Sandra Henderson

The standard presentation in survey anthologies of Virginia Woolf’s significance remains that of stylist, modernist, and aesthete, an erudite but completely apolitical member of the Bloomsbury coterie. Woolf’s legacy in twentieth centur y European intellectual history is secured, according to the evidence cited by Paul Fussell, by the fact that she reviewed Siegfried Sassoon’s poems favorably and went skinny dipping with Rupert Brooke. Fussell declares that Woolf was "not involved with the war" and cites Jacob’s Room as her only contribution to the ‘literary war.’ In fact, Fussell cites this novel only as an example of the theatrical metaphors for the Great War that had become clichéd "by the late thirties, " despite the fact that Jacob’s Room was published in 1922.

Virginia Woolf was in fact profoundly affected by the First World War, and was arguably the most consistent opponent of war in intellectual and literary England between the wars. Woolf was 32 years old when the Great War began, and for her it lasted until her death at the age of 59. War and militarism were dominant and recurrent themes in both her fiction and prose, from the 1922 publication of Jacob’s Room, one of the earliest treatments of the Great War in fiction, to he r final novel, Between the Acts, which she was revising at the time of her death in 1941. Woolf wrote and published extensively during the interwar period. A careful examination of her work demonstrates that Woolf wrestled with the "European War" and developed a sophisticated analysis of opposition to it.

Sifting through her work after World War I, it is difficult to find an area of Woolf’s life or work that was not touched by the war. In truth, all of Woolf’s writing was in response to it, either directly or indirectly, and Woolf’s response to the war was feminist and political as well as aesthetic. Woolf wrote eight novels and six books of nonfiction, along with numerous articles, essays, and reviews during her life after the Great War. Woolf was a prolific correspondent, and 3, 800 of her letters have survived, along with thirty notebooks of her daily journals from 1915 through 1941. Posthumous collections of Woolf’s previously unpublished writings number approximately 40 volumes. In spite of this body of work precipitated by the Great War, there developed a myth that Woolf’s interest in the war was ‘negligible’ and that she was largely untouched by it. Early critics of Woolf’s work overlooked her critical analysis of the First World War, focusing on her stream-of-consciousne ss techniques to the exclusion of content. The diminution of Woolf’s role in postwar cultural and intellectual history began with her contemporary literary critics, primarily male colleagues, whose assessments of her work and ideology are not borne out b y her novels, essays, letters, and diaries.

This distorted view of Virginia Woolf’s significance in intellectual history has persisted to the present, in part because primary evidence of Virginia Woolf’s life and work was controlled for over half a century by male survivors w ho were not entirely receptive to her views on war and gender. Leonard Woolf described Virginia as "the least political animal . . . since Aristotle invented the definition." Leonard managed Virginia’s literary estate for the 28 years that he outlived her. After Leonard’s death in 1969, Virginia’s nephew, Quentin Bell, assumed control of her estate until his death in 1997 at the age of 87. He declared in his biography of Woolf, "her prose could never be an effective vehicle for conveyi ng political ideas."

In spite of feminist and historical reinterpretations of her work, the editors and executors of Woolf’s literary estate have controlled access to her papers and managed their presentation in a manner that has perpetuated the apoliti cal myth. For example, omitting all references to ‘war’ in an index, as Anne Olivier Bell has done in the five volumes of Woolf’s published diaries, has a profoundly distorting effect on the perception of Woolf by the reader. Quentin Bell’s 1 972 biography of Woolf remained the only authoritative version of her life for twenty-five years, largely because of his control over Woolf’s unpublished writings. Historians have generally followed the lead of literary critics, as with James Joll, who h as written that "The novels of Virginia Woolf... conveyed no public message." A careful reading of Virginia Woolf’s writings reveals a much more extensive engagement on her part with the Great War than most critics, historians, editors, and e xecutors have allowed.

Woolf was an early and consistent critic of the war, and often lamented the effects of the war in journal entries: "Patriotism is a base emotion"(1915); "It is difficult to see how even a jingo can now b elieve in any good from war"(1918); "Patriotism is the devil"(1935). In a letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies from 23 January, 1916, Woolf wrote: "I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction keeps going a day longer."

