Three Guineas

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”

Setting out to answer the question “How are we to prevent war ” Virginia Woolf argues that the inequalities between women and men must first be addressed. Framing her arguments in the form of a letter, Woolf wittily ponders to whom—among the many who have requested it—she will donate a guinea. As she works out her reasons for which causes she will support, Woolf articulates a vision of peace and political culture as radical now as it was when first published on the eve of the Second World War. A founding text of cultural theory, Three Guineas can also help us understand the twenty-first-century realities of endless war justified by “unreal loyalties.”

“Witty, scornful, deeply serious…If you are a woman, or anti-war, or both, read it.”—The New Yorker