Virginia Woolf 's body of work contains within it a developing line of sceptical thought on the usefulness of the traditional library for women, marked by what can be seen as a critical highpoint in her powerful polemical text, A Room of One's Own (1929). That text in particular articulates the different problems that such libraries presented: their suspicion both of women, manifesting in a refusal of entry or a hostile environment, and of women's work, leading to a dearth of material written by women held inside their collections.

Critics have provided detailed insight into Woolf 's antipathy towards what Diane Gillespie terms “institutional libraries”:

As Gillespie suggests in her essay, Woolf found libraries such as these (for example the British Library, featured memorably in Jacob's Room (1922) and A Room of One's Own) inherently male: ruled by men, protected by men, and filled with books by men. Woolf 's solution lay in a different type of library, one where books were used rather than locked up, visitors—women included—were welcomed rather than turned away, and the collections included titles from both men and women authors.

Despite this negative experience of the institutional library, Woolf also writes of the positive experience she had of a different library, at the study of 22 Hyde Park Gate. This paper aims to solve two questions: how are these contrasting representations reconcilable, and how is it that her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, is featured in both. In order to answer these questions, I will be discussing several texts that demonstrate how Woolf's allusions to Stephen and his work take a different tone depending on her purpose.

Starting at that first library in her family home, Woolf 's formative years spent in her father's study have been referred to extensively in Woolf scholarship, and for obvious reason.

With these words, Virginia Woolf shared with Vita Sackville-West the first inkling of Orlando, a novel that would be deeply concerned with heritage: with history, genealogy, literary tradition, an ancient city, and a stately home. The lines also reveal Woolf 's rich, complex, and often conflicted relationship with heritage. Although Woolf was captivated by Vita, the handsome aristocrat, she was also sceptical of wealth and privilege and her tone here is somewhat competitive. She is ironic about Vita's inherited pearls, asserting instead her own “makeshift” inheritance: the vast intellectual heritage that had made her a writer and the wealth of English literature that she had first encountered through her father's recitations and his library. Yet, Woolf gave Vita a “makeshift” inheritance of her own in Orlando, a book that, as Nigel Nicolson wrote, “identified her with Knole for ever” thereby providing her with a “unique consolation for having been born a girl, for her exclusion from her inheritance, for her father's death earlier that year” (190). This strategy sits closely with Woolf 's call for women to “rewrite history” (AROO 45).

The papers in this book, which arise from a conference held at Leeds Trinity University (Yorkshire, UK) in June 2016, explore some of the complex dynamics of Virginia Woolf 's relationship with heritage, ranging across the themes of education and mentoring, heritage places and spaces, the literary and cultural past, the queer past, modernism and its relationship with heritage, the writing of lives and history. It also looks at ways in which later generations of writers from several cultures have traced their heritage from Woolf.

Heritage: A Debate

The collection opens with a challenging essay by Jane Goldman that invites us to consider the politics of what is meant by “heritage.” Goldman argues that the term is laden with implications of legal inheritance, patriarchal privilege and the exclusion of women, and that the “heritage industry” is a term that masks the appropriation or “plundering” of artefacts.