In addition to her horror at the loss of life, Woolf was alarmed by the mob mentality that the war fostered. In a 1915 letter to Duncan Grant, she lamented its effect: "Now that they have been roused they seem full of the most violent and filthy passions." Woolf’s reaction to the Armistice day crowds in London indicates that her worst fears had been confirmed:

In Woolf’s view, war mobilization had subsumed the individual and left only a monolithic, collective ‘we.’ In A Room of One’s Own, she observed that "great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives." Woolf saw this loss of personal identity to the forced, anonymous uni ty that war demanded as a continuing feature of inter-war life and a contributing factor to fascism.

In the remarkable 1919 essay "The War from the Street," Woolf took on the topic of subjectivity and cultural claims to the war experience. Woolf begins by declaring "the history of the war is not and never will be wr itten from our point of view." This review in the Times Literary Supplement of a book entitled Our Own History of the War, which contains only one brief citation from the reviewed work, reads instead like a discourse on th e Great War itself:

The review contains an implicit critique of gender divisions, of public and private life, social versus political history, and the hierarchical nature of state-sanctioned killing. It also anticipates the concept of an "Outsiders Society" that Woolf would articulate in Three Guineas nearly twenty years later.

Woolf consistently expressed the view in her diaries and letters that the Great War was being romanticized. She felt that even writers like Vera Brittain had contributed inadvertently to glorification of the war, as all wor ks in the trope of ‘anthems for doomed youth’ inevitably do. Woolf admitted grudging admiration for Brittain’s "social conscience," but questioned her motives in publishing Testament of Youth, along with those of the other writers who ma de up the wave of belated war books that she was reading in 1933: "Why now? What urgency is there on them to stand bare in public? She feels that these facts must be made known, in order to help--what? herself partly I suppose."

Woolf was distressed that ‘soldier-poets’ were increasingly glorified in overly-sentimental reviews and biographies that celebrated their struggles without a sense of disgust and outrage at the slaughter. In a 1917 review in the Times Literary Supplement entitled "A Cambridge V.A.D," Woolf reminds readers that "a time in the trenches does not make bad men good." In her 1918 review of Siegfried Sassoon, "Two Soldier-Poets," Woolf cited the imp ossibility of judging dispassionately "poems written by young men who have fought or are still fighting." In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrator describes "The European War" as "that little shindy of schoolboys with gun powder."

Woolf again expressed her reservations regarding the ‘literary war’ in her review of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir, which appeared in 1918. Woolf had known Brooke well in his "decadent Cambridge p hase" and Woolf shared the sentiment amongst Brooke’s closest friends that the biography was distorted - "a disgraceful, sloppy, sentimental, rhapsody, leaving Rupert rather tarnished & yet canonised." In preparing to write her review, she noted in her diary the conflict between honoring the war dead without honoring the war itself or glossing over the lives lost. "He was jealous, moody, ill-balanced, all of which I knew, but can hardly say in writing," Woolf wrote of Brooke in her diary on 27 July 1918.

In her review, Woolf chose her words carefully, noting that because of the growth of "the Rupert Brooke legend" readers were left with a sadly "incomplete version which must in future represent Rupert Brooke to those who never knew him." She protested the popular worship at his grave on the Greek island of Skyros and the shrine mentality: "To imagine him entombed, however nobly and fitly, apart from our interests and passions still seems impossibly incon gruous with what we remember of . . . his life," which was "complex & sceptical. . . Not with a sense of completeness, finality, but rather to wonder and to question still: what would he have been, what would he have done?" For Woolf, a detached, disjointed mentality in European culture persisted long after the war and represented another aspect of the ways in which the Great War continued to assault civilization.

Woolf’s complete opposition to a cult of war heroes is clearly established in Jacob’s Room, where she focused on the civilian costs and social identities of the dead in a psychological study of the costs of the Great War. W oolf was already taking a revisionist view of the war, prior to 1922. Although there is nothing grand in Jacob’s death, a pointless sacrifice, neither is he eulogized; "Jacob’s Room is a covert critique of the romantic posturing so common in the anthems for doomed youth." He is evoked in the memories of those who knew him well and who recall for the reader examples of his privileges and prejudices, as well as his potential.

