The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

Outka's is one of several contributions that show how Woolf's sometimes myopic attitudes-to disability, class, or race, for example-can also be highly generative because Woolf is a writer who so often uses her own failures of empathy as occasions for pushing her thinking further. Maxwell Uphaus exemplifies his suggestion that a "promising new direction for Woolf studies" would be to flesh out how she draws on and subverts "ideas of a natural connection between the British Empire and the ocean" (393) by showing how, in "Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer," she "subverts the naturalization of British sea power but also reinforces other (racist) imperialist attitudes" at the same time (405-06). Hdgberg calls for renewed attention to how the lyricism of Woolf's works of this period revive "the democratic art of prose" as political resistance (115). Wilson is concerned less with Woolf's theories than with her lived experience in a house with servants, making the telling point that "Woolf invokes servants to highlight their difference from the middle-class characters at the centre of the novels, but in so doing also highlights servants' closeness to those characters and their narratives" (470).