The Dream Work of a Nation: From Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen to Mary Lavin

Abstract

Virginia Woolf provides a backbone for important arguments that transform our reading of women’s writing during times of rising nationalism and war. In Three Guineas and elsewhere, she creates a new ground for fiction by including what is commonly thought a ‘small’ rather than a ‘large’ subject, and she creates links between domestic and public ‘tyranny’. Woolf challenges the claims of critics who assert that women writers do not engage with or link their fiction to the wider society, the nation and the world. Inspired by Woolf, the Irish authors, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Lavin, illuminate these ‘small’ shocks and events in the lives of individuals, families, communities and institutions. Bowen provides ‘in-between’ glimpses of war in her wartime stories, Ivy Gripped the Steps while Lavin creates close-ups of ‘small’ scenes of beleaguered widows, loyal wives, enfeebled husbands, independent daughters, and needy clergy in her short stories. The intimate lives revealed in these stories are not ‘outside’ of politics and history and the world but are a part of the historical texture of life. They present a resistance to dominant views and richer definitions of the future of community: the dream work of a nation.