In 1920, Virginia Woolf archly summarises the life of nineteenth-century woman of letters Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855): ‘Her loves were vegetable, and her lanes were shady’ (E 3.211). Twenty-five years earlier, the Dictionary of National Biography had credited Mitford with laying ‘the foundation of a branch of literature hitherto untried’ with Our Village, a collection of sketches of rural life, yet now, the wish of the narrator of A Room of One’s Own has come true: ‘the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford [have been] closed to the public for a century at least’ (AROO 42). Yet Woolf’s review, ominously entitled ‘An Imperfect Lady’, challenged Mitford’s rural idyll by centring on the figure of her emotional and financially abusive father, an experience she shared with her friend (and erstwhile protégée) Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), convicted ‘of some complicity in the development of modern poetry’ by Woolf (F 109 n2). Although both women were bestselling canonical writers in their lifetimes, their literary fortunes were waning when Woolf was most drawn to their lives. Woolf’s critical attention at once presents a canonical intervention –she advocates for Barrett Browning but condemns Mitford to obscurity –but also sidesteps discussions of their literary merit. Most famously, Woolf is drawn to the life of the spaniel Flush, Mitford’s gift to Barrett Browning; yet her earlier reviews of both women’s lives and work centre on their shared position as victims of a patriarchal society, ‘triply imprisoned by sex, health, and her father’ (E 5.262), and constitute some of her most sustained journalistic engagement with aspects of the central arguments of A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

Neither woman has been studied extensively in relation to Woolf. Mary Russell Mitford is most commonly acknowledged as the first owner of Flush, while to date, Anna Snaith is the only critic to acknowledge Barrett Browning’s fundamental importance to Woolf’s thinking in the 1930s. This chapter builds on Snaith’s article to argue that both writers played a fundamental role in the development of Woolf’s feminism in the 1920s and 1930s. If Woolf’s engagement with Austen highlights that biography fundamentally shaped her reception of individual writers, her writing on Mitford and Barrett Browning makes legible the extent to which her fiction and journalism are mutually constitutive projects.