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1. A Feminist Perspective of Virginia Woolf’s Novels

2. Name: Rajyaguru Dhvani Dipakbhai
Paper Name: The Twentieth Century Literature:
1900 to World War 2
Code: 106
Subject:
A Feminist Perspective of Virginia Woolf’s Novels
Roll no: 04
Email Id: dhvanirajayguru22@gmail.com
Department: Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji University,
Bhavnagar

3. Brief Introduction of Virginia Woolf:
• Original name is Adeline Virginia Stephen, (born
January 25, 1882, London, England—died March 28,
1941, near Rodmell, Sussex).
• English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear
approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on
the genre.
• Living in Bloomsbury, Woolf’s circle of friends,
including her brothers’ friends from Cambridge, formed
a group of elite writers, artists, and philosophers known
later as the Bloomsbury Group.
• The Bloomsbury Group boasted such members as E. M.
Forster, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey, and it was
where Woolf met her future husband, Leonard.
• She is best known for her novels, especially Mrs.
Dalloway, To the Lighthouse , “Room of One’s Own” etc..
• Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory,
literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of
power.
• She experimented with several forms of biographical
writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to
her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.

4. What is Feminism and How Virginia Woolf influenced by this
movement?
• feminism is the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although
largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented
by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.
• The fight for women’s vote between 1903 and the beginning of the first world war the
Women’s Social and Political Union made the suffrage issue to their key project. Parts
of that group even participated in a hunger strike in order to obtain their goal.
• At this day, women, who were demonstrating on Parliament, were sexually attacked
by the police.
• Virginia was stirred by this incident as well. Therefore, she joined the “Adult Suffrage”;
a moderate wing of the movement. And also started writing for women.

5. Virginia Woolf : Feminist Writer
Not only do Virginia’s novels have to be seen in the light of modernism,
but also in the one of feminist movements.
Virginia’s first priority and main goal-woman should obtain access to
professions.
To establish a female tradition of writing, history and literature, because
she is convinced that literature ought to have a mother as well as a
father.
She was concerned with many issues like “the social and economic
context of women’s writing, the gendered nature of language, the need to
go back through literary history and establish a female literary tradition,
and the societal construction of woman” .
She was truly committed to women rights and concerned with their
position in society throughout her whole life and therefore had a major
impact on the feminist movement . Francisco Javier Pérez-Scribd

6. Summary of
Lighthouse
The novel centres on
the Ramsay family and
their visits to the Isle of
Skye in Scotland
between 1910 and
1920. Following and
extending the tradition
of modernist novelists
like Marcel Proust and
James Joyce, the plot
of To the Lighthouse is
secondary to its
philosophical
introspection.
Summary of Room of One’s
Own
The book describes
the adventures of a
poet who changes
sex from man to
woman and lives for
centuries, meeting
the key figures of
English literary
history.
Summary of Orlando
Woolf addressed the
status of women, and
women artists in
particular, in this
famous essay, which
asserts that a woman
must have money and
a room of her own if
she is to write.
According to Woolf,
centuries of prejudice
and financial and
educational
disadvantages have
inhibited women's
creativity.

7. Feminism in “To The Lighthouse”
• Lily is the feminist character in the
novel..Observant, philosophical, and
independent, Lily is a painter. When
Charles says ‘Women should not write
and paint”, She challenges it by her
work and proved it wrong..
• Mrs. Ramsay wants her to marry, but
she denies..
• In Chapter 3, Lily struggles (and
eventually succeeds) in painting the
picture she had first attempted in
Chapter 1, all the while revisiting
memories of Mrs. Ramsay and
contemplating the great mysteries of
life, death, art, and human experience.

8. • The feminity of the novel is also reflected through its symbols,
“The Window” is a female and that for another section „The Lighthouse‟ is male.
• Exalting the feminine principles in life over the masculine,.
• Virginia Woolf built her novel around a character embodying the life –giving role of the
female.
• Another central symbol is cyclical change which is not change at all, this symbol refers
to Mrs. Ramsay herself. Mrs. Ramsay, reads a newspaper aloud, thinking that they
were happier now than they would ever be again. In so doing, Mrs. Ramsay feels that
she does not only have a strong voice in the family, but is also responsible for the
welfare of its members.
• This meaning is revealed to the reader explicitly”Mrs Ramsay looked up over her
knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her
own eyes ,searching she alone could search into her mind and heart... She praised
herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she
was beautiful like the light”.
Dr. Saad Mohammed Kadhum Al-Maliky- Uni of Basrah

