Natania Rosenfeld OUTSIDERS TOGETHER VIRGINIA AND LEONARD WOOLF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 2000
Acknowledgments 
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the many friends who helped this work to felicitous completion. Its first incarnation was conceived under the tutelage of Maria DiBattista, a kind and incisive critic and reader, and of Sandra M. Gilbert, whose lively teaching inspired and whose encouragement fed the project. Larry Danson gave tough love from the beginning, reading several chapters in succeeding drafts, catching every instance of sloppiness, but never stinting his praise. Mimi Danson helped me with Anglicisms, and Brenda Silver gave wise and canny suggestions, steering me on the right path. 
In the summer of 1989, the Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship enabled me to visit the University of Sussex, which houses the Monks House Papers and the Leonard Woolf Papers. There, I was assisted by Bet Inglis, and by Helen Bickerstaff, who also arranged and conducted my pilgrimage to Monks House and Charleston. Sadly, I can no longer thank Helen for her kindness, as she died of breast cancer in early 1998; I hope her surviving relatives will be warmed by the knowledge of an American scholar's gratitude. 
The final stages of the project received much nurturance. The students in my two undergraduate seminars on Woolf at Duke University, in the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1997, inspired and heartened me. One young woman, who refuses to come out from the bushes, suggested the punning possibilities of “Moor” and “moor” in Orlando. Thanks to the Dannenberg Mentorship fund, I had two research assistants at Duke whose labors were invaluable: Kate Hagopian and Laura Podolsky, both of them lovingly diligent and quick on the uptake. And Amira Jarmakani performed a small but important service for which I remain grateful. 
Vicki Mahaffey cannot be thanked enough. She read the introduction in an early form and, through caring “resistance,” launched me on a maturer intellectual journey. Vicki sustained me in lean professional years by the compliment of her unwavering faith in this book, and in my virtues as a teacher and scholar. The desire to go on deserving this compliment inspires me continually. 
My editor, Mary Murrell, was gratifyingly forthcoming from prospectus to final copy; her responsiveness and humor made the process of revision a pleasure rather than a burden. Lauren Lepow was a sensitive and clever copyeditor—she, too, deserves thanks. 
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INTRODUCTION 
Border Cases 
THIS STUDY is animated by two contrary, yet intimately related, tropes: marriage and annexation. While Virginia Woolf often represents real marriages as microcosmic forms of colonization, tyranny, or warmongering, marriage as a metaphor in the writings of both Virginia and Leonard Woolf always stands for the opposite: a dialogue, in which neither subjectivity drowns out the other and both partners thrive. Their own marriage negotiated the dangers of inbuilt hierarchy through self-awareness on both sides, always leaning toward the metaphor and away from the traditionally conceived actuality. 
My focus on the relationship of Virginia and Leonard Woolf for the greater part of the chapters that follow emphasizes the intersubjective principle in Virginia Woolf's prose and links it with larger sociopolitical questions about belonging and exclusion. While this study gives primary attention to analysis of Virginia Woolf's writings, my new readings of her works depend on an understanding of both the irritation and the inspiration provided by Leonard Woolf (with “irritation” understood as creative and intellectual restlessness rather than malaise). Although Virginia's feminist beliefs and her shrewd observations of gender relations under the rule of patriarchy were spawned early in life, her husband's ardent political engagements created fertile ground for their growth and expression. More provocatively, her alliance to an impecunious Jew with the highest connections in British academe and politics multiplied and illuminated the contradictions in her own identity and politics. Leonard Woolf, at the time of their marriage in 1912, was a former colonial administrator turned fervent anti-imperialist, an active socialist engaged particularly with feminist questions within the British Labour movement, and a theorist of international relations whose work contributed directly to the formation of the League of Nations. Most compelling for my particular perspective is his divided sense of ethnic and class identity: an assimilated Jew, he fluctuated between fierce pride in his heritage and a repudiation of it—a repudiation partially expressed in his gravitation toward Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Nothing was simple in this story, however, and fundamental to my examination of the relationship and writings of the Woolfs is the idea that Leonard Woolf brought to the marriage, but also to the wider currents of literarymodernism and political theory, the complex and vital perspective of the social outsider. 
In opposed yet complementary ways, the Woolfs were outsiders together—she privileged by her background, but excluded from centers by her gender, he privileged by gender and marginalized through background. Such a chiasmic alliance forces... 
 
