ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an assessment of Woolf’s feminist legacy in the light of her “contradictoriness.” This leads me to probe the “woman question” as Woolf inherited, addressed and transformed it. I then assess this transformation by comparing some of Woolf’s reviews and essays on women and fiction with George Lewes’ essay “The Lady Novelist” and E.M. Forster’s lecture on “the Feminine Note in Fiction.” From there, I move to the exploration of Woolf’s double thrust towards embodiment and theorisation enacted by Woolf’s gendered allegories of “Fiction as a Lady.”
