Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

BUT THE BARRIER IS IMPASSABLE
ence of women, as they chose to tell them” (vii). Th e emphasis upon women’s representation
of their own lives is, of course, appropriate to a political organisation that encouraged its
members to participate in “public life” (Davies xiv). It means the text is also a distinctive
contribution to a broader extension of authorship in the 1930s, a decade which saw the
publication of an increasing number of working-class autobiographies, many, as George
Woodcock observed, “bound in the limp orange covers of the Left Book Club” (125). Th is
development, was, of course, enabled by a political and intellectual environment shaped by
events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Wall Street Crash, the Depression,
and the rise of Fascism. In “Th e Leaning Tower,” a paper delivered to the Workers’
Education Association in May 1940, Woolf argued that in “1930 it was impossible—if you
were young, sensitive, imaginative—not to be interested in politics,” and one product of a
literary culture in which many young writers and publishers “read Marx” and “became communists”
and “anti-fascists” (CE2 172) was an increasing interest in working-class life. Th is
led to an increase in texts both about and by the working class, though inevitably the former
predominated. In his preface to Seven Shifts, Jack Common noted:
My friends include members of the literary bourgeoisie and lads from the unprinted
proletariat. Both parties talk well, and you’d probably enjoy a crack with
them as much as I do. But here’s the pity. Th e bourgeois ones get published right
and left—especially left; the others are mute as far as print goes, though exceedingly
vocal in public-houses. Now I’ve often felt it would be good to swop them
round for a change. (vii-viii)
Life as We Have Known It is an example of precisely such a shift, of the publication of the
previously “unprinted,” those who “do not belong to the writing classes” (vii). As a collection
of essays by women, the text is all the more remarkable, as many of the working-class
writers published by editors who “read Marx” and “became communists” were men drawn
from “traditional” industries such as mining, shipbuilding, and steel production, men
who conformed to the dominant image of the proletariat. In this context, descriptions of,
for example, domestic labour, domestic service and midwifery, of women who “had gone
into factories when they were fourteen” (Woolf, “Introductory Letter” xxxiii) extended
and developed images of working-class life, exposing both tensions and solidarity.
Woolf insisted that she was “keenly roused” (xxxii) by the prospect of reading the
papers Davies had collected. Nonetheless, she argued that it
cannot be denied that the chapters here put together do not make a book—that
as literature they have many limitations. Th e writing, a literary critic might say,
lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked
variety and play of feature. Here are no refl ections, he might object, no view of
life as a whole, and no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. Poetry and
fi ction seem far beyond their horizon. Indeed, we are reminded of those obscure
writers before the birth of Shakespeare who never travelled beyond the borders
of their own parishes, who read no language but their own, and wrote with diffi
culty, fi nding few words and those awkwardly. (xxxix)
Th is is not to say the essays did not possess “some qualities even as literature that the liter-
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