Equal Outsiders: Woolf and Coleridge Thinking Community, Romance, and Education in the Face of War

In the last endnote of her pacifist plea in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf illustrates her vision about the Outsiders' Society by referencing three nineteenth-century authors: S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and George Sand. The first and longest quotation is from Coleridge's The Friend. However, oddly enough, Woolf seems to misunderstand Coleridge's intention and/ or creatively misuse his words. Taking this understudied detail as its pivot, this article explores Woolf's conception about war and community as it relates to Romantic political thought, particularly Coleridge's. Drawing on Woolf scholarship (Beer, Black, Lounsberry, Saint-Amour, Snaith, Wood, etc.), as well as diaries and correspondence, the first section of the article constructs a genealogy of the concept of the "Outsiders' Society", thus situating Three Guineas in the evolution of Woolf's reflections about war as they come through both in her novels and in her non-fiction. The second section analyzes Woolf's framing of the notion of romance in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, paying attention especially to the use of words like "illusion" and "fact". Zooming in on the connection with Coleridge, the last section contextualizes the quotation from him used by Woolf in the endnote by re-embedding it in the conceptual framework of The Friend, but also offers a broader overview of Coleridge's own changing opinions on community and conflict, from "Fears in Solitude" to Letters on the Spaniards and On the Constitution of Church and State. By employing this array of sources, the article points out some strong discrepancies between Woolf's and Coleridge's convictions, which render her recourse to his political writings counterintuitive. However, the paper also reveals a strong affinity between the two writers regarding the topic of education and its role in community-building. These converging opinions on education as an antidote to addictive tendencies like greed, vanity, and pugnacity offer a key to Woolf's gesture of returning to the Romantics in the final pages of her argument against war.