Discussion Questions:
2549:

• In what ways was Woolf "one of the chief architects of literary modernism" (2549)?

• Explain: "Language cannot simply mirror something . . . because it is too mysterious and subtle and wayward to do so" (2551).

• Explain: "Seemingly neutral space, the room of cultural agency just as the room of writing, is in truth  a gendered space" (2660).
• What is "the subversive quality of occupying the blank page and wielding the printed word" (2660)?

• Explain: "She keeps an ironic tension in play, holding at bay her anger at being censored or silences by male readers by creating a sense of privacy and secrecy among women" (2661).

• To what does "women and fiction" refer?

• Explain: "Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact"
   (2662).
• What is Oxbridge?
• Explain: "'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being" (2662).

• Explain: "That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library" (2663).

• Explain the discussion of the "flow of gold and silver" (2664).

• What is so conventional about Woolf's description of lunch?

• How has conversation changed, according to Woolf, after the War?

• How do living poets, according to Woolf, compare with Tennyson and Christina Rossetti?
• How have Tennyson and Rossetti been inspired by an illusion?

• Explain: "The beauty of the world which is seen to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder" (2668).

• Explain: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" (2669).

• Explain: "To endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether" (2671).
• Explain the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1884.

• What's the difference  between being "locked out" and being "locked in"?

• Explain Woolf's conception of Shakespeare's Sister.

• Explain Woolf's conception of "contrary instincts." What more contemporary African American writer has also discussed this concept?

• Explain: "It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that on can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her" (2675).

• Explain: "To write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty" (2675).

• Explain Oscar Browning's suggestion that "the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man" (2676).

• Explain: "The history of man's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting, perhaps, than the story of that emancipation itself" (2677).
• Explain: "It is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them" (2677).

• Explain: "The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effect of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent" (2678).

• Explain: "Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for" (2678).  Are there any activities to which this statement might not apply?
• Explain: "Masterpieces are not single and solitary births" (2678).

• Other than being novelists, what else do George Eliot, Emily Brönte, Charlotte Brönte, and Jane Austen have in common?
• Why did Jane Austen hide her manuscripts?

• Explain:  "Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth" (2680).

• Explain:  "All those good novels . . . were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman" (2681).
• Explain: The novel "is a structure leaving a shape on the mind's eye" (2681).

• What does "integrity" mean when discussing novelists?
• Explain:  "Nature, in  her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm" (2682).
• Explain:  "The imagination falters under the enormous strain" (2682).

• How do the values of women and men differ?
• Explain the comparison of novels to pock-marked apples.

• Explain:  "We think back through our mothers if we are women" (2684).
• Explain:  "The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully" (2684).
• Explain:  "Since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools must have told enormously upon the writing of women" (2684).

• Explain:  "The book has somehow to be adapted to the body" (2685).

• Explain  how life in London is like a river.

• Explain:  "A great mind is androgynous" (2687).
• How is Woolf's age "stridently sex-conscious"?

• How is the letter "I" like a "straight black bar" in men's writing of Woolf's time?
• Explain:  "Virility has now become self-conscious" (2688).

• Explain:  "The emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible" (2689).
• Explain:  "One blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy" (2689).

• Explain:  "It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex" (2690).
• Explain Woolf's use of fertility images.
• Explain:  "In a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of errors" (2690).

• Explain:  "Where books are concerned it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a away that they do not come off" (2691).
• Explain:  "Praise and blame alike mean nothing" (2691).

• Explain:  "Intellectual freedom depends upon material things" (2692).

• Explain the effect Woolf sees of reading such works as  King Lear and Emma.

• Explain:  "'When children cease to be altogether desirable, woman cease to be altogether necessary'" (2694).

• Explain Woolf's statements about the reincarnation of Shakespeare's sister.