Virginia Woolf maintained a contradictory relationship to academic institutions. Readers and critics are familiar with her childhood freedom to read throughout her father's library and her arguments for women's education in A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). As H. J. Jackson has observed in Marginalia (2002), writing in books is a technique that students have learned in school. While Woolf rarely annotated her personal library, this paper illustrates the ways that academic institutions informed her responses to marginalia.

As Woolf put it in her 1923 diary, her usual strategy was “reading with pen & notebook” (D2 259). Hermione Lee has argued that Woolf “hardly ever marked her books, and was satirical about people who did” (406). Instead, as Lee puts it, Woolf's “reading notebooks were her system of annotation” (406). In addition, Diane Gillespie has noted in her introduction to the catalogue of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's library at Washington State University that Woolf inscribed “some of her books [with]…light marks in the margins or handwritten genealogies of characters. Leonard [Woolf], on the other hand, kept indices in the back or marked passages in many books he read” (xviii). The three-page manuscript to which Lee is referring is in Woolf's Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex. In this sketch, Woolf proposes that a “student of character” “will keep his attention alert upon all [instances of] such” “[a] practice…so common of writing…observations in the margins of books.” It is significant that Woolf selects a student, as annotating is a student practice.

Several different types of academic and institutional contexts informed Woolf's composition of “Writing in the Margin” on May 22nd of what was probably 1906. The previous year, Woolf had been selecting letters and completing a “note” about her father, the Cambridge scholar who had annotated his personal library, for Frederic Maitland's Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906) (PA 219). It was also in 1905 that, as Beth Rigel Daugherty, Melba Cuddy Keane, Quentin Bell, and other scholars have noted, Woolf began teaching at Morley College (PA 217). After visiting Madge Vaughn and her husband, headmaster of the Giggleswick School, in Yorkshire in April of 1906,