SOURCE: Schröder, Leena Kore. “Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's ‘Jewish’ Stories.” Twentieth-Century Literature 49, no. 3 (fall 2003): 298-327.

In the following essay, Schröder explores elements of anti-Semitism in Woolf's short story “The Duchess and the Jeweller” and Leonard Woolf's “Three Jews.”

There can be no straightforward account of attitudes toward Jewishness in the work of Virginia Woolf. This is a woman who lived happily married to a Jew and whose private references to Leonard as “my Jew” are marital jokes (Diary [The Diary of Virginia Woolf] 1: 11), yet whose diaries regularly efface the individual Jew and reduce him or her to an identity that is generalized and conceptual rather than unique. She reads a French novel, Et Cie, “by a Jew,” not by Jean-Richard Bloch (1: 134); Roger Fry's daughter Pamela marries “her Roumanian Jew,” not Micu Diamand (2: 188); it is only a “young Jewess [who] was...