‘A tremor of hope’: Bloomsbury in and after 1918

This talk of peace . . . comes to the surface with a kind of tremor of hope once in 3 months; then subsides; then swells again. What it now amounts to, one doesn’t even like to guess, having a sort of superstition about guessing; at any rate, one can’t help feeling something moving; one may wake to find the covered murmur proclaimed in every newspaper. (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 99)

In her first diary entry for 1918, Virginia Woolf recorded the wave-like rhythm with which the possibility of imminent peace took hold of her thinking, only to recede again. As this article intends to show, for Woolf and many of her friends 1918 became a year in which hopeful anticipation and a subsequent disenchantment characterized their experience of the fluctuating course and the protracted ending of the First World War. The ‘tremor of hope’ will serve both as a metaphor to capture this experience and to delineate the structure of this article. Following Woolf’s impressions and reflections as chronicled in her diaries and correspondence, this essay will explore the political views and reactions to major events of Woolf and some members of her circle, as well as the connections between art, literature and politics that were forged in 1918. It will consider how the war affected Woolf’s writing after 1918 and how members of the Bloomsbury group received the arrival of peace.

Woolf’s entry for 4 January 1918 echoed the chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V at the beginning of Act 4: ‘Now entertain conjecture of a time / When creeping murmur and the poring dark / Fills the wide vessel of the universe’ (4. Prologue. 1–3). The chorus describes the scene on the night before the fateful battle of Agincourt, when anxiety and wariness pervade the atmosphere. Henry’s soldiers, ‘this ruined band’ (4. Prologue. 29), worn out by the Hundred Years War, are painfully aware that they are far outnumbered by the opposing French army, and will stand little chance of victory the next day: ‘The poor condemnèd English, / Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires / Sit patiently and inly ruminate / The morning’s danger’ (4. Prologue. 22–5). Yet they are comforted by King Henry, and together, unexpectedly, they win the battle at last. Woolf used the scene as a prologue to the fourth year of the war to express the profound sense of unpredictability that governed the historical moment in which she wrote, and, in evoking the Aristotelian parallel of the fourth act as falling action and delay, perhaps also tentatively suggested that the year might bring a more positive outcome than the dismal present would allow her to foresee.

I would like to argue that Woolf’s writing not only recorded, but also defined, the historical moment. Combining history and literary analysis, this essay will engage with the troubled and productive years that saw the founding of the Hogarth Press and the acquisition of Charleston Farmhouse – stages that brought together different individuals and their work and laid the foundations for many of Modernism’s negotiations of crisis and creativity. Rather than attempting to ecumenically define Bloomsbury in and around 1918 as a coherent whole, I would like to point to some of its political, artistic and regional components.

The year 1918 in many respects presented what Woolf would later refer to as ‘The platform of time’ (1977–85: 5, 281): the notion of a present that was encrypted between anticipation and retrospect. Her diary of the previous year likewise ended in a questioning tone of uncertainty:

So we come to an end of the year, & any attempt to sum it up is beyond me, or even to cast a final glance at the evening paper, with news from Russia, which has just come in and drawn L. to remark

‘A very interesting state of things – ’

‘And what’s going to happen?’

‘No human being can foretell that.’ (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 95)

Leonard Woolf was referring to the negotiations with the Russian government that took place at Brest-Litovsk and resulted in a temporary armistice, before another conference there brought about a rather demeaning peace agreement with Russia, signed on 3 March. In 1918, the Woolfs, their family and wider circles of friends and acquaintances had been suffering from the tribulations of a war that had been going on for four years. In 1914, shortly after the war had started, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had moved to Richmond in search of a quiet place outside central London for Virginia to recover from recent spells of ill-health and the anguish surrounding the publication of her first novel The Voyage Out (1915). Richmond also allowed them to remain at a distance from their multiple social obligations in the city. After first renting rooms on Richmond Green, the couple moved into Hogarth House on Paradise Road in 1915. In the same year, they bought a printing press and taught themselves how to print. In October, Virginia enthusiastically wrote to her friend Lady Robert Cecil: ‘Dear Nelly . . . We are thinking of starting a printing press, for all our friends stories. Dont you think its a good idea?’ (sic) (1975–80: 2, 120).

