Writing Radically as Women With Virginia Woolf: Why?

Abstract

In a short essay titled “Why,” Virginia Woolf daringly questioned the ways in which knowledge is produced, performed, and proclaimed as particular kinds of truths in institutions of power and authority, including academic writing. She subversively suggested, “The little twisted sign that comes at the end of the question has a way of making the rich writhe” and advised that such questions choose their “asking place with care”. In this article, we suggest that the “post” scholarship moment is the moment to ask new questions about the ways Woolfian inspired life-writing as a performance of self and social worlds might be engaged to trouble and open up what the “product” and performance of academic work, words, and worlds might come to be.

Keywords

feminist studies gender and sexuality Virginian Woolf academic writing post qualitative

We Shall Now Have our Treat by Writing to Virginia to Begin¹

Let us go straight to the heart of the matter, and trust that you will be excited by what we are about to share with you. In a short essay titled “Why,” you daringly questioned the ways in which knowledge is produced, performed, and proclaimed as particular kinds of truths in institutions of power and authority, including academic writing. You subversively suggested that “The little twisted sign that comes at the end of the question has a way of making the rich writhe” and advised that such questions choose their “asking place with care” (Woolf, 2008d, p. 160). You see, we like your writing very, very much—in fact, once we began reading works like A room of one’s own, Three guineas, “Professions for women,” “The moment,” and How should one read a book, we have been unable to think of little else. And because, like you Virginia, we are “astonished, as [we] draw the veil off things with words . . . how more and more bubbles” (Woolf, 1943, p. 61) in our minds to give new meaning to that twisted little sign to trouble what the product and performance of academic writing, words, and worlds might come to be. In this performative paper, we share the ways in which you, Virginia, inspire us and we have decided that we are going to play about with all of our favorites—those words of yours we adore and the ones that embolden us over and again to write critical autoethnography as women in the academy.

Yet, we have to confess, there is one sentiment in particular that refuses to settle, feverishly scratching and screwing fear into our brains, and it relates to the “genius” and “integrity” required in the midst of the “purely patriarchal”—and we might add, neo-liberal-colonial, White-supremacist imperialist, the list goes on!—academy in which we find ourselves. You see we are afraid of refusing to obey those voices which dictate to us how we should present this work—perpetual, domineering, grumbling, patronizing, aggrieved, angry but rarely kind voices; write this they say, write that they say, and they will never let us alone. But, no; it is time to no longer be afraid and we refuse the frowns and gowns that send us into failure even before we have begun. Come do your worst then Beadle, “lock up your libraries if you like” (Woolf, 1929/2009, p. 76), shout all manner of warnings and advice, and put as many fences as you can in our way (Woolf, 1929/2009, p. 92); we have the staying power, we will make the attempt and we shall not hesitate or fumble—we shall fly over each and every one of them like a bird and we shall write critical autoethnography!

Elizabeth in with Karen, Renee Mel (blissfully walking with bare feet on the forbidden grass)

Becoming the Woolf pack: Introducing Ourselves

A Feminist Leader in a Girl’s School

When our paper² was accepted, we decided we might tell you something about our professional experiences and how they have been impacted by Virginia Woolf. It is true I, Karen Madden, am a PhD candidate; it is true I am employed as a leader in a girls’ school; but what experiences have I had with Woolf that impact upon my leadership work? It is difficult to say. My profession is education; and in that profession there are perhaps more experiences for women to lead than in any other, particularly in girls’ schools where my job, my PhD, and a good part of my life, are situated. For the road was cut many years ago—by the Sisters of the Sacred Advent, the Sisters of St Joseph, the Mercy Sisters—many women in religious orders, and many more women otherwise, also unknown and forgotten, except perhaps with a building named for them here or a house bearing their name there—have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to lead in a girls’ school, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Leading was a natural and expected progression. The school peace was not broken by the appointment of a woman. No demand was made to make room for the men. The focus on girls and women is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as leaders in girls’ schools before they have succeeded in the other professions, so what possible need for Woolf would there be in such a place?

And Exactly How Should One’s Students Read a Book?³

Hello. My name is Mel Green. I’m also a teacher and PhD candidate. I’m also inviting VW to make sense of a critical school issue. One which may be considered as multitudinous chaos. My doctoral thesis asks, how should teachers engage students in reading for enjoyment? In the first place, I want to emphasise the note of interrogation at the end of my title.⁴ This is a question that has lasted the lifetime of my teaching career and kept me awake on many a night. Over the past 25 years, I have encouraged and advised many hundreds of children and teachers with ideas and suggestions⁵ for reading, while also sustaining the spirit of freedom⁶ in their book choices.

