Virginia Woolf and the languages of patriarchy.

Arguing that Virginia Woolf is the first modern socialist feminist critic, Jane Marcus offers new readings of A Room of One's Own and the fiction, particularly the neglected novels The Years and Night and Day. She offers a new and original interpretation of A Room, examining the anti-patriarchal impulse in Woolf's life and work. Seeing it as a narrative of seduction, Marcus explicates its references to the censorship trial for Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. She studies the Stephen family in the nineteenth century, including J.K. Stephen, Fitsjames Stephen, and Caroline Stephen, the Quaker mystic aunt who provided the legacy central to A Room of One's Own. Inheriting the languages of law, history, political reform, and official biography from her professional family, Marcus argues, Woolf transforms them into a Feminist, socialist, pacifist, and anti-fascist critique of patriarchy. --- from book's back cover