Virginia Woolf was a writer who was much concerned with the general plight of women in literature in her era. Indeed, she showed considerable interest and concern with the place of women in her society and with the need for women to foster a solidarity with one another, making her a feminist in her point of view. Her feminism derived from her perception of the very real discrimination experienced by women throughout Victorian society, and the woman as artist also had to overcome a degree of prejudice against she and her work. At the same time, it is evident that women in the arts did achieve a certain freedom from the structures of society that other women could not, and Woolf herself is a clear example of this. Her personal life shows considerable divergence from the mores of her time, yet her writings also show that she was fully aware of the social restrictions faced by women in general. In her fiction, relationships between women serve as examples of how women can and do support one another in some cases and undermine one another in others. Among these relationships are mother-daughter relationships which in part may derive from her own odd relationship with her mother and from her observation of other such relationships, and the mother-daughter relationship is key in much of Woolf's fiction.
The issue of the plight of women in society has been addressed directly by different writers, and Virginia Woolf showed concern for the matter in her criticism as in her fiction and also indicated that she was looking to her own life as a source. Woolf's approach to the issue of women and fiction was firmly grounded in a general theory of literature:
She argued that the writer was the product of her or his historical circumstances, and that material conditions were of crucial importance. Secondly, she claimed that these material circumstances had a profound effect on the psychological aspects of writing, and that they could ...