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. Indeed, it is 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. This classic study, now made available again to readers, shows that Woolf's most experimental writing is far from being a flight from social commitment into arcane modernism.