For my inquiring students, I have trained them exactly and powerfully⁷ to find the very spot on the shelves of the school or classroom library, to locate that one special book in the multitude of beckoning titles, that will provide the deepest and widest⁸ and fullest possible enjoyment in reading.

From the enchantment of the magic chair and carpet, we have for brief time-spells lived in different worlds and been spun round⁹ by character revelations. We have imaginatively perceived a thousand conflicting impressions and lost all grasp upon emotion itself. And still made it on time to school assembly.

Each reading experience has left, in its wrenching and uprooting, a residue in relations towards nature and destiny.¹⁰ But also importantly, a vital sense of aesthetic curiosity well satisfied.

What if all this important work were to cease?

Now I ask You to Take a moment, to Consider, what composed the present moment¹¹?

In this present moment I will first introduce myself. I am Renee Mickelburgh, a PhD Candidate at the University of Queensland’s School of Communication and Arts. In a past moment, I was a journalist and communications specialist and so perhaps in this moment I still am. In this present moment, the past lies upon the present¹².

In this present moment I will also explain myself. My PhD explores what happens when Australian women’s stories of private, home gardens are transplanted into the public, online space. What happens when the physical garden moment, that moment when the sun is on your face, and your hands are full of soil runs, like quicksilver on a sloping board¹³, into the digital realm? To help consider my personal and PhD moment, which is full of other moments, Virginia Woolf and I invite you to sit in our bubble: a picnic table in my garden.

In this digital moment you may be in a moment where the night (is) falling so that the table in the garden among the trees (grows) whiter and whiter; and the people round it more indistinct¹⁴. Where I speak to you from, in this same moment, the light has emerged, and the day fully welcomed.

I am speaking from the moment of a crisp, warm spring morning, almost summer because the thunderstorms have already started rolling in from the west. I sense we are not too far from a Summer’s Night, that seasonal moment of warm air, mosquitoes, and cool drinks with condensation dripping slowly down the side of a clear glass, making it tremble and quiver¹⁵. In your present moment you may be enjoying something similar, or perhaps something quite different. But despite being separate we are also somehow also together and in this moment, we can consider what compose(s) this moment¹⁶ and feel firsthand how the technology we communicate through blurs boundaries and borders to consider the same, but very different, moment together.

These moments are, and this moment is, composed of visual and sense impressions¹⁷.

She Was a Woman; This Was Her World

Associate Professor Mackinlay was sitting, writing, at a table in an alfresco cafe. She looked up, startled, as the shadow of a man passed by. No, it was not a beadle—it was only the waiter. She laughed. Then as the attendant placed her beverage in front of her with a smile, the words of her own poem came into her mind.

A girl in a blue and white checked dress quietly sipped her sweet thick coffee.

It was her usual start to the day, but she was not in a usual place

The noise of one motorbike for every two people filled the air.

All manner of horns sounded to signal a change in movement for her to be free.

She sighed for soon her solitude would be gone. The thought of having to fall in line behind the academic procession of men that pervaded her world completely and utterly bored her. Blah blah blah said Professor von X as his band of monstrous men went on and on.

She had written that poem one day 11 years ago while attending an academic conference when she was very unhappy. Now she was happy. She was growing old yet, thinking back through and with her mothers’ as a woman, was keeping her reading and writing feminist academic soul, sound, and sentiment alive. She bent down over the words she had written in her journal for a moment. Her words with their wide-mouthed w’s, great I’s, and heavy curled y’s still resembled her. She was a woman; this was her world. That was all. The alfresco table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still.

“Why” Virginia Woolf in our Work?

Killing the Good-Girl

But to tell you my story—it is not as simple as one might expect for a woman leading in a girls’ school. You have only got to figure yourselves in a school with girls and young women to educate. She had only to become indispensable to her bosses—studying diligently, showing her dedication by taking on extra projects and conscientiously speaking positively about the school at every opportunity. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and expected at a certain point after all—to attend some conferences for aspiring leaders, put in an application or two and practice her interview technique. It was thus that I became a leader; and my effort was rewarded with a position on the senior leadership team—a very glorious day it was for me—a chance to do something, really do something, to address the unequal opportunities available to girls and young women. But, to show you how little I deserve to be called a feminist in my professional life, how little I kn(e)w of the struggles and difficulties of such ambitions, I have to admit that instead of speaking out about the ways our approach to educating girls perpetuates the status quo, I went out and performed Ms Madden, leader in a girls’ school, with professionally suited, broad-smiled, enthusiastic excellence, carefully avoiding any conflict whatsoever.

