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Virginia Woolf, an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist, is a prolific writer. She represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” Moreover, Virginia Woolf is considered the founder of modern feminist literary criticism. Prior to her landmark contributions to the field, in particular her feminist manifesto of literary criticism, A Room of One’s Own (1929), very few works register in historical accounts of its genesis.

 When much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. Woolf argues passionately for the right of women to create and think independently. Her eloquent advocacy of her gender’s capability has made her a lasting feminist icon. Faced with the question of whether women’s writing is specifically feminine, she concludes that the great female authors “wrote as women write, not as men write.” She thus raises the possibility of a specifically feminine style, but at the same time she emphasizes that the greatest writers, among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust, are androgynous, able to see the world equally from a man’s and a woman’s perspective. To her, a mind that is able to reconcile both its masculine and feminine parts is the most creative. 

Virginia Woolf has only a certain type of woman in mind when she speaks or writes of equality—educated, upper class, and intellectual elite women like herself. She is a product of a very specific social class in a rigidly stratified society. And although she spends a lifetime pushing limits, ultimately she cannot break down the tormenting barriers of her own mind. Yet, Virginia Woolf’s goal is never to be a spokeswoman for all womankind. For as she writes in A Room of One’s Own, “When I rummage in my own mind, I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.” In her unbending determination to be only herself, Virginia Woolf paves the way for other artists to do the same.