At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. Sometimes women do like women.”Ĭhloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael.
(The published text of “A Room of One’s Own” is framed as a lecture and based on a pair of talks that she gave at two Cambridge women’s colleges in October, 1928.) “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Do not blush,” Woolf cautioned her audience. “Chloe liked Olivia.” When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in “ A Room of One’s Own,” her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future-that of queer literary criticism.
