First published by the Hogarth Press in 1931, Life As We Have Known It gathers autobiographical accounts by members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild.

Margaret Llewelyn Davies, a major organiser within the Women’s Co-operative Guild, assembled the accounts; Virginia Woolf contributed the introductory letter to the original edition, recognising in them a form of experience largely absent from literary culture. 

These were working-class women writing directly about childhood, domestic service, factory and field work, marriage, childbirth, poverty, political awakening, unsuual as this group of voices were previously undocumented altogether, but also because the women here are neither case studies nor characters observed from elsewhere. They narrate themselves. The result is social history with the abstraction stripped out: money counted in shillings, children put to work, clothes repeatedly altered rather than replaced, ambitions abandoned because training costs £30.

This 1977 Virago edition also contains a new introduction by historian Anna Davin. Particularly nice as an object of feminist publishing history: this was Virago Reprint Library No. 1, and Virago identifies it as the first book published after the press became fully independent in 1977 — effectively the beginning of the reprint project that would become central to the press. 

Edition: Virago, 1977. First Virago edition; Virago Reprint Library No. 1. Paperback. First published by Hogarth Press in 1931. Introductory letter by Virginia Woolf; new introduction by Anna Davin.