Virginia Woolf's "Two Women", or, "The Wrong Way of Reading"

This paper reads Virginia Woolf’s ‘Two Women,’ a 1927 review of two biographical works, in relation to A Room of One’s Own (1928) and ‘The Wrong Way of Reading,’ a short biographical review from 1920. Woolf’s sustained enquiry into the historical repression of middle-class women in ‘Two Women’ closely anticipates her investigation into the socio-economic obstacles that have stifled women writers in A Room of One’s Own. Following the unorthodox approach to reading biography that she set out in ‘The Wrong Way of Reading,’ Woolf adapts her sources in ‘Two Women,' and again when re-reading this material in A Room of One’s Own, in order to emphasise her feminist critique. Woolf’s willingness to manipulate biographical documents to suit her critical purpose indicates her subversive attitude to the authority of fact and reflects her position as a feminist reader and critic.