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\Remarkable Obscurity\: Portraits of Professional Women in Good Housekeeping and Three Guineas
(55) This dynamic circulation of authors and ideas to a wide audience provides a useful model for understanding how Woolf's Three Guineas, published in 1938, built on the work of feminist journalists in the 1920s. [...]the circulation, re-circulation, and re-packaging of authors and ideas led to the innovation, development, and refinement of periodical genres, notably genres for writing Victorian women's biographies. In Three Guineas, for example, Woolf dusts off the lives of governesses and other professional women \"in embryo\" not in order to find exceptional exemplars but to learn more about pre-professional women in the mass, women whose common qualities yield both predictive value-once out of obscurity, how will women behave?-and the potential force of the mass.3 Woolf supplies examples of this potential for a remarkable life to emerge from the obscure mass when she identifies four Victorian lives that \"were so successful and distinguished that they were actually written, the lives of Florence Nightingale, Miss Clough, Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell\" (TG 73).4 Of course, womanly obscurity did not begin as an asset; and in Three Guineas Woolf is primarily concerned with the wrongful keeping of women in the darkness, their gifts continually repressed.5 But while womanly obscurity begins in patriarchal suppression and exclusion, wherein women are its victims, it becomes a learned ethos. First comes \"an obscure Miss Weeton, [a governess] who used to scribble down her thoughts upon professional life among other things when her pupils were in bed\" (TG 71). [...]comes Josephine Butler, illustrating women's absence of egotism; Octavia Hill is then slotted in by way of an endnote, adding more evidence of altruism to the family portrait.8 And finally, bringing the composition to completion, is Gertrude Bell, illustrating chastity of body and mind.
Journal Article