virginia woolf essay modern fiction

A Short Introduction to Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’

A short summary and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s 1919 essay

Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’, which was originally published under the title ‘Modern Novels’ in 1919, demonstrates in essay form what her later novels bear out: that she had set out to write something different from her contemporaries. Analysis of this important short essay reveals the lengths that Woolf was prepared to go to discredit earlier writers and promote a new style of writing, which she calls ‘Georgian’ and was often referred to as ‘impressionist’ at the time, but which we now know better as ‘modernist’.

In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), Virginia Woolf takes issue with those Edwardian novelists writing in the early years of the twentieth century who, in some ways, might be seen as relics of the nineteenth-century realism outlined above: her three targets, Arnold Bennett , John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells , are all labelled ‘materialists’ because of their preoccupation with predictable and plausible plots and their interest in describing the exterior details – the clothes a character wears, the furniture in a room – when what Woolf, as a reader, really wants to know is what is going on the heads of their characters.

Such a story points a way forward for Woolf and other writers, whom she labels ‘Georgian’ – i.e. more ‘modern’ and progressive than the materialist Edwardians.

In a later essay, ‘ Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown ’ (1924), Woolf attacked Bennett again, and summed up the difference between his type of fiction and the way life actually is:

In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an image of Mrs. Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever. In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs. Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us. Hence spring those sleek, smooth novels, those portentous and ridiculous biographies, that milk and watery criticism, those poems melodiously celebrating the innocence of roses and sheep which pass so plausibly for literature at the present time. [Woolf, Selected Essays , ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 53.]

Readers need to say ‘enough is enough’ and embrace the kind of fiction Woolf had just started to write – her novel Jacob’s Room had appeared the year before, in 1922 – which sought to capture the wonder and reality of life more accurately than Arnold Bennett ever did.

Others had got there before Woolf: in ‘Modern Fiction’ she mentions Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, praising them for moving away from such traditional realism or ‘materialism’ in fiction in favour of a newer and more subjective and psychological mode in English fiction. S

he also praises Anton Chekhov’s short stories – which would go on to influence Katherine Mansfield – and singles out his short story ‘Gusev’, in which nothing much happens, as a fine example of this new mode of fiction. This new impressionistic and psychologically focused mode of writing, which would move away from Victorian realism and push fiction into new territory, would later become known as ‘modernism’.

Discover more about female modernist writers with Woolf’s finest short stories , our pick of Woolf’s best novels and essays , our reappraisal of May Sinclair’s fiction , our introduction to the work of pioneering writer George Egerton , and our overview of the best stories by Katherine Mansfield .

Image: Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry (c. 1917), via Wikimedia Commons .

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Modern Fiction

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Summary: “modern fiction”.

Virginia Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction” was first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1919 as “Modern Novels.” A revised version was published as part of Woolf’s collection The Common Reader in 1925. Woolf was a key figure in British Modernism, and the essay itself explores the idea of “modern fiction,” contrasting it with the literature of previous generations. Many of the ideas contained within the essay inform Woolf’s fictional works, especially her later novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). This guide references the version of the essay included in The Essays of Virginia Woolf , Volume 4: 1925-1928 , edited by Andrew McNeillie and published by the Hogarth Press in 1984.

Woolf begins by suggesting that it is easy to assume that modern writers, with more sophisticated tools, are superior to their predecessors. She invokes Henry Fielding and Jane Austen as writers who succeeded in spite of their circumstances, yet whose work evinces to the modern reader a sort of plainness. However, analogizing literature and the development of the motor car, Woolf acknowledges that the two do not progress along the same course: Literature does not follow a path of endless growth and improvement but instead moves cyclically. Consequently, writers stand “on the flat, half-blind with dust” and look with envy upon the writers of the past (157), who had a far easier part to play in what Woolf imagines as the battle of literature.

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Woolf attempts to explicate her relationship with these envied literary forebears—both those she quarrels with ( H. G. Wells , Arnold Bennett , and John Galsworthy) and those for whom she is grateful (Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and W. H. Hudson). To Woolf, these six writers divide into two categories: materialists and spiritualists. Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy belong in the first category, having created work that “we”—modern writers—could not produce but also would not want to. She argues that these materialists are “concerned not with the spirit but with the body” (158).