I soon discovered that if I were going to review my leadership through a feminist lens, I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better, I called her, The Good-Girl Leader. It was she who used to come between me and my feminism when I was at work. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Good-Girl. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of school life. She sacrificed herself daily for her students. If there was a school function, she was at it; if there was a project that needed doing, she did it—in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the mind and wishes of the Principal. The Principal’s wishes were her greatest privilege—she was so grateful to have been given the chance to lead. And when I came to write about feminism and leadership, I encountered her with the very first words. “Feminism is the fight against ‘imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy’” bell hooks (2004, p. 17) said.

“Oh dear!” Good-Girl Leader replied.

I needed to kill her. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be held up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the feminist heart right out of my leadership work.

Three Minds Meet Over Dinner

But, you may ask, “Who might you invite to a dinner party, if you could invite any two people dead or alive?” Here I bring together the philosophical genius and wit of pioneering reader-writer Virginia Woolf and contemporary of hers, American educational reformer John Dewey. The setting is the Bistro at the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane. The year is 2021. The pressing matter in this momentous meeting of magnificent minds is the current state of student engagement in reading for enjoyment. The pandemic problem of readicide¹⁸ has surreptitiously crossed international borders. Its neoliberal transmission increasingly continues to catastrophically threaten children’s lives on a global scale. The dinner guests have agreed to unite in solidarity in this, a reading-for-enjoyment movement, on one pernickety proviso; prunes are off the menu.

I said:

Virginia! John! Thank you both for joining me here to discuss this very pressing matter of readicide. What do you make of this?

Virginia said:

What an acrid vision! Is literature to be forgotten? To vanish or perish on the rubbish-heap?

John said:

Are you to drive away aesthetic experiences that are the very necessary and vital ingredients of happiness?¹⁹

And Virginia asked:

Is there not an open window?²⁰ From which light can be thrown on literature? Books? reading?

And John asked:

Is reading to become a process that is essentially mechanical?²¹

So, I said:

Yes John!! Some may call it the science of reading. Others call it mind-numbing drills. You both ask the same questions that prompted my doctoral study. How do we advocate reading enjoyment?

Virginia said:

I feel at liberty here to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you must not allow anyone to fetter that enjoyment which is the most important quality that a reader can²² experience.

If nothing else, to refresh and exercise children’s own creative powers.²³

John said:

Indeed, it is safe to say that “creative” conceptions come only to persons who are relaxed in their reading to the point of reverie²⁴ and enjoyment.

Virginia said:

To really feel the intoxication of rhythm²⁵ of words sensitively written.

John said:

YES! In reading literature there is a rhythm of surrender and reflection.²⁶

And Virginia said:

To feel the splendour of words!²⁷

And John said:

YES! The visual forms of letters and words are stimuli to which we respond with emotional, imaginative, and intellectual values.²⁸

Virginia said:

Promoting higher standards of aesthetic sensibilities, all by contact with the books themselves.²⁹

John said:

It seems to me; the school would fail to accomplish its full office if it does not fully indicate to pupils what to look for and what to find in books as aesthetic objects.³⁰

Virginia said:

Opportunity is squandered when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the teacher has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot!³¹

John said:

They must judge literary texts in terms of preconceptions as to what³² the author meant by such-and-such word or such-and-such phrase. By which there is no inherent aesthetic value.³³

Virginia said:

When good teachers may ask from books what books can give us!³⁴

John said:

When books are open in the hands of the pupils and with the teacher’s encouragement, they discuss the beauty, getting out of it all the joy possible. This stimulates a real love of books.

Virginia said:

Yes! The desire grows upon us!³⁵ The nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling.³⁶

And John said:

We do Virginia we do! Through the responsive energies of feeling:

barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning,

because it enters directly through the senses into attitude. ³⁷

So, I said:

You have both enlightened the many aspects of enjoyment that reading brings as an evocative embodied experience.

Sitting in a Blissful Moment: What Shape Does It Take?

Now . . . let us move back into our garden moment. As we wander through this garden, online and off, I will try to convince you, as Virginia Woolf did in “The moment,” that we are spectators and also passive participants in a pageant³⁸.

As we sit in this blissful moment—we might get the sense of what this moment is composed of. What shape does it take?

In this physical and sensual moment, this moment, like Virginia’s moment is composed of a sense that the legs of the chairs we sit on are sinking through the centre of the earth, passing through the rich garden earth; they sink, weighted down³⁹. Perhaps you might imagine, as I do, that wherever you are in this garden your feet are bare on the forbidden grass.

But in 2021, this garden moment is also a digital moment.

Entry into my garden moment should have been quite a simple process. Put hands on the gate, unclasp the latch, and wince as the rusty hinges squeak their discomfort. The gardens I arrived at though required a different entry. The simple click of a button did not allow me to feel the heat of the day like it did in Virginia’s moment where the surface of the body is opened, as if all the pores were open and everything lay exposed, not sealed and contracted, as in cold weather. The air wafts cold on the skin under one’s clothes⁴⁰.

Technology opened the gate for me; provided my welcome and allowed me to become both the spectator, and the passive participant.

I may not have felt the soil and rough grass beneath my feet but soon my eyes and ears became as familiar with these gardens as my own. Virginia Woolf wanted a room of her own to write. The women I study have, like me, a garden of their own to write, and speak and picture. In past moments women’s gardens have long sat in the private place, once considered unfit for public consumption. But I found my way into these small private gardens, places nestled among the home. For me, they were very much a public space.

My wandering led me to three garden plots: a garden to listen to; a garden to look at; and a garden to read.

Digital podcasts tell garden stories of care and compassion and made me consider whether, or not, they contain within them a historical legacy of more unpaid work for women. I watched the growth and sudden decline of a much-loved neighborhood verge garden and considered the precarity of what it means to reclaim the commons. I have studied the words of a garden writer in a series of personal, online essays about her journey to a new life and garden in an isolated river cottage and thought about blurred boundaries, dreams, and desires. As I read, listened, and watched these contemporary Australian women’s stories I wondered; what did they mean when they spoke and wrote and pictured their lives in and around their gardens? What was the shape of their moment . . . both online and off? What is their moment of being?

I was searching for what Virginia Woolf describes as: the wider circumference of the moment⁴¹.

Online garden stories are a shared habitat. Private garden her-stories are now part of the public technoculture; that intangible place where culture and technology collide. The circumference of these moments stretches wider than we realize; they are moments shared by the human and non-human, the technical and natural, the past and the present, strangers and friends. They are words and visual sense impressions. There is a sense that they all exist in the same bubble.

The circumference of this moment is wider than the space of the garden; at times it has felt like trespass. In my search for what is communicated from common ground, I have wandered into private property. I wondered whether, as the sign says, will trespassers be prosecuted?

Let It Blaze, Let It Blaze!

Dearest Virginia,

Why, I hear you ask, am I contemplating writing feminist autoethnography with you? The explanation is quite simple, you see, because I read A room of one’s own with an “ethnographic I” and I felt the sense-abilities of autoethnographic writing shimmering beneath the surface of your words immediately. “Fiction,” you wrote on page two, “is likely to contain more truth than fact” and once you had dropped this line of thought into the stream of my own about “Virginia Woolf” and feminist autoethnography, it kept tugging and teasing at the back of my mind. And this is something I must take up with you as a matter of urgency; this matter of the “f” word, for it has been spinning and pressing with the great force of a screw on my brain. I am trying to position your work as feminist words; writing we might hold close to our own as autoethnographers to “light the feminist lamp in our spine” and let it blaze, let it blaze. For isn’t that the revolutionary call you sounded to us in Three guineas?

Setting the academy alight with feminist thinking and wondering seems just as pressing now as it was then for it would quite likely distress you to know that patriarchy Virginia—but let me borrow from you and call him Professor von X (Woolf, 1928/2009, p. 32)—is still up to his same old tricks with his procession of educated men following dutifully behind, in this 21st-century version of Oxbridge. Why it was only last week I saw what I can only read now as the most comical display of the boy’s club. It was during our Faculty committee meeting, a bastion of masculinist superiority, and the characters in this particular performance were Professor von X; Drs A, B, and C; and Professor W for woman. The committee was discussing nothing of extreme importance, but Professor von X spread his legs wide and assumed the mantle.

“As the only Professor here,” Dr A began and directed his words to Professor von X who nodded in smug affirmation for his understudy to continue.

Professor W stared resolutely ahead.

“Perhaps you would be kind enough to grace us with your intellectual presence Professor von X and present the inaugural Faculty lecture this year.”

It was more of a statement of fact than a question.

I watched incredulously as Drs B and C started bobbing their heads up and down like young parrots waiting for their parents to feed them, and I wondered for a moment if they were at risk of developing severe ataxia. I looked around the meeting table and saw my academic sisters staring at the strange behavior of their male creatures—oops, a slip of the tongue, I meant to write colleagues. They too were stunned and yet not surprised by the scene of sycophantism unfolding before them.

Dr A continued excitedly by waving his long arms in the air as if desperately trying to catch his seminal plans for the Faculty lecture series, “Then we could ask John, and after that we could check to see if Paul is in town, perhaps Judas?”

Professor W remained still, but one by one she caught the eye of her female friends and a bubble of recognition floated in the air. With every inch of our bodies, brains, and souls, we knew what was happening between Professor von X and his band of merry men and we willfully refused to take part in it. Our newly formed society of women made a secret vow to watch, wait, and walk in solidarity; we were prepared to be patient for knew then and know now that our time is coming to throw armfuls of dead leaves on our feminist bonfire and we will leap over the flames with delight.

Forever your firebug, Elizabeth

Virginia, Let us Converse Some More About our Work With You

What Then is a Feminist Leader and How Might She Come to Live?

But to continue my story. The Good-Girl Leader was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object—a feminist woman in a girls’ school with a leadership position. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a feminist leader? How does one lead a girls’ school in a feminist way? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has lived a feminist life and lived that life in all aspects of her life, including her work.

I turned to the theoretical work of Sara Ahmed. And to understand, you must try first to imagine the state of mind of a senior leader in a girls’ school. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a senior leader’s chief desire is to be as uncontroversial as possible. (S)he has to induce in (her)self a state of perpetual congeniality. (S)he wants school life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. (S)he wants to be liked by her students, useful to her staff, and respected by the parents; to update essentially the same policies, make small improvements to the same systems day after day, month after month, while (s)he is leading, so that nothing may break the illusion in which (s)he is living—that the best things she can do is avoid anything that will disturb or disquiet the fine tradition and culture of the School.

Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me beginning my research of leadership in a girls’ school and discovering Sara Ahmed’s The promise of happiness (Ahmed, 2010), Willful subjects (Ahmed, 2014), and Living a feminist life (Ahmed, 2017). I want you to figure to yourselves a woman sitting in an office in which for hours, and indeed days, months, and years, she read of the cost to girls and women when we promote happiness mythologies; of how current education practices are underscored by philosophies of willfulness that serve to oppress rather than liberate its subjects; of the brick walls feminists come up against when they challenge the status quo in educational institutions. If you imagine her sitting there trying to grapple with what she did each day and her ambition to live an authentically feminist life, you will, no doubt, begin to see why Woolf’s questions started to become my questions too.

To Read a Book as It Should be Read: The Rarest Quality of Imagination!

I said:

Virginia! John! I do appreciate your insights here, I really do! You both share so much in common when it comes to the art of reading!

Virginia said:

And literature is a very complex art!⁴² To read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment.⁴³

And John said:

This fact constitutes the peculiarity of all experience that is definitely aesthetic! Its imaginative quality dominates. ⁴⁴

Virginia said:

You must be capable. . .of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist—the great artist—gives you.⁴⁵

And John said:

It must fall back upon imagination—upon the embodiment of ideas in an emotionally charged sense. ⁴⁶

Virginia said:

You must be capable of great fineness of perception. ⁴⁷

And John said:

Yes! The promise of that delightful perception, which is aesthetic experience!⁴⁸

Virginia said:

Readers must follow their own instincts. . .⁴⁹

John said:

And only then readers may become interested in whether Shakespeare meant to represent Hamlet as mad.⁵⁰

So, I asked: I believe you both enjoyed Hamlet?

And Virginia asked: Better than Lear⁵¹ John?

John said:

Not if you’ve seen Edwin Booth’s portrayal⁵² —the greatest performance of the 19th Century!

So, I asked: What about Diderot? Such a prolific writer—a bit like Andy Griffith.

John said:

Diderot virtually announced a historic revolution when he said there was need for bourgeois tragedies. ⁵³

Virginia said:

I would swim the channel, to meet Voltaire and Diderot, and Madame du Deffand.⁵⁴

Then I said:

I would swim the Oceans to meet Alexander McCall Smith. I love him.

I think we all love Keats!

Virginia said:

The emotion which Keats felt when he heard the song of a nightingale is one and entire[xxii]!

John said:

You know, there has been much dispute as to what Keats meant in his famous lines:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty- that is all

Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”⁵⁵

Virginia said:

Oh, to enjoy the purer truth of fiction!⁵⁶

So, I said:

Undeniable beauty! Speaking of beauty, what about Coleridge?

And Virginia said:

One of those very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art!⁵⁷

Then I said! John! Virginia! This is exhilarating! But I’ve just had a terrifying thought . . . What if our children never get to read Dahl, and Gleitzman and Rodda and Rowling and French and Gaiman and Tan and DiCamillo? What if our children never get to experience this marvelous work-of-art? And then never experience the intimate social connections made through the deep bonds of book blether? What if they never encounter the communal enjoyment that accompanies the sharing of experiences of literature with others? These deep discussions of our responses to the books we’ve so enjoyed. They’re such a rich means to deep human connection.

And Virginia said:

I do believe more wine bottles are needed here.

Trespass at Once!

So, what happens when this private moment runs like quicksilver on a sloping board⁵⁸ into a public technoculture? Moments of the past shoot through the moment⁵⁹ I am in and the moments I study. They shoot through the practicalities of growing a garden and into the aesthetics and poetics of what it means to garden and then shoot further along into relationships. They slide from the concrete . . . into the abstract.

And I began to wonder, is owning nature ever compatible with loving it? The truth is, my presence in these physical and digital gardens feels harsh. Australian gardens, and the digital stories that grow from them, remain spaces where even all the promises of the digital world have failed to peel back the layers and complexities of Australia’s violent colonial histories.

In addition, when the dirt of the garden soil becomes a plot in the digital world those communicative practices—discussion, performing, and posting make us more dependent on the very networks that are integral to neoliberalism’s financial and corporate dominance (Dean, 2009, p. 2). Digital garden stories risk being washed in green and smothered in white noise. In the garden, and on the screen, the present and the past collide, the physical entangles with the technical and language mingles with an optimistic sense of something about to happen.

Much of this is intangible.

Yet I say, “I have optimistic faith that something that matters is unfolding in the common space and common ground and the digital commons. What is unfolding holds promise. It might provide the potential to unbind boundaries and borders of communication. I am optimistic that writing about the common home garden ground will lead to more boundary unbinding.”

Woolf agrees, suggesting “could we not fly too, with broad wings and with softness; and be all one wing; all embracing, all gathering, and these boundaries, these pryings over hedge into hidden compartments of different colours be all swept into one colour by the brush of the wing.”⁶⁰

She leans against a tower and whispers from outside this moment, “whenever you see a board up with ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’, trespass at once.”⁶¹ Following Woolf’s suggestion might bring an end to having a foot in two worlds and instead standing, without hedges between us, on the common ground.⁶² It is then that we might better understand ways to communicate in, about and around private, home garden lives.

The Matter of the “f” Word

Dear Virginia,

Sunday evening returns and turns me once more to the subject of the “f” word and your work, for I have decided that your work is cross my heart and hope to die upon vibrant aurelian and rich vermillion flames, undoubtedly feminist. I am not alone in reaching this conclusion; Jane Marcus in particular agrees with me and referred to you variously as “a guerilla fighter [and writer] in a Victorian skirt” whose enemy was the British patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism in all of its forms (Marcus, 1981, p. 1), a “raider on received history,” “redeemer of lost lives,” “rescuer and deliverer of stranded ghosts” (Marcus, 1981, p. 3), and a “woman warrior” (Marcus, 1981, p. 4) to allude to the ways you sought to “storm the citadel of male dominance” (Marcus, 1981, p. 4) and “untie women’s tongues” (Marcus, 1981, p. 12). Your work is first and foremost feminist, because of the initial focus on women and the overarching goal to complete abolishment of tyranny and all hierarchies of power and entitlement, and words and writing were the feminist weapons you felt best served the cause (Black, 2004, p. 49). While the great battle of World War II began to rage in the skies above you and apple blossoms snowed onto the grass in the front garden, on Wednesday, 15 May 1940, the following idea took hold, “the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting” (Woolf, 2008b, p. 477). And your commitment to write for what is right continued, because for some time now you had been collecting enough “powder to blow up St Paul’s” (Woolf, 2008b, p. 314) and forge ahead, albeit hidden in plain sight, with “the explosive and transformational nature” of your revolutionary “enterprise” (Black, 2004, p. 31).

And speaking of blowing up things, rebellion and outspoken women decried as felons, I am reminded of your Rose Pargiter. How could we forget fierce and formidable Rose? I see in her your position on the subject of the suffragettes and their strategies, as well as your deep held fear of retribution for speaking out as a feminist. You appreciated the cause but did not agree with the forcefulness, you preferred pacifist approaches which took up the fight intellectually; writing letters, writing essays, and writing novels which imagined a different kind of world for women, men, and everyone in between. Your approach to the war against patriarchy was an “anti-war” kind of feminism, not the Rose Pargiter kind, but a kind feminism which viewed words as weapons of a softer yet even stronger kind. I think and wonder that perhaps there is a Rose Pargiter in all of us who write autoethnography, whether it be feminist or otherwise.

