Marketing Virginia Woolf: Women, War, and Public Relations in Three Guineas

On 2 June 1938 the Hogarth Press published Virginia Woolf’s feminist-pacifist polemic Three Guineas. Like A Room of One’s Own, written a decade earlier, Three Guineas is centrally concerned with the material conditions of space and economy that govern women’s contributions to the public sphere. In contrast to the more hopeful Room, which culminates in Woolf’s famous exhortation to her women readers to revive the “dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister,”¹ Three Guineas is rife with anxieties. Written as Europe drifted toward armed conflict (Woolf was correcting proofs the week Hitler marched into Austria) Three Guineas has a rhetorical urgency quite different from its predecessor: money and a room to write are all very well, but how might women use their emergent economic power to prevent war? On the threshold of their historically unprecedented entry into higher education and professional careers, how might they resist the urge to don the ermine wigs, chancellery robes, and merit badges of higher office that advertise wealth and status and, in Woolf’s estimation, invite violence?

Framed as a series of responses to three letters requesting monetary support for three worthy causes—a society for the prevention of war; a fundraising campaign for a women’s college; and a society to support women’s advancement in the professions—Three Guineas is an artful but vehement critique of the ties binding patriarchy and fascism, men’s education and their appetite for war, professional aspiration, and the march toward battlefield graves. As Anna Snaith has argued, the essay and its reception confirmed Woolf’s belief that “the politics of genre include the letter.”² Three Guineas deploys an epistolary arsenal that deconstructs the nebulous spaces between public and private worlds where patriarchal excesses secretly flourish—where the dictator excoriated abroad appears to have found safe haven at home. Snaith has published all eighty-two letters Woolf received from common readers, three-quarters of them women, to whom Woolf diligently (and sometimes repeatedly) replied. Merry Pawlowski has published the charity letters between Woolf and Vera Douie, the librarian of the Marsham Street Library, which Woolf visited frequently in her research for the book. The library was affiliated with the London/National Society for Women’s Service, the professional women’s organization that had invited Woolf to speak in January 1931 and had inspired her formative thoughts about Three Guineas.³

This research has contributed to revising the early image of Woolf as an apolitical aesthete and highlighting her role as a public intellectual. My arguments here derive from yet more “lost” letters generated by this conversational, open-ended text. They speak, however, to a different, arguably more complicated side of Woolf’s construction as public intellectual, because they reveal the strategies of promotion and marketing that mediated between Three Guineas and its readers. This small cache of about a dozen letters were all written by or addressed to a historically obscure woman named Norah Nicholls. Nicholls had arrived just one month before the scheduled publication of Three Guineas to take up her new position as manager of the Hogarth Press, the private publishing company established by Leonard and Virginia Woolf twenty years earlier. Her letters, primarily written after the initial release of the book and targeted exclusively to a select number of prominent women’s professional, political, and social organizations, illuminate previously unknown production, distribution, and consumption networks behind the reception of Three Guineas. In them we hear Nicholls’s vibrant managerial voice working her professional women’s contacts, drawing on her past marketing experiences, and constructing a community of women readers and buyers who actively promoted the book among other women.

As promotional materials targeted at a new class of professionally aspirant woman—the first generation to reap the double fruits of enfranchisement in 1918 and professional advancement promised by the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act—Nicholls’s letters force us to return with new eyes to the ambivalences of Woolf’s text. Interleaving Nicholls’s voice with Woolf’s fictional epistolary voices as they address in consecutive order...