Three Guineas

Three Guineas is a book-length essay structured as a letter from Virginia Woolf to an unnamed correspondent who has asked her for help with his efforts to “prevent war” (3). Three years after receiving the letter, and amidst the rise of fascism across Europe, Woolf has finally decided to respond. As a pacifist, she feels compelled to find a way to prevent another World War, though she is perturbed by the correspondent’s ideas, which ignore society’s patriarchal nature and its role in perpetuating war. The respondent outlines three ways he believes war can be prevented: 1) write letters of protest to newspapers; 2) join an anti-war society; and 3) donate money to anti-war causes. She argues that women lack access to education, institutions, and professions, and this lack of access means that her ideas of how to prevent war will be fundamentally incompatible with those of her correspondent.

Within her letter to the unnamed correspondent, Woolf composes letters responding to two hypothetical requests for funding, one to help build a women’s college and another to help women enter professions that require a university education. These letters become a framing device. and the “three guineas” of the title serve as a

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