Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann review – feminist pyrotechnics

A collection of wickedly funny, rousing polemics takes aim at ecotourism, the beauty industry ... and crime fiction

In 1938, three years before her suicide at 59, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, a long-form essay on patriarchy and its seemingly inevitable trajectory, war - a forceful indictment of the fascism that was then sweeping Europe and beyond. Her most conspicuously pacifist work, Three Guineas was contentious for its time. It argued that subjugation of women in the domestic sphere (notably, Woolf refers to the daughters of educated men", women of her own privileged class) is reflected in an equal lack of representation in the public domain of education and influence: The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other," she wrote. As part of a solution, Woolf proposed supporting three causes with a guinea each: specifically, a society to avert war, a campaign for the rebuilding of a women's college and an organisation to encourage women's professional employment. Always elegant, Three Guineas nevertheless throbs with justifiable anger and fear. Its rallying cry and the recognition that the personal is also political would go on to, for example, inspire female peace activists of the 1960s, who took various of its sentences as antiwar slogans. Set fire to the old hypocrisies," urges Woolf. Unsurprisingly, its central themes have not dated.

Ellmann is hellbent on upbraiding the deleterious forces of the prevailing misogyny