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‘What I find deplorable,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, ‘is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century’ (Woolf, 1998, p. 59). Racking the bookshelves in her quest to uncover the material facts of women's lives in the past, Woolf was repeatedly thwarted: women were, Woolf found, ‘all but absent from history’ (Woolf, 1998, p. 56). For Woolf, the writing of women's lives was an explicitly feminist endeavour, an attempt to bring to light the ‘infinitely obscure lives’ that ‘remain[ed] to be recorded’ (Woolf, 1998, p. 116). Around the same time that Woolf was encouraging women to ‘think back through our mothers’, Sigmund Freud, notoriously, found himself confronting the more obscure regions of women's lives (Woolf, 1998, p. 99). For Freud, the ‘shadowy’ roots of femininity remained enigmatic; his own account of female sexuality was, by his own admission, ‘incomplete and fragmentary and […] not always […] friendly’ (Freud, 1924, p. 423; Freud, 1933, p. 135). Signing off his 1933 account of femininity in defeated terms, Freud suggested his reader look elsewhere: ‘If you want to know more about femininity,’ Freud concluded, ‘enquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information’ (Freud, 1933, p. 135).
Reviewing her former analyst's contribution to the disputed subject of female sexuality, Joan Riviere - one of Freud's chief translators as well as his former patient - did not hold back: ‘It is not a credible view of women; nor have poets ever foreshadowed it; nor is it the ordinary judgment of mankind’ (Riviere, 1934, p. 336). Whatever the reader's own position on Freud's and his contemporaries' conflicting views on female sexuality, it is difficult not to sympathize with Riviere's exasperated observation that although the castration complex may be real, ‘it is not half the story of woman’ (Riviere, 1934, p. 337). Writing to his wife in 1925, J