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PARTISAN REVIEW
private fears and fantasi es touched on public iss ues. For her, it served a
therapeutic function . It was the only perspective she had on her life
which allowed her to see herself as part of a group whose problems
could be traced to common sources.
Superimposed on the class structure as usually defined , she saw a
much simpler grid of power-insiders and outsiders. Women, along
with the poor, were outsiders in England, and to be born female
partially offset the advantages of being born to money and privilege,
for a lthough wealth might be counted on to bring freedom to young
men , to young women it seemed to bring only greater restrictions on
their experience and mobility in the name o( protection and good
breeding. This had been her own experi ence, and she assumed it was
general for what she call ed in
Three Guineas
" the daughters of
educa ted men." Because the family 's educa tion fund had been devoted
to her brothers, she felt she had been deprived of the bes t training and
the widest experience of life, had missed out on discussing Plato
cas ually , before a fire, with her intell ectua l equals, had missed out on
walking the streets of London alone by night. She imagined herself a
kind of maiden enchanted by the evil power of patriarchy; outside her
tower lay the world, but like the Lady of Shalott, she could view it
only indirectly, through the medium of books.
It
is the nineteenth–
century myth of the artist with a feminist twist-she is locked in the
palace of art because she is a well-born woman.
As a young woman, it took her a long time to convince herself that
difference of sty le did not mean inferiority , tha t she had her own voice,
unique, feminine, worth attending to. The Immured Maiden became
the Outsider, who derived strength and distinction from exclusion .
Nothing is more striking in her career than the crazy see-saw between
two very different kinds of works , works of genuine originality and
works of academic discipline. She wrote radicall y individua l novels
like
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts,
and parts of
Th e Voyage Out ,
but she a lso repeatedly-one might
a lmost say compulsively-turned out books in which there was as little
of herself invested as possibl e;
Night and Day, The Years,
and the
biography of Roger Fry, massive, time-consuming, exhausting exer–
cises in self-suppression. Writing sty le, identity, and madness were
perilously interconnected. When she felt threa tened, she clung to the
novel o( (act and traditional form. She wrote
Night and Day,
for
exampl e, while the idea (or her new style was ta king shape, but she
fought the excitement and the terror of the new sty le and stuck to her
academi c task because she had just been insane (from 19 13 to 1915 ) and
feared becoming insane again. The traditional novel was her magi cal
