“Little waves that life makes”: Virginia Woolf ’s Diary and Feminist Modernist Aesthetics

Virginia Woolf renegotiated her relationship with art and politics throughout her novels, short stories, reviews, and diary. In Woolf ’s view, politics alters the content of literature, thus altering that aspect of literary aesthetics. However, she argued against polemic in literature, asserting in A Room of One’s Own that Charlotte Bronte’s anger made her leave her story “to attend to some personal grievance,” the limitations placed on the lives of women (79). Woolf believed that writers must find a way to make their political points without allowing anger and bitterness to affect the aesthetic quality of their work.