ABSTRACT
Poverty is a concept that Virginia Woolf's contemporary Walter Benjamin took up in his 1933 essay on 'Experience and Poverty', where he defines it as synonymous with a culture of impoverished experience. In this essay, Benjamin first seems to lament the loss in experience First World War and the loss of value experience underwent at the time. But he then proceeds to show that his loss turned out to be a liberating force and a form of poverty that became the very condition of creation and modernity. As for Virginia Woolf, she stages a Jewish character, the richest jeweller in England. One of the sentences which have been said to be the most offensive in her story, beyond the character's name, is the description of his nose, 'like an elephant's trunk'. Building on the analysis of dialogue with her predecessors, this chapter argues that for Woolf, legacy or heritage have a specific meaning, in keeping with her politics of democracy.
