Why I Still Hate Virginia Woolf

A Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sad White Women in Literature Class

I met Virginia Woolf in the second half of the 1990s while I was in boarding school. No cell phones. No earbuds. Just me, the only Black foster kid on a full scholarship, fresh out of the system in Trenton, NJ. All the girls in my class were white. And the teacher, who I hated and she hated me too, had the audacity to create an actual class called Dances with Woolf.

I thought the class was going to be about Native Americans. It wasn’t. It was about white women walking in circles, drowning in metaphor, and sighing about time. I had bigger problems. Like, where the hell was I supposed to connect with any of this?

My classmates treated Woolf like she invented introspection. Meanwhile, I was sitting at that oval wood table wondering if I was dumb, because I couldn’t find the plot, couldn’t hear my voice, couldn’t find anyone on the page who talked, moved, or felt like the people I knew. I didn’t have the language for it back then.

I’ve gaslit myself for years thinking that maybe the failure was mine. Maybe I was too young. Too unformed. Too damaged from child abuse and foster care. Maybe my teenage brain just couldn’t hold the nuance. So recently, like a good recovering student, I went back. I cracked those literary works again. Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse. Orlando. All of them. And I told myself: maybe now, with maturity, perspective, grown-woman wisdom, I’ll finally see what they saw.

I did not.

It wasn’t me. It was her. Virginia Woolf was the damn problem!

I still felt lost in the sentences. Still felt like I was being asked to admire fog. Still felt that same hollow ache that comes from trying to find yourself in a mirror that wasn’t made for you. And this time, I didn’t blame myself. Those books weren’t hella confusing. They were exclusionary. They weren’t deep. They were just drenched in a whiteness that had been mislabeled “universal.”

So, I’m writing these short reviews for any Black girls (and boys) out there who might have the misfortune of being assigned one of these books.

This isn’t for the teacher. This isn’t for the AP exam. This is for YOU.

And yes, this is for the white kids too, especially the ones who might also be sitting in class pretending to understand Woolf because everyone else is nodding. The ones highlighting long sentences like they mean something just because they’re long. The ones who feel weird admitting, “I don’t get it,” because they think literature is a test of intelligence instead of an invitation to feel something real.

This is for anyone who has ever been gaslit by a syllabus. For anyone who’s ever felt stupid for not swooning over a sentence that made you feel nothing. This is your permission slip to ask:
Wait… what exactly are we praising here?

Welcome to the resistance reading list. Footnotes, side-eyes, and survival tips included. This is to give you language. To validate what you might be feeling when you’re staring at the page wondering if the problem is you. It’s not.

You are not confused. You are not dumb. You are not alone.

What you’re feeling is the dislocation of being asked to find yourself inside a worldview that was never meant to see you. And if you feel bored, angry, indifferent, or suspicious of the praise, trust that instinct. It means your brain is working.

So here they are: Virginia Woolf’s most “important” books. With footnotes from a Black woman who survived them.

Mrs. Dalloway

Clarissa throws a party. That’s the book. That’s the plot. A rich white woman with no job walks around London being haunted by vibes and floral arrangements, and every white girl in class called it “revolutionary.” I call it a long-ass journal entry written by someone who needed carbs and a hug.

As a teenager coming out of foster care, I didn’t see a woman navigating the burdens of femininity. I saw a lady with nothing real to do having a midlife moment over a damn doily. I was told there was some universal truth in her interiority. But my girlhood was about survival, not sentiment. Clarissa was worried about legacy. I was worried about whether my financial aid would get renewed. Where was I supposed to find myself in her afternoon anxieties?

For me this work revealed that even the most privileged white woman can be repackaged as the Everywoman so long as her emotions are fragile, poetic, and wrapped in European melancholy. Clarissa’s pain is indulgent. It’s allowed to exist without context, without consequence. It’s white womanhood as free-floating grief.

Survival Tip: If they tell you it’s “about time,” just nod and say, “Yes, and how white women experience it differently from literally everyone else.” Then move on.

To the Lighthouse

This book had me beefing with a piece of architecture. They don’t even go to the damn lighthouse until the last thirty pages. Instead, we sit through woolgathering, tea drinking, and a kind of grief so repressed it could only have been written by someone whose emotional vocabulary was shaped by porridge. This was supposed to be profound. To me, it read like a brochure for why colonial Britain needed therapy.

