One little-known fact about Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own, the famous book discussed in the previous entry, is that Woolf was angry that her family spent money to send her brothers to university and  had no funds left over for her. In other words, she was envious. She hid the fact in her lectures so that it wouldn’t appear she had a grievance. She wrote to a friend in 1933:

I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious; legendary. If I had said, Look here am I uneducated, because my brothers used all the family funds which is the fact – Well they’d have said; she has an axe to grind; and no one would have taken me seriously.

Susan Gubar, a women’s studies authority on Woolf, says in her recent introduction to a new edition of the book:

Virginia Woolf would always resent the familial and historical circumstances dictating that she, like so many daughters of men prominent in the nineteenth century, was to be denied access to a university education.

Apparently, Woolf would have preferred her brothers to do with less. Feminism is an ideology of envy. It is based on the utopian premise that somehow envy can be resolved, that there are enough resources for men and women both to have everything they want. Envy has a bottomless appetite. Once fed, it grows. The truth is there is enough for men and there is enough for women, just not enough of the same things.

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