Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (1986)

Woman of Letters is a biographical and critical text written by Phyllis Rose and published in 1986 by the Pandora Press. The book focuses on an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s feminism and its place at the center of her intellectual and emotional life. Woman of Letters was a finalist for the Nationalist Book Award, and can be placed within a broader trend of feminist re-evaluations of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsburg Group more generally; Rose’s efforts in many ways can be understood within the academic context of 1970s second-wave feminism, a movement which gave rise to much literary critical theory.

Rose dissects Woolf’s biography into chronological sections, focusing particularly on the transitions between ‘stages’ of her life and the place of her writings within them. Beginning in St. Ives and Kensington, Rose explores the contexts in which Woolf’s books and essays were written and published, examining her relationship with Leonard Woolf, her love of women and Woolf’s place within the Thirties. Interspersed amongst this, Rose discusses the implications for Woolf’s feminism posed by many of her key texts (A Room of One’s Own or Mrs. Dalloway, for example), examining Woolf’s understandings of femininity in both herself and wider society.

Rose’s text is an interesting one because it chooses, often in quite explicit terms, to avoid any biographical reading of Woolf in light of her mental health issues or suicide, an approach which is, sadly, often taken up by critical understandings of her work. Instead, Rose focuses on the nuances inherent in Woolf’s especial brand of feminism, encompassing everything from Woolf’s attitude to Cambridge to her homoerotic love letters to Vita Sackville-West. Rose both criticises the glamorisation of Woolf’s mental illness and works upon an understanding of Woolf as a transformative writer who transcribed her life in letters; Woman of Letters seeks to understand Woolf’s life and its place in her literary creations almost from the perspective of Woolf herself. As Rose herself says, Woman of Letters seeks to deal with what is “not comfortable in life”, engendering an understanding which goes beyond the elegant figurehead of the Bloomsbury Group and attempts to perceive the “real woman” (249) beneath.

Phyllis Rose is an American literary critic, biographer and essayist. Born in 1942 in Manhattan, Rose attended Lawrence (NY) High School before graduating from Radcliffe, the women’s college of Harvard University, in 1964. She spent the next year pursuing a masters in English Literature at Yale University and afterwards returned to Harvard to complete her graduate studies. In 1969 she began teaching, beginning in Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she has remained a member of the faculty since. Rose specialized in nineteenth-century literature and in 1970 received a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Charles Dickens. She is also the author of Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages and often reviews books for the New York Times Book Review and Yale Review.

By Angharad Miller