It was playful and bold to write a novel as though it were a biography, and to call a fiction a life, and to invent that life around a woman the author was in love with, and to stretch her over 350 years, like a body freed from the problems of gravity. In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf did away with the usual co-ordinates of biography and set off through time as though it were an element, not a dimension.

The story is simple: Orlando is a young nobleman, aged 16, in the reign of Elizabeth I. After a series of adventures and disappointments in love and life and poetry, he takes an appointment as the British ambassador in Constantinople. Aged 30, he wakes up one morning from a week-long dead sleep to find that he is now a woman. Orlando returns to England and discovers that it changes as centuries pass but he, or rather she, continues as before. Woolf wrote the book at top speed, scarcely pausing, as Orlando scarcely pauses as he races through 350 years.

On 11 October 1928 — the last day in the novel — Orlando has reached the age of 36: “The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.” This is a poke at Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the great and erudite editor of the DNB. The Victorians loved dates and facts, especially dates and facts in order — theirs was the age of classification, of taxonomy, of the museum, the geographical society, the butterfly net. The pinned wings or the shot and stuffed head are symbols of Victorian England. The Dictionary of National Biography, where the great and the good could be safely pinned and stuffed, was, to Woolf, part of the monstrous edifice of the 19th century that 20th-century creativity needed to overthrow.

As Orlando enters the 19th century she notices, to her dismay, “widow’s weeds and bridal veils… crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments”. In one of the funniest passages in the novel, Orlando suffers a kind of self-generated electric shock treatment as her left hand takes to convulsing spontaneously. She realises that it is because she is not wearing a wedding ring. She rushes out and finds a husband, and the symptom subsides — the censorious somatic symptom of an age where every woman must be classified as virgin, wife or widow.

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And everyone as male or female. Woolf was born in 1882. She grew up as a Victorian. Gender roles were strictly observed in society and at her London home in Hyde Park Gate. Her brother Thoby went to Cambridge; Virginia and her sister Vanessa were educated at home. The social doctrine they were raised on was that of “separate spheres” — woman in the home, man in the world — and it was still going strong when Woolf published Orlando, in the year that all female British citizens over 21 finally got the vote.

But Woolf believed that the creative mind is androgynous. She was an expert in Elizabethan literature. She loved both the scope and the certainty of the Renaissance mind. Shakespeare, writing his sonnets to boys and women with equal passion, understanding the manliness of a soldier, the intensity of a nun, seemed to her to be a sign of what we all might be — bigger, wider, freed from convention and hypocrisy. Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in 1922. Sackville-West was an English aristocrat brought up at Knole House in Kent. As a woman, she could not inherit the ancestral home. Woolf, who had fallen in love with Sackville-West’s past as much as her person, found that the family portraits, ancient relics and priceless objects that filled Knole filled her imagination.

But Orlando is more than a fantasy or a historical novel; it is highly political. Orlando is a savage satire on sexism. When Orlando becomes a woman, his stately home and all her affairs are put in Chancery, because a woman cannot be a duke, and a woman cannot be an ambassador to the Turks, and a woman cannot inherit one of the finest houses in England. But a woman can cross-dress. Once Orlando becomes Lady Orlando, he must make his skirmishes across gender by dressing up. This she does frequently, in order to meet with life outside drawing-rooms and carriages. Sackville-West often dressed as a man and had affairs with other women in her disguise as “Julian”. She had an affair with Virginia Woolf as herself, and although both women were married the passion between them was real — this is clear from their letters. On Woolf’s side it was deeper while it lasted, because Woolf was deeper, and Sackville-West was an unrepentant flirt.

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But whatever happened between them affected Woolf’s imagination as well as her heart. Orlando, written as a romp, a love letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of an exploding freedom in her style. Writing Orlando did Woolf good. Begun as a gift to Sackville-West, it became a gift to herself. It is the most joyful of her books. Woolf’s mind was always first-rate, but when she came to write her next book, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she carried across the full-heartedness of Orlando. A Room of One’s Own is a masterpiece because it is more than a polemic; when she writes about women, about men, about the interplay of the mind, about creativity — above all, about writing — all her thoughts are steeped in feeling. The tract is much more than an argument; it is a passion for life as it could be lived.

Sackville-West, who was not a great writer or a deep thinker, and certainly not a faithful lover, released something in Woolf — something that had been pressing at the bars since Mrs Dalloway (1925). The quality of mind that Woolf (following Coleridge) called “androgyny” is really an adventure of the spirit (think Emily Dickinson). Sackville-West, for all her evening suits and ancestors, did not possess that quality of mind or that adventure of spirit, but she did have a full sexuality and a body to match. It is as though Sackville-West became Woolf’s blood supply for a while. Woolf was never a physical person; with Vita she found herself to be a woman — rather in the way that Orlando does. Sackville-West, all body, allowed Woolf to live in her own body.

It is an entertaining thought to remember that Orlando, all sex-change, cross-dressing and transgressive desire, appeared in the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s sapphic romance The Well of Loneliness. The two novels are different solar systems. The Well is gloomy, beaten, defensive, where women who love women have only suffering and misunderstanding in their lonely lives. The theme is as depressing as the writing, which is terrible. Orlando is a joyful and passionate declaration of love as life, regardless of gender. The Well was banned and declared obscene. Orlando became a bestseller. Woolf’s wit, her writing, her audacity, smuggled across the borders of propriety the most outrageous contraband. Many of the photographs included in the first edition of Orlando were of Sackville-West. I am still not sure how Woolf got away with all this, but she did. The exhilaration of the writing has a lot to do with it.

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It is hard not to fall in love with this book. The writing has a lovely physicality to it. Woolf is always an exquisite detailer but in Orlando the writing is earthed differently. There is something unprotected, even as it is fully conscious. There is a smell of soil, a wave of bilge, the turf is spongy, the rooks hoarse. The unprotected feel of the writing is about speed and energy. Some of that energy is sexual:

“Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard.”

