Welcome to Litsy!

Zwerdling uses a myriad of sources to argue that Woolf was deeply engaged in current events and movements (women‘s suffrage; the World Wars) and used her work to articulate her beliefs, hopes, and ultimately, despair. His respect for her is obvious: he isn‘t trying to co-opt her for a cause, as people have tried to do, and sees her vacillations as proof of her extraordinary sensibilities.

This day has given an emotional weight to reading this chapter. The struggle to be treated as (and to believe you are) equal and capable and valuable when you have been raised to not take yourself seriously and to believe you are fundamentally inferior is arduous. There is no specific marker you can point to and say: “When X happens the work will be done.” As Woolf saw, legislation isn‘t enough alone, but oh my god, it is necessary. #RIPRBG

Woolf traces the process of socialization from the extended moment in which each was intensely alive—young, brash, open, taking emotional risks—to the stage of conventionality. [Their class] is not at all hospitable to such intense feelings. Gradually it blunts, denies, trivializes, or absorbs them, transforming the young rebels into wooden creatures whose public lives no longer express their buried selves.

She felt that serious reading was gradually becoming extinct, to be replaced by forms of communication designed by a new class of cultural middleman who had insinuated themselves between writer and reader.

One of the reasons the [Bloomsbury] group remains so controversial is that the question of how to deal with the faults of one‘s society produces little agreement. Revolutionists, reformers, and private explorers are often more critical of one another‘s strategies than of the flaws they jointly see in the world around them.