Woman in literature?! If we think that it was only in the early years of the twentieth century that women could not access bookshops unless accompanied by a man, we can well say that a little progress has been made. Today busy women writing are a more valued resource. From news journalism to non-fiction, a world of narrated thoughts that gracefully enter the history of literature, a different sensitivity that is inherent in the female soul.
A tribute to this Women's Day definitely goes to Virginia Woolf (London, 1882 - Lewes, 1941), British writer, essayist and activist of the "Fabianism" political movement who was certainly the forerunner of the female presence in the world of culture. She militant of this thought, she wrote two important essays about it, "A room all to yourself"and "The Three Guineas”, denouncing how the female condition was repressed by the dominant male culture of the time. But also "Orlando", an imaginary biography of an androgynous character; the book is actually a poem addressed to her friend the writer Vita Sackville-West. Her "Work" by her is a declaration of the total absence of women on the literary scene of her time declared in every writing by her; it is no coincidence that her essays - fueled by subtle controversy - appear among the great founding texts of feminism.
In 1917, with her socialist journalist husband Leonard Woolf, she founded the independent publishing house: Hogarth Press, with an editorial policy aimed at new generation writers, little known or often not translated. The Hogarth Press catalog includes works, among others, such as those of Katherine Mansfield, Freud, Rilke, Svevo, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy.
Intelligence, sensitivity and literary propensity led her to express herself and write fighting between states of love and hatred towards life. An example of fragility and solid literary ability which for her represents a reason for life and an impulse to die. Her illness leads her to choose abandonment, thus denying her only passion: writing.
If life has a foundation upon which it rests, then mine undoubtedly rests upon this memory. That of lying half asleep
and half awake, on the bed in the nursery at St. Ives, To hear the waves break, one, two, one, two, behind the yellow curtain. To hear the curtain draw its little acorn tassel across the floor as the wind moves it. And to lie down and hear the splashes and see the light and think: it seems impossible that I am here…” (Virginia Woolf – images from the past in Moments of being)
