SOURCE: "Virginia Woolf: Art and Sexuality," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 441-59.

In the following essay, Fromm responds to critics who see Virginia Woolf's writing as characteristically "sexless. "

Since the publication in 1941 of her last novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf's reputation has undergone radical transformation. At first characterized as "experimental" and treated from an esthetic vantage point, her novels received serious, if somewhat limited, examinations as literary productions, while a view prevailed of her as a rather precious Bohemian associated with slightly disreputable characters from Bloomsbury. But even as late as the sixties, when Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse—and by some, The Waves—were considered major works, she herself was not regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, and as recently as 1975 the Norton Anthology did not consider her a "major author." Still, with the gradual appearance in...