Virginia Woolf and War Fiction, Reality, and Myth

Virginia Woolf's feminist-pacifist essay "Three Guineas," with its rallying cry to "Outsiders" - "As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world" - has become a classic antiwar text. But Woolf's thinking on war began right at the start of her career, and this stimulating and diverse collection of essays is the first book to explore how ideas about war and conflict informed Virginia Woolf's writing, from her early reviews to her posthumous work, Between the Acts. The essays, by twelve established Woolf scholars and new voices from the United States, Japan, and England, seek to show the roots of Woolf's sensitivity to violence and how she began from the start to connect the myths and the realities of war with the private violence of the patriarchal family. Dispelling the myth that Woolf was "apolitical," these essays bring to light her profound concern with the daily realities of statecraft, with the political and ethical implications of aesthetics, and with the effects of war on the homefront. The essays reveal new evidence of Woolf's collaboration with her husband, Leonard, on the "war for peace," and present new readings of her novels that convincingly identify Woolf as a major antiwar novelist. This volume will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the connections between feminism and pacifism, gender and war, and ethics and aesthetics.