ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the opportunities for bringing historical criticism and feminist criticism together around a topic which will be seen in many ways differently from a woman's perspective. The island is bound up with a whole tradition of thinking about England and English identity which was set to suffer encroachments from that modern machine unbound to either natural or fictional shorelines. The image of the aeroplane, which at the time was at the height of its power to inspire collective fantasies, is utilised by Woolf as part of her idiosyncratic feminist critique of insular masculine Englishness and militaristic aggressiveness, as well as in relation to a rather different set of associations with feminine versions of ambitious or erotic soaring. Virginia Woolf's first novel is The Voyage Out, which opens with the ship leaving England - a journey from which its heroine never returns. Woolf's quarrel with patriarchy and imperialism gave a particular complexity to her appropriations of the island story.