I kept waiting for something to happen. For meaning to rise like the tide. But all I found was a story obsessed with absence: the mother dies, the father broods, and everything is muted. I was a Black girl raised in chaos. I didn’t have the luxury of philosophical reflection. This kind of grief, the aestheticized, beautifully restrained kind, was foreign to me.

But white women’s silence gets interpreted as depth. That longing, detachment, and invisibility can be called art when whiteness frames it. To the Lighthouse isn’t really about family or mourning. It’s about how whiteness intellectualizes emotional vacancy.

Survival Tip: Remember, the lighthouse is a metaphor. Don’t waste time looking for plot. Look for patience. And bring snacks.

Orlando

A nobleman lives for 300 years and switches genders halfway through. It’s heralded as Woolf’s “queer masterpiece.” There’s time travel, gender play, and literary winking. Think Downton Abbey meets RuPaul’s Drag Race with no music or joy.

I was told this book was groundbreaking. But it felt like a party I wasn’t invited to. The gender fluidity didn’t liberate me. It floated above me, detached from the body, race, or real-world stakes. I didn’t see queerness grounded in survival, or femininity grounded in struggle. I saw a character shapeshift through centuries of British privilege without ever touching the margins where I lived.

That gender is whimsical when you’re white. That fluidity is fun when empire protects you. Orlando doesn’t contend with systemic anything. Woolf’s queerness is literary, not lived. It's a sandbox for elite bodies to perform identity while the rest of us live it.

Survival Tip: Treat it like fanfiction from the 1700s and don’t expect actual queer politics. It’s gender play but only for rich people.

A Room of One’s Own

This one almost got me. I underlined things. I nodded. Woolf argues that women need space, money, and independence to write. It’s feminism 101 but with expensive curtains and colonial amnesia. But then I realized: she was talking to her girls. And her girls didn’t look like me.

This was the book that made me think maybe I’m just not smart enough. Everyone around me treated it like gospel. But I read it with clenched teeth. My mother , grandmother, great-grandmother and her enslaved mother didn’t have a room. I didn’t have peace. I was writing from foster homes, dorm rooms, trauma, and borrowed time. Woolf’s version of liberation assumed we all had families who could give us allowances and summer homes with solitude.

White feminism often centers comfort and access as the starting point for creativity. “A room of one’s own” sounds like freedom until you realize Woolf was talking to daughters of empire, not survivors of it. It’s not that her thesis is wrong, it’s that her audience was never me.

Survival Tip: When she says you need a room and money to write, silently add: “...and generational wealth, colonial spoils, and servants.” Context matters.

The Waves

This book broke me. Six characters. No dialogue tags. Just a swirl of internal monologues so similar they may as well have been six branches on the same white, existentially exhausted tree. I remember reading a passage three times and still not knowing who was speaking—or why. Woolf was trying to capture “consciousness.” I was just trying to pass English without crying.

I tried. God, I tried. I highlighted. I reread. I journaled. But every voice in the book sounded the same. Like an emotionally constipated white person narrating a tea commercial. I felt stupid. Like my brain wasn’t wired to process abstract anguish. But the truth is, this was never for me. It’s stream-of-consciousness for people whose consciousness has never been interrupted by poverty, racism, or generational trauma.

Whiteness treats introspection as art, even when it’s just self-absorbed mumbling. The characters are less people and more moods. Woolf isn’t building narrative, she’s building atmosphere. And only whiteness could afford to be that airy and still be taken seriously.

Survival Tip: It’s okay if you don’t know who’s talking. Neither do they. Just vibe through the existential fog and keep flipping.

Three Guineas

Woolf responds to a man’s letter asking how to prevent war. She ties together patriarchy, education, and fascism. It’s her attempt at political engagement. Her anti-fascist, anti-war treatise. The one the teacher said was “urgent” and “political.” But guess who’s missing? Us. Woolf spends a whole book interrogating patriarchy and war from her father’s study, while empire hums quietly in the background. Black and brown people don’t appear, not as subjects, not as thinkers, not as casualties. Just a feminism of omission.

