mean to the Kurdish hairdressers based in the Kurdish barbers I go to; to the till woman at Tesco from Ghana and Mauritius that I always chat to; to the wives of the Albanian builders who put up a new fence for me; to the Somali family or the Afghan family who live in the flats across from my place. Enjoying the blessings of Shakespeare? Most of them can barely speak English. I’m not saying that’s fatal. I’m just saying it restricts the relevance of Woolf’s discourse, these days, to an even tinier, bookish clique than it did in her day.

To summarise, Woolf feels that in this conversation at the Guild headquarters in Hampstead, she tried:

to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence. (p.154)

Scene 3. The letters themselves

Apparently it was at this point in Woolf’s lament to Davies in the Hampstead headquarters, that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the many letters she had received from working women around the country. Woolf asked to see them but Davies, at that meeting, demurred. It was only years later, after the Great War, that she finally sent Woolf a packet of letters.

And here comes the radical transformation in the content and tone of the piece which I mentioned earlier. The simple unvarnished lives of these staggeringly poor women, the brutal conditions they grew up in, the childhood exploitation, the lives of unremitting labour garnished with the brutality of overseers, fathers and husbands, the horrors of childbirth, the lack of any healthcare, beggars belief.

Yet out of all these terrible stories, Woolf emphasises the positives, praising ‘that inborn energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench’. The women describe lives packed with debilitating toil,  long hours working in fields and factories and domestic service, six days a week, with sometimes only a few hours free time each week, along with the struggle to support husbands, often ill or thrown out of work, and all the time raise numerous children, often going hungry in the process, worn out by stress and continual work, old and ill before their time.

And so, as I mentioned in my summary, the reader at last gets to the nub of the subject, the testimony of these many women and, as I suggested, realises that maybe the self-obsessed vapourings of the first half of the essay are intended as a deliberate contrast with the shocking lives depicted in the letters. Maybe. Or was Woolf that artful? Discuss.

Because of the in-your-face reality of these last few pages, this essay stands head and shoulders above the others. Maybe it’s just my old left-wing leanings being triggered, but I felt the essay only came to life with them and suddenly, from whimsical Woolfian sepia, changed into colour. Woolf, too, is thrilled by what she calls:

the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench

This is all very moving but, unfortunately, Woolf rather undermines herself, and in a characteristic way, which is that she in particular praises the women who made time in their wretched lives to read and to read the classics, which she then goes to the trouble of namechecking for us:

They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please,” and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books…

All true no doubt, and education begins with reading, but you can’t help feeling there’s something everso narrow about Woolf’s view of life. In her view the good life is reading the books she loves, the books she grew up reading in her father’s library, the same relatively short, restricted list of Great Books, Masterworks of the Spirit etc. Very narrow. Very limited.

Anyway, in the last pages she moves on to praise the work of the Guild and at this point the text morphs more into what you’d expect an introduction to be like, praising the work of the organisation it’s introducing.

It was the Guild that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. It was the Guild that made a central meeting place where formed and solidified all that was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what ‘clean ground’ had been given to the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had been to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place that rarest of all possessions – a room where they could sit down and think, remote from boiling saucepans and crying children… (p.157)

And she goes on to describe the growth of the organisation, its importance as a place where women could meet and share and think and develop their ideas.

And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things—of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult childbirths, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere.

His final section which actually summarises the letters and the achievements of the Guild is as genuinely inspiring as Three Guineas is excoriating and anger-making. But again Woolf partly undermines what she’s saying, because she feels the (wholly unnecessary) need to pass literary judgement on these stories, lamenting their lack of literary finish like the crustiest of male critics.

The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. (p.158)

It’s not only socially that Woolf was a snob, but in her very narrow, elitist view of Great Art. But she does condescend to comment that some of the accounts have the rude ‘accuracy and clarity’ of Defoe. In the midst of pontificating, she says something very, very symptomatic, she writes:

Writing is a complex art.

But is it? She would like to think so, but much of the great writing is not that complex. Worked over and elaborated, maybe, but not necessarily that complex. And the history of twentieth century literature since her heyday tends to demonstrate a steady simplification and de-complicating of literary writing, until our own day when much ‘literary’ writing is not, sentence by sentence, complex or difficult.

Here as in most of her writings, Woolf is judging others by her own standards and these standards are themselves a kind of aspiration to an ideal made up of a bunch of Victorian writers mashed together, Keats and Shelley and Lamb, into a vague icon of high Poetry and Truth. Her judging of the working class women’s writings says more about Woolf and her narrow idea of Literature than it does about the working class women.

This is characteristic of all her criticism. She doesn’t really engage with the meat and texture of the works under review, she tends to use them as pretexts to sound off about her hobby horses, to repeat her commitment to Poetry and Truth and hold Shakespeare up as the Great Model, time after time.

A Virago classic

I already knew that the book was published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so there was a more than usually close connection between her and the book i.e. she was more than just an admirer of the Guild asked to write something, but the book’s publisher.

From looking on Amazon and Ebay I learned that Life As We Have Known It was one of the first books published by the feminist publishing house, Virago. So there are multiple layers of feminist history at work here: the women’s original personal experiences; the Guild which encouraged them to write about them; the collection of writings itself; the Woolf connection (publishing it and writing the introduction); and the Virago revival of it. It is quite a dense, multi-layered cultural artefact, then.

So I bought and read it and have reviewed the book as a whole, in a separate blog post.

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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 to the book can be read on Amazon.

Related links

• Virginia Woolf’s introduction to Memories of a Working Women’s Guild online
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews