Once Virginia Stephen said ‘yes’ to Mary Sheepshanks and agreed to teach at Morley College, she confronted the task of negotiating the difference between her own educational background and that of her students. She also, as with her homeschooling, walked into a school of sorts, one that had a curriculum guided by a pedagogical theory where she learned lessons about particular topics within a community of teachers and learners. In the process of teaching her classes there, Stephen learned about institutions, education, pedagogy and class barriers from teachers: her mentor, Mary Sheepshanks, and her students. In a tangible outcome, she created lectures and learned to distrust their usefulness. Intangibly, she saw what lack of access had done to her students and worked to develop strategies for helping them learn.

Although her Morley College teaching was time-consuming, sometimes frustrating and often difficult, Virginia Stephen ended her work there having gained a wealth of pedagogical strategies that Virginia Woolf would consistently use in her essays. Most important, Stephen redefined her audience to include Morley students, whose exclusion, desire and struggles helped engender Woolf's concept of the common reader. Her uneasy class heritage would continue to trouble her life and work, but at Morley, she momentarily crossed class barriers in a classroom. As a result, Woolf sought to create classrooms in her essays, spaces permeated with the ‘understanding of a teacher’ whose main goal is to motivate students to read, discuss and learn, spaces where the teacher/writer and student/reader can talk.

A ‘vain and vicious system’: Virginia Stephen's Lectures

Virginia Stephen quickly abandoned an adherence to formal lectures at Morley, as Chapter 8 details. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf would call the practice of lecturing a ‘vain and vicious system’ (46) and call for a university that promoted conversation about the ‘art of understanding other people's lives and minds’ (43). In her essays, she often inveighed against the practice as well, having a woman ask in ‘Why?’, for example, ‘why continue an obsolete custom which not merely wastes time and temper, but incites the most debased of human passions – vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert?’ (E6 33). About the popular and famous Professor Walter Raleigh, she writes,