Yr, EM

And That’s the End, They Said⁶³

This Freedom is Only the Beginning

These then were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Good-Girl Leader—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about what it will take to transform our schools into places that will genuinely contribute to gender equality in society, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any(one) has solved it yet. The obstacles against us are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to address. Outwardly, what is simpler than to fight for gender equality? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; we still have many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can lead a girls’ school without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. If I, in this presentation, have laid stress upon the feminist leadership experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. We have won rooms of our own, attained leadership positions within our professions. But this freedom is only a beginning—the rooms are our own, but they are still bare. They have to be furnished; they have to be decorated; they have to be shared. How are you going to furnish your room, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think, are questions of the utmost importance and interest. And you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers—but not today. My time is up; and I must cease.

For They Will Have Loved Reading

I said:

Virginia, John. It really is time to reverse the ruin of readicide and rescue the love of books for new generations of young readers.

Virginia said:

Then cry “Teachers open the books on your library shelves.”⁶⁴ Read aloud with gusto discuss a few passages in the books⁶⁵ and the desire grows upon⁶⁶ students.

And John said:

Well Mel, the solution to the pandemic problem of readicide may well lie in reading enjoyment itself. Art has always been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun “evidence.” The prophets of humanity have always been poets.⁶⁷

I said:

But I am not a poet John!

Virginia said:

But you think poetically on the matter of children’s reading enjoyment. You have grasp upon the emotion⁶⁸ in it, an immense range of personal emotion⁶⁹, the intensity of which poetry draws on.

Then I said:

I am a wretch.

But Virginia said:

Then take the wretch to writing dear.

Then John said:

Bring the full force of the imaginative and emotional word⁷⁰ to your work. Create a thesis that not only conveys the meaning⁷¹ and beauty in the enjoyed reading experience of children. It constitutes one⁷² for your reader.

Only then can it be carried to full transformation.⁷³

I said:

I think I know what I need to do now. Although, I would really like to give Virginia the last word here.

And Virginia said:

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.” ⁷⁴

The Growth of a Garden Is Not Separate From the Growth of Stories

My hand now hovers above the gate that leads me out of this garden moment. My thesis is complete. But like any gardener will tell you . . . my work here is . . . Never quite done. Virginia’s warnings continue to interrupt my thinking-gardening, as these moments within moments run into each other . . . like quicksilver on a sloping board.⁷⁵ Before I leave, the gate squeaking on its hinges, something catches my eye. Virginia’s moment and the moments I study meld and merge into one.

A light is struck. ⁷⁶

Tendrils in an old growth forest emerge but are caught by heavy machinery: a blow on the side of her head.⁷⁷

The forest slopes, dusty, roots sticking out like a hairpin sticking out, about to fall.

She moans in a chronic animal way.⁷⁸

The investor sits himself down with a thump at the table and carves a hunk of bread and munches because there is nothing to be done.⁷⁹

Vegetable steam curling from the pot;⁸⁰ the fog of earth rising from the exposed soil.

Let us do something then, something to end this horrible moment.⁸¹

These garden stories of the past and the present and the digital run together like quicksilver on a sloping board.⁸² Garden stories placed online aim to make us feel something. The growth of a garden is not separate from the growth of stories. They all grow from the same earth.

There are promises embedded in the green words of the garden, conditions of possibility, that buzz around. They rub up against each other, they mingle and collide. Communication is a revelation, but it is also about relationships happening in a moment.

And now let us go and watch the owl flute off its watery bubble.⁸³

The Growth of a Garden Is not Separate from the growth of stories

Dear Virginia,

Why, oh why? Why did “Why” capture our attention so when we set out to search for ways to write critical autoethnography? The little twisted sign shows how much our thinking and wondering has been tumbling from this to that in your writing, stumbling even, often quite by accident and yet we sense it is no coincidence that we willfully caught the line of this small word as it floated by. “Why” reminds us of the promise we have made to free the “bubbles of thinking and wondering trapped in our heads” to speak up, to speak back, and to speak as loudly as we can as critical autoethnographers to throw fire on the flames and light up the world with words from within and without that are kind, wise, loving and will bring about the change we are fighting for in our working, wondering, and womanly lives.

I am so privileged Virginia; today you have come to know this society of women I call sisters—XXXX, XXXX, and XXXX, and the way they are turning your words over to reclaim their mother’s tongues and become bubble blowers of words, of this one thing, and another. Your words and writing have found their way into our hands and hearts, and we are now not just overflowing but seething with the waves of revolution your writing has incited in our minds. I have decided it is time to let patriarchy know, to burst that particularly oppressive little bubble and so I have penned “him” a letter. I think your dear Rose would quite like it, don’t you?

Your in-sister, XXXX

Dear patriarchy,

I hope this letter finds you—you may think I’m about to say “finds you well”—but there; and, there’s the interruption. I hope this letter finds you because now the tables have turned. It is my turn to turn and I am on the hunt for you.

