Three Guineas

Virginia Woolf published a condensed version of Three Guineas under the title Women Must Weep - Or Unite Against War in Atlantic Monthly, May and June 1938. She later retrenched her position. 

Virginia Woolf, ROO, 1919, repr. in A Room of One s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford World s Classics, 1991), pp. 99, loi. All further references will be to this edition. 

In the 1930S this pattern of interconnection between essays and fiction continued. The Waves kept pace with the reading for the second Common Reader, published in 1932, The Years and Three Guineas with much writing... 

The fairy-tale structure of the three women, representing three novelists, each with a story to tell (rather like the three Marys who appear in A Room of One s Own, or the three begging letters in Three Guineas), is buried in the final version of How Should One Read a Book , leaving just a trace behind.But the essay has emerged from a story which is itself an exploratory refusal to choose between different species fantasy or fact, realism or romance, essay or fiction. 

Let us think in offices, Woolf writes in Three Guineas-,... 

A Room of One s Own and Three Guineas form the core of Woolf s feminist writings. Renewed critical attention to these texts - and to Woolf s numerous... 

The division of The Pargiters into the texts that became The Years and Three Guineas was at least in part a way of dealing with these difficulties. In the process of turning The Pargiters into The Years, Woolf also drew back... 

Three Guineas. In Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid , published in 1940, Woolf wrote of the external and internal voices driving the young airmen up in the sky and of instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition . We must help the young Englishmen , she writes, to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. 

In the decades between Holtby s study and Woolf s rediscovery by second-wave feminist criticism, a number of commentators on Woolf had also put feminism at the centre of their analyses - though often in less than sympathetic ways. For Woolf s friend and fellow-novelist E. M. Forster, delivering a lecture on her life and work two months after her death, Woolf s feminism was a very peculiar side of her , producing one of the most brilliant of her books - the charming and persuasive A Room of One s Own , but also responsible for the worst of her books - the cantankerous Three Guineas - and for the less successful streaks in Orlando . There are spots of [feminism] all over her work, and it was constantly in her mind, Forster asserted, representing feminism as a matter of streaks and spots , blemishes on the work of art. In my judgement , he continued ... 

Forster s comments typify the inability of many of her contemporaries -women as well as men - to accept Woolf s feminist pacifism of the 1930s or her perception, explored at greatest length in Three Guineas, that patriarchy , militarism and fascism support and sustain each other. 

To return to Forster s original assessment. .. I have suggested firstly that the protests in Three Guineas are legitimate in the contest of the thirties secondly, that feminism proper is aesthetically unacceptable to Virginia Woolf and hardly appears in her writings and thirdly that what is constantly in her mind is not feminism but a passionate concern with the nature of womanhood. ... 

Such a response is anticipated in Woolf s accounts of the difference of value. It is probable , she writes in Women and Fiction , that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. She elaborated this claim at length in A Room of One s Otvn, playing, as in Three Guineas, with the relationships between money and value ... 

Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf and the Women s Movement , in Virginia Woolf A Feminist Slant, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln, NE University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 185. See also Black s recent book, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 2003), for detailed discussion of Woolf s feminist politics and a very full account of Three Guineas. 

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