Virginia Woolf states in A Room of One's Own (1929) “For we think back through our mothers ifwe are women,” immediately asserting: “It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey—whoever it may be— never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully” (75, my emphasis). The narrator does not mention Henry Fielding in this list of male British literary luminaries or anywhere else in the essay. Since, like most of Woolf's published work, A Room is about what is cleverly not said and what cannot be said directly without undesirable consequences, I argue that by not mentioning Fielding Woolf indicates she has “learnt a few tricks [from him] and adapted them to her use,” with particular reference to one of the three unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf's essay.

In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three well-known Marys, saying, parenthetically, “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of importance” (5, my emphasis), a phrase with a shrug similar to “whoever it may be” above. The speaker suggests any surname will do as long as the given name is Mary; but, when the narrator of A Room, with a rhetorical wink, says “by any name you please” (5), she hints that we may also call her “George,” as in Hamilton. Using Fielding's narrative strategies as a template for A Room, Woolf slyly reveals she has “lift[ed] something substantial from him successfully,” revising Fielding's work by writing in a similarly evasive and euphemistic style to protect “delicate ears” (Fielding 23).