Late Victorian and Modern Feminist Intertexts: The Strachey Women in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas

This article examines the extensive feminist dialogues between Virginia Woolf and two generations of Strachey women. It turns new attention to the Stracheys' social criticism and histories, along with their connections to the classicist Jane Harrison, juxtaposing them with Woolf's best-known feminist writing and her lesser-studied essays and fiction. It uncovers the parallels and breaks between their views on women's rights and locates the Stracheys at the center of Woolf's feminist thinking. The article provides a new reading of their places in each other's intellectual lives, demonstrating the Stracheys' substantial influences not only on advances in women's political and economic rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also on the subjects and language of Woolf's literary texts.