Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject

This classic study shows that Woolf''s most experimental writing is far from being a flight from social commitment into arcane modernism. Indeed, it is best seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles of a patriarchal social order: the very definitions of narrative, writing and the subject. In a series of subtle readings of five major novels - Jacob''s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves--closely informed by psychoanalytic theory, Makiko Minow-Pinkney presents Woolf as a committed feminist whose politics emerged as an aspect of her experimentation with language and form.