Finally, something political tho. I thought I could latch on. But even in this “radical” work, Woolf centers the plight of the “daughters of educated men.” She’s trying to dismantle fascism without ever naming the colonial violence Britain exported daily. As a Black girl whose ancestors were brutalized by the empire she refused to name, I didn’t feel seen. I felt erased.

Even white women’s radicalism is often narrow. Woolf critiques the system that oppresses her, but not the one that built her world. Her feminism is still family-friendly. Safe enough to quote. Silent on empire.

Survival Tip: You are not hallucinating. She really wrote a whole anti-fascist essay and barely mentioned colonialism. Take a deep breath. You’re not the problem.

The Years

This is a multi-generational novel that follows one upper-middle-class family through changing social tides in England. It’s fucking long. It’s restrained. It’s dry. This book is what happens when generational trauma is replaced with generational ennui. It’s a whole family saga that somehow manages to be both long and forgettable. You ever read a book that feels like eating unseasoned mashed potatoes for 300 pages? That.

This was supposed to be a masterpiece about time and transformation. But all I saw were rich white people navigating dinner parties, polite disappointments, and occasional revelations while the world burned off-page. I was a kid who knew about foster care, fractured families, and sudden endings. This book moved like it had never been touched by urgency.

Time, for white people, is allowed to unfold slowly. Their trauma is ambient. Their family dysfunction is literary. The novel doesn’t interrogate history, it drifts through it like a Monet painting of denial.

Survival Tip: Skip to the last chapter. If you made it that far, you’ve already passed the endurance test. Bless you.

Between the Acts

Her final novel. A small English village stages a play the day before World War II breaks out. They say it’s haunting. It was. But not in the way they meant. It was haunting because it reminded me how Woolf always managed to say so much and still leave people like me out of the story. Even when she was staging a play within a novel within a metaphor within a mood, there was no place for a foster kid from Trenton in her world. Not even between the acts.

This was the end of her legacy. Woolf wrote about performance, literally. But she didn’t recognize how performative whiteness had become. The villagers stage history while real life looms. That part I understood. But I didn’t believe their fear. I didn’t believe their innocence.

White English identity is always centered as tragic just before it becomes violent. Woolf captures the moment before the storm but never names the structures that make war inevitable. Even in her final act, whiteness is both victim and witness, never the perpetrator.

Survival Tip: It’s a play within a play. But the real performance is white England pretending it’s innocent. Watch for that.

They told us Virginia Woolf walked into the river with stones in her pockets and drowned. They called it poetic. Tragic. A woman too sensitive for the world she lived in. And maybe that’s true.

Virginia had her room. Her river. Her readers.

I don’t hate Virginia Woolf because she was broken. I hate the literary church that turned her sighs into sacred scripture and told me to whisper when I had something loud to say. As a Black girl, I was told her work was “timeless.” But when I needed time to find my own voice, her work made me feel like I didn’t belong.

Now as a Black woman, I understand why.

Virginia Woolf was writing from inside a house I was never meant to enter. And I’ve stopped apologizing for knocking on the door and finding nothing but ghosts. Because now I have to ask:
What is the point of this pedagogy? What are we asking students to prove when we assign books like these? That they’re smart enough to analyze dense white sadness? That they’re good at deciphering metaphors stretched thinner than a hot croissant?

Are we teaching them to love language, or just to survive it?

Are we telling young women that power lives in their voices, or that power lives in the ability to imitate the voices of dead British women who never imagined them existing?

Because reading Woolf didn’t empower me as a girl. It taught me that to be taken seriously, I’d have to sound like someone else. That to write well, I’d have to shrink myself into abstraction, ambiguity, and aestheticized despair. That kind of literary education doesn’t liberate. It domesticates.

And maybe it’s time to ask why we keep assigning these books at all when they’ve taught so many girls, especially girls of color, that brilliance only comes in one voice, one mood, one race, one gendered gaze peering out a foggy-ass window.

So no, dear scholars, you don’t want to be fluent in fog. You don’t want to learn how to turn pain into floral metaphors. You want to write in a voice that’s full, cracked, reckless, rhythmic, and authentically YOURS.

Virginia Woolf walked into the river. One day you will walk out of the classroom for good. And your survival won’t come from deciphering her sadness. It will come from refusing to drown in it.

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