Democratic Art or Working-Class Literature? Virginia Woolf, the Women’s Cooperative Guild and Literary Value in the ‘Introductory Letter’

Abstract

The chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s preface to a collection of testimonials by autodidact members of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, Life as We Have Known It, against Leonard Woolf’s involvement with the Cooperative Society to explore social class, education and writing. Where Melba Cuddy-Keane (2003) argues that Woolf’s preface offers a ‘hopeful’, future ‘combinatory vision’ of cross-class literary discourse, this chapter focuses on the transitional present. Consideration of two published versions of Woolf’s response to the memoirs, ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ and the ‘Introductory Letter’, is employed to argue that Woolf consolidates the polyphonic qualities of the text’s narrative voice to mitigate criticisms of the memoirs’ literary value. Woolf validates the memoirs as a record of human strength as she distinguishes between democratic art and working-class writing.