When Woolf thought about writing she concluded that poets proceed by leaving everything out. The novelist proceeds by piling everything in. How could she both pile in and leave out? Orlando is more cluttered than any of her other novels. At the same time, because she is Virginia Woolf, this pell-mell fling of a book is anti-clutter, anti-collecting, and we find as we read that all these collectables are playthings and chimeras. She vanishes them away in an instant. Centuries pass, the rules of time are ignored, physical boundaries do not matter, even the shabby poet Nick Greene, who insulted Orlando as a young man, is met with again as a fashionable London critic of the Victorian age.

Woolf’s sense of this tremendous freedom of existence clusters in a moment near the end of the novel. The Lady Orlando is by the Serpentine watching the toy boats. She has lunched with Nick Greene. She has ordered books from a bookseller — a great novelty for one born in the age of ink-stained manuscripts. She stands at the water’s edge:

“It’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous… ecstasy…”

And we are back with the boy Orlando racing through the rooms of his ancestral home, late for the great queen, sinking upon his knees under a hand “attached to an old body that smelt like a cupboard in which furs are kept in camphor”.

We live in a speeded-up world where is it difficult to find 40 minutes, let alone nearly 400 years. Yet, as Woolf observes, time is there for us if we know how to take it. Reading is one way of taking time. Reading takes time, but time is not lost that way, it is repurposed. We find time. Orlando refuses all constraints — historical, fantastical, metaphysical, sociological. Ageing is irrelevant. Gender is irrelevant. That last is especially interesting now, as the politics of non-binary identification are challenging categories of what is male, what is female, and whether or not biology should be destiny. Orlando grapples with sexism for sure — but makes it clear that while society regards Orlando very differently after her unexpected sex-change, Orlando themselves does not take that view. Immediately after the transformation, the newly formed Orlando gazes into the mirror “without any signs of discomposure” and calmly goes off for a bath, while Woolf addresses us directly:

“We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.”

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Different sex. Same person. Orlando is not the first piece of fiction about sex change. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an equally playful and serious treatise on the mutability of the human form. The Arabian Nights is stuffed with gender-switches and cross-dressing. Shakespeare’s comedies often pivot round a gender-disguise, and as no women were allowed on the Elizabethan stage, and female parts were played by boys, every romance is also a bromance. It’s likely that Woolf’s title is taken from As You Like It, where Rosalind, disguised as the shepherd Ganymede, teaches the man she loves — Orlando — how to love in return.

Still, Orlando is the first trans-novel. Except that Woolf was refusing all labels here. She called it a “biography”, knowing it was a novel. She started the postmodern fashion for mixing up fact and fiction, history and invention. We are used to all that now. Woolf was our pioneer. “Did you feel a sort of a tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last at five minutes to one?” Virginia wrote to Vita on 20 March 1928. She sent her a copy on publication day, 11 October 1928. Their love affair was nearly over by then. Our love affair with Orlando, the boy who’s a girl who’s a girl who’s a boy, goes on and on.

***

This extract is taken from an introduction to the Everyman Classics Library edition of Orlando by Virginia Woolf. 

But the joy, the pleasure of my embodied reality is worth it. I know exactly when my period is due, the sensation of ovulation and the micro-weight gains pre-period that affect my balance, my flexibility and my confidence. I understand the pressures of aesthetics, the desire to be thin, to be ripped, to be long limbed, to be fast and athletic. It’s never ending what you should or could be as a female body in my artform.

I am a dancer and choreographer and have been making work since graduating from London Contemporary Dance School in 1998. I set up my eponymous dance company in 2004, and would regularly tour the UK, Europe and the USA. My work includes 5 Soldiers and MK Ultra which explored conspiracy theory through the lens of pop stars, music video imagery and Britney Spears. I dance, I teach, I speak, and I collaborate.

The body is at the heart of my work and research. To explore the idea of how we inhabit our bodies, I have joined an all-male infantry battalion to train with soldiers, I have been on the beat with West Midlands Police, I have worked with children and teenagers. I have tried to understand the pain women feel about their identity, their changing body in puberty, their sexuality and their confined role in society. I’ve trowelled through the internet and dived into conspiracy theory.

At times, face-masked in mud, helmet and body armour on, clutching an SA 80, I felt more macho than any man I’d ever met. Leaping out of windows, throwing grenades, I felt as cocky and dangerous as any human could ever be. Dressed for a dinner at a private country estate, dangling earrings and floor length gown, I could not feel more feminine. But these are gender stereotypes. These are roles that say soldier = boy, dancer = girl. I stand on the front line of the gender debate, challenging myself and everyone around me, and it’s easier than it looks. You just have to engage your mind, engage your body and be in time in space in the present.

But the frontline of the gender debate is a dangerous place to be. Which is why today I find myself without a dance company, ostracised by my former executive co-director and my board of trustees.

I was shunned following a party at my house during which I disclosed that my new work would be based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando and I revealed my growing unease around the erasure of the word “women” and the biological denialism associated with Gender Ideology.

I did not intend to cause offence or make this about individuals — my ideas were forming and I wanted to have robust debate to find out what the other side thought. But to even float these thoughts in the privacy of my own home was deemed beyond the pale. I was subsequently accused of transphobia and have been investigated for bigotry by my own company. Last week, I decided that I no longer had any trust in my board, and that they had abused the grievance policy of the company to unfairly investigate me. I had no option but to resign, citing constructive dismissal in the hope that I might take back control of my life and my creativity. They tried to silence and shut me down; the next day they took my phone and personal email accounts that were intertwined with the company I founded. I’ve endured dishonest and gross misrepresentations of my views spoken and written about me, and I have quietly tried to maintain my sense of self, my sense of humour and my sanity.

