From Women’s History to Gender History: Rethinking (Literary) History with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf’s suggestion in the third chapter of A Room of One’s Own to ‘add a supplement to history’, if not to ‘rewrite’ it, has been taken up since the 1970s by many feminist literary critics, historians and literary historians who have contributed to establishing the fields of both women’s history and literary history, many of whom acknowledged their debts to Woolf herself as both a foremother and an early practitioner. Indeed, A Room of One’s Own is a highly performative text in which Woolf puts into practice what she seems to be merely suggesting, and as her persona goes through the library shelves (literary) history is being rewritten. It appears, however, that the subsequent critical and historiographical shift from women to gender has not yet been applied to Woolf’s conceptualisation of (literary) history. This article offers to track the reception of A Room of One’s Own as a landmark text of women’s (literary) history before using gender as a ‘useful category of historical [and literary] analysis’ (Joan W. Scott) to re-read Woolf’s essay and show that beneath what is showcased as a reflection on ‘women and fiction’, which has mostly been read as a sketch of women’s (literary) history, Woolf actually rethinks both history and literary history through the lens of gender.