Virginia Woolf and the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1913–31

Abstract

Introduction Another lapse in this book, I must confess; but if I do it against my humour I shall begin to loathe it; so the one chance of life it has is to submit to lapses uncomplainingly. I remember though that we walked, printed, & Margaret came to tea […] This time we were whelmed in the Coop. revolution; the characters of Mr. King & Mr. May, & possibilities. I get an occasional swinge of the tail which reminds me of the incredibly insignificant position I have in this important world. I get a little depressed, a little anxious to find fault – a question of not being in the right atmosphere […] But of course her niceness & valiancy always conquer me in spite of injured vanity. ( D 1 65) Written in October 1917 while she was struggling to write Night and Day, this diary entry reveals Virginia Woolf's fractious relationship both to the Women's Co-operative Guild and its president Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Here Woolf positions the cerebral world of her novel writing in antithetical tension with the public world of Llewelyn Davies's political activism. As with the tension Woolf cultivated between her reviewing and her voluntary teaching at Morley College, this binary registers more than straightforward antagonism. While her reference to being ‘whelmed in the Coop. revolution’ sounds sarcastically dismissive, this is tempered by Woolf's feelings of inadequacy – the ‘swinge’ in her tail. The self-awareness of Woolf's admission that she was ‘a little anxious to find fault’ casts this entry as a mournful self-recrimination rather than as a biting critique of Llewelyn Davies or the WCG. Woolf's final recognition that in spite of her ‘injured vanity’ she continues to admire Llewelyn Davies's ‘valiancy’ hints at the complicated mixture of personal loyalty and indebtedness, genuine respect but also immutable difference, which characterised Woolf's feelings towards the WCG. Llewelyn Davies was the daughter of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies, the Christian Socialist clergyman who had instructed Leslie Stephen at Cambridge ( PA 6). The two men remained friends while their children forged friendships among themselves; Theodore Llewelyn Davies, Margaret's brother, was at Cambridge with Thoby Stephen and was a fairly regular visitor to Gordon Square.