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to ‘official’ public historiography from early in her career. She was largely educated at home, moreover, and according to Quentin Bell, the studies her father prescribed for her in her adolescence had included most of the historical and biographical classics produced in the nineteenth century, among them Macaulay’s
History of England,
Carlyle’s
French Revolution,
Thomas Arnold’s
History of Rome,
Gibbon’s multi-volumed
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
and Froude’s
Life of Carlyle.
That most of these books centred on the lives and works of men, almost entirely omitting any discussion of the experiences and achievements of women, must have soon become irritating to a young proponent of women’s rights who was eventually to produce two of our century’s major feminist treatises –
A Room of One’s Own
(1929) and
Three Guineas
(1938).
    Perhaps, therefore, as a gesture of rebellion against both paternal and patriarchal authority, some of Virginia Stephen’s first writings took shape as biographies and histories which drew upon the form in which her father and his associates worked, while not so subtly satirizing the Lives of Great Men that were the subjects of his dictionary, and which his friend Thomas Carlyle had, in
Heroes and Hero Worship,
proclaimed the substance of history itself. ‘Friendships Gallery’ and ‘Reminiscences’, her affectionate tributes to Violet Dickinson and Vanessa Bell, were in fact preceded by an attempted ‘History of Women’ (written in 1897 when she was just fifteen and unfortunately now lost) and later by a fanciful meditation on the past entitled ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), in which a woman historian named Rosamund Merridew discovers a set of documents purporting torecord the life and times of one Joan Martyn, a fifteenth-century diarist who is also a sort of prototype of the mythical ‘Judith Shakespeare’ whose tragic and monitory tale Woolf was to invent in
A Room of One’s Own.
    As Woolf matured, these early efforts to revise and reimagine a past that had always been depicted as primarily masculine branched out into three major biographical/historical projects that consistently concerned her both as a fiction-writer and as an essayist. First, she frequently attempted to rewrite official history so as to provide what the French feminist theorist Héléne Cixous has named ‘the other history’ – the history not of ‘Great Men’ but of women and of, in Woolf’s own phrase, ‘the obscure’, the history that falls into the interstices between the chronicles of princes and kings so that, when told, it ‘breaks the sequence’ of recorded time. Second, she frequently sought to excavate and inspect
family
history – to investigate, that is, the chronicles of the person and the personal, the family romances, which stand behind both the Carlylean ‘Lives of Great Men’ and the Woolfian ‘Lives of the Obscure’. Third, in such crucial texts as
A Room of One’s Own
and
Three Guineas,
she produced meditations on education which simultaneously recounted her rejection of the ‘old’ history, her dream of a ‘new’ history, and her desire for a reengendered education – literally (from the Latin
educere
) a ‘leading into’ – in the new.
    Woolf was not, of course, alone in her disaffection with traditional history. As early as 1818, her favourite novelist, Jane Austen, had created in
Northanger Abbey
a naive young heroine named Catherine Morland who voiced a discontent that would have been congenial to the youthful Virginia Stephen. History, Catherine complained, ‘tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.’ 19 In seeking to remedy this problem, moreover, Woolf’s own work significantly parallels (or in a few cases almost uncannily foreshadows) the research