How were the Yellow Book women lost?

Abstract

Virginia Woolf did not appear a comfortable figure as she addressed the students of Newnham College on a bright but windy October day in 1928. The 200 young women in Clough Hall saw a tall, sad-eyed, long-faced woman.[i] She sat on a stage in a hall at a table illuminated by a reading light, alert and ‘sensitively nervous’, speaking of the loss to literature of female exclusion in history.[ii] She famously called up the image of Shakespeare’s sister who had all the attributes of her brother but was female, and so instead of gaining riches and lasting fame by her pen, came to grief. Woolf formulated the main problem as a power imbalance between femaleness and maleness, of the comparative denial of income and privacy between women and men. She proposed a counter-history of women and the interior life, suggesting it as if it were a recent literary discovery, while praising selected women writers of the past. As Talia Schaffer notes, Woolf’s lecture, later expanded into A Room of One’s Own (1929), ignored the recent generation of women writers altogether; ‘her feminist historiography leaps from Charlotte Brontë straight to her own contemporaries’.[iii]

[i] Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 1997), p. 564.

[ii] Lee, Woolf, p. 566.

[iii] Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Women and British Aestheticism (University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 13.