Virginia Woolf has been represented as the origin of the feminist author and scholar \"the mother of us all,\"1 and as \"the real-life epitome of that feminine archetype, the mad wife\" (Showalter 1977: 276). If \"the mother of us all\" is also an archetypal \"mad wife,\" we have problems. These are especially deep-rooted if, as Sue Roe suggests, \"[s]he has been so readily and so ubiquitously appropriated to the feminist literary Cause that it sometimes seems as though every feminist insight has its origin somewhere in the work of Virginia Woolf (1990: 3). To address these problems, our feminist roots in \"madness,\" I believe that we need to disentangle some of the strings wound around Woolf studies. In so doing, it is my aim to foreground the complex web of gendered, pathologizing discursive practices that have produced, no doubt unwittingly, a seemingly unending and often unreflexive quest a kind of binding Gordian knot in Woolf studies attempts to diagnose

They All Cried Woolf@@@Virginia Woolf@@@Virginia Woolf: A Biography@@@Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries@@@Virginia Woolf/The Echoes Enslaved@@@Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision

They All Cried Woolf@@@Virginia Woolf@@@Virginia Woolf: A Biography@@@Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries@@@Virginia Woolf/The Echoes Enslaved@@@Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision

Citations

"Locked in a Room of One's Own?": Querying the Quest for Keys to Woolf's "Madness"

Is there a woman in the text? : a feminist exploration of Katherine Mansfield's search for authentic selves in a selection of short stories