I have been your aspirations, your assertions, and your assumptions for many years now and I have come to know you well. Your authoritative aroma reeks and seeps everywhere and anywhere alongside your arrogance which has turned you into a middle-aged fool, pale and paunched in the pride, power, and privilege of your foul-smelling odor.

You are not hard to find, and this letter will find you. For the newly born women I now run with—my Woolf pack—we are daring, we are fast, and fleet-footed, we are dangerous, and we are coming for you.

So, patriarchy, who’s the monster now?

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Elizabeth Mackinlay

Notes

Author Biographies

Elizabeth Mackinlay is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland where she teaches Research Methods, Gender Studies and Arts Education. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from The University of Adelaide and a PhD in education from the University of Queensland.

Karen Madden is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Her PhD titled, Can I be feminist here? A critical autoethnographic perspective of feminist leadership in Australian girls’ schools proposes feminist theory has more to offer leaders of girls’ schools than conventional leadership scholarship.

Renee Mickelburgh is a PhD candidate with the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. Her PhD engages with ecofeminist, feminist and affect theory to examine the way Australian women communicate everyday environmental issues through written, oral, and visual digital storytelling.

Mel Green is a PhD candidate with the School of Education at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. Her PhD research explores student engagement in reading for enjoyment in the primary school context. Following 25 years of primary teaching, with 20 of those in teacher-librarianship and five in curriculum leadership, her area of passion is primary literacy; curriculum and pedagogy.

References

Ahmed

(2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.

Ahmed

(2014). Willful subjects. Duke University Press.

Ahmed

(2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Black

(2004). Virginia Woolf as feminist. Cornell University Press.

Dean

(2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies. Duke University Press.

Dewey

(1922). Knowledge and speech reaction. Journal of Philosophy, 19, 561–570.

Dewey

(1934). Art as experience. Minton, Balch and Company.

Gallagher

(2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about it. Stenhouse Publishers.

hooks

(2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Routledge.

10.

Marcus

(1981). Thinking back through our mothers. In Marcus

(Ed.), New feminist essays on Virginia Woolf (pp. 1–30). MacMillan Press.

11.

Woolf

(1929). A room of one’s own. Hogarth Press.

12.

Woolf

(1938). Three guineas. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

13.

Woolf

(1943). The waves (Rev. ed.). Hogarth Press.

14.

Woolf

(1960). How should one read a book? In Woolf

(Ed.), The second common reader (pp. 258–270). Harcourt, Brace and World.

15.

Woolf

(1975a). The leaning tower. In Woolf

(Ed.), The moment and other essays (pp. 128–154). Harcourt, Brace and Company. (Original work published 1947)

16.

Woolf

(1975b). The moment: Summer’s night. In Woolf

(Ed.), The moment and other essays (pp. 3–8). Harcourt, Brace and Company. (Original work published 1947)

17.

Woolf

(2008a). Professions for women. In Woolf

(Ed.), Selected essays (pp. 140–145). Oxford University Press.

18.

Woolf

(2008b). Selected diaries ( Bell

A. O.

, Ed.). Vintage.

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Woolf

(2008c). Selected letters ( Banks

J. T.

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Writing Radically as Women With Virginia Woolf: Why?

Abstract

Keywords

We Shall Now Have our Treat by Writing to Virginia to Begin 1

Becoming the Woolf pack: Introducing Ourselves

A Feminist Leader in a Girl’s School

And Exactly How Should One’s Students Read a Book? 3

Now I ask You to Take a moment, to Consider, what composed the present moment 11 ?

She Was a Woman; This Was Her World

“Why” Virginia Woolf in our Work?

Killing the Good-Girl

Three Minds Meet Over Dinner

Sitting in a Blissful Moment: What Shape Does It Take?

Let It Blaze, Let It Blaze!

Virginia, Let us Converse Some More About our Work With You

What Then is a Feminist Leader and How Might She Come to Live?

To Read a Book as It Should be Read: The Rarest Quality of Imagination!

Trespass at Once!

The Matter of the “f” Word

And That’s the End, They Said 63

This Freedom is Only the Beginning

For They Will Have Loved Reading

The Growth of a Garden Is Not Separate From the Growth of Stories

The Growth of a Garden Is not Separate from the growth of stories

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biographies

References

We Shall Now Have our Treat by Writing to Virginia to Begin¹

And Exactly How Should One’s Students Read a Book?³

Now I ask You to Take a moment, to Consider, what composed the present moment¹¹?

And That’s the End, They Said⁶³