Virginia Woolf has an odd short story called “A Society.” The plot is about a group of girls who form a society. They vow that none of them will marry or have children until they can determine what men have been doing all the this time and whether it was worth it for women to spend their youth in bearing an raising them:
We have gone on all these years assuming men were equally industrious [as their mother and grandmothers who have had ten or more children], and that their works were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They has civilised it. But now we can read, what prevents us from judging the results?
And so they set off, each with a different topic to investigate. They hold regular meetings and make reports.
We meet up with them five years later and it is clear that they are frustrated and tired and starting to wonder why they are doing what they are doing and a few of them wonder why they shouldn’t all just give up the society and get married and have children. Elizabeth, who dressed like a man and was taken for a reviewer, gives her report. She has been reading new books including those by the most popular authors for the last five years. The girls want to know if the men have surpassed Jane Austen and George Eliot, if the men’s books were good. But Elizabeth talks around the answer as if she has been reading too many reviews with lots of words and nothing to say.
The girls press her again, demanding the truth. She replies,
‘The truth? But isn’t it wonderful,’ she broke off–’Mr Chitter has written a weekly article for the past thirty years upon love or hot buttered toast and has sent all his sons to Eton–’‘The truth!’ we demanded.
‘Oh, the truth,’ she stammered, ‘the truth has nothing to do with literature,’ and sitting down she refused to say another word.
In the end, they can’t come to any kind of conclusion, though men come off looking rather silly and the girls, by this time young ladies, are all rather frustrated. The only conclusion they can reach is that they must teach their girl children to believe in themselves. They give up their society, and pass their meeting notes to the younger sister of one of the society members. The child bursts into tears.
Obviously Woolf had a point to make with this story. Supposedly it was written in response to an article by a woman who was disparaging the intellect of women. No one has been able to find the article Woolf noted in her diary. But that’s okay because we have Woolf’s story. It is a story that is not written in the usual Woolfian style. It is straightforward and plain and trying to make a point. The ending feels rather like a cop out, as though Woolf didn’t know the answer herself and instead of trying to propose one, the ladies give up and pass the problem off to the next generation who is none too happy about it. Perhaps Woolf thought that hers was not the generation to figure it out. But I kind of wish she would have tried.
I nearly finished reading The Hours last night and for a moment when reading your post I was picturing Cunningham’s character of Virginia in this type of meeting – talk about interlocking literary influences.
I’m curious to read this story as well. Maybe she found herself confronted with a much larger problem than she expected when she began the story and didn’t know how to write her way out of it.
Sounds like a very interesting story, even (especially?) as it provoked ambivalence in you.
I have never heard of this story, but it does sound wonderful. And very Woolfian – let’s try something hard and then realize that it may not be worth it. Thanks.
You always find the most interesting short stories by VW! Or maybe all her stories are unusual? I wonder at what point in her career this was written? She seems to have such strong opinions I would almost expect her to come to a resolution, but maybe not. I’ll have to look for this one.
How interesting! This makes me eager to read some more Woolf stories — I plan on reading Monday or Tuesday at some point soon and am looking forward to it. It sounds great to read Woolf exploring a topic like this one, even if she comes to no satisfactory conclusions.
I’m glad I came across this, I have always been fascinated by Virginia Woolf…some of her quotes are my favorites! I have a hard time getting through her books though! I will try her short stories!
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
-Virginia Woolf
How very intriguing! i wonder whether this was written before or after ‘A Room of Her Own’? I think it probably was immensely difficult for women of Woolf’s era to imagine how they could combine creativity and mtoherhood, and how they could be taken seriously as intellectual beings. But Woolf gets there in the end, spectacularly of course, with Lily in To The Lighthouse, and her simple, undecidable line in the middle of the canvas. I felt that by this point, Woolf had really come to understand the value of enigma and its power in art. She realised that the enigmatic could come in feminine form too, and her work ends up a testimony to that clever, insightful and damaging vision of hers. Sounds like this story was written before the enigma set in.
Verbivore, yes, I suspect you are right. The problem was bigger than she thought and she wasn’t sure how to write her way through it. I love it when what I am reading starts to relate to other things like the Cunningham book you are reading.
Logophile, yes most definitely. But I think the ambivalence was also in the story which also makes for some interesting reading.
Andi, it turns out Woolf never published the story. So she probably was not satisfied with it.
Danielle, I think all of Woolf is unusual. She was a one-of-a-kind writer. The story was never published but written sometime around 1920. I read it in my copy of The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf.
Dorothy, Monday or Tuesday should be fun to read. It’s always interesting to watch someone as brilliant as Woolf thinking on paper.
Sheryl, give her stories a try. She considered them as practice for her novels. And great quote!
Litlove, this story was written about 1920, so long before A Room of One’s Own (1929) and To the Lighthouse (1927). So when you look at it like that, she had been thinking about women and society for a very long time. Perhaps enigma was a coming to terms with a big problem that she couldn’t understand fully, she couldn’t pin it down fully in words so turned it into a description of a line in the middle of a canvas. That seems very beautiful to me. You also remind me that it has been far too long since I have read To the Lighthouse!
Sounds like a really interesting story, especially written by an author I adore, but I bet someone could easily take that very clever theme and write a better story now. One of my thoughts as a woman who chose to focus on a career rather than to have children has often been that men were very angry at women for coming full force into the business world mainly because it meant more women knowing that what men have been doing for years to “bring home the bacon,” and for which they’ve believed they deserve so much credit, is nowhere near as demanding, nor is it usually as difficult, as being a mother and taking care of a home (not to mention taking care of husbands who’ve been “working hard all day long” and “need to relax” when they get home). Not to say that raising children isn’t extraordinarily rewarding work — often loads of fun — nor the most important work a person can do, but my feeling has always been that most men prior to the women’s movement of the late twentieth century (in white collar professions at least) were having more fun at work than most women were having at home.