Contexts

The introduction discusses three contexts for this study’s focus on Virginia Woolf’s apprenticeship: Virginia Stephen’s education at home as described in biographies; as compared to three groups of other women writers; and as a non-fiction writer during journalistic expansion. It organizes the book into three parts – Virginia Stephen’s homeschooling, Morley College teaching, and essay writing and book reviewing – and organizes each part into a wider historical context, teachers and lessons, practice, and resulting outcomes. The book argues that during her apprenticeship, Virginia Stephen experienced gender’s isolating impact and learned to create community through writing; she observed class’s damaging impact and learned to make her writing more welcoming; and she grasped readers’ generative impact and learned to create mutual writer and reader relationships. Virginia Stephen’s struggle to educate herself between 1882 and 1912 shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist who believed ‘literature is common ground’.