Blogging Woolf

Did Virginia Woolf identify as a feminist? That was one of the questions I raised in a paper I presented at the 24th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which will be included in the Selected Papers from the conference, published in May 2015.

So imagine my satisfaction when during a visit to my local library, I spotted Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) smack in the middle of a section of feminist standards, sandwiched between Steinem and Ensler.

No surprise there. Room is a feminist classic mentioned daily in writing both personal and public. It also appears regularly on lists of books everyone must read and lists of books that have changed the world. It’s mentioned in stories about life-changing books. And it has inspired a women-centered foundation and provided the name for bookstores.

But I doubt Woolf had any inkling that would be the case 73 years after her death.

Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is the skinny white-spined volume tenth from the left.