The press expanded over the years and became an important agent in disseminating the works of numerous Modernist writers, as well as significant ideas in art, politics and criticism to a broader public. During the war years, the Woolfs were busily reviewing, typesetting, printing, book-binding and distributing not only their own writing, but stories by Katherine Mansfield, poetry by T. S. Eliot, and novels by E. M. Forster. ‘The Hogarth Press’, named after their residence, flourished and became a commercial publisher which eventually also issued the works of Sigmund Freud in English in James and Alix Strachey’s translation.

Despite its comparative calm, Richmond was, however, by no means an escape from the impact of war, which the Woolfs, like many of their friends, hoped would soon be over. Virginia Woolf frequently described the effects of war such as food rationing: ‘There is no fat to be had; no margarine, no nutter’ (sic) (1977–85: 1, 104), or the general absence of more luxurious goods like chocolates or flowers: ‘Most of the . . . shops are shut; the only open shop was besieged. You can’t buy chocolates, or toffee; flowers cost so much that I have to pick leaves, instead. We have cards for most foods’ (1977–85: 1, 100). Apart from the war, Woolf often mentioned how the outbreak of influenza affected herself, her servants and her neighbours: ‘a funeral next door; dead of influenza’ (10 July, 1977–85: 1, 165). The epidemic lasted throughout the year, and in October Woolf noted:

Lytton . . . avoiding London, because of the influenza – (we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since the Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it may seize upon Lord Northcliffe, & thus precipitate us into peace). (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 209)

Woolf’s slightly mischievous hint revealed her anger at how figures like Northcliffe influenced both the government and public opinion during the war by their propaganda. The Woolfs, though, were no strangers to the brutal realities of war, as returning wounded soldiers would be nursed in Richmond Hospital and in a military hospital that was established in the Star and Garter Hotel just a few hundred metres from Paradise Road up Richmond Hill.

Despite living away from the city, the Woolfs remained committed to their friendships and continued to regularly entertain and receive many visitors:

at this moment the mere length of my list of unrecorded visitors frights me from beginning. Judge Wadhams, Hamilton Holt, Harriet Weaver, Ka, Roger, Nessa, Maynard, Shepherd, Goldie, not to mention the Guild & Alix & Bryn & Noel, (who may be called the 17 Club:) all these have accumulated since Sunday; & each deserves something to mark their place. (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 139)

Woolf also invited speakers and hosted meetings of the Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild at Hogarth House.

The ongoing war, however, disheartened many of her friends and she often commented on how crestfallen and utterly disillusioned some of her long-term and formerly high-spirited Bloomsbury acquaintances had become: ‘We had Saxon to dinner on Saturday. He was at his lowest ebb . . . he grieves over the inevitable frailty of mankind’ (1977–85: 1, 105). Like Saxon Sidney-Turner, the optimism based on human originality and intelligence and the accomplishments of an enlightened civilization that was at the core of the pacifist and humanist principles of many members of the Bloomsbury group had been eroded. ¹ In coming to terms with her Victorian upbringing and helping her to cope with the deaths of her parents and brother, Bloomsbury had inspired Woolf with a sense of liberation and strengthened her determination to prove herself as a writer and a thinker (Harris, 2011: 38). Many of her fictional works reflected on ways of writing the past, and her criticism, like A Room of One’s Own, shaped her views of women’s roles in education, politics and society. The belief that humankind was able to learn from the past became fragile as Woolf and her circle were shocked and felt increasingly helpless in the face of the growing barbarity of the war and the destruction of central values of civilization. In a letter to S. R. Masood dated 8 September 1917, E. M. Forster described his exasperation at how the war consumed his creativity as a writer: ‘the cause of all that is evil – i.e. this war which saps away one’s spirit’ (Forster, 1985: 269).

