This is an interesting, informative and wrong-headed book, at its best when the author ignores her own theoretical assunlptionsand gives us straight forward literary history.

The problem with Julia Briggs's theory becomes clear at the start. In her preface she describes Virginia Woolf as belonging to a 'tradition of women's writing in which moral awareness carries the reader across boundaries of gender, class and race in the interests of wider sympathy and understanding'. My heart