As Virginia Woolf notes about the 1930s poets in “The Leaning Tower” (1940), an education makes an indelible mark on a writer: it is internalized, affecting how the writer sees and works; it is something the writer cannot throw away (CE2 172). Using that comment to answer Elena Gualtieri's question about how we should “read the work that precede[s] her emergence” as Virginia Woolf (25), I work to show in my book project how Virginia Stephen's homeschooling, teaching at Morley College, and apprenticing under seven different editors influenced her work as an essayist. To summarize my overall argument briefly, Virginia Stephen's home schooling taught her about gender isolation and its impact on learning; her work at Morley College taught her about class exclusion and its impact on teaching; and her years as a reviewer taught her about different audiences and their impact on writing. I argue, then, that Virginia Stephen's struggle to educate herself shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist who teaches, and that in Virginia Woolf's hands, the essay becomes a classroom.

According to my preliminary count, Virginia Stephen worked hard and practiced every chance she got during her apprenticeship, publishing 160 reviews and essays. As Virginia Woolf, the increasingly public figure, she wrote or published 480 more, for an essay canon total of 640. Another kind of preliminary count, of essays within general topic categories, shows that Virginia Woolf wrote 102 essays that fall into the category I call reading/writing/education/pedagogical, 16% of her total output. As Anne Fernald comments, Woolf's literary essays “do attempt to teach readers how to read” (194), and Danell Jones has shown what a good creative writing teacher she is. On the other hand, almost all Virginia Woolf's essays seem pedagogical, perhaps because in addition to the actual teaching her essays do, Woolf develops a pedagogical style.