Women's Letter-Writing and Intersubjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Common Reader

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's feminist convictions have been questioned over the years with critics arguing that the author tried to repress her female personality and compromised her identity in order to succumb to the male-dominated societal context of her time with the goal of establishing her reputation as a writer. This article will examine this view in the context of Woolf's essays included in The Common Reader which focus on women letter-writers only in order to argue that the author was not effacing her female personality but was voicing it 'intersubjectively' by entering into a dialogue with readers. A pronounced dialogism was in fact her ultimate objective in both volumes of The Common Reader, published in 1925 and 1932 respectively.