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I believe adult people have the right to be, to feel and to identify any way they want. I do believe, though, that if we erase the word women, if we stop it meaning a biologically based sex class, it becomes a word that can include any male who self-IDs and by doing so we erase women’s rights, the women’s movement and the very basis of attacking and naming sexism and misogyny. The idea that to even state that “a woman is a woman” is extremist or transphobic is deeply chilling and totally false.

The past few years have been dominated by the gender debate online, with the defining moment of the JK Rowling statement, and her eloquent exploration of defending the trans community, defending women, and attempting to explain how domestic violence so affects us as women, and that asking for same sex protections is not in itself transphobic. In fact, in our desperate desire to explain our mistrust of men, so many women have had to re-traumatise themselves, dredging up pain and hurt from the past, as I have done, to help to try to explain just how scared we all really are.

Throughout history it is the artists and the intellectuals who are shut down first — those who dare to question the status quo, or are the first to notice cultural shifts. As artists it is our job to be thinking ahead, following trends, thinking through the eventual outcomes or legacy of new waves of thought. And while my feminism burns bright, I was still feeling uncertain as to what was the right approach to this new way of thinking and talking. I wanted to do the right thing, I wanted to be inclusive, I am a modern progressive artist, I can adapt, change, shift my norms.

So I began looking for a novel or a book that I could hang a lot of my sex and gender questions on, reading, researching, studying Olympe de Gouges who wrote the amazing tenant of Rights for Women, the French Revolution and its betrayal of rights for all (and certainly not for women), sexual politics, and returning to second wave Angela Carter, bell hooks, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Then I came to Orlando. I saw the film, and then read the book, and I was utterly blown away. I had found Virginia Woolf pretty impenetrable as a young woman; but when I sat down with it this time, I read it in a heightened state over two fabulous days. I knew I’d fallen in love — with Orlando, with Virginia, and then after reading the letters between Virginia and Vita Sackville West (as recommended by the local LGBT reading group), I fell in love with Vita too. I was so inspired byWoolf’s third way of approaching all of this muddled and difficult stuff.

Orlando absolutely is a man at the start of the novel, a privileged, precocious boy, beautiful, charming, rich, aristocratic. He falls in love, he loses in love, he writes dreadful poetry, he is humiliated, he is confronted with real warfare and can not cope with his “manly role” to fight and he goes to sleep. When Orlando awakes, she is a woman. A total sex change. A different-sexed body, a thing that even with modern medicine, hormone treatment and surgery, can never, ever be achieved. But humans have the power of imagination. There isn’t one woman alive who hasn’t imagined what her life would be like had she been born a man, the freedoms, the right to pleasure, the right to self.

The problem, Woolf seems to suggest, is no man has really, deeply, truly thought about this the other way around. Men have still not truly grasped the radical notion that a woman is a fully created, total, embodied human being, worth exactly the same as any man. The fact that then Orlando does have a wonderfully wicked time in Georgian England (a time where at least 20% of all women and girls in London worked in the sex trade), is both delightful, titillating and fun.

Remember, it would take until the Sixties and the contraceptive pill before any woman could have sex with a man and not be concerned about the consequences of pregnancy, and what that meant for her and her baby’s future. Woolf knows that women and men are not so dissimilar. We have wants, needs, and desires, but we do not have equal treatment, in the eyes of society or in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, even the GRA of 2003 made sure that no woman could change gender to be a man in order to inherit aristocratic wealth. Exactly as in Orlando all those years before. Some things don’t change…

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Unfortunately, because of my attempt to articulate my gender critical beliefs, I now find myself without a company and without an Orlando. I stand accused of transphobia, which is damaging to the trans community, to women and to me and my reputation as an artist. But I must defend myself, defend my views and stand with the other, incredibly brave women and men who are speaking out against this dangerous ideology. The oppression of women is based entirely on our biology and our reproductive rights and vulnerabilities. We embody our oppression and our strength.

I feel this powerfully in my own body. A dancer’s body, but also a woman’s body; a body that has been raped, assaulted, attacked, strangled, knocked out and abused. My body has been in deep pain, physical and mental. My body has been a victim, that has scars running deep — on my scalp and in my soul. But it is also a body that has created, nurtured and given life. A body that coped with pregnancy, that survived an emergency birth, and then breastfed an infant until he was 30 months. A body of beauty, miracle, love and care. A body that sat in local cafes, shamed me with my bursting boobs, leaking nipples and abundant health. A body that was met, even as an infant suckled, with tuts and looks from by passers — the old judging my openness, the young unable to see boobs as anything but sex objects. I sat there, ashamed but not understanding why until I realised that I felt like an an animal. I was an animal. It shocked me. I couldn’t identify out of my life-giving properties. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t female; I was a woman, a mother, a life giver, yet I wasn’t respected or liked or even tolerated because of it.

Something changed in me. Something deep, and I became braver, fiercer, angry even, about how badly women are treated. And it certainly wasn’t just me — it was all my friends, all those forceps births, split and cut vaginas, c-sections, dangerous births, the refusal to give any kind of painkillers, husbands and partners banned from the birthing room. And then there is the aftermath: the refusal to learn your baby’s name. The infantilising of you and your body and your baby, despite being a grown-up professional woman. I felt like I was 10 years old and being told off. The moment of sheer relief when one midwife treated you and your body with respect and compassion. Often the most overworked and exhausted of women who still hung onto a modicum of love and respect for our bodies and babies.

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This body, my body, it’s been through so much. But it is a dancing body, a body with more to give and to learn than ever before.

My body is why I challenge the belief that we are walking meat sacks. How can it be that we are just flesh, blood, fluids, nerves, muscles, bones. That we are nothing alive, we have nothing to feel, nothing to give pleasure. It is this sort of “transhumanistic philosophy”, that we are merely a brain homunculus behind two jiggling eyes, which is the destroyer of women, of our innate power in the universe, of our understanding that we are mammals, we live on a finite planet, we eat and we shit and we make love and we birth babies and we orgasm and we feel pain and we feel hurt and some of it is from outside of us and some it we invent inside ourselves.

