Peace, Friendship, and “The Educated Man’s Sister” in Woolf’s Pacifist Writing

This chapter explores the connection between Woolf’s notions of friendship and her critical writings about peace and pacifism. For Woolf, friendship not only constitutes a personal intimate relationship with another person, but it also represents a force that stands in opposition to oppressive impersonal concepts like nationalism, imperialism, and militarism—and is thus deeply intertwined with her particular brand of pacifism. In order to make this argument, the chapter employs Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship and explores the place of the sister in his text. Though Derrida traces the relationship between the friend and the brother throughout the history of western thought concerning friendship, he often stops to ask about the absence of the sister. His book ultimately shows that this figure of the “friend in the feminine” could be the key to thinking politics “beyond the principle of fraternity.”

“Cry with the Pack and Kill What We Fear”

After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future wars might be prevented. This essay explores the work of these women playwrights and makes comparisons between their dramas and Woolf’s thinking about war in her novels and Three Guineas. Woolf and playwrights such as Vernon Lee, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Box, Olive Popplewell and Elizabeth Rye ask us to examine nationalism as a catalyst for conflict and to take up the position of ‘outsiders’ in order to question our place in supporting future wars. In light of this, the essay will also address form, particularly pageantry as a mode that all these authors use to undermine the central purpose of pageantry which is to create the group cohesion that these writers believe leads to conflict.

“Very Slowly into My Own Tongue”

This chapter considers how the modernist form of Woolf’s work brought about a reimagining of the politician. In Three Guineas, Woolf identifies politics as ‘the profession that is most closely connected with war’. However, while her critique of patriarchy takes aim at generals, judges, dons and archbishops, its comments about politicians are more conflicted. In an essay framed as a response to the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”, the very group whose failings most directly cause war is never directly attacked. This elision echoes her mixed feelings about her husband Leonard’s parliamentary candidacy, and expresses her recognition that Parliament, though ‘ridiculous’, may also be an instrument of change – a possibility that distinguishes it from the other institutions of patriarchy.

“The Journey is Everything”1

Virginia Woolf had a European sensibility and a sense of Europe as an intellectual sphere. She was writing at a time when a syncretic European consciousness was emerging, as epitomized by Gide who hailed nomadism as a lifestyle. Woolf regarded the concept of nationality as obsolete and decried the ‘insularity’, ‘domesticity’ and ‘homeliness’ of England for which she produced a number of satirical metonyms. Possessing ‘the zest of travelling’, she found in France a ‘congenial civilisation’, where she could experience new trends of thought and sensory impressions, which would fuel her creativity. It was not just the blend of intellectuality and sensuality, but also the sheer strangeness of a foreign language and landscape that spurred her spirit of experimentation.

Goldie’s “War and Peace”

This chapter explores the influences of Futurist aesthetics and music, Aristophanes's comedy “Peace,” and Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” in Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's unpublished 1914 play “War and Peace,” the prologue of which was performed at the Omega Club using Winifred Gill's puppets in spring 1917 as a benefit for Belgian refugees.

“Unblowing, Ungrowing Are the Roses There”

This chapter brings Virginia Woolf and Native American writer Louise Erdrich into transnational conversation to highlight intersections between sexual violence against women and manipulation and destruction of the land. It situates both novels in the context of ecofeminism. A “common goal of ecofeminism,” Kathi Wilson states, ‘is to disrupt those women-nature connections that are oppressive’. Such disruption figures significantly in Between the Acts and The Round House, earthtexts depicting the suffering of Others to reveal how hegemonic concepts of land use and ownership engender the violation of women.

Gabriela Mistral, Virginia Woolf, and the Writing of the Spanish Civil War

This chapter traces the cultural intersections between Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral and Virginia Woolf, particularly through their aesthetic responses to the Spanish Civil War. A search for pacifist visions during the Spanish War led to the creation of transatlantic women’s modernist networks marked by anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-patriarchal ethical engagements. It argues that Mistral and Woolf were part of a web of transnational cultural communities within metropolitan centres such as London and Buenos Aires that were instrumental in the development of an international network of women’s writers preoccupied with the rise of fascism in Europe and the rest of the world.

European Peace in Pieces?

The “Scrapbook Series” was a popular, long-running BBC broadcast launched in the late 1920s; conceived as a ‘microphone medley’ or ‘sonic pageant’, it revisited the acoustic highlights since the advent of recording technology. This remarkable audio documentary provides the starting-point for this Chapter, which explores essential links between cooperative broadcasting policies, Woolf’s heightened acoustic sensibility in the 1930s, and the era’s awareness of itself as being, for the first time in history, dimensioned by reiterable sound. Retracing the evolution of the European Broadcasting Union via sound archives, wave-length legislation, and primetime BBC programmes, the chapter charts the richest, most overlooked experiments in cultural diplomacy on air, designing a safer, more harmonious Europe which linked common listeners at home via the boldly trans-European resonance of music.

Gender Wars in Music, or Bloomsbury and French Composers

This chapter explores Woolf’s relationships with two important French women composers: Germaine Tailleferre and Nadia Boulanger. The former is singled out by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as emblematic of the professional bias facing women composers. Boulanger and Woolf met in 1936, at a lunch with Ethel Smyth and Winaretta Singer (Princesse Edmond de Polignac). As her correspondence confirms, Boulanger and Woolf stayed in touch for some years and Woolf repeatedly referred to Boulanger’s example when reflecting on the misogyny and obstacles facing contemporary women artists, whether composers, painters or writers. Consideration of Woolf’s relationships with these women is placed in the larger context of their reception in the French and British press, exploring the role that their gender played in the critical reception of their work and aesthetic innovations.

“Mental Fight”

Virginia Woolf's citation of a famous lyric by William Blake in her essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940) contests its usage as warmongering propaganda in the context of two world wars, and still has resonance today. This chapter builds upon Diane Filby Gillespie’s article “Blake and Bloomsbury” (1990), which established the importance of a radical Blake in Bloomsbury, applying to Woolf the findings of Blake scholars Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker who argue Blake’s vision of “Jerusalem” and “Albion” represent “the return to Eden before hereditary power, before tribalism and before nationalism”. By focusing on this key Blakean citation in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” the chapter’s argument also opens Blakean aspects in Woolf's pacifist aesthetics in other works such as Three Guineas and “Anon.”