Jacob’s Room addresses the war directly only twice, in brief passages. The exact manner of Jacob’s death, although never specified, is implied through a battle scene:

Instead of dwelling on second-hand details of trench life and warfare, Woolf focuses on the life of a dead soldier from his bereaved mother’s point of view. Woolf makes references to domestic political events - such as the Irish Home R ule Bill and the restructuring of the House of Lords - that place Jacob’s time of death in the context of the home front. Although most references in the novel to death are oblique, Jacob’s surname, "Flanders", would have been synonymous with d eath for the contemporary reader, since nearly one-third of the one million British soldiers killed in World War I died there.

Despite its pedestrian view of the war, Jacob’s Room was inaccessible for many contemporary readers because it appeared fragmented and lacked a tidy conclusion. This was, however, a function of the very idea that Woolf wa s trying to convey: the sense of a truncated life. Woolf’s development of the stream-of-consciousness style was an effort to employ a form of writing that would convey her themes through form and structure as well as content.

Although Woolf did not directly experience combat, she did possess insider knowledge of the political prosecution of the war. Her friend John Maynard Keynes, who remained at the Treasury during the war, gave her an intimate accoun t of Asquith’s resignation as Prime Minister in December 1916, his succession by Lloyd George, and President Wilson’s private threats to cut off aid to Great Britain. On October 15, 1918, her cousin, H.A.L. Fisher, a cabinet member in Lloyd Ge orge’s coalition government from 1916 to 1922, dropped by for tea and told her "‘We’ve won the war today... we shall have peace by Christmas.’" Woolf recorded the experience in her diary: "extraordinary... to be in touch with one who was in the very centre of the very centre, sitting in a little room at Downing St. where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide." This perspective on power is reflected in a strikingly simila r passage in Jacob’s Room: "Gentlemen, lifting their pens or turning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the course of history should shape itself this way or that way." This dual consciousness as insider/outside r is a recurring theme in Woolf’s writings, and especially her prose.

Woolf’s next novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), is considered by some the finest novel of the Great War. In it, Woolf attacks the official version of the war. The novel includes among its themes deferred shell-shock, the marginal ization of veterans, the subjective nature of sanity, and the postwar sufferings of survivors. In a series of jarring comparisons, Woolf juxtaposes a lower-middle class veteran, Septimus Smith, with the comfortable insularity of the governing class. Sep timus sits in the park listening to the voices that inspire him to write a treatise against the evils of war while the upper class welcomes the reappearance of quality leather goods in the shops on Bond Street; the crowd follows a limousine in hopes of c atching a glimpse of the Queen and aeroplanes have been redeployed, skywriting advertisements over London while children on the street stare at the disabled veteran. Woolf has the narrator sum up this malaise with a flippant but insightful "Poor wo men, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War -- tut, tut."

Woolf suggests throughout the novel that a stoic ruling class is denying the costs of the war, engaging in a conspiracy to deny its significance and its pain, refusing to respond to the transformation. "Every one has friends wh o were killed in the War," one character observes, but the social system continues status quo ante because it simply ignores the devastation.

Woolf’s social agenda in this novel echoes a statement in her diary from 1920: "Our generation is daily scourged by the bloody war." The timeless nature of the fallout from the war is a major theme throughout Woolf’s nov els and essays. Her development of the stream of consciousness model can be viewed as an effort to transcend the temporal limits of traditional political history, with its discrete markers of peacetime and civilian life.

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf explored the gender divisions that the war had produced:

Woolf goes on to analyze the dilemma for women, who are caught between two seemingly irreconcilable facts: The attractiveness of the idea that "a great mind is androgynous," combined with the fact that "England is under the rule of a patriarchy." As a feminist and a pacifist, Woolf recognized the risk involved in her analysis:

This passage anticipates precisely the fate of Three Guineas, a ‘powerful and masterly’ grievance against ‘European war,’ written with gender consciousness.

