9 - Virginia Woolf's common reader and her social criticism

Summary

Virginia Woolf shared with Beatrice Hasting and Rebecca West the belief that women's contribution to social progress was not only indispensable but also fraught with difficulties because of the suffragette campaign. Woolf defined women's independence by intellectual freedom from gendered conventions but she went deeper than either Hastings or West into precisely how this intellectual freedom would translate into tangible social and cultural benefits. She also followed more closely in the footsteps of nineteenth-century women moralists than either of her peers, producing unsigned cultural criticism in The Times Literary Supplement and using these articles to refine her understanding of culture's power to heal society, and to earn the cultural authority which justified the wider remit of her public moralism. In A room of one's own (1929) and Three guineas (1938) she diagnosed different problems in English society and culture. In A room of one's own she argued that campaigns for women's political rights ran the risk of polarising social relations between men and women. In fact, the manifest egoism of male or female sex-consciousness was damaging to British culture and society, and it was time for women and men to abandon the restrictive binary of either ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ altogether. However, by the time that Woolf came to write Three guineas, the prospect of another war in Europe led her to modify her argument. In a complex discussion which historicised women's education and employment, she urged women not to lose their qualities of intellectual independence and disinterestedness. These qualities were the hallmarks of the tradition of women moralists to which she belonged, and gave women the power to revitalise British culture and ensure peace and prosperity.

The arguments of these two critiques were informed by the ideal of ‘unanimism’ which was ‘a utopian form of community free of conflict’. Woolf began to describe this utopia in her critical reviews and essays of the interwar period, and continued to promote it in the Common reader essay collections of 1925 and 1932. These articulated the idea of a common reader and his or her relationship to literature, in which differences between readers of the present were effaced in favour of shared human universals. The social criticism of A room of one's own and Three guineas was derived from these previous claims about readers and their relation to the world of literature.