Throughout 1918, Woolf, like everyone else, endured the prolonged course of the war, and only a few days into the new year described how peace became, once again, a more and more elusive hope: ‘The hope of peace all broken up again; policies once more are running in every direction, so far as one can tell’ (1977–85: 1, 105). Often, she would record how the civilian population was affected by Germany’s new way of waging war by Zeppelin raids against allied cities such as Paris and London (Leonhard, 2014: 810). In Hogarth House, the Woolfs had taken precautionary measures: mattresses were set up in the basement kitchen and dinners were occasionally eaten in the coal cellar. The servants Lottie Hope and Nellie Boxall had stayed with the Woolfs since 1916. The general anxiety, food rationing and the fact that the printing press was installed in the larder, with Leonard and Virginia continuously moving through the kitchen, exacerbated some domestic issues. Alison Light explains how class differences were maintained and impacted their living together (2007: 141). Virginia Woolf often sought her sister’s advice in dealing with household problems, but she was also aware of her duty to protect her servants. She described how, after the sirens sounded, she, Leonard, and Nellie and Lottie were restlessly lingering around the house for hours trying to stay reasonable and moderately composed.

The danger, to be sure, was very real, as London was severely bombed during the nights of 28 and 29 January:

An aeroplane went over the house about 11.30. Soon after, the guns were so near that I didn’t like to fetch a pair of shoes left in the bedroom. We had arranged mattresses in the kitchen & after the first noise slackened we lay all together, L. on the kitchen table, like a picture of slum life. One thud came very near; but in an hour we had the bugles, & went up to bed. The thud, wh. L. distinguished from the rest, came from the explosion of bombs at Kew. Nine people, I think killed. (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 116)

On 29 January, she wrote to her sister Vanessa: ‘Well, you almost lost me. Nine bombs on Kew; 7 people killed in one house, a hotel crushed’ (1975–80: 2, 214). Devastating air raids that continued throughout the year caused Virginia Woolf to reflect on ‘the animal human being’ (1977–85: 1, 153) and the cynical logic of war when Leonard told her that ‘Women’s bodies were found in the wrecked aeroplanes. They are smaller & lighter, & thus leave more room for bombs. Perhaps its sentimental, but the thought seems to me to add a particular touch of horror’ (1977–85: 1, 153).

Leonard Woolf was exempted from military service because he suffered from trembling hands and needed to take care of his wife’s at times delicate health. Lytton Strachey likewise renounced service, making a case for conscientious objection, but had to undergo several humiliating medical examinations until he was finally declared unfit for all forms of military service in March 1918 (Atkin, 2002: 29). Eminent Victorians, the work that gained him much critical acclaim, was published in May 1918.

Like the Woolfs and Strachey, Bloomsbury artists like Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell or the painter Duncan Grant sought refuge in the countryside. In 1916, while looking for a house in Sussex, Leonard Woolf discovered a farmhouse at Charleston on the South Downs and recommended that Vanessa Bell should come and look at it (Woolf, 1975–80: 2, 95). Virginia likewise told her sister that she had been dreaming about Charleston and strongly encouraged her to buy it (1975–80: 2, 125). From a short holiday in Cornwall, in September 1916, she eagerly wrote to Vanessa:

Dearest, It is very exciting to think that you may get Charleston . . . [Leonard] says the garden could be made lovely – there are fruit trees, and vegetables, and a most charming walk under trees. The only drawbacks seemed to be that there is cold water, and no hot, in the bathroom; not a very nice w.c, and a cesspool in the tennis court. But . . . the country there is superb to live in – I always want to come back again, and one never feels it dull, but then, not being an artist, my feelings are not to be considered ha! ha! . . . Please write soon and say what happens. I’m sure, if you get Charleston, you’ll end by buying it forever. If you lived there, you could make it absolutely divine. (Woolf, 1975–80: 2, 118–19)

Vanessa leased Charleston in the autumn of 1916, and it became home to her, her children Quentin and Julian Bell, and also to her friend and lover Duncan Grant. In order to eschew conscription by doing work of ‘national importance’, Grant and David Garnett took up work on nearby farms. It was Duncan’s long-term friend and former lover Maynard Keynes who was in a position to advise and help them and others to eventually be exempted from military service.

