Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf and the Maternal

In this book chapter originally presented as a plenary paper at the International Conference ‘Contemporary European Women Writers: Gender and Generation, March 30th to 1 April 2005 held by the University of Bath, Professor Humm discusses writings of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir as a maternal legacy for British feminist critics and activists. The chapter focuses on a crucial year for feminists in the 1970s: 1972 which saw the first publication of the paperback of The Second Sex. It touches on de Beauvoir’s debt to Woolf, and de Beauvoir’s literary critiques of masculinity and the maternal in The Second Sex, as well as British feminist reception of de Beauvoir and Woolf in that year. Woolf’s famous injunction in a Room of One’s Own that a woman writer “thinks through her mothers”, Woolf’s recovery of the lost mother in “A Sketch of the Past”, The Voyage Out, and Lily Briscoe’s reparative painting in To The Lighthouse are often cited as Woolf’s maternal imaginary. The chapter tells another story about maternal presences in Woolf’s own domestic photographs and in some professional photographs taken of Woolf, as well as Woolf’s debt to her mother Julia’s writing, particularly Julia’s Notes From Sick Rooms