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Three Guineas is a book-length essay by Virginia Woolf, published in June 1938.
When Woolf realised the idea of a "novel–essay" wasn't working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion became Three Guineas. The fiction portion became Woolf's most popular novel during her lifetime, The Years, which charts social change from 1880 to the time of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War II.
In the course of responding to the educated man's questions and practical suggestions, Woolf turns to two other letters: a request for funds to help rebuild a woman's college and a request for support for an organisation to help women enter the professions (professional life). Both allow Woolf to articulate her criticisms of the structure of education and the professions, which mostly involves showing how they encourage the very attitudes that lead to Fascism both at home and abroad. Woolf does not refuse the values of education and public service outright but suggests conditions which the daughters of educated men will need to heed if they are to prevent being corrupted by the public order. She imagines, for example, a new kind of college that avoids teaching the tools of domination and pugnacity, "an experimental college, an adventurous college…. It should teach… the art of understanding other people's lives and minds…. The teachers should be drawn from the good livers as well as from the good thinkers."
In the final section, Woolf returns from the topics of education and the professions to the larger questions of preventing war and the practical measure suggested for doing so. In it she argues that although she agrees with her interlocutor that war is evil, they must attempt to eradicate it in different ways. "And since we are different," Woolf concludes, "our help must be different." Thus, the value of Woolf's opinion (and help) on how to prevent war lies in its radical difference from the ways of men. Its impossibility of being completely understood is, then, the condition of its usefulness.
The book is composed of Woolf's responses to a series of letters. The question and answer format creates a sense of dialogue and debate on the politically charged issues the essay tackles, rather than just presenting simple polemical diatribes on each topic. The principle of dialogue is one that informs much of Woolf's work, and is also seen in her novels when she gives voice to different classes and marginalised groups in society through a diversity of characterisations.Snaith, Anna. Virginia Woolf: Private and Public Negotiations. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2000. For example, the sky-writing scene in Mrs. Dalloway includes characters with a variety of class-influenced dialects. The "guineas" of the book's title are themselves a badge of social class, the money amount of 21 shillings (1.05 pounds sterling) for which no coin any longer existed, but which was still the common denomination for solely upper-class transactions (e.g., purchase of pictures or race-horses, lawyers' or medical specialists' fees, and so on.). She wrote "It is much to be regretted that no lives of maids … are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography" which her father had created. (In time her servant Nellie Boxall would be included in its successor.
The epistolary novel format also gives the reader the sense of eavesdropping on a private conversation.Snaith, Anna. "Three Guineas," The Literary Encyclopedia. 2001. We listen in on Woolf's suggestions to a barrister on how to prevent war, to a women's league on how to support females in the professions, and to a women's college on how to encourage female scholarship. All three sources have written to Woolf asking for financial donations. What she donates, though, is her advice and philosophy.
Woolf was eager to tie the issues of war and feminism together in what she saw as a crucial point in history. She and her husband Leonard had visited both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the early part of the decade. The ideology of fascism was an affront to Woolf's conviction in pacifism as well as feminism: Nazi philosophy, for example, supported the removal of women from public life.
In 2002, City Journal published a critique of Three Guineas by the conservative essayist Theodore Dalrymple, "The Rage of Virginia Woolf" (later reprinted in Dalrymple's anthology, Our Culture, What's Left of It), in which Dalrymple contended that the book is "a locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood as a genre in itself" and that "the book might be better titled: How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved". In response, Woolf scholar Elizabeth Shih defended Three Guineas and claimed Dalrymple's article was full of " ad hominem moments".Elizabeth Shih, "When Woolf Goes Missing (From Herself): The Surfeit of Short Articles on Virginia Woolf's Life and Work". Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Number 62, Spring 2003, (pp. 2–3). Shih argued that Dalrymple "obtusely and consistently misreads Woolf's hyperbole", interpreting literally Woolf's comments about burning male-dominated colleges, and Woolf's likening women using their sexuality to control men to prostitution. Shih also criticised Dalrymple's attacks on Woolf's anti-militarism and her calls for working-class education. Shih suggested Dalrymple's objection to Three Guineas was due to his opposition to Woolf's "politicization of the private lives of women".
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