Woolf’s Three Guineas, Antigone, and Peace: Modern Echoes of Antique Debates

Virginia Woolf evokes Sophocles’ Antigone in several of her private and published writings throughout her writing life.¹ However, the ancient play appears in Woolf’s late work. and especially Three Guineas (1938),² in ways that go far beyond the few references to it in the body and the footnotes of the text; indeed, it may be said to form its intertext. For, apart from Woolf’s aesthetic appreciation of the play’s linguistic force, the figure of Antigone appears to epitomize the author’s political response to the turbulent 1930s, routinely described in criticism as a pacifist feminist stance. Woolf’s allegorical use of the