Three Guineas

Woolf states explicitly that the “question—How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” (3) has inspired her to write her letter, even though three years have passed since she received it. Given the historical moment in which she wrote the essay, it is understandable that Woolf felt the need to address the topic. Almost two decades on from the end of the First World War, the nascent fascist governments in Germany and Italy indicated that conflict was seemingly inevitable. With the Second World War beginning not long after the publication of this essay, Woolf was justified in her prediction.

Her analysis of war is different from that of her contemporaries, however. The unnamed correspondent writes to Woolf because he views her as a noted pacifist. There is some truth to this, as Woolf had written about the horrors of war in previous works. However, his fundamentally flawed interpretation of Woolf’s work leads her to write Three Guineas. The correspondent’s mistake is that he views war in isolation, as a horrible plague in need of a cure. But Woolf, as she explains throughout the essay, sees war as a symptom of a disease, rather than the disease itself.