O Sister Swallow: Sapphic Fragments as English Literature in Virginia Woolf

In the feminist pamphlet Three Guineas (1938), Woolf linked gender and citizenship, writing, “As a woman, I have no country” (3G, 109). Today, we hear in that phrase not only a refusal of nationalism-as-patriotism, but also a gesture toward a new global citizenship, which is differently constituted to welcome women and is imagined in opposition to mainline nationalism. For some time critics have made this into Woolf’s most important statement on nationalism.1 They have emphasized the link Woolf makes between the resistance of antifascist women and Antigone’s refusal to obey Creon. But this progressive, antipatriarchal sense of the legacy of Greek literature was not always Woolf’s. Early in her career, she acceded to the bourgeois habit of using her knowledge of Greek as cultural capital. Aware that few women knew Greek, she willingly distances herself from working women in order to forge an alliance with educated men, a gesture she explicitly repudiates in Three Guineas. At the same time, her female tutors introduced her to a counterhistory of Greek heroines while providing a living model of how the discipline of Greek can be open to all. To explore how Woolf went from this bifurcated but otherwise conventional bourgeois Victorian idea of the classics to the antinational vision of Antigone in Three Guineas, this chapter takes a close look at major texts from the mid-1920s: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and the essay “On Not Knowing Greek” from The Common Reader (1925).