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 in a different way, and to show different relationships within the observed world. For Woolf, this included different gender relationships than had prevailed in the nineteenth century.
Woolf's personal life shows considerable divergence from the mores of her time, yet her writings also show that she was fully aware of the social restrictions faced by women in general. In her fiction, relationships between women serve as examples of how women can and do support one another in ...