Virginia Woolf

First edition of Woolf's essays on women and the political sphere, once part of an experimental "sequel" to A Room of One's Own.

• Virginia Woolf (English).
• London: The Hogarth Press, 1938.
• 329, [1] pages.
• Illustrated with 5 black-and-white photographic plates.
• In original blue and purple pictorial dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell.
• Bound in original yellow cloth, spine lettered in gilt. 

These nonfiction interludes gave Woolf much trouble. Originally, she attempted to incorporate them into a novel. After wrestling with that manuscript, Woolf finally separated the two genres, publishing the fiction as The Years, an epic story of the interior and political lives of women in a single family, and the nonfiction as Three Guineas, three interrelated meditations on women, politics and war. In her first essay, representing a guinea in support of women's education, Woolf considers the 1919 Act of Parliament that opened the professions to women, and wonders what kind of influence educated women might now have in the public sphere: "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes." The second essay, a guinea in support of women in the professions, focuses on what we know today as the wage gap, taking the publicly known wages of government workers as an example. The third essay, a guinea in support of pacifism, takes an unpopular position on the eve of World War II. Three Guineas was controversial, especially among men: Woolf's biographer Hermione Lee says that Three Guineas, "furious, lacerating, harsh and awkward, stuck in many of its readers' throats" (692). Nevertheless, the book found an admiring audience among many women intellectuals, including novelist Edith Somerville, who remarked that "it cuts too deep for men to endure." A beautiful, nearly flawless copy, with original jacket design by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell.

Woolmer, A checklist of the Hogarth Press, 440.

Lee, Virginia Woolf.