We only have this life, this existence and this time on this planet. We cannot invent a new planet, we cannot pretend we do not exist, we cannot pretend our bodies are not ours. We are more than the sum of our parts, we are our bodies, minds and consciousnesses. We are only just now starting to truly understand the connectivity between our minds, bodies, nature and the planet.

So I say no to the new puritans, the sex deniers and the body snatchers. No to erasure of my sex, no to erasure of my boundaries and my safety. You are asking far, far too much and we know it. We must, and always must, state our truth of our own existence.

Like so much of Woolf’s diaries, that last description has an echo in her fiction. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa, the eponymous wife, thinks about how much she dislikes her own appearance, her “ridiculous little face, beaked like a birds’”.

In her new, annotated edition of Mrs Dalloway, Merve Emre doesn’t footnote the parakeets. But she is frank about Woolf’s less sympathetic side — and the ghastly personal beliefs she subsumed into her fiction:

“The fact is that the working classes are detestable”, Woolf would write in her diary in 1920 — a prejudice she harboured and took great care to ironise in Mrs Dalloway.

Indeed, the point of Mrs Dalloway is to show the thoughtless distance that existed between the comfortable world of the rich and the unquiet world of the poor. Woolf “took great care” to transform the rudeness of her diaries: what appears as shockingly nasty and unprovoked becomes artful and observant — empathetic, even — in her fiction.

Because we do think about other people like that. We can’t control our thoughts. And Mrs Dalloway is concerned with the inner life (“one’s life,” Woolf wrote, “is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does”). Clarissa is so polite, so well mannered, so poised; Woolf drew on her own nastiness to show Clarissa’s interior: frustrated, suppressed, annoyed — about even the smallest things. “For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation.”

To use the language of Twitter, Clarissa Dalloway is trying to control her inner troll — just as Woolf was disguising, ironising and converting hers. In the online age, we are constantly confronted with the dilemma of appropriately expressing our thoughts, of not feeling free to express what ought to be acceptable, of feeling obliged to disguise or edit ourselves, or simply of disliking our own personality. The Annotated Mrs Dalloway is timely.

Woolf wrote in her diary that she detested “egoistical: personal” writing — of the kind that proliferates, now, in autofiction. She worked to be formal, objective. But Emre finds Woolf’s life surfacing everywhere. Woolf’s thoughts, and her self, are irrepressible. Her half-brother used to fondle her in bed, and Emre suggests we can see him “peeping out” from behind Hugh Whitbread, a “sexually abusive” character. Woolf’s early suicide attempt is drawn on. Like Septimus, the soldier suffering from PTSD, Woolf once hallucinated birds talking to her in ancient Greek.

The form of the footnotes mirrors their eclectic contents. They are laid out in thick margins, but sometimes they don’t run in sync with the text, so you have to scout around for the relevant note. There is at least one pile up, where a page of images is put in to allow the notes to catch up with the novel. Emre has created a kaleidoscope of revealing and illuminating images: contemporary photos of London; Duncan Grant’s painting of Regents Park; an etching of Oxford Street by Joseph Purnell; the Tatler cover for May 1922; an X-Ray of a hand. There are also frequent maps showing the characters’ routes through London.

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Just as Woolf’s fragmentary syntax reflects the irrepressible flux of a busy mind, the images and footnotes give a sense of the emergent bustle of London — one of the novel’s essential metaphors — and the disjoined way in which we piece our thoughts together. We are used to this of course — or we should be. Modern culture is chaotic. Social channels and comment threads enable everyone to footnote everything. But still, the annotations show what a marvel it is that Woolf managed to hold together this strange and vivid story — in her head and on the page.

It wasn’t easy. Emre shows how Woolf worked and worked and worked at this book. She was weary with the effort. She resented distractions — she often did. Throughout the letters and diaries, Woolf complains about the demands of other people. “We have seen an endless number of people”. Clarissa’s inventor was, like her, a reluctant hostess. Without people, she relaxed. She wrote to Vita Sackville-West from Sussex in 1928, “I am in soaring health and spirits after one day here and have sat looking at cows for 3 hours instead of chasing round London buying scraps of meat and coming home to find Clive, Miss Jenkins, Sybil, etc.”

Her diary, when she is home, crashes around from notes of where she has been, what she did, who was there, into convoluted psychological, ethical, and philosophical considerations. Just when the discussion becomes intractably deep, she flips into personal admin, grumbles, plans for work, gossip. Woolf seems calmer — nicer — when she is relieved of her anxieties, ambitions, and activities. Unquiet minds, we might speculate, produce unpleasant remarks. They also produce good art. Mrs Dalloway crashes around, too.

Woolf examined her own mind for material, but the novel wasn’t simply a re-working of her diary. Remember: Woolf took great care. She had almost impossibly high standards: she once told E.M. Forster that he wasn’t really a novelist. The poor man had nothing to say other than “Ah!” She criticised him for being unable to marry “satire and sympathy; fantasy and fact.” To meet Woolf’s high standards, then, one must transform the biographical. We must look for the way her rudeness is recreated — not merely expressed — in her art. What we dislike in her private voice, we most likely, unsuspectingly, admire in her public art. If only the same were true of our own vicious internet selves.

It would be easy to cancel Woolf today — parts of her, at least. Emre’s notes introduce critical debates about Woolf’s racism: the diaries are full of unacceptable remarks about Indian people. Mrs Dalloway, however, is not so straightforward. Woolf unflinchingly portrays how the English upper classes saw Indian women as mere objects of desire; as Emre (summarising Supriya Chaudhuri) says: “she represents prejudice from the intimate position of who feels it… Woolf is critiquing what she knows best: her failure to transcend her own racism.” By reading Woolf, we might critique our own rudeness. We might learn, like her, to use our lesser thoughts to encourage ourselves into empathy.

