Abstract
Abstract How can we understand Virginia Woolf’s life and art through the idea of ‘home’? This chapter answers the question by tracing the multiple places Woolf called home over the course of her life. From a Kensington childhood to final years spent with Leonard Woolf in Richmond, from her famously defiant young adulthood in Bloomsbury to her sister Vanessa Bell’s artistic retreat in Sussex, Woolf’s movements between homes shaped her maturing aesthetic philosophies. As the daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, Woolf experienced Englishness itself through a sense of simultaneous belonging and exile. She consistently framed citizenship and national identity as feminist problems because ‘if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical’ (ARO 96). My essay illuminates the vitality of ‘home’ – physical as well as conceptual – in Woolf’s literature, feminism, and politics.
Published Version
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