9. Feminist Reading of “Room of One’s
Own”
Woolf writes in this essay: “Ladies are only admitted to the
library if accompanied by a fellow of the College or
furnished with a letter of introduction”
It satirically addresses the obstacles and prejudices
encountered by women writers.
With this novel, Woolf attempts to define women’s place in
literary history.
Dr. Sangita Dubey- Shodhganga

10. • According to Woolf, centuries of prejudice and financial and educational
disadvantages have inhibited women’s creativity.
• To illustrate this she offers the example of a hypothetical gifted but uneducated sister
of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all but the most mundane domestic
duties, eventually kills herself.
• Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become
writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte,
and Emily.
• In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are androgynous. She argues
that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom, and she entreats her audience to
write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.
• The essay, written in lively, graceful prose, displays the same impressive descriptive
powers evident in Woolf’s novels and reflects her compelling conversational style.

11. Gender Equality in Orlando
• Orlando promotes the concept that gender and sexuality are not exclusively linked
to sex, thereby normalizing and promoting a more androgynous reality as an
arguably more natural state.
• After seven days of existing in a trancelike sleep, Orlando awakens to find that his
body has been transformed into that of a female and “we have no choice but
confess- he was a woman”. The narrator ergo begins to address Orlando as “she”.
When Orlando is transformed, she simply arises in her new form, stark naked and
proceeds by taking a bath. She does not seemed to have suffered during this
drastic change and neither is she shocked by it.
Judy Little writes, “Orlando arrives as an adult
on the scene of each era, she escapes normal
childhood socialization” that evolved her as “a
self who is free of the major illusions of many
eras and the stereotypes of both sexes”.
Shreya Das-feminisminindia
Sharron E. Knopp claims,
ORLANDO IS NOT A WOMAN ACTING LIKE
A MAN. ORLANDO IS A MAN. AND A
WOMAN AND THERE IS NOTHING
UNNATURAL ABOUT IT.

12. Woolf writes,
ORLANDO HAD BECOME A WOMAN THERE IS NO DENYING OF IT. BUT IN EVERY OTHER
RESPECT, ORLANDO REMAINS PRECISELY AS HE HAD BEEN. THE CHANGE OF SEX,
THOUGH IT ALTERED THEIR FUTURE, DID NOTHING WHATEVER TO ALTER THEIR IDENTITY.
When in Constantinople amongst the natives, Orlando did not experience gender differences due
to her changed sex. However as soon as she boards the Enamoured Lady to return to England,
appropriately dressed as a “young Englishwoman of high rank”, she realized that English “women are
not […..] exquisitely apparelled by nature”.
Woolf writes:
CLOTHES HAVE, THEY SAY, MORE IMPORTANT OFFICES THAN MERELY TO KEEP US WARM.
THEY CHANGE OUR VIEW OF THE WORLD AND THE WORLD’S VIEW OF US.
Cross-dressing in Orlando occurs fairly frequently. Archduke Harry dresses as a woman, but later
reveals himself as a man. Similarly, even after Orlando’s sex change, she continues to switch
between clothes of both gender. This motif functions in the novel to emphasize the similarities
between men and women, underneath their clothes, and hence, that genders should be allowed more
freedom in their actions.

13. References:
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Lily Briscoe". Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Feb. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lily-Briscoe. Accessed 10 April
2022.
Das, Shreya. “A Feminist Reading of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography.” Feminisminindia.com, Feminism in India, 31 July 2015,
https://feminisminindia.com/2015/07/31/feministic-reading-virginia-woolfs-orlando-biography/.
Dubey, Sangeeta. “Feminism in the Novels of Virginia Woolf a Critical Study.” Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith, Shodhganga, 2011, pp. 1–302.
Fernald, Anne E. “A Feminist Public Sphere? Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of the Eighteenth Century.” Feminist Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2005, pp. 158–82,
https://doi.org/10.2307/20459014. Accessed 10 Apr. 2022.
Maliky , Saad Mohammed Kadhum Al. “Reappraising Patriarchy and Matriarchy in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse : A Feminist Study .” Journal of Basra
Research for Human Sciences, vol. 45, Aug. 2020, pp. 39–53.
Pérez, Francisco Javier. “Virginia Woolf As A Feminist Writer.” Scribd.com, 28 May 2013, https://www.scribd.com/document/144138353/Virginia-Woolf-as-a-
Feminist-Writer.
Reid, Panthea. "Virginia Woolf". Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Mar. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Woolf. Accessed 10 April 2022.

14. Thank you