Echoes of Virginia Woolf

There was a central paradox in Virginia Woolf's life and art: experientially, emotionally and politically, women were her most valuable audience; artistically and critically, men seemed to her more serious and respectable. Who then should be the critical critic? She herself acknowledged that the male view of the world accorded little value to expressions of the female view of the world, yet it was the female view of the world that Virginia Woolf wanted to express. Were women ‘literarily reliable’ and valid, perhaps Virginia Woolf's ‘echoes’, her life and her work, would have been very different.