" (Bell p. 144) However, what sets her apart from other writers of the modernist or feminist genre is her denial of her namesake, Woolf shed it and believed that a feminist label bastardized the ideal of struggling for equality, not only for women, but for men as well. "The polematic grinder of the feminist movement has greedily devoured Virginia Woolf, spewing her for as the appropriately committed feminist whose cause is somehow connected to her fiction. Such a view of Woolf is not particularly useful." (Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf pp.36) Despite her rejection of the feminist label, her abstination is superficial. Woolf's goals in writing To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway are uniquely feminine. Only females are protagonists while males, although not replete antagonists, are the cause of many of the women's problems. Woolf was not writing for universal equality when she conjured these plots. Her rejection of the feminist label is irrelevant; her behavior labels her a feminist.
In To The Lighthouse she returns imaginatively to St. Ives, resurrecting her parents, explaining her involvement with them and questioning at last the myth of sexual duality developed partly through her experience with her father and mother, partly in reaction to the masculinity of the Bloomsbury Group. The outspoken feminism of her later years is not a change of direction.
2.
but an intensification and a clarification of attitudes developed .
early in her life and in response to early experiences .
(Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf pp. 49-50).
Instead of becoming more moderate in the later years of her life, as is the stereotype of age, Woolf became more fervent and outspoken about her feminist views. Her increasingly feminist tone was Woolf's attempt to hold on to life as mental illness took her life away. There is a direct relationship between mental illness and the feminism in Woolf's works.