Louisa Albani: Virginia Woolf in a London Bookshop
“It was late at night... we were not wearing white satin or seed pearls; we were not dressed at all.”
In our newsletter poetry, and you, and solitude, we brushed the surface of Virginia Woolf’s writing and its resounding impact on modern feminism- a well-loved topic in today’s creative circles. However, the history of Woolf’s life and the cultural shifts she and her siblings created is less broadly known.
At the start of the 1900s, after the death of their father, Virginia and her sister Vanessa began to host evening gatherings for creatives and philosophers at their house in Bloomsbury, London. Boosted with the friends and connections of their brother Thoby, a Cambridge graduate, this community quickly took off as a space for intellectual and artistic expansion.
Naming themselves the ‘Bloomsberries’, members of this group rejected many aspects of their traditional and classist upbringings, adopting freer approaches to everything from romantic relationships to their creative work. Feminist and socially progressive thinking became a standout attitude of the Bloomsbury lifestyle, with works such as Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own dissecting the misogyny present in both the writing world and in society’s infrastructure as a whole.
Poet Dorothy Parker described the community as ‘living in squares, painting in circles, loving in triangles’- a vivid phrase often used to refer to the members’ non-monogamous and community-centric lifestyles. Virginia’s sapphic relationship with Vita Sackville-West, a writer and poet closely involved with the group, highlights the social protection that the community provided with this open outlook. The many collected love letters sent between these two women are a treasured piece of surviving queer history, so much of which has unfortunately been erased.
Despite their strong denouncement of social hierarchy, the privilege which allowed the group such freedoms led to a fair amount of public disapproval, with many claiming the community as exclusive and elitist. The majority of this opposition eventually mellowed over time, however, as this decades-long culture proved itself a pillar for positive changes far beyond the group’s own walls; the advancements in social and gender equality that the Bloomsberries’ work helped inspire are one of the reasons this group is so often credited within the English Modernism movement.
This movement challenged tradition for tradition’s sake and questioned reductive portrayals of women in media, bringing new complexity and breadth to the written feminine experience. Woolf's literary contributions opened the door to a more accessible world for women, and her Bloomsbury history is yet another beacon of feminist effort which brought us to where we are today. A century later, and so much has changed- but we are still, and always, fighting the good fight.
Further Reading
We’ve curated a selection of our favourite books from classic feminist authors if you'd like to explore a little further. Our list of Patent Remedies for Patriarchy features diverse voices, including Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Simone De Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Bell Hooks. You can browse the full list and purchase any of the titles from us by clicking here.
by Ifor Lawson