SOURCE: Lassner, Phyllis. “‘The Milk of Our Mothers' Kindness Has Ceased to Flow’”: Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and the Representation of the Jew.” In Between “Race” and Culture, edited by Bryan Cheyette, pp. 129-44. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Lassner points out ambivalent images of Jews in several works by Virginia Woolf and Stevie Smith, respectively, noting that the coming of World War II was a milestone event in both writers' thinking about Jews.

Among the constantly shifting boundaries of canon formation, perhaps no other text so represents the intersection of gender, modernism, and anti-militarism as Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. In its experiments with genre and form, it constructs a history and theory of fascism through a feminist pacifist polemic. Invoking the figure of Antigone as muse of women's war resistance, Three Guineas argues that the history of continuous conflict is evident in the...