Charleston was decorated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and before long became a summer house and a hospitable retreat to many Bloomsbury residents and visitors, the most frequent among whom were Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, together with Lytton Strachey, Desmond and Molly McCarthy, Mary Hutchinson and Roger Fry. Far from being a typical household, Charleston represented a microcosm where art and life had become interpenetrating realities, and in spite of the vicissitudes of life, the wartime tribulations and domestic upheavals, it retained its vigour and its magnetism. At times this led to it being inundated by self-invited visitors in need of entertainment who ‘stayed hours and had nothing to say’ (Bell, 1998: 322), so that Vanessa was prompted on occasion to put up a notice board at the bottom of the hill saying: ‘To Charleston. OUT’ (Bell, 1998: 322; see also Olk, 2013). The Woolfs were very welcome and frequent visitors and they spent Christmas 1917 both at their house in nearby Asheham and at Charleston:

One of the coldest & finest of Christmases. Rather to our relief, we spent it alone, Ray falling ill, Ka coming for week end, & Nessa’s children. There was the usual visit from Maynard & Clive; my usual failure to get to Charleston corresponding to Nessa’s failure to get to Asheham. (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 94)

Maynard Keynes had his own room in the farmhouse, and came for long weekends and holidays from Cambridge and London. He was 31 when the war broke out, and as his biographer Robert Skidelsky summarizes:

The war changed his life-style, career, and ambitions, though not his ultimate values. After playing an important part in averting the collapse of the gold standard in the banking crisis of August 1914, he joined the Treasury in January 1915, remaining there till his resignation in June 1919. (Skidelsky, 1996: 18)

Having been part of the group of ‘Apostles’ during his years at Cambridge, where he studied under G. E. Moore, Keynes, although an important figure in the British government, was deeply conflicted about the war. Personally, he was a pacifist and, as he told Duncan Grant, he did not consider the war worth fighting for; economically likewise, he saw no benefit in the war, and opposed it because it would make Britain increasingly dependent on the United States.

From early on, Keynes had been part of the ‘Union of Democratic Control’ that was founded in 1914 to protest against the politics of the Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey. It became an extra-parliamentary anti-war platform to which Bertrand Russell and the future prime minister Ramsay MacDonald also belonged. As the main representative of the Treasury, Keynes played a key role in the Versailles Peace Treaty, and his major work The Economic Consequences of Peace (1919) was written at Charleston. In it he criticized France for its strategy of reparation and argued for an increased integration of the European states (Leonhard, 2014: 970). Keynes was in favour of strengthening Germany and suggested cancelling any inter-Allied debt. Skidelsky writes, he ‘foresaw that attempts to make it pay would destroy the economic mechanisms on which the pre-war prosperity of Continental Europe had depended. He predicted a war of vengeance by Germany’ (1996: 20).

In 1918, Keynes proposed that the government should acquire art from France as a means of securing assets before the British loans expired. Prompted by Duncan Grant, he managed to attend an auction of pictures that were sold after the death of Degas. Grant also advised him to buy the works of painters such as Ingres, Cézanne and Corot who were little known and appreciated in Britain at the time. Keynes took to the paintings and also bought some for himself. Quentin Bell records an amusing incident when Keynes, returning from France on 28 March, was given a lift to Charleston by Austen Chamberlain. Getting off at the bottom of the hill, he was allegedly so loaded with luggage that he left a painting of Cézanne’s entitled ‘Pommes’ on the roadside. Upon arrival at Charleston he told his duly baffled friends that he had left a ‘Cézanne in the hedge’. The painting was instantly retrieved by Duncan Grant and David Garnett (see also Olk, 2013). ² During the war years and beyond, Charleston became a place of refuge to Vanessa Bell, her family and friends, where she and Duncan could continue to paint and sculpt, and where her children could grow up in comparative peace.

When Maynard Keynes met his future wife, the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova who came to London with the Diaghilev Ballet Company in September 1918, Vanessa and Virginia harboured some reservations. Vanessa Bell objected to their staying at Charleston for long periods of time, and when Tilton farmhouse down the hill from Charleston became available, the Keyneses bought it. It was at Tilton that Keynes wrote some of his major theoretical works such as A Treatise on Money (1930) and The General Theory of Employment (1936). Virginia Woolf followed Maynard Keynes’ accounts from the Treasury with a lively interest. She discussed with him his political visions and views about the state of the war, and she often shared his news with other friends like Margaret Llewelyn Davis (Woolf, 1975–80: 2, 133).

