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Abstract:

In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders’ Society by referencing three 19^th-century authors — S. T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and longest quotation is from Coleridge’s The Friend. However, oddly enough, Woolf seems to misunderstand Coleridge’s intention or perhaps to creatively misuse his words. Taking this understudied detail as its pivot, this article explores Woolf’s view on war and community as it relates to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge’s.

Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and correspondence, as well as on Woolf scholarship, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the “Outsiders’ Society,” thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf’s reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf’s framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, especially through her use of words such as “illusion” and “fact.” Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes a Coleridge quotation in Woolf’s endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend; it also offers a broader overview of Coleridge’s own changing opinions on community and conflict, from “Fears in Solitude” to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. The article points out differences between Woolf’s and Coleridge’s convictions yet also an affinity between them regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies such as greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf’s gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.

November 2021: Laura Cernat is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, Belgium, working on a thesis about the representation of writers from the 19^th and 20^th centuries in recent biographical novels. She has published work on biofiction in the edited volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Clemson UP/ Liverpool UP, 2017) and Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21^st-Century Conceptual Commons (Bloomsbury, 2021), and in the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (43:2/ 2020). She has presented her work at sixteen international conferences, including several editions of the ACLA and the MLA, contributed to the organization of four international conferences hosted by the KU Leuven English Literature Research Group, including a conference of which she was the main organizer: Biofiction as World Literature/ La biofiction comme littérature mondiale (Leuven &online, 15-18 September 2021).

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