Wells, Woolf says, is worthy of praise, but in his insistence on meticulously imagining possible worlds, he overlooks humanity’s frequent contradictions and “coarseness,” mitigating his genius. She deems Bennett the superior craftsman of the three, imagining his novels as structures robustly built against invasion or decay. However, within these structures something is missing: “life.” His characters may live, but they do so entirely in the physical realm, without purpose and without authenticity. Galsworthy receives less attention than the other two. Woolf suggests that he has integrity and humanity but says his work does not contain the life she seeks. All three are materialists because they exert their energy to write only of unimportant things. They also represent the majority of the popular fiction of the moment, which fails to capture “life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing” (160). Instead, they pursue plot, accurate description, or the conventions of genre .

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Woolf sets out her contrasting conception of the novel as something that ought to capture a series of “myriad impressions” that arrive randomly and haphazardly; it should resist convention, symmetry, pattern, and plot. It is these qualities that Woolf seeks to identify in the spiritual writer, and she identifies James Joyce as an example of someone who has the courage to depict life as it truly is: “disconnected and incoherent” (161). Woolf mentions Joyce’s two most prominent works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the then-unfinished Ulysses , as exemplifying Joyce’s spiritualism and describes the scene in the cemetery in Ulysses as a masterpiece depicting “life itself.” However, Woolf suggests this scene pales in comparison to Joseph Conrad’s Youth or Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge . She wonders why that might be, and in a series of rhetorical questions suggests answers such as “method,” Joyce’s emphasis on “indecency,” or the work’s originality simply rendering its departures from worthwhile tradition more visible. Ultimately, she compares Ulysses to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or W. M. Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis in its ability to reveal much of life that other literature overlooks.

Woolf theorizes that the first problem the modern novelist faces is finding the courage and the freedom to narrate what they want. The next problem is to find a method and technique capable of communicating this new material.

Woolf moves into an analysis of modern Russian writers, namely Anton Chekhov , who she says are years ahead of their British contemporaries. Woolf suggests that only a Russian could or would have written Chekhov’s story “Gusev,” which she briefly summarizes. She notes that the emphasis of the story is placed bizarrely, requiring readers to accustom themselves to the work as if adjusting their eyes to a dark room. Even then, they remain uncertain as to the short story’s intentions or even its status as a short story.

Woolf argues that modern English fiction owes much to the influence of Russian literature. One might even feel that to write of any other literature is pointless because of the Russians’ superior understanding of humanity and their resistance to materialism; she likens Russian writers to saints and deems others “irreligious” in comparison to the Russians’ compassion, sympathy, and sadness. Most importantly, she says, the Russian mind is inconclusive and provides no answer to the numerous questions that life poses. However, the English enjoy humor and comedy—like that written by Sterne or George Meredith—and so face disappointment in the pessimistic Russian novel.

Russian and British literature are entirely different from one another, and their distance is evidence of art’s “infinite possibilities.” Woolf concludes that there is no “proper study of fiction”—or rather that “everything is the proper stuff of fiction” (164). Woolf’s final image is of fiction as a female figure standing among modern writers and asking that they mold her into something new.

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Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf Analysis

In this article, we will delve into the analysis of “Modern Fiction” by Virginia Woolf and its significance in the realm of literature.

Virginia Woolf, a prominent figure in modernist literature, revolutionized the literary world with her groundbreaking works. One of her notable contributions is the novel “Modern Fiction,” which showcases her unique writing style and thematic explorations.

Table of Contents

The Life and Works of Virginia Woolf

Before delving into the analysis of “Modern Fiction,” it is essential to gain an understanding of Virginia Woolf’s life and her notable works. Virginia Woolf, born in 1882 in London, England, was a British writer and a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group. She produced a wide range of influential works, including novels, essays, and non-fiction.

Some of Woolf’s renowned works, aside from “Modern Fiction,” include “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” and “A Room of One’s Own.” Through her writing, Woolf explored themes of gender, consciousness, and the human experience, challenging traditional literary conventions and advocating for a more inclusive and introspective approach to storytelling.

