![]() In the past few decades, her novel “ Frankenstein”-which she began writing, extraordinarily, at the age of eighteen-has been credited as a primary text not only in science fiction, a genre that the book is said to have originated, but also in fiction about women’s experience. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday.įeminist readers have long acknowledged Mary Shelley as one of the most influential of those literary mothers. If conventional literary history passes over these figures, we may need to create them. “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Woolf writes. Woolf laments the paucity of models for relationships between women in novels by male writers: “If Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” “A Room of One’s Own” argues for the importance of literary forebears. But, as is often the case in queer history, words unspoken or muttered under the breath can be more significant than words said aloud. The implications of Biron’s crusade would not have been lost on either of them.Ī typical reader may skim over the reference to Biron, which is no more than an aside. The inspiration for the book was her lover Vita Sackville-West, who accompanied Woolf on at least one of her trips to Cambridge. What’s more, Woolf had just published her novel “ Orlando,” a fictional biography of a man who transforms into a woman. The novel had been published earlier that year, and the trial, which Woolf would attend, took place a couple of weeks after the Cambridge lectures. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall’s “ The Well of Loneliness,” a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be a boy and has romantic feelings for women. ![]() At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. ![]() Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. Sometimes women do like women.”Ĭhloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. (The published text of “A Room of One’s Own” is framed as a lecture and based on a pair of talks that she gave at two Cambridge women’s colleges in October, 1928.) “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. ![]() Do not blush,” Woolf cautioned her audience. ![]() “Chloe liked Olivia.” When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in “ A Room of One’s Own,” her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future-that of queer literary criticism. ![]()
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