Mrs. Thatcher and Mrs. Woolf

This essay addresses the implications of Margaret Thatcher's explicit criticism of Bloomsbury in her memoir, The Path to Power. Thatcher and Woolf circulate as icons of opposing cultural politics in a struggle that has persisted from the 1920s until now. Woolf's attitudes to middlebrow culture, exemplified by the representation of London suburbs in her writings, are antagonistic to Thatcherite thinking, a worldview that holds sway not only in critical attitudes to Woolf and Bloomsbury but also in the public posture of American politicians. Woolf's attitudes to class form a resistance to such postures.