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Because some of the rudeness Woolf buried in her novels has become more, not less, acceptable: Emre shows many lines that were cut from the original draft of Mrs Dalloway, a lot of them about same-sex attraction. Clarissa’s memory of her first kiss with Sally was rewritten so that it described something spiritual and nostalgic, rather than a physical pleasure: “she became instantly soothed and yet stimulated as if myriads of bells chimed.” As with her racism, when writing about concealed desires, Woolf wrote about unacceptable things from the intimate vantage point of one who has experienced them.

Today’s literature looks for the personal everywhere — memoirs proliferate, especially from the unmemorable. But today’s culture is often intolerant of imperfection. We are too close to ourselves, perhaps, to see ourselves clearly, and accept what we find. The distance of fiction can help us see our irrepressible thoughts — to understand we are not obliged to be what we think or say or write.

Woolf’s novels are so serious and seriously good that they are, somehow, inexplicably bad. It’s a perverse logic. Take Mrs Dalloway: a little novel of 250 pages so ingeniously structured, elegantly grooved, impeccably polished and deftly brought off that it always takes about two months to read. Nothing so short should take so long.

For a writer so attentive to the twitchy, nervy minutiae of life — she called them “moments of being” — it is amazing how often Woolf died. Not just the watery one eighty years ago, when she left one of the all-time great “I’ve had enough of this nonsense” suicide notes, loaded her pockets with heavy stones and toppled into the River Ouse.

She died first when her mother died in 1895. Julia Stephen was 49, Virginia barely 14. “Nothing was left,” she would later write, “… a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion”. Her essayist father, a busy, hill-climbing Victorian scarecrow with a today impossible name (Leslie), was no support to Virginia, her sisters or her brothers.

It was a matter of space as much as anything. After Julia’s death, eleven Stephens’s and seven live-in servants dwelled up, down and under three stories in 22 Hyde Park Gate — like lobsters scuttling about inside a vent. “How,” Virginia wrote in one of her teenage diaries, “is one to live in such a world?” Of course, she would later call for a room of her own; these days she would have justly demanded a Peloton, and a podcast of her own too.

Worse waited outside the house in society, where Virginia would die again. Her priggish cousin George Duckworth, who both sexually assaulted her and published her first novel, started taking her to parties when she was eighteen. She wore long white satin dresses, pinned with three pink carnations.

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Other people’s parties are generally much more fun to read about than attend. So it is with the ball at Lady Sligo’s mansion which Virginia was spirited to in June 1900. The solid, rumbling reign of Queen Victoria had just a few months left to run; Victorianism — that thicket of customs, manners and morals — would last a few years longer still. Decades later, Woolf wrote about the party: the vinegary dowager aunts swarming about, the long dining tables plastered with silver, the heavy bachelor colonels exhaling expensive cigar fumes, the walls ringing with complaints about gout and the talk of young men not yet pulled into the whirlpool of the new century.

All this in a world where hansom cabs still waited outside theatres, where turtle soup was what rich people called medicine, where self-care meant reading Homer not downloading a used-once meditation app, where every family had a grandfather who lost an eye during the Indian Mutiny. All this, all around; the exquisite champagne arrogance of power that would soon — sooner than the men in the smoking rooms realised — melt away.

So Virginia blushed, and hid behind a curtain.

She wrote to her sister in the following days: “We are failures. Really, we can’t shine in Society. I don’t know how it’s done. We ain’t popular — we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral.” A funeral: dead again.

The memories — and the resentments — are worked on in the later reminiscences, written in 1920. The fault is not hers; the pink carnations were good. The world was wrong: “I could not get young men to talk… the pressure of society almost forbade any natural feeling… society in those days was a very competent machine. It was convinced that girls must be changed into married women.”

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Why it's time to abolish schools

By Will Lloyd

Artists always think the world is wrong. Circumstances are refashioned to fit their ideas. Then they make their own world. Virginia’s was the Bloomsbury group. Bloomsbury was not so different from Lady Sligo’s ballroom. Its members — Virginia, her sister Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes — were part of the owning, quality class. Their ancestors were judges and civil servants, imperial operatives and dons, manufacturers and Quakers; none had been peasants for generations. They were never proletarians.

The difference between Bloomsbury and the other toffs was that all its young men were unhappily homosexual, or like Virginia, too cracked up to enter society on its own terms. They were privileged outcasts. They wanted freedom from the constraints and sanctions of traditional morality; there would be no more hiding behind curtains.

In their world within a world, leisurely Bloomsbury developed into what Raymond Williams called a “dissenting fraction” of the English upper-class. Light, Beauty and Truth were the new values. They believed that if they talked openly about sex they would never be hypocrites. “We were full of experiments and reforms,” Virginia wrote of the group’s early days. “Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.”

The disastrous First World War confirmed every prejudice the group held about England, and made their work sexy and cool. Christianity, patriotism, well-plotted novels and realistic landscape painting looked like bumbling absurdities. The values of the fathers and grandfathers were laughable and philistine. With flawless timing Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was released in May 1918. Using innuendo rather than invective, Strachey doodled moustaches on the heroic statuary of a fading age.

When the grand Tory historian G.M. Young read the book, he said: “We’re in for a bad time.” “We” meant the old establishment, which preached, as Tennyson had, that “the path of duty was the way to glory”. It turned out that the path of duty was the way to the Somme. Victorianism was punctured for good. The young looked to Bloomsbury for its values in the 1920s — which is probably why so many of them ended up as communist spies in the 1930s.

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The village that imagined a godless world

By John Gray

Woolf’s position in all this, T.S. Eliot said, was “the centre, not merely of an esoteric group, but the literary life of London.” In Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and Orlando, she stirred the heavy dough of English fiction and discovered new forms. Being new was more important than anything else. The aim of her writing, she told Clive Bell, was to “give the feel of running water” — and so each novel is a strange prefiguration of her drowning.

