Virginia Woolf is seldom seen as a political writer, least of all as a successful or influential political writer, and almost never as a the- orist with a comprehensive and penetrating grasp of the social and political fabric of the society we inhabit. For the most part, the political content of her writings goes completely unnoticed. Essay upon essay, book after book, deals with the aesthetic qualities of her art, the “lyric mode” of her novels, the techniques of interior monologue, the form and style and symbolism of her writing, her success or failure in creating “character,” and the allegedly internal (or even “egoistic”) focus of her work.2 Leonard Woolf, her hus- band, wrote that she was “the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition.”3 Quentin Bell, her nephew and biographer, devoted scarcely a handful of pages to her political awareness in the first 400 pages of his two-volume biography, and remarked of her in the year 1934 (when she was fifty-two years old) that “as yet Virginia was not really worried about politics.”
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