This classic study shows that Woolf s most experimental writing is far from being a flight from social commitment into arcane modernism Indeed it is best seen as a feminist subversion of the deepest formal principles of a patriarchal social order the very definitions of narrative writing and the subject In a series of subtle readings of five major novels Jacob s Room Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse Orlando and The Waves closely informed by psychoanalytic theory Makiko Minow Pinkney presents Woolf as a committed feminist whose politics emerged as an aspect of her experimentation with language and form