As the war continued, 1918 was to be a year of more losses and bloodshed for the British Army than 1917 had been. The ‘Manpower Bill’ of April 1918 raised the age of conscription even further. For Woolf, the spring of 1918, with the war still raging with undiminished ferocity, was tinged with melancholy and grief. She noted that Eric Whitehead, the younger son of mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, had been killed while flying a patrol over the Western Front, and reflected upon reading Wordsworth:

I happened to read Wordsworth; the poem which ends ‘what man has made of man’. The daffodils were out & the guns I suppose could be heard from the downs. Even to me, who have no immediate stake, & repudiate the importance of what is being done, there was an odd pallor in those particular days of sunshine. (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 131)

The profoundly unsettling experience of the continuing war and the question of what had become of humanity and civilization preoccupied Woolf throughout her life, and shaped her feminist views, which she would more widely express in Three Guineas (1938). As early as 1916, however, she wrote to Margaret Llewelyn Davis: ‘I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this preposterous masculine fiction [the war] keeps going a day longer’ (1975–80: 2, 76). Woolf did not succumb to despair, but saw through the inhumanity of war and its inherent contradictions. Upon observing her brother Adrian speaking to a German prisoner, she compared the difficulty of reading a human being to reading a character in a play when she reproached her fellow-citizens for a lack of imagination and empathy with another human life:

[T]he existence of life in another human being is as difficult to realise as a play of Shakespeare when the book is shut. This occurred to me when I saw Adrian talking to the tall German prisoner. By rights they should have been killing each other. The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him – the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent. (Woolf, 1977–85: 1, 186)

Once again, the experience of 1918 turned into one of continuously raised and subsequently thwarted hopes. Woolf recalled that their hearts jumped at the German offer of peace, but that the news did not leave much reason for ‘exhilaration’ (1977–85: 1, 199). In October 1918, the prospect of an ending to the war caused a renewed sense of hope:

Possibly the fighting will be over this time next week. Whatever we have done this week has had this extraordinary back ground of hope; a tremendously enlarged version of the feeling I can remember as a child as Christmas approached. (1977–85: 1, 200)

On 15 October, Virginia mentioned a visit by her first cousin Herbert Fisher, President of the Board of Education, who predicted that there would be peace by Christmas. She was fascinated to hear the latest news from an insider, but at the same time found it odd that the affairs of the world depended on decisions taken in small rooms by elderly men:

I tried to think it extraordinary but I found it difficult – extraordinary, I mean, to be in touch with one who was in the very centre of the very centre, sitting in a little room at Downing St. where, as he said, the wireless messages are racing through from all over the world, a million miles a minute; where you have constantly to settle off hand questions of enormous difficulty & importance – where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide. (1977–85: 1, 204)

She imagined the relief and calm that peace would bring when nobody would have to fear the threat of bombing on clear nights anymore:

so far the Germans have not answered. But their Retreat goes on, & last night, beautiful, cloudless, still & moonlit, was to my thinking the first of peace, since one went to bed fairly positive that never again in all our lives need we dread the moonlight. (1977–85: 1, 205-6)

Yet, for some time there seemed no end to the ending of war. Finally, on 11 November, Virginia Woolf described the arrival of peace:

Twenty-five minutes ago the guns went off, announcing peace. A siren hooted on the river. They are hooting still . . . The rooks wheeled round, & were for a moment, the symbolic look of creatures performing some ceremony, partly of thanksgiving, partly of valediction over the grave. (1977–85: 1, 216)

As she would often do, Virginia Woolf looked up to the sky and observed the rooks. Instead of directly voicing a sense of liberation and joy that the war had ended, however, she rendered her perception of the moment in describing the ambivalent flight-pattern of the black birds as celebratory, and, at the same time, mourning.

