Virginia Stephen and The People’s Suffrage Federation

Join us for a talk about Virginia Stephen, later Woolf’s, link to suffrage campaigning!

This event is part of the series celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Women’s Library.

The talk will consider the ways in which Virginia Stephen’s early alliance with this group may have influenced the politics and aesthetics of her second novel Night and Day (1919). It will conclude with a focus on a later moment of feminist involvement for Virginia Woolf: her involvement throughout the 1930s with The Women’s Service Library, forerunner to The Women’s Library.

Speaker:

Clara Jones is a Reader in Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her publications include Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (EUP, 2016), the edited collection Virginia Woolf and Capitalism (EUP, 2024) and British Interwar Women Writers: Class, Gender, Genre (EUP, 2026). Her next major research project, ‘Committee Woman’, is a literary and cultural history of British women’s administrative labour in cultural organisations and social movements from the first half of the twentieth century.