Abstract

The spatial arrangement of the past twenty-three years of Woolf scholarship focuses on the truncated scripts of bisexual and heterosexual desire in the novels, rather than celebrating the partially open and fully open lesbian spaces of the shorter fiction. The erotics of lesbian sexuality are not circumscribing but freeing in the short fiction. Lesbian desire is not just an auxiliary episode; it is the igniting center of large portion of the shorter fiction and this partially accounts for its marginalized position in Woolf criticism. ;Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction is a critically neglected field. Class is the determining factor that influences how women occupy private and public space and articulate lesbian desire in Woolf's 1906--1941 shorter fiction. Drawing upon published and unpublished holograph and typescript drafts of the shorter fiction in The Monks House Papers as well as the Berg Collection, this new reading examines Woolf's oscillating patterns of elision, idealization and contempt for the voices and desires of servants, gypsies, Irish, Black, Jewish and Asian women. ;The role of the working class woman is a neglected theme in Woolf studies. This comprehensive reading of Woolf's prototypical shorter fiction focuses on how women's occupation of private and public space influences the articulation of lesbian desire and becomes a vital template for Woolf's novels. No one has produced a comprehensive reading of Woolf's shorter fiction which considers how class affects the occupation of space and the articulation of lesbian desire. It is a question whose resolutions are ethically long overdue. ;The lyrical and the inconclusive genre provided a space for Woolf to conclude in the 1922--26 halcyon period that class differences animated or made lesbian desire possible. Woolf's shorter fiction shifts representational techniques---the pre-1917 and pre 1926 stories are bright snapshots of lesbian life where class does not fatally delineate desire. After 1929, the aperture narrows, less light is permitted and a more rigid class and race bound system, which resembles the endorsements of canonically revered essays such as "Street Haunting," "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," "Character in Fiction" and anecdotes of The Dreadnought Hoax appears