"Opening the Door": The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf's Outsiders' Society

This essay argues that Virginia Woolf's personal publishing venture, the Hogarth Press, both prefigured and influenced her later vision of a feminist, transnational Outsiders' Society, a proposal that she outlined in the 1938 text Three Guineas. Woolf imagined an Outsiders' Society with neither meetings nor leaders that pieced together a multiplicity of private actions to exert political influence. The Hogarth Press, however, was already a material incarnation of this strategy as its translations, feminist works, political pamphlets, and political fiction challenged both the male-dominated British canon and the nationalistic patriarchy that Woolf deplored in Three Guineas.