The People’s War

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s relationship to her identity as an English woman was complicated and ambivalent. Her great pacifist polemic, Three Guineas (1938), epitomized her conviction that a woman’s relationship to her nationality was compromised by discriminatory laws. Three Guineas contains her celebrated declamation that English women were ‘stepdaugh-ters, not full daughters of England’1 because women were required to change their nationality on marriage to a foreigner: ‘A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German.’2 Yet even in Three Guineas Woolf stopped significantly short of the disavowal of all patriotic feeling by recognizing that the human heart had its reasons that reason knew not: And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.3 The start of the Second World War focused Woolf’s attention on those aspects of England that she cherished, especially the City of London with its rich literary associations and the beauty of the English countryside.