Virginia Woolf, whose first novel was published in 1915, is considered one of the earliest feminist writers. Her novels, book-length essays and lectures gave a great deal of inspiration to the feminist movement of the early 20th century, with A Room of One’s Own being considered a milestone in feminist literature. In her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claimed that Woolf was one of three female writers ever to explore “The given”. That...
Virginia Woolf, whose first novel was published in 1915, is considered one of the earliest feminist writers. Her novels, book-length essays and lectures gave a great deal of inspiration to the feminist movement of the early 20th century, with A Room of One’s Own being considered a milestone in feminist literature. In her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claimed that Woolf was one of three female writers ever to explore “The given”. That being said, Woolf’s 1933 novel, Flush, has been widely disregarded from the literary canon, with Woolf herself even calling it “silly” and a “waste of time” in her diary in 1933. Consequently, it has received significantly less critical attention regarding the feminism perspective than much of her other work. Susan Merril Squier heavily disputes this, with her claim that ‘Flush operates as a stand-in for the woman writer’, arguing that many aspects of Flush’s life are similar to that of a woman, particularly a Victorian one.
