ABSTRACT
Woolf came from a literary family and associated predominantly with an elite circle of writers and intellectuals, suffragists, socialists and pacifists with whose politics she broadly agreed. Woolf’s best-known statement about the war is to be found in a letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the secretary of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Woolf took issue not only with the ideological dominance of war reporting, but also with the literary fictions that gave it prominence. The hints of the onset of war, the submerged images, the implicit critique, are all brought together in the final pages of Jacob’s Room. The war is more clearly visible in this novel than in Jacob’s Room as a massive social eruption which continues to interrupt daily life long after the Armistice. The pre-war world in To the Lighthouse is again divided by the binary oppositions male and female.