The popular image of Woolf comes from this period. Here she is, the paradigmatic mad lady genius: wronged, misunderstood, impractical, oracular, ahead of her time and consequently not like other people, not quite human at all. Nicole Kidman’s fake nose won an Oscar for playing that Woolf in The Hours (2002), and this caricature was last seen in the grave, trembling lesbian romance movie Vita & Virginia (2019).

It’s the picture postcard version of Woolf — a mannequin on which any number of ideas can be hung, regardless of whether they are true. Those who knew her would be surprised to see her portrayed as a lesbian, or made a hero for the LGBT movement, given that she was terrified of sex. Anything more than holding hands was improbable.

What is true about this image is that Woolf never changes. She writes somewhere that “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living”. Woolf never managed it — just read the Diaries, where page after miserable page shows how stuck she became. Bloomsbury thought there were many ways of living, and many ways of feeling, but they were wrong.

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Women have always been better writers

By Tanya Gold

She began work on a new novel in 1932, when she was established as one of the most spectacular writers of the era. It would encompass “everything”. It would be her definitive statement on women and men, politics and society; on art and on life.

Two exacting years produced a useless first draft. In London, Bloomsbury was being attacked with exactly the same weapon — sarcasm — it had buried the Victorians with. Younger writers snapped at her heels. She thought of a provisional title for another book: On Being Despised. This was another kind of death.

Her diary jangled with nerves. Was her “everything” novel merely an essay about herself? (Yes.) When it was finally published in 1936, The Years was an enormous commercial success. Yet it was too detached, too backwards-looking, too voluptuous. Educated taste had moved on. “Live differently,” one character thinks — the same thought Virginia was scribbling in her diary at fifteen.

Once the war began, and Nazi bombs destroyed her London house, Woolf began to change her mind about things. The Bloomsbury judgments about England and the English were evaporating. Always a mega snob, Woolf was amazed to find herself admiring “every sort of person: chars, shopkeepers, even more remarkably… politicians — Winston at least — and the tweed-wearing, sterling dull women here… with their grim good sense.”

The deep conservatism of her country, which she’d disdained all her adult life, proved itself useful in 1940. It was an advantage to be dull, ignorant, sluggish, and unimaginative. The great majority “were hardly able to conceive,” in the words of one historian, “that Britain might lose the war.” It helped to carry them through, but it damaged her.

This is what killed her off one last time. The vast trauma, not only of war, but in discovering, so late in the day, that all her judgments were wrong. Oscar Wilde once said you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop — true, but he didn’t live long enough to see what happened to Virginia Woolf.

At the bottom of the window is a simple dedication:

R. A. Fisher
Fellow 1920-26 1943-62
President 1956-59

What Ronald Aylmer Fisher was fellow and president of was Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (in whose dining hall the window was installed). He was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. He more or less invented the modern discipline of statistics. As if that wasn’t enough, he also made a vital contribution to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ — which rescued Darwinism from the doldrums and turned biology into a fully-fledged science. Richard Dawkins named him the “greatest biologist since Darwin”: Fisher “provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology’s central theorem.”

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China's modern genocide

By Sarah Ditum

R. A. Fisher was, in other words, a foundational figure. Unfortunately, one of the things he founded was the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society. He was also a racist, telling a UNESCO enquiry that “available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” (the opposite of what the enquiry concluded).

Last month, the college announced that Fisher’s window would be removed — following a campaign by Cambridge students.

Political correctness gone mad? Well, how would you like to eat below a memorial to a man who considered you racially inferior? As for concerns about erasing history, the window was only installed in 1989.

The real problem here is that Fisher was not some isolated crank. He was part of the much wider eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It can’t be edited out of our intellectual history, because for many decades, and to a shocking extent, it is our intellectual history. 

*

For obvious reasons, we view eugenic ideology through the lens of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yet there’s another story that must be told — of how eugenics in Britain and America exerted an influence over the intellectual mainstream that outright fascism never did. Eugenic ideas were deeply embedded within almost every facet of modernity — shaping the thinking of movements, organisations and individuals that are still venerated today as icons of science and progress.

Taking Fisher as a starting point, one can, in the manner of a crazed conspiracy theorist, trace the links between many of the biggest names in science, literature, politics and social reform. Except that there’s no conspiracy — it’s all on record: a dense web of professional and personal relations that define the intellectual life of the era.

For instance, Fisher had an important mentor and supporter in Leonard Darwin — the son of Charles and the President of the Eugenics Education Society from 1911 to 1929. The EES was the focal point of the eugenics movement — almost every eugenicist that I mention in this article was a member of it.

Further reading

'Eugenics is possible' is not the same as 'eugenics is good'

By Tom Chivers

The father of eugenics was Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who coined the word and laid down its pseudoscientific principles. He was instrumental in founding the EES in 1907 with the 21-year-old Sybil Gotto. The EES became the (British) Eugenics Society in 1924 and then, much later in 1989, the Galton Institute. 

It should be said that the Institute has long repudiated its eugenic past. For instance this is what it’s website says in reference to Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius:

“Galton devotes an entire chapter to an overtly racist view of intelligence, which uses a completely fallacious group of criteria to argue that Africans were of less ‘worth’ than Europeans. These views are shocking now, but were pretty representative of many at that time.”

It was indeed another time, but even so Galton’s prejudices were grotesque. This is clear from a letter to The Times, in which he advocated a scheme of racial replacement in Africa:

“My proposal is to make the encouragement of the Chinese settlements at one or more suitable places on the East Coast of Africa a par of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race. I should expect the large part of the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages living under the nominal sovereignty of the Zanzibar, or Portugal, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order loving Chinese…”

University College London, where Galton was based, is now in the process of renaming its Galton Lecture Theatre.

