Factory wheels

In 1940, Virginia Woolf defended the Bloomsbury Group from an accusation of elitism by noting:

As Anna Snaith suggests, Woolf's confidence in that ‘wider circle’ was probably based on the eighty-two letters she received from readers of Three Guineas (1938), which were eventually collected by Snaith and published in the Woolf Studies Annual. While only three correspondents explicitly identified themselves as working class, and another three said they were from a different class background to Woolf, the letters represented a diverse range of response and proof that working women could get hold of her books through libraries. They also indicate that the arguments of Three Guineas, which were driven by Woolf's own feminist and pacifist concerns, connected with women in society. Eight years earlier, Woolf had written in her introductory letter (dated May 1930) to Margaret Llewelyn Davies's edited collection of the autobiographical experiences of members of the Women's Co-operative Guild, Life as We Have Known It (1931), that:

In this letter, Woolf writes an account of her own interaction with the working women of the Guild beginning with her attendance at a Guild Congress in Newcastle in June 1913 and sitting through speech after speech in the knowledge that she was personally untouched and therefore only had an altruistic interest in ‘questions of sanitation and education and wages’.