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CHAPTER I 
Strange Crossings 
I am going to found a colony where there shall be no marrying—unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven—no human element at all, except what comes through Art—nothing but ideal peace and endless meditation. This world of human beings grows too complicated. … 
(Virginia Woolf, letter to Emma Vaughan, April 1901) 
“It's you novelists who're responsible, you know. You've made a world in which everyone is always falling in love— but it's not this world.” 
(Leonard Woolf, “A Tale Told by Moonlight”) 
Love … and sensual pleasure … are two different phases of a single fact. … The man of superior mind as well as the imbecile … feels the need of the ideal and the need of the sensual; all alike go about in search of this mysterious hermaphrodite, this rara avis which, in a majority of cases, is found to be a work in two volumes. This search is a form of depravity for which society is to blame. 
(Balzac, La Cousine Bette) 1  <99657392>
AMPHIBIANS 
Marriage is a paradox. In legally uniting man and woman, society attempts to author a hermaphrodite: a single, ambivalent being. Yet flesh is an insuperable barrier, as is subjectivity: bodies cannot meld, nor brains join. And “falling in love” means embarking on a self-created fiction that has no simple resolution in marriage but receives there a continuation either fecund or embattled—or both. What began, often, as mutual cathexis is then, with luck, complicated and enriched through dialogue. For Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who experienced barriers to physical conjunction, true intercourse was verbal, and largely expressed through the remarkably fertile literary output of both partners. 2  <99657392>Marriage, for them, was a cowritten narrative: one work in two volumes. 3  <99657392>The many actual volumes the couplewrote were the products not only of intellectual cross-fertilization but, even more important, of the sense of strengthened individuality each gained from the other. 
The novels Virginia and Leonard conceived before marriage, and ended by dedicating to each other, inscribe attitudes and fantasies...
 
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CHAPTER II 
Incongruities; or, The Politics of Character 
Whether Leonard Woolf fell in love with a young woman of beauty and intellect, or … with a Stephen of beauty and intellect, will always be a formidable, and a necessary, question. 
(Cynthia Ozick, “Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman and Her Nurse”) 
It is certain that Harry did feel that Camilla's presence there alone with him was in some curious way a proof of his value in the world, showed him to be finer and more of a man than all the other Toms and Dicks and Harrys. … It is just as certain … that Camilla felt no such reflection of her value in his presence. 
(Leonard Woolf, The Wise Virgins) 
[T]o be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English. 
(Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”) 
THE JOKE 
In May 1912, Leonard and Virginia sent Lytton Strachey a note that read: 
Ha! Ha! Virginia Stephen Leonard Woolf 
Having been instrumental in their relationship, Lytton would have understood this note as an engagement announcement and shared the joke—a joke, perhaps, both on him and with him. He himself had been engaged to Virginia—for a day—in 1909; her new engagement might, in recalling that earlier fiasco, naturally evoke laughter. The laugh might also be one of conquest on the part of Leonard (“Ha! Ha! I did it!”), or a conspiratorial laugh between the two men, whose scheming had borne fruit. 
To the reader not personally acquainted with either of the parties named in it, the note would pose some difficulties. It is the first cooperative literary effort of the couple, and it already seems to mock cooperation. If we didn't know what it was “about,” how would we read it? Apparently the merejuxtaposition of these two names is supposed to be funny. Humor in juxtaposition generally arises from incongruity; therefore, we must look for the differences between the names. We see, first of all, that the two persons named are of opposite gender. The name on top—and its... 
 
