Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

“BUT THE BARRIER IS IMPASSABLE”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND CLASS
by Ben Clarke
In June 1913, Virginia Woolf attended a Women’s Co-operative Guild conference in Newcastle,
and in 1931, when the Hogarth Press issued a collection of autobiographical essays
by members of the Guild entitled Life as We Have Known It, she contributed a substantial
introductory letter. As Anna Davin observes, her “connection with the Guild is surprising
enough to need comment” given that she “had little interest (or faith) in organized politics.”
It originated not only in her political commitments but in her personal relationships, and specifi
cally “her marriage to Leonard Woolf, an active Fabian, and her friendship with Margaret
Llewelyn Davies” (Davin viii). Davies was secretary to the Guild from 1889 to 1921 and a
dedicated advocate of a movement she believed represented the “beginning of a great revolution”
(Davies xi) that would “see the Community in control, instead of the Capitalists” (xii).
She was a forceful fi gure and reaction to her varied. As Hermione Lee notes, although Leonard
Woolf described her in his autobiography as “an exhilarating Joan of Arc fi gure,” Quentin Bell
characterised her “as a battle-axe and a bore.” For Woolf herself, Lee argues, Davies was one
of “those vigorous political women who made her feel insignifi cant, sceptical and lightweight”
(Lee 328). Davies represented direct activism, and, in particular, a working-class activism rooted
in the organized politics of the labour movement.
Woolf’s introductory letter to Life as We Have Known It is addressed to Davies and
engages with working-class women, their writing, and their concerns from the explicit perspective
of one “shut up in the confi nes of the middle classes” (xxx). It is, as Rachel Bowlby
states, “partly a retrospective analysis of the embarrassment for a ‘lady’ in attending a working
women’s conference and fi nding herself unable to feel at one with the demands for material
improvements which were the main preoccupation of the participants.” Th is discomfort
forms the basis of an analysis of class that emphasises material and social divisions and in
so doing “troubles any wish to imagine Woolf having a straightforwardly immediate feeling
of sisterhood, whether political or literary, with other women, whatever their backgrounds”
(Bowlby xxvii). Woolf’s letter moreover provides a position from which to question and
indeed undermine what Alison Light describes as the widespread “tendency to universalise
women’s experience,” something frequently enabled, she argues, by a “blindness to the categories
of class” (xi-xii). Its contradictions expose class divisions between early twentieth-century
feminists, divisions to which there was, as Woolf recognised, no simple solution, despite
her hope that in the future women would meet “casually and congenially as fellow-beings
with the same wishes and ends in view” (“Introductory Letter” xxix).
Like all texts, Life as We Have Known It can be read within a variety of historical,
political, and literary contexts. It bears, for example, an obvious relation to books such as
Maud Pember Reeves’s Round About a Pound a Week (1913) and Margery Spring Rice’s
Working-Class Wives (1939), which reported on the condition of working-class women in
the fi rst half of the twentieth century. However, it diff ers from such texts, and, as Davin
argues “has exceptional value,” insofar as it provides “accounts by ‘us’ rather than ‘them’”
and deals “not just with the generalities of working class life, but with the specifi c experi-