, Woolf indeed took the risk of starting a new war between the sexes that until Three Guineas she had kept saying she wanted to avoid, and this, by letting the feminist's anger ("her") cover the voice of the common reader ("us"); she also took the risk of overestimating her audience's intelligence; last but not least, by reactivating old clichés, she ran the risk of perpetuating them. But I imagine Woolf thought the risk was worth it. Besides, risk is an idea she kept valuing, especially when "women" and "fiction" were concerned. It first enabled her to take position as a literary critic and historian outside the Academy, and to increase her reader's receptivity to the controversies that started in the eighteenth century and culminated in the late nineteenth century. In her essays, Woolf implicitly answers back a genealogy of writers: eighteenth century essayists and critics preoccupied with the novel being, The Lady Novelist

W. R. Greg, But beyond the well-known trope of "conversation" as a writing and reading method, what Woolf looked for here, it seems to me, is a form of discomfort provided by the way the rhetorical figure of allegory is meant to encode meaning. Indeed, although "genre" and "gender" -"fiction" and "woman" -enable Woolf to refer her reader to a body of traditional thought and apparently recognizable patterns, this reader is soon provoked out of his potential passivity by the three-fold effect of allegory's poetics. As Teskey reminds us, "an allegory means something other than what it says and says something other than it means

. Woolf, At the moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship

, Lord David Cecil's words eported by Leïla Brosnan in Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays and Journalism

, 1773: 154) and quoted by Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood in Women and Literary History: "For There She Was, A comment found in the Monthly Review, vol.48, p.116, 2003.

S. Allott,

G. Henry and L. , The Lady Novelists, Westminster Review, pp.45-58

, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, National Review, pp.145-154

W. R. Greg, False Morality of Lady Novelists, National Review, pp.145-154

J. Ruskin, Fiction-Fair and Foul, The Nineteenth Century, pp.297-308

H. James, The Art of Fiction, Longman's Magazine, pp.317-332

. Besnault-levita,

. Thus, It "opens a schism in consciousness -between a life and a mystery, between the real and the ideal": it renders an analogy visible, yet allows its truth to escape. Last but not least, when it figures, as it so often does, the appropriation of a female body by male abstraction, it implies a form of epistemological violence, a hidden process of "capture" whereby female materiality is submitted to masculine desire, while simultaneously "being raised up from its logical place, which is beneath the lowest species, into the realm of abstractions

, Besnault-Levita, vol.8

R. London and K. Paul, Novelists on the Novel, 1959.

E. Blair, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, 2007.

R. Bowlby, A More than Maternal Tie': Woolf as a Woman Essayist, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf

L. Brosnan, Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays and Journalism, 1997.

M. V. Cuddy-keane and . Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere, 2003.

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 1927.

N. Frye, A Review of Virginia Woolf's The Moment and Other Essays, Frye on Twentieth Century Literature, vol.27, pp.80-81, 1948.

P. Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, 1921.

, A Victorian Art of Fiction. Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1979.

B. C. Rosenberg, V. Woolf, and S. Johnson, Common Readers, 1995.

M. Quilligan, Allegory and Female Agency, pp.163-187, 2010.

G. Teskey, . Allegory, . Violence, and . Ithaca, , 1996.

V. Woolf, London: Hogarth Press, 1986. 6 vols. Print. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie ed, vol.I, issue.6, pp.1929-1932, 1904.