Woolf's fiction and literary criticism, as in The Common Reader volume, insist on the continuity of the cultural and literary record ‘from Chaucer even to Mr Conrad’ in the face of a ‘time passing’ that, in the First World War, passed in a particularly disruptive and destructive way. However, when Woolf concentrates on economic issues, especially the position of modern women and the professional opportunities available to them or still denied, she is able to embrace the War more positively as a means of historical change. In A Room she offers thanks to both the Crimean and ‘the European’ war for the opportunities they provided for women's employment outside the home, the latter having ‘opened the doors to the average woman’ (RO, p. 97), and in Three Guineas she stresses the importance of ‘the sacred year 1919’ (TG, p. 141) when the opening of these doors was formally recognised in the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. This sense of progress, however, runs up against Woolf's romantic and retrospective longings in a deeply conflicting way, as we see in A Room itself in its flight from modern sexual relations towards Christina Rossetti and Tennyson, even though Woolf is prepared to ponder whether the War offered the further service of abolishing outmoded ‘illusion’: