In June of 2009, as part of the nineteenth annual Virginia Woolf conference, three women sat on the stage of Fordham University's Pope Auditorium to speak on a panel, hosted by Katherine Lanpher, about the work that they do—work that is heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf. The ages of the women onstage, Ms. Kris Lundberg, Dr. Susan Sellers, and Dr. Ruth Gruber, spanned several generations, and, while they each had followed a different path, all had held Woolf as a compass. Many of us in the audience had come to be there for different reasons but shared this sense of Woolf as our compass. I was there as a young woman, a college student, and a writer. I learned that Lundberg, Sellers, and Gruber have each looked to Woolf for direction and have each used the creative legacy that Woolf left as an inspiration and a guide.

In her doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf, Dr. Ruth Gruber writes: “The psychic consciousness of woman is her imperative medium. Her struggle for the ‘true’ style and philosophy is determined not only by her own feminine impulses, but by her inheritance from the creative women who have preceded her” (63). That creative inheritance, from women for women, has informed the work that Gruber, Sellers, and Lundberg have done throughout their lives.