The ensuing celebrations of peace in London alienated Woolf, who disapproved of mass events, but even more so because they exhibited to her an alarming nationalism. She openly expresses her contempt:

A fat slovenly woman in black velvet & feathers . . . she & her like possessed London, & alone celebrated peace in their sordid way, staggering up the muddy pavements in the rain, decked with flags themselves, & voluble at sight of other people’s flags . . . The crowds had nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were in the state of children with too long a holiday. (1977–85: 1, 216-7)

After the initial festivities dwindled a few days further into November, Virginia noted with some relief that: ‘Peace is rapidly dissolving into the light of common day. You can go to London without meeting more than two drunk soldiers; only an occasional crowd blocks the street . . . We are once more a nation of individuals’ (1977–85: 1, 217). At the end of November, while still working on her short story ‘Kew Gardens’, she spoke about being ‘overwhelmed with things that I ought to have written about; peace dropped like a great stone into my pool, & the eddies are still rippling out to the further bank’ (1977–85: 1, 219). On 10 December, she had ‘practically’ finished ‘Kew Gardens’, and for Christmas the Woolfs went to Charleston, where Vanessa Bell gave birth to her and Duncan Grant’s daughter Angelica on Christmas Day.

Although the fighting was over, war was to remain a subject for many of Woolf’s works. As Hermione Lee has noted: ‘Her books are full of images of war: armies, battles, guns, bombs, air-raids, battleships, shell-shock victims, war reports, photographs of war-victims, voices of dictators’ (1997: 341; see also Hussey, 1991). Her experimental novel Jacob’s Room (1922) was an ‘elegy for the death of a young man’ (Lee, 1997: 342). The main character, Jacob is the absent centre of the novel, similar to a monument like the Cenotaph, commemorating those who have lost their lives in the war (Olk, 2014: 127). The Cenotaph, like many war memorials encapsulates the feeling of grief in an expression of national pride. In The Waves (1931), likewise, the character of Percival, to whom all other characters relate, forms the central lacuna of the novel. Both Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) convey the effects of shell-shock and lives lost in the war, and Woolf’s last work, Between the Acts (1941), metaphorically refers to England between the two world wars, which, like Woolf’s reference to the prologue to Act 4 of Henry V, are viewed in terms of drama (Olk, 2010: 113–29).

In the aftermath of 1918, the Woolfs continued their prolific work as writers and publishers, but they did not return to the enlightened optimism that Bloomsbury had once professed. They were increasingly disturbed by the rising nationalist sentiment they observed. On 19 July 1919, Virginia Woolf again described the celebrations of ‘Peace day’ as a ‘servants festival’ (sic): ‘I’m desolate, dusty, & disillusioned . . . The servants had a triumphant morning . . . It was they said the most splendid sight of their lives’ (1977–85: 1, 292). Not only did she wish to distinguish her refined taste from that of the lower classes, but what she found most appalling was the hypocrisy of the way in which mass spectacles such as the parade were politically instrumentalized to glorify the patriotic feats of the war: ‘There’s something calculated & politic & insincere about these peace rejoicings’ (1977–85: 1, 292).

Woolf's novel The Years (1937) contains sections entitled ‘1917’ and ‘1918’. The short 1918 section, which is set in November 1918, conveys an atmosphere of insecurity and gloom. It begins by describing how a dense veil of mist conceals the sky, and how dampness permeates the atmosphere. The section is then told from the perspective of the servant Mrs Crosby as she grudgingly walks from Richmond Green to the High Street to run her errands. When she is about to reach the grocer’s shop, she hears guns and sirens, but like people she sees on the street she continues what she is doing entirely nonplussed: ‘The war was over – so somebody told her as she took her place in the queue at the grocer’s shop. The guns went on booming and the sirens wailed’ (Woolf, 2012: 275). The rendition of this rather unspectacular ending of the war expresses not so much the remoteness of the war from ordinary life, but rather the way in which it had become an everyday reality, grinding down characters to the verge of disinterestedness or even boredom, who as a consequence are no longer capable of feeling any sense of relief or optimism.

The Years was published at a time when another war was already looming. Again, Virginia and Leonard Woolf would oppose militarism at home and abroad. In his biography, Leonard Woolf remembers that, in 1935, ‘people were just beginning to understand’ how ‘sinister and menacing’ Hitler and the Nazis were (1967: 185). He vividly recalls feeling helpless as ‘a powerful nation completely subservient to a gang of squalid, murderous hooligans’ destroyed civilization (1967: 248). Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas would famously argue for women to form a ‘Society of Outsiders’ and considered herself one of them: ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (2001: 99–100). Like her diaries and correspondence of 1918, as well as many of her writings, Three Guineas remained one of the most enduring legacies against all forms of violence, nationalism, and war – including a second war she did not live to see the end of.