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CHAPTER III 
Links into Fences 
And there is the girl behind the counter too—I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and his like are now inditing. 
(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own) 
To expect us, whose minds … fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down again to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. 
(Virginia Woolf, “Introductory Letter,” Life as We Have Known It) 
When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath. (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out) 
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S grand stream-of-consciousness debut was Mrs. Dalloway, the novel whose polyphonic style sweeps up characters, and readers, too, in an exhilarating flow of impressions. The famous web technique, linking the minds of disparate people, seems to defy barriers between subjectivities; indeed, the whole book seems founded upon Clarissa Dalloway's philosophy that the self is unbounded and inheres partly in other people, other things. “Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, even barns” (MD 153). The idea of affinity with a barn, though not unthinkable, strikes such an absurd note that the appended clause calls the first one into question. And indeed, as I will argue, Woolf means her web to be a paradox, in which the links are the very things that divide. One can talk across a counter; one can never communicate—if by communication we understand an authentic exchange. The high-society hostess's “affinity” is a fiction; the gossamer web belies an iron grid, the skeleton of class division beneath the novel's fabric. 1  <99657398>This novel about a conservative woman of the English upper class, who engages the reader's sympathies by the vivacity of her imagination and the wholeheartedness, if not always the warmth, of her relationships with friends, family, and servants alike, suggests that egalitarian wishful thinking is just that—thinking, not action, a form of passivity enforced by inescapable social structures. 
Since 1913, at least, Woolf had been thinking in political terms about issues of social class. That year she accompanied Leonard to... 

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CHAPTER IV 
Translations 
An agreement or obligation of whatever sort—a promise, a marriage, a sacred alliance—can only take place, I would say, in translation, that is, only if it is simultaneously uttered in both my tongue and the other's. … In order for the contract or the alliance to take place, in order for the “yes, yes” to take place on both sides, it must occur in two languages at once. … Thus the agreement … has to imply the difference of languages, rather than transparent translatability, a Babelian situation which is at the same time lessened and left intact. 
(Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other) 
Copia is that figural capacity of discourse which allows man to express the diversity of his nature, as well as that of surrounding nature, and even to inaugurate mutations in its being. Without copia, there is only repetition. 
(Eugene Vance, ibid.) 
Copia: Plenty, a plentiful supply; now chiefly in the L. phrase copia verborum abundance of words, a copious vocabulary. 1713, ADDISON, Guardian no. 155[:] Since they [women] have such a copia verborum, or plenty of words, it is pity they should not put it to some use. 
(OED) 
I snuggled into the core of my life, which is this complete comfort with L., & there found everything so satisfactory & calm that I revived myself, & got a fresh start; feeling entirely immune. The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it. That is, if one enjoys a bus ride to Richmond, sitting on the green smoking, taking the letters out of the box, airing the marmots, combing Grizzle, making an ice, opening a letter, sitting down after dinner, side by side, & saying, “Are you in your stall, brother?”—well, what can trouble this happiness? 
(Virginia Woolf, Diary, June 14, 1925) 
SMOKE AND COBBLESTONES 
In a diary entry in August 1924, Virginia described what she saw as the difference between Leonard's mind and hers. She begins by noting that yesterday's mood, which she describes as “my silver mist,” is dissipating; and today
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CHAPTER V 
Monstrous Conjugations 
Every rational and civilized man is aware that not very far below the surface of his mind there lurks a savage, primitive instinct of self-glorification. One's own family, house, village, county, nation, school, university are all felt to be in some way superior to those of other people. Reason, if it be used, teaches us that the feeling must be a delusion and a superstition. Even the most patriotic can hardly believe that every family is superior to every other family and every tribe or nation superior to every other tribe or nation. … 
(Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack!) 
“We?” said Giles. “We?” He looked, once, at William. … It was a bit of luck—that he could despise him, not himself. 
The good man contemplated the idiot benignly. His faith had room, he indicated, for him too. He too, Mr. Streatfield appeared to be saying, is part of ourselves. But not a part we like to recognize, Mrs. Springett added silently. … 
(Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts) 
OLD WORDS 
In her description of a decidedly nonandrogynous novel in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf complains of the barred and barring shadow cast over its pages by the recurrent pronoun “I.” The ego of the writer looms so large that all interest and all variety are obscured. There is no perspective apart from those of the author and his male protagonist—which are one and the same. The book is finally dull and unreadable. 
In the 1930s, a similar shadow loomed over all Europe. It was the shadow of the authoritarian proclaiming his will, his desire, his intention. He had taken over and was dictating the narrative of European history. Other voices and other perspectives were squelched by his insistent “I,” whichcould only evoke an echo: the cry of misery Woolf transcribes in Three Guineas as “Ay, ay, ay, ay” (141). “It is not a new cry,” she writes, “it is a very old cry.” 
History was repeating itself, and repetition became a theme in...  
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Notes 
Introduction 
1  <99657212>	These figures from To the Lighthouse meet their ends both at the center of a tripartite structure and in a parenthetical space. Their deaths are at once vital and trivial. The same is true of Jacob Flanders in Jacob's Room and of Percival in The Waves: cogs in the wheel of overweening political forces, they die offstage, yet their loss irrevocably affects the characters who remain. 	
		
