modernism and political theory, the complex and vital perspective of the
social outsider.

In opposed yet complementary ways, the Woolfs were outsiders to-
gether—she privileged by her background, but excluded from centers by
her gender, he privileged by gender and marginalized through background.
Such a chiasmic alliance forces social borderlines into relief, making them
inevitable objects of scrutiny—all the more so as Leonard Woolf, in his
political scholarship, was by vocation a student of borders, between nations
but also between groups such as colonizers and colonized, male capitalists
and female workers, and different political camps within one governmental
structure. In their marriage the Woolfs enacted, and in their work they
fantasized, theorized, and attempted, the crossing of borders intently po-
liced in the “real world.” As the founders and editors of the Hogarth Press,
moreover, Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf laid a crossroads in the dis-
semination of avant-garde literature and ideas; it is difficult to imagine
literary modernism without their wide influence, and this study is also,
finally, a denotation of that influence.

The violent deaths that embody the opposite of mutual recognition and
cooperation in the work of Virginia Woolf, occur in places at once central
and obscure: Judith Shakespeare, the invented sister of A Room of One's
Own, died for the historical and literary sins of patriarchy, and is buried at
a crossroads; Septimus Warren Smith, the World War I veteran of Mrs.
Dalloway, whose impaled figure is the emblem of my middle chapter and
irradiates its outskirts as well, expired on the railings that divide two prop-
erties. Both were technically suicides; both were victims of larger social
forces, just as surely as Andrew Ramsay, killed in the war, Prue Ramsay,
whose father “gave” her in marriage only to see her die soon after of “com-
plications resulting from childbirth,” and Mrs. Ramsay, overworked by her
demanding husband and an ethos requiring the endless self-sacrifice of
wives, are such victims. ¹ All of them could have lived if the spirit of negotia-
tion had won over the will to annexation.

Woolf gives Septimus Warren Smith a cannily ambiguous label: he is “a
border case, neither one thing nor the other” (84), and his absurd name is
emblematic of between-ness, being divided in three parts. “Septum” itself
is a dividing wall or membrane, frequently osmotic; and Septimus, polysyl-
labic and Latinate, suggests both grandeur and last (“seventh”) things,
God's chosen and God's afterthought. His surname is as prosaic and “com-
mon” as his given name is high-flown and extraordinary: he is a private
person, a son, a dreamer, and a middling citizen of a class-bound state that
sends Smiths by the thousands to die in war. His middle name, transposing
those two words, reminds us of this—reminds us that this would-be poet,
this private thinker and possible genius, is and was inevitably co-opted by

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