PROFESSIONS, FREEDOM AND FORM: REASSESSING WOOLF'S THE YEARS AND THREE GUINEAS

In the manuscript of Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes that 'if people are highly successful in their professions they are failures as human beings'. Such comments on the professions are historically significant. The first part of this article considers the socio-political context of professionalism for Woolf's writing in the 1930s. The second part makes use of manuscript versions of The Years to show that Woolf's ambivalent feelings towards women's entry into the professions not only informed her political views in Three Guineas, but also shaped her aesthetic decisions throughout the extensive rewriting process of The Years. Through this it reconsiders Woolf's use of such devices as ellipses, truncations and omissions in The Years, and reassesses the validity of both works. It argues that the vision which underlies The Years is possibly even more sweeping and radical than the solutions proposed in Three Guineas, and shows how Woolf's views of the professional system became the basis for her vision of freedom in a new type of society.