"The London Scene": Gender and Class in Virginia Woolf's London

Abstract

Whether she thought it most beautiful place on the face of the earth or very devil, to Virginia Woolf the city of was the focus for an intense, often ambivalent, lifelong scrutiny. Not only did she make her home there for nearly all of her fifty-nine years-first in the narrow streets of Kensington and then in the spacious squares of Bloomsbury-but she found it a powerfully evocative figure in the literary tradition within which she wrote. And one of the most powerful nonfiction representations of Virginia Woolf's response to was the series of six essays which appeared a little over fifty years ago, from December 1931 to December 1932, in the magazine Good Housekeeping. As their titles indicate, the essays surveyed the highs and lows of the city: The Docks of London, Oxford Street Tide, Great Men's Houses, Abbeys and Cathedrals, 'This is the House of Commons,' and Portrait of a Londoner. Plotless, descriptive, slight as these essays seemed at the time to Woolf, to readers of today the London Scene essays are fascinating, for as I will show, they reveal Virginia Woolf's ambivalence about identity, social position, and access to material possessions, and they contain the strategies forged to accommodate her changing sense of self and social place without alienating the Good Housekeeping audience. Although the London Scene essays celebrate a conventionally modernist setting, the city, they are anything but conventionally modernist in their approach. At their best they subvert the often complacent genre of the urban travelogue to portray gender and class relations in the modern city.1 Woolf struggled with conflicting identifications in the London Scene essays, between insiders (men, the upper classes) and outsiders (women, the working classes), and she used a number of different