© IANDAGNALL COMPUTING / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, lamenting women’s absence from the literary canon and the history books. But since her suicide in 1941, at the age of 59, Woolf herself has become an icon: her life and work are the subject of regular homage, from academic studies and biographies to novels, television series and a recent ballet. In 2018, a major exhibition inspired by her work opened at Tate St Ives and travelled to Sussex and Cambridge (places strongly associated with Woolf), while the film Vita and Virginia, exploring her affair with Vita Sackville-West, is set for release in July. Woolf’s legacy is thriving; she remains a powerful figurehead for generations of women to “think back through.”
Woolf herself spent significant time contemplating how posterity would view her and her friends. She spent most of her life in London, yet noted sardonically how the cityscape reminded her, at every turn, of women’s exclusion from public affairs: wandering through the streets, decorated with images of hoary statesmen to celebrate their service to the British Empire, she was intrigued by the occasional appearance of a woman’s statue, which seemed to represent an alternative history in which she might be able to locate herself.