From her early treatments of the gendered effects of the Great War, Woolf moved steadily toward an analysis of war that located gender as a cause rather than an outcome. This perspective appears to have been influenced by the ways that gender divisions were highlighted and exacerbated by World War I. Woolf indicts patriarchal society in Three Guineas, with the argument that "final proof of its harshness upon one sex... can be found in the annals of our ‘great war,’ whe n hospitals, harvest fields and munition works were largely staffed by refugees flying from its horrors to their comparative amenity." Woolf suggests a complimentary argument in her critique of women’s gender socialization, which she saw as ensuring their support for the war:

Woolf’s thesis explains her contempt for the suffragists who had turned militantly patriotic during the war, and her skepticism toward women like Vera Brittain for playing the role of help-mate to warriors in an epic tragedy. Woolf was well aware that many of the militant ‘suffragettes’ had defected from peace movement to support the war in a quid pro quo strategy to gain the vote. Woolf urged women to "refuse in the event of war to make munitions or nurse the wounded," and suggests somewhat sarcastically that women make "a courageous and effective experiment in the prevention of war by not knitting socks."

Woolf’s ideology of pacifism has been described as "virtually unprecedented" because of her unique synthesis of pacifism and feminism. Although Vera Brittain maintained her post-war pacifism throughout World War II, she had come to it late, in Woolf’s opinion, and at times fell victim to the heroic vision of the war, which Brittain admitted:

In writing her 1933 "epic of the women who went to war," Brittain employed the ultimate device for telling a war story in all of its heroic connotations, and in it she declares that "war, while it lasts, does produce hero ism to a far greater extent than it brutalises." Woolf was determined to undermine such notions of false heroism.

Woolf was painfully aware of the susceptibility to epic heroism of the younger generation, as exemplified by her nephew, Julian Bell. Bell, her sister Vanessa’s eldest son, had been raised in a community vehemently opposed to war, and he had collected essays and memoirs from World War I conscientious objectors for a 1935 anthology, We Did Not Fight: 1914-1918 Experiences of War Resisters. With the rise of fascism, however, he rejected pacifism and felt compelled to p articipate in the Spanish Civil War, informing his elders that he was fighting for the same causes that inspired them not to fight in the Great War.

On April 28, 1935, Woolf recounted in her diary a discussion with Julian that foreshadowed her arguments in Three Guineas regarding war and "whether one can give people a substitute for war." Julian had argued th at men "must have the danger emotion," and that "all the young men are communists in order to gratify their desire to do things together & in order to have some danger." After recording their point/counterpoint, Woolf noteed: &qu ot;But this was not the 1914 emotion. Lust & danger. Cant [sic] cut them out at once. Must divert them on to some harmless object. But what? Some fantasy must be provided. I say many people have found life exciting without war and bull fighting. Has war ever won any cause?"

Woolf viewed Julian Bell’s death, in July 1937, not only as a personal tragedy but also as another sign of the increasing polarization of the interwar years, and of a backlash against pacifism. In a letter to her sister, written th e same day as the diary entry above, Woolf noted the discussion with Julian -- "we got into a political argument which lasted all night" -- along with Virginia’s growing awareness and alarm regarding German anti-Semitism. In an unpublished memo ir of Julian written immediately after his death, Woolf asked herself:

Developing a "plan for fighting English tyranny" was exactly the project that she undertook next.

Woolf began collecting articles from the daily newspapers and organizing them into the reading notebooks for Three Guineas (1938). These then became the source material for the damning quotes and extensive footnotes that sup plied evidence for the link between ‘masculinity’ and war that Woolf was exploring. Woolf had been examining gendered aspects of the war from its beginning, but in Three Guineas, which she referred to in December 1935 as "my war book," her political philosophy is the most complete and complex. The book is Woolf’s attempt to articulate a unified intellectual position that would be inclusive of the opposition, feminists, socialists, pacifists, anti-fascists, artists, Jews, in a united front against the patriarchy.