Preview of The Duchess and the Jeweller Summary:

In spite of the relative affluence of her family, Virginia Woolf was aware of the difficulties most British subjects faced in terms of earning a living. As a social activist committed to women's suffrage, as a lecturer at Morley College which drew many working-class men and women, and as a partner with her husband at the Hogarth Press, she moved considerably beyond the economic security her birthright offered. The practicality of her declaration in her famous essay "A Room of One's Own" that an artist must have at least 500 pounds a year is an indication of both her lingering sense of entitlement and her awareness of the crippling effects of constant poverty. As she examines the intricate arrangements of the British class system in the early decades of the twentieth century in "The Duchess and the Jeweller" from the perspective of the ambitious arriviste jeweler Oliver Bacon, her...