‘Notebook Literature’: Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner

In February 1933, Virginia Woolf found herself ‘quivering’, ‘itching’ with anticipation at her next writing project, ‘the sequel’ to A Room of One's Own, for which she had ‘collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls’. In three large notebooks compiled between 1931 and 1937, Woolf pasted newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, political pamphlets, handwritten and typewritten quotations, and other ephemera, testimonials of everyday life lived in early 20th-century Britain. The three now-crumbling scrapbooks that Woolf compiled in the 1930s speak eloquently to her methods. Covering her notebooks by hand with cloth and marbled paper, Woolf made detailed typed index pages for each volume and abbreviated handwritten indexes, which she pasted onto the top left-hand corner of each cover (see Figures 1 and 2). Inside these notebooks, clippings detailing university accounts appear side-by-side with letters asking for donations to women's colleges, while photographs of men in ceremonial and military garb jostle with quotations from ‘lectures by men’ on their ‘Hatred of w[omen]’, handwritten notes about women's access to abortion, men's opinions on women's smoking, nail polish and football, and newspaper cuttings quoting the speeches of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering. Drawing on these ‘scrapbooks’ (as many scholars have come to call them) in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf would draw a line from the ‘tyrannies and servilities’ of the English private house to the toxic growth of fascism taking hold across both Europe and Britain in the 1930s, arguing that the germ of fascism could be found in British broadsheet newspapers as much as in the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini. For Woolf, women's position as ‘outsiders’ gave them a unique vantage point from which to criticise the reigning structures of capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power. For Woolf, keeping scrapbooks formed part of her own outsiders' experiment—an experiment not only in criticising capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power but also in imagining an alternative society freed from servility to (what she described as) the ‘manly satisfaction’ of war.