Virginia Woolf lived during an age and in a community where utopian and dystopian projects were very much in the air, not only as the promises off ered by women's equality, Fabian social planning, the Cooperative movement, and movements for international peace and cooperation, but also as warnings and plans for battle against a mechanized, militarized, totalitarian, and largely metropolitanized future. The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the high tide of utopian writing. Edward Bellamy' socialist/consumerist vision of the Industrial Army, Looking Backward, came out in 1888. William Morris's Arts and Crafts utopia, Newsfrom Nowhere, answered with a vision of artistic production as the basis for a happy life in harmony with nature in 1890. H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, and Aldous Huxley all wrote about and/or critiqued utopian experiments in metropolitan living. Wells in particular pumped out a steady sequence of a half-dozen utopian romances and dystopian satires between A Modern Utopia in 1905, and The New World Order in 1940, including The Shape of Things to Come, which was made into a major motion picture in 1937. In 1909, E. M. Forster published one of the classics of anti-mechanistic dystopian literature, “The Machine Stops.” And in 1932 Aldous Huxley produced his dystopian critique of contemporary hedonism and consumerism, Brave New World.

Apart from literary trends, Woolf's own political activities and those of her immediate circle often had utopian antecedents and intentions. The Women's Cooperative Guild with which Leonard was involved from 1912 onward and in which Virginia was also active, was an outgrowth of the Cooperative movement, usually seen to have been fathered by Robert Owen, whose success in operating his Scottish cotton mills on cooperative principles was not extended to his attempt to form full utopian communities in Orbiston Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana. Owen's vision of societal reform included increased emphasis on education for children and adults. The communal ethos of the Omega workshop (1913-1919) as well as its ambition to provide complete interior design from rugs to furniture to walls, owes much to the example of William Morris, who also founded the Socialist League in 1884.