Virginia Woolf - A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon . Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner ; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress , making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition–publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

It would be fair to say that Virginia Woolf was an intense and complex personality. Some might describe her as highly imaginative, sensitive and creative, while others might use the words high-maintenance, introspective and obsessive. In truth, she was all of the above, which meant that she was highly regarded as a novelist by many and entirely disregarded by others.

The central sticking point with the latter was that she came from a highly privileged, upper-middle-class background, yet she viewed the world in quite a negative light. Untroubled by the daily pressures of most, her time was spent in deep analysis of life – or rather, her own life and that of her friends and family. Her literature, therefore, could occasionally disconnect with the lay reader, because her concerns could be seen as self-indulgent and focused on a rarified environment to which most people were not privy.

As a human specimen, Woolf was not a very robust figure. She was prone to bouts of depression and breakdown, in part possibly brought on by the lack of any necessity to just get on with activities that were positive for her mental and physical constitution. In the absence of responsibilities to toughen the character, she lived in a world of ever-decreasing circles until, one day, her horizons closed in so tight that she chose suicide as a means of escape. She filled the pockets of her overcoat with pebbles and walked headlong into a river to drown her sorrows, quite literally. Her life was ended by her own thoughts and actions at the age of 59.

Woolf is a classic case of an artist whose creative expression was bad for their health. Had she abandoned writing in favour of an occupation that took her mind away from her obsessive thoughts, she would undoubtedly have lived a happier and more fulfilled life, but instead she became the author of her own undoing. So, a weighty question remains: was it worth all the pain and suffering? Inevitably those with similar leanings will say yes , because they are able to identify with Woolf’s desire to commit her thoughts to the written word as a kind of catharsis. Inevitably those who cannot identify will say no , because her work offers nothing to which they can relate as they have no need of therapy. It may be that there has never been a more divisive novelist in the history of English literature, and this is probably Woolf’s most interesting aspect.

Woolf’s main influence on modern literature was her ‘stream of consciousness’ approach to prose. Her novels were really vehicles for the copious current of thoughts and emotions to flow without parameters. She was an aesthete and intelligentsium, investing all of her mental capacity into understanding and disseminating the minutiae of human nature, human society, human culture and the human condition. Woolf and her set could be seen as looking down on those who chose not to analyse human existence in such microscopic detail, but realistically this was probably the result of insecurities about one’s own talent, context and significance. The one thing that is certain about belief systems is that believing things doesn’t make them true. This is certainly not to say that Woolf’s portfolio has no value – far from it – but that we do well to remember the context of the author. After all, it was precisely because she existed in her particular milieu that she produced her pioneering style of literature. Moreover, had she been born into a more typical, lower-middle or working class background, she would probably not have had the wherewithal to dissect humanity to such a level.

Woolf’s credentials as a feminist writer were secured with the publication of an extended essay, A Room of One’s Own , in 1929. The title alludes to her assertion that a female writer needs to be financially stable and to have the space and privacy in which to write. In essence the ‘room’ of the title is a metaphor for the freedom needed for creativity and imagination to flourish.

In particular, Woolf wonders whether, if constraints placed on women by society were to be lifted, female writers would have the potential to produce work comparable to that of Shakespeare. In addition to lacking financial security and a space in which to work, Woolf considers other obstacles to productivity: an absence of formal education, and the presence of domestic responsibilities. Due to these constraints, female writers of Woolf’s time – the inter-war period, when societal structures and expectations on women were quite different from now – emerged from a background of privilege and independent, often bold, life choices.