Merry Pawlowski has published the charity letters between Woolf and Vera Douie, the librarian of the Marsham Street Library, which Woolf visited frequently in her research for the book. Snaith has published all eighty-two letters Woolf received from common readers, three-quarters of them women, to whom Woolf diligently (and sometimes repeatedly) replied. As Anna Snaith has argued, the essay and its reception confirmed Woolf’s belief that “the politics of genre include the letter.”2Three Guineas deploys an epistolary arsenal that deconstructs the nebulous spaces between public and private worlds where patriarchal excesses secretly flourish-where the dictator excoriated abroad appears to have found safe haven at home. Written as Europe drifted toward armed conflict (Woolf was correcting proofs the week Hitler marched into Austria) Three Guineas has a rhetorical urgency quite different from its predecessor: money and a room to write are all very well, but how might women use their emergent economic power to prevent war? On the threshold of their historically unprecedented entry into higher education and professional careers, how might they resist the urge to don the ermine wigs, chancellery robes, and merit badges of higher office that advertise wealth and status and, in Woolf’s estimation, invite violence?įramed as a series of responses to three letters requesting monetary support for three worthy causes-a society for the prevention of war a fundraising campaign for a women’s college and a society to support women’s advancement in the professions-Three Guineas is an artful but vehement critique of the ties binding patriarchy and fascism, men’s education and their appetite for war, professional aspiration, and the march toward battlefield graves.
In contrast to the more hopeful Room, which culminates in Woolf’s famous exhortation to her women readers to revive the “dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister,”1Three Guineas is rife with anxieties. Like A Room of One’s Own, written a decade earlier, Three Guineas is centrally concerned with the material conditions of space and economy that govern women’s contributions to the public sphere. On 2 June 1938 the Hogarth Press published Virginia Woolf’s feminist-pacifist polemic Three Guineas.
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