The Past, the Present and the Lessons of History: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Historiographical Method in Three Guineas

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf draws on her extensive knowledge of history and the literary past in order to interrogate pressing contemporary concerns about war, the rise of fascism, and the marginalisation of women. In building her case, Woolf demonstrates relationships between examples taken from such disparate sources as Western classics like the Antigone and the Bible, a lifetime’s reading in literature, history and biography, and recent political propaganda and newspaper reports, which she describes as ‘history in the raw’. This chapter will demonstrate how Woolf makes connections between her examples by using specific historiographical methods to set different historical periods in relation to one another and demonstrate how the past impacts upon the present. Woolf’s approach to history in Three Guineas reflects two key principles that inform her understanding and representation of the past seen across her career: her rejection of a linear account of history as progress and her emphasis on the lives of ordinary people, particularly women. Her writing of history also elides generic boundaries, for it engages techniques that she used in her fiction; she also used her fiction for exploring questions about history. This chapter begins by examining these practices and principles as they are used in a range of her writings, before exploring how Woolf employs these in Three Guineas, showing how she rejects Whig progress narratives in order to demonstrate how little has changed for women over the centuries.