Virginia Woolf & Plight of Women in Literature Virginia Woolf was a writer who

Virginia Woolf was a writer who was much concerned with the general plight of women in literature in her era. Indeed, she showed considerable interest and concern with the place of women in her society and with the need for women to foster a solidarity with one another, making her a feminist in her point of view. Her feminism derived from her perception of the very real discrimination experienced by women throughout Victorian society, and the woman as artist also had to overcome a degree of prejudice against her and her work. At the same time, it is evident that women in the arts did achieve a certain freedom from the structures of society that other women could not, and Woolf herself is a clear example of this. Woolf was a proponent of the new aesthetic sense that would come to be identified as modernism, and an important element in her modernist point of view was her feminism. Her view of the plight of women, the rights of women, and especially how women should take their place in literature was an important component in her fiction and other writings. Her feminism informed her version of modernism as part of a general separation from the conventions of literature prior to the modern era. Modernist fiction, like modernist art in general, involved a disjointed time sense, the flight from the conventions of realism, and the adoption of complex new forms and styles in the modernist period, all undertaken to provide new meaning, to illuminate the world

gnified (Moore 12). Woolf, has written about her childhood and adolescence in an essay written at the end of her life, in 1939 and 1940: The feelings it describes about both her parents are now very complex, and those concerning her father display all the unresolvable issues that a strongwilled child feels toward a dominating parent, particularly one who was thrown into a slough of despond when he found himself a widower, for a second time, at the age of sixtythree . . . [I]t is this latter image of the selfcentered Victorian paterfamilias, here representing the universal male tendency to turn women into slaves, that serves as the necessary conceptual framework for a proper understanding of the author's life and writings (Powers 43). Quite clearly, there is a strong feminist strain in Woolf's essays that can be found elsewhere in Woolf's writings as well, and often that feminism takes the form of a consideration of the relationship between women and art, women and writing. Writing was a vital pursuit for Woolf herself, and it is natural that she question her own role and the role of other women both in writing and in society and consider the reasons why she is part of such a small sorority of women writers. The obstacle