The traditional literary canon of the early 20th Century makes readily apparent the virtual disconnect between women and
popular literature. An authentic
female voice was a faint if at all audible contingent within what preceded modernist authors. Even rarer, were the voices of women who spoke against the normative restraints of their culture. The paper shows that the writings of Virginia Woolf offered significant contributions to this emerging literary demographic, both in the areas of women writing about women and, more specifically unique to her modernist experimentalism, the exploration of female-to-female intimacy. Woolf was a pioneer in her incorporation of these themes into her work. She creates characters who embody the struggle that she and other women experienced in early 20th century Britain. The paper shows that, beginning with her young protagonist, Clarissa, in "Mrs. Dalloway", Woolf explores the social constraints that limit agency and suppress these yearnings. The paper shows that with the later works of "To the Lighthouse" and her unfinished and posthumously published novel, "Between the Acts",
lesbian desire is squelched by popular convention and its oppressive alienation robs her characters of the chance to possess the objects of their desires and withholds from them a social environment wherein it is plausible to assume a lesbian or woman-centered identity.