Virginia Woolf's celebrated opening rejoinder, “But, you may say,”, anticipates an as yet unspoken objection, forestalls opposition, and summons an unseen reader or audience, whose thoughts and words she is confident she can know almost before they do. In fiction, the writer projects herself into the minds of her characters and thinks with them, ventriloquising beyond her own boundaries; likewise, in such polemical and confessional writings as A Room of One's Own (1929), someone is lurking at the edge of Woolf's consciousness, as she bends over her paper, composing: the implied recipient of the letter, the imagined reader, hostile or otherwise whom she is engaging, interrupting, cutting short.

The famous essay began as talks, and although her real-life interlocutors were her hosts, the fellows and students of Cambridge women's colleges, she is addressing over their shoulders other unnamed and unseen presences: imagined fathers and brothers, rulers and taste-makers and power-brokers, who assume there is no connection of her subject, “women and fiction” with property, power, independence and laws.

That many words exist for types and degrees of contradiction—rebuttal, refutation, rejoinder, retort, even refusal—and that so many are explicitly forms of speech rather than action (even Bartleby's silence must be broken by utterance, by his mild but steady contradictoriness), reveals how the critic and writer's task of ten takes place within existing circuits of value, the logos which they (we) struggle to reshape through a counter-utterance, a counter-script. Contradictoriness also holds “contrariness” within its compass, on either side of the central syllable, “dicto,” I say. It is Woolf's contrariness, rather than her contradictoriness that I want to look at, though the two concepts intersect, as noted.

And I want to look at her contrariness from two points of affinity that I have felt from the first moment I encountered her voice. Both affinities arise from the questions she puts about authority and class and English history and the ways the personal and public interconnect—through fathers, especially. How values are passed on from a standpoint of unexamined and effortless authority, how those values grow in a deposit of layer upon layer of English historical self-importance, these are the disturbing areas of inquiry, still.