Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels

This classic study shows that Woolf’s most experimental writing is far from being a flight from social commitment into arcane modernism. Rather, it can be best seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles of a patriarchal social order: the very definitions of narrative, writing and the subject. In a series of subtle readings of five major novels - Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves - closely informed by psychoanalytic theory, Makiko Minow-Pinkney presents Woolf as a committed feminist whose politics emerged as an aspect of her experimentation with language and form.