However, that’s not all they’re having to do. UCL also has (or rather had) a Pearson Lecture Theatre and a Pearson Hall named after Karl Pearson. He was a protege of Galton’s, a fierce rival of Fisher’s and, you guessed it, yet another raving eugenicist. His very real achievements in statistics and biology were horribly marred by his revolting opinions on “inferior races” and “degenerate and feeble stock”. That didn’t stop him from being offered an OBE and a knighthood — both of which he turned down because he was also a ‘principled’ socialist.

It may seem incredible to see such a combination of views, but before the Second World War it was unexceptional. Eugenic ideas were common among both Marxists and Fabians. The Left-wing eugenicists of the time included Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane. They didn’t just hold these beliefs in awkward juxtaposition, but saw eugenics as an essential part of socialist project. In Shaw’s infamous words, “the only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of Man.”

It wasn’t just socialists though. In 1899, Winston Churchill declared that his aim in life was the “improvement of the British breed.” He saw “the “feeble-minded” as a threat and in a 1910 letter to the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith advocated compulsory sterilisation as an alternative to confinement — a “simple surgical operation so the inferior could be permitted freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.”

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By Niall Gooch

Churchill was a Liberal at the time he wrote that — albeit one who had come from, and would return to, the Tory ranks. However, many life-long Liberals — including those intellectual titans John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge — were also convinced eugenicists. Keynes was a co-founder of the Cambridge Eugenics Society with Fisher — and continued to support eugenic ideas even after the Second World War. 

Beveridge was no better. In 1906, he stated that “the unemployable” should be supported by state, but at the cost of losing their rights including “the franchise… civil freedom and fatherhood”. In the 1940s, at the height of his influence, he argued that child benefits should be paid at a higher rate to middle class than working class families to boost the birth rate of the former.

Again and again we see the co-mingling of eugenic and progressive ideologies. Early feminism was no exception. That’s especially true of the first advocates of birth control — women like Alice Vickery, Sybil Gotto, Marie Stopes and, in America, Margaret Sanger. They were all active in what was euphemistically known as the ‘social hygiene movement‘ — a mixture of charitable action, social reform, finger-wagging moralism, class snobbery and, in many cases, outright bigotry.

Some of the worst offenders are still revered as feminist pioneers and forerunners of the sexual revolution. Marie Stopes has a reproductive health non-profit named after her, and yet she was a eugenicist through-and-through. In her 1920 book Radiant Motherhood, she looked forward to legislation that would “ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased”. Meanwhile, Sanger — the founder of Planned Parenthood — set out her ideology in a 1923 op-ed for the New York Times:

“Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtless practised. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilisation.”

And there it is, the whole of the eugenic mentality distilled down to just two words: “human weeds”.

*

Confronted by the poverty and squalor of the fast-growing industrial cities, there is ample evidence that the intelligentsia felt not compassion, but deep revulsion, for those less fortunate than they were. Take this 1915 diary entry from Virginia Woolf:

“we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. the first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”

The more progressive intellectuals may have subscribed to various schemes for the improvement of society, but that did not preclude the most dehumanising attitudes to individuals that they saw as beyond help. Even the self-declared socialists, who supposedly had the best interests of the working class at heart, perceived much of it as an obstacle to progress. As H. G. Wells complained:

“We cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny …and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”

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The Scopes Monkey Trial was about racism, not god

By Dennis Sewell

Socialism and eugenicism went together because the latter was a tool for getting rid of the people that supposedly couldn’t benefit from, and might overwhelm, the former. Or to quote Karl Pearson’s chilling words:

“No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings.”

This was also the Bureaucratic Age — a time in which technocracy had yet to understand its limits. Everything, not just the economy, was to be managed from the top-down by an expert class: “No consistent eugenicist can be a Laisser Faire individualist”, exhorted Sydney Webb, “he must interfere, interfere, interfere!”

Eugenics stood at the intersection of so many powerful intellectual currents — so why didn’t it triumph completely?

In part, it was because modernism, though untamed by later doubts, had to contend with what was still a Christian society. The Evangelical, Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic currents in the great Victorian torrent of social reform took a long time to lose their full force. And thus in the twentieth century, the eugenicists were opposed head-on by Christian campaigners like G. K. Chesterton and Halliday Sutherland.

And yet, as we know, the twentieth century also saw traditional Christian morality lose ground to progressive forces across a whole range of issues — from abortion to the divorce law to Sunday trading. So why did the explicitly eugenic agenda — once part of the progressive mainstream — not advance? What happened to it? 

The short answer is that the Second World War did. But that’s not the only reason it lost its respectability. Even if the Nazis had never come to power, the ‘progressive’ eugenicists would have been exposed as the cranks that they were. Their demographic paranoia would have been shown to be baseless. The growth of prosperity and the extension of the welfare state demonstrated that no section of society was beyond help. Over the decades we greatly improved the material condition of our nation without recourse to the eugenic methods that a generation of intellectuals once told us were indispensable.

Further reading

Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

By Peter Franklin

Clearly, there’s no fad so dangerous as one that spreads through the academic and cultural elites — especially one that categorises the rest of the population by things like race and class, and then makes sweeping generalisation on that basis alone. 

In 2020, we could look for more windows to remove and lecture halls to rename. We could stop putting on the plays George Bernard Shaw and stop reading the books of H. G. Wells. We could erase any tribute to Marie Stopes or William Beveridge. We could even get economists to stop calling themselves Keynesians. 

But all of that would be missing the point. After all, it’s not the madness of the dead we need to watch out for. 

That evening, the Somerville graduates — including the future novelists Dorothy L. Sayers, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby — celebrated with a jubilant dinner, where a special toast was drunk to Emily Penrose, principal of the college, and where Professor Gilbert Murray presided as  guest of honour. “I gnash my teeth when I think of all yr Somerville young women preening in cap & gown,” wrote Murray’s friend Jane Harrison from Cambridge, where proposals to admit women to full membership of the university — for which she had been petitioning since 1895 — were rejected that December for the second time. “So like Oxford & so low to start after us & get in first!”

A century has now passed since the first degree ceremony at Oxford — the University of London became the first institution in Britain to open degrees to women in 1878 — and across the world, girls’ access to education still remains a fraughtly contested issue, emblematic of wider questions around the freedoms afforded to women today.

The campaign for women’s education in Victorian Britain, wrote Vera Brittain, “represented the quintessence of the whole movement for women’s emancipation, the contest for the equal citizenship of the mind”. Across the latter half of the 19th century, activists had pressed for schools and universities to offer girls an education on equal terms with men, to secure the grounding necessary for employment and political influence.

“Why,” wrote Florence Nightingale in 1852, “have women passion, intellect, moral activity — these three — and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?” This proposed upheaval of the status quo stirred virulent opposition among commentators: some medical detractors argued that education would disrupt menstruation and cause dysfunction of the reproductive system; others feared that educated women would be introduced to sexual licentiousness through classical literature, that spinster teachers might peddle “oblique and distorted conceptions of love”, or that women’s widespread employment might presage an apocalyptic war between the sexes, culminating in the ultimate extinction of the race.

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Like the 1920s, the 2020s will be an age of anxiety

By Richard Overy

In 1873, two Oxford colleges offered a scholarship to the school student who obtained the highest results in the “Cambridge Locals”, only to withdraw the prize in embarrassment when that pupil’s name was revealed to be Annie Rogers. Rogers (who was awarded a set of books as a consolation prize) became the symbol of women’s fight for education, specifically in Oxford, where that year a series of “Lectures for Ladies” was established in borrowed buildings and attended by the daughters, sisters and wives of sympathetic dons.

Between 1879 and 1893, several women’s colleges were established as residential halls where pupils could live and devote their time to study. These often presented themselves more as homes than as educational establishments; the first principal of Lady Margaret Hall insisted to suspicious onlookers that far from setting in motion a societal revolution, “we want to turn out girls so that they will be capable of making homes happy”.

By the dawn of the 20th century, these colleges were tentatively established within the ancient university: women were allowed to sit all classes and examinations, though were not considered “full” students, nor was their work acknowledged with the award of a degree at the end. A female student recalled a don who began his classes “Gentlemen — and others who attend my lectures”, and another who insisted that the women sit behind him so he didn’t have to see them as he declaimed. Articles in the press constantly feigned concern that women were overworking, and that their minds and constitutions were not geared to such intensive toil.

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By Daniel Kalder

But outside the university, women’s opportunities were fast expanding. During the First World War, women took over men’s jobs in the civil service, in munitions factories, in hospitals and shops; the war, wrote Millicent Fawcett, “revolutionised the industrial position of women — it found them serfs and left them free”. On 6 February 1918, women’s suffrage became part of the British Constitution, for property-owning women over 30; the following year, the Sex Disqualification Removal Act opened up many professions previously barred to women, stating that “a person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function”.

Back at Oxford, the campaign for women to be allowed to take degrees accrued new urgency. Rosamund Essex, who arrived there in 1919, recalled that “the women’s colleges were bursting at the seams, for the war had brought an emancipation for women which they could never have gained for themselves in so short a time. Besides that, girls knew now that most of them had to make their own way in the world and must be properly equipped for a professional life.”

Writing in the Oxford Magazine on 30 January 1920, Annie Rogers insisted that “Parliament has shown very clearly what it thinks about the removal of the customary legal disabilities of women,” and argued that the university should follow suit and not begrudge women credit for their labours. When the statute was debated on 17 February, women gathered with placards outside the Congregation House. On 7 October, the bill came into force, and Rogers herself graduated in the second ceremony to include females, on 26 October that year.

There remained dissenting factions within and outside the university: on 20 October, an editorial in the university’s Isis magazine expressed its fears that women “will outnumber and swamp the men”, who will be forced to retreat to Cambridge (which didn’t grant women degrees until 1948). Their fears remained unfounded for several decades yet: on 16 June 1927 it was reported that Oxford’s Council had voted to limit the number of women undergraduates to 620, maintaining a decorous ratio of one woman to four men.

Even by 1935, Dorothy L. Sayers could set her wonderful crime novel Gaudy Night in the serene setting of an Oxford women’s college, where the dons have dedicated themselves to their work at the expense of family life (making them exemplify, to detractors, a monstrous perversion of woman’s natural instincts). In a dark and premeditated attack on an institution of women’s education, sinister messages are daubed on the walls of the library or tucked into stray gowns.

As newspaper reports begin to hint at an apparent outbreak of insanity in a closed environment of educated single women, detective Harriet Vane sees at once that this scandal risks doing considerable damage to the ongoing fight for women’s education: “’Soured virginity’ — ‘unnatural life’ — ‘semi-demented spinsters’ — ‘starved appetites and suppressed impulses’ — ‘unwholesome atmosphere’ — she could think of whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for circulation.”

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How Britain created the Middle East crisis

By James Barr

In her 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, Woolf describes a female student staring at the ceiling of the British Museum Reading Room while she waits for her books, noticing not a single woman among the names engraved on the dome. At the end of the decade, Woolf picked up similar themes and images in her essay A Room of One’s Own, delivered in 1928 as a lecture at Cambridge’s two women’s colleges.

As Woolf forcefully challenges women’s continued exclusion from intellectual life, she explores with sensitivity and nuance the ongoing struggle to establish conditions, material and emotional, under which artistic work can prosper. “Even when the path is nominally open,” she writes, “when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant —there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way.”

Today, we speak about “having it all”, perpetuating an unattainable ideal of achievement and fulfilment: still, women talk anxiously of how to reconcile their personal lives and careers, of the toll taken by refusing to conform to persistent narratives of how to live, echoing concerns little-changed from a century ago.

Yet Woolf’s words still resound, and we can still take up the gauntlet she threw down to her room of women students: “The room is your own, but it is still bare… How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think, are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be.”