This book follows Woolf's changing representations of femininity throughout her career. In her early work, Woolf was particularly interested in the difference and specificity of feminine experience. In her later work she was more sceptical of the value of creating a special category of 'the feminine'. Her work is thus centred on a dichotomy which still structures our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialist and constructionist views of gender. Virginia Woolf is the most famous twentieth-century woman writer in English. This book explores the relation between her life and her work, and charts the development of the writer who has done the most to alter the common reader's understanding of the relationship between gender and writing. Examining a wide range of novels from throughout her career, this book follows Woolf's progression from the celebration of femininity in her earlier work to her later wariness of the dangers of creating a category of 'the feminine' which might prove restrictive to women. It is argued that there is a shift in Woolf's writing from an interest in the difference of femininity to an interest in femininity as difference in a wider, philosophical sense. The book thus re-reads Woolf as a writer whose work centres on the dichotomy which continues to structure our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialism and constructionism, between the idea of gender as fixed and given and the idea of gender as socially constructed and thus open to change. In placing Woolf's writing within this dichotomy, rather than attempting to read it exclusively from one or the other perspective, this book takes the terms of debate beyond the partiality of earlier feminist accounts of her work Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-27 Moving Out: Rachel and Jacob....Pages 28-55 Romancing the Feminine: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse....Pages 56-93 Imaginary Lives: Orlando and A Room of One’s Own....Pages 94-125 Generation(s) in The Waves and The Years....Pages 126-167 Coins and Mirrors: Three Guineas and Between the Acts....Pages 168-200 Back Matter....Pages 201-216 Examines Woolf's changing representations of femininity, arguing that in her early work, Woolf was particularly interested in the difference and specificity of feminine experience, while in her later work, she was more sceptical of the value of creating a special category of "the feminine".
