Virginia Woolf’s shadow: sex bias in academic publication

The principal findings of this chapter on gender patterns of authorship and subject in scholarly publications on British authors in the period 1930-60, are that, within these parameters, women authors publish on female subjects much more than male authors do, and male authors rarely publish on women subjects, unless they are Virginia Woolf. An unanticipated result from the data shows that, as a subject, Woolf dominates the British academic monograph market for this period. She throws a historiographical shadow like no other twentieth-century woman author, which exacerbates a serious imbalance in the publication of scholarship on other women writers of this period