2  <99657213>	In the past several years, many if not most of the MLA convention panels dealing expressly with modernism have focused on such questions. Anthologies such as Bonnie Kime Scott's The Gender of Modernism and her more recent, twovolume study Refiguring Modernism have initiated a reconsideration of the movement and period as a network of intersections among artists and writers of varied class, national, racial, and ethnic background, as well as infused with ideologies of gender. Continuing studies of T. S. Eliot's ideological and especially antisemitic leanings have broadened into recent considerations of the figure of “the Jew,” especially in conjunction with ideas about sex and character, in modern British literature. See, for example, Andrea Freud Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene, and Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in Modern English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945.  A fascinating study elucidating the way the definers of literary high modernism— in particular, Hugh Kenner—have privileged exile over national rootedness as the condition for membership in the canon (and thus excluded Virginia Woolf) is Michael Gluzman's “Modernism and Exile: A View from the Margins” in Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. 	
		
3  <99657213>	Michael Tratner's book Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats is the first to extensively discuss her politics in conjunction with these other figures'; it also argues convincingly for modernism as a movement composed of splinters and antithetical currents. 	
		
4  <99657214>	Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and ManicDepressive Illness. My conviction derives from Caramagno's detailed research into Leonard's care of Virginia and attitude toward her illness, but also from notations in Virginia Woolf's own diaries and Leonard Woolf's descriptions in his autobiography of his painful efforts to help Virginia understand her “phases” as somatic episodes rather than symptoms of moral weakness—the latter being an all-toocommon explanation of mental illness, especially in women, in those early postVictorian times. 	
		
5  <99657215>	See the second chapter in Tratner's Modernism and Mass Politics for an indepth analysis of the relation between sections of the novel and sectors of society within the novel. The work of postcolonial theorists, such as Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, discusses the simultaneously buttressing and unsettling presence of the colonies even in texts whose main locus is the metropole. 	
		
This corresponds to Randall Stevenson's analysis of modernists' use of Bergson's “time in the mind” against “time on the clock,” which “enables readers to recognise any ordering of temporality as a construct, an artifice and not an absolute” (Stevenson, Modernist Fiction 136, 221). Continually privileging mind-time, Woolf draws attention to the inherently political tyrannies... Works Consulted 
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Works by the Woolfs 
Woolf, Leonard. After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931. 
Woolf, Leonard. Barbarians at the Gate. London: Victor Gollancz, 1939. 
Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963. 
Woolf, Leonard. Diaries in Ceylon, 1908–1911 and Stories of the East: Three Short Stories on Ceylon. In Ceylon Historical Journal 9, nos. 1–4 (July 1959 to April 1960). 
Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967. 
Woolf, Leonard. Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920. 
Woolf, Leonard. Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961. 
Woolf, Leonard. The Hotel. New York: The Dial Press, 1963. 
Woolf, Leonard. In Savage Times. New York: Garland Publishing, 1973. 
Woolf, Leonard. The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939 to 1969. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. 
Woolf, Leonard. Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex (unpublished). 
Woolf, Leonard. Letters of Leonard Woolf. Edited by Frederic Spotts. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. 
Woolf, Leonard. Quack, Quack! New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. 
Woolf, Leonard. Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960. 
Woolf, Leonard. Stories of the East. See Diaries in Ceylon. 
Woolf, Leonard. The Village in the Jungle. Hogarth Press, 1971. 
Woolf, Leonard. The War for Peace. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1940. 
Woolf, Leonard. The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions and a few Emotions. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. 
Woolf, Leonard., ed. The Intelligent Man's Way to Prevent War. London: Victor Gollancz, 1933. 
Woolf, Leonard and Virginia. Two Stories. London: Hogarth Press, 1917. 
Woolf, Virginia. “Anon.” Edited by Brenda Silver. Twentieth Century Literature 25, nos. 3–4 (1979): 385. 
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1941. 
Woolf, Virginia. The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950. 
Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays, Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. 
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan B. Dick. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. 
Woolf, Virginia. “Anon.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942. 
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–1984. 

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