Women - Regional Studies, Women's Studies, Essays, European Studies, Diplomacy & International Relations, Regional Studies

Three Guineas

Name: Three Guineas
Author: Virginia Woolf
ISBN: 9781447479154

by Virginia Woolf

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Overview

Virginia Woolf received three separate requests for a guinea--one for a women's college building fund, one for a society promoting employment for professional women, and one to help prevent war.

This book is an answer to these requests--and as Wolfe examines the three causes and points out that they are inseparably the same, she declares a new tactic of feminine purpose.

"She follows two streams of thought until they flow into the same sea; and that end, that finally encompassing wholeness is not merely peace, not merely freedom and equality for race and sex, it is human civilization, a civilization which must be better, sounder....Toward so broad a purpose must we move if wars are to be prevented and the human mind and spirit are to stand erect and fearless in this world." (The New York Times)

A discussion of the role of woman in modern society and an examination of the causes of war and the means of preventing it.

About the Author, Virginia Woolf

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.

Biography

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her stepsister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favorite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941).

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

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Library Journal

Three of Woolf's top works get annotated by individual scholars, who also supply introductions and additional reading lists. Other extras include a chronology of the author's life and illustrations. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.