TO LYRICISE THE ARGUMENT: VIRGINIA WOOLF, NOVELIST AND FEMINIST

The emergence of The Pargiters from the collection of unpublished Woolf manuscripts reveals the degree to which Virginia Woolf attempted to write a truly feminist novel, and yet failed to do so. The difficult and lengthy evolution of The Pargiters into The Years and Three Guineas illustrates in a dramatic and conclusive way the conflicts which arose when Woolf attempted to incorporate her feminism into the novel form. My concern in this study is not with the material Woolf left out of The Years so much as with what she was able to get in, albeit under cover. I began to study Woolf from the premise that she held very strong feminist views which she explicated in a quite sophisticated way in the essays; that she also held an aesthetic that excluded overt feminist content, i.e. that did not allow her to express those views directly in her art; that she was able to find ways of doing so in the novel itself, as well as in the essay. The first chapter takes a cursory look at Woolf\u27s aesthetic theory and its relation to her political thought. The second chapter examines how The Pargiters took shape, and how it evolved from this single root into The Years and Three Guineas. The third chapter looks at The Pargiters as a penetrating feminist analysis of the family. The fourth chapter examines the relation between The Pargiters and The Years, establishing the connections between the raw material of the manuscript and the themes and techniques of the finished novel. The fifth chapter attempts to evaluate the degree of success with which Woolf fused her aesthetics and her feminism in The Years