Virginia Woolf and Capitalism

Virginia Woolf and Capitalism explores Woolf’s engagement with and critiques of capitalism throughout her life, arguing for its central importance in our understanding of her as an author, activist and publisher. Galvanised by existing scholarship on the place of economics, class, gender and empire in Woolf’s writing, this collection draws attention to her thinking about history, labour and economics and gives space for understandings of Woolf in the context of our own late-capitalist moment. Chapters by leading and emerging scholars range across Woolf’s oeuvre in all its generic diversity, from her earliest short fiction and Night and Day to Three Guineas and Between the Acts, showcasing a range of critical approaches from the archival to the creative to the pedagogical. This collection demonstrates how productive and provocative thinking about Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction through the lens of capitalism can be for Woolf scholars.

Clara Jones is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (2016) and is currently at work on a new book on the politics of interwar women writers and activists, including Rosamond Lehmann, Ellen Wilkinson, Elizbeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Amabel Williams-Ellis.