The Writing Style of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s writing style in “Modern Fiction” exemplifies her experimental and innovative approach to literature. She employed several techniques that distinguished her work from conventional narratives.

Stream of Consciousness Technique

One of the defining features of Woolf’s writing is her use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. This literary device allows readers to delve into the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, providing a more intimate and introspective reading experience.

Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style captures the ebb and flow of human consciousness, portraying the characters’ fragmented and often nonlinear thinking patterns.

Experimental Narrative Structure : Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf Analysis

Woolf’s exploration of narrative structure in “Modern Fiction” challenges traditional linear storytelling.

She breaks away from chronological order and experiments with unconventional narrative techniques, such as flashbacks and shifts in perspectives.

These structural innovations create a sense of fluidity and reflect the complexities of the human experience.

Introspective and Psychological Themes

Woolf delves deeply into the interior lives of her characters, exploring their emotions, desires, and struggles.

She delves into the depths of the human psyche, unraveling the complexities of human thought and perception.

Themes of identity, consciousness, and the search for meaning are recurrent in her works, including “Modern Fiction.”

Analysis of Modern Fiction by Virginia Woolf

“Modern Fiction” by Virginia Woolf is a thought-provoking piece that offers a rich canvas for analysis. Here, we will explore some key aspects of the novel and the underlying messages conveyed by the author.

Exploration of Interior Lives

Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” delves into the interior lives of characters, peeling back the layers of their thoughts and emotions. By focusing on the characters’ inner worlds, Woolf emphasizes the subjective nature of reality and challenges the notion of objective truth.

She highlights the complexities of human existence, portraying the intricate interplay between individual experiences and external circumstances.

Fragmentation of Time and Space

In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf breaks away from linear narratives and experiments with the fragmentation of time and space.

The novel’s structure reflects the disjointed nature of human perception, where thoughts, memories, and experiences often overlap and intertwine.

By embracing this fragmented approach, Woolf captures the fluidity of consciousness and presents a more authentic representation of the human experience.

Feminist Perspectives : Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf Analysis

Virginia Woolf was a prominent feminist and her works often reflect her feminist ideologies. “Modern Fiction” subtly challenges traditional gender roles and societal expectations placed upon women.

Through her female characters, Woolf explores themes of identity, autonomy, and the struggle for self-expression in a patriarchal world.

Her writing serves as a critique of the limitations imposed on women and advocates for their liberation and empowerment.

Critique of Traditional Literary Conventions

In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf challenges the conventional norms of storytelling prevalent during her time. She questions the rigid structures, linear plots, and neatly resolved narratives that dominated the literary landscape.

By deviating from these conventions, Woolf invites readers to engage with her work in a more active and participatory manner, encouraging them to question established literary norms and explore new possibilities.

Influence and Legacy of Virginia Woolf’s Modern Fiction

Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” continues to resonate with readers and writers alike, leaving an indelible mark on the literary landscape. Her experimental style and thought-provoking themes have influenced numerous authors and shaped the evolution of modernist literature.

Woolf’s pioneering use of the stream-of-consciousness technique has inspired generations of writers to explore the depths of human consciousness and embrace innovative narrative forms.

Her feminist perspectives have also paved the way for feminist literary criticism and contributed to the ongoing discourse on gender and representation in literature.

Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” stands as a testament to her brilliance as a writer and her commitment to pushing the boundaries of literary expression.

Through her innovative writing style and thematic explorations, Woolf challenges conventional norms, offers introspective insights, and invites readers to contemplate the complexities of the human experience.

Her work continues to inspire and captivate audiences, making her an enduring figure in the world of modern fiction.

Frequently Asked Questions

“Modern Fiction” is significant for its experimental narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness, and its exploration of interior lives and feminist perspectives. It challenges traditional literary conventions and offers a more introspective and nuanced reading experience.

Virginia Woolf revolutionized literature through her innovative writing style, including the stream-of-consciousness technique and experimentation with narrative structure. She explored themes of identity, consciousness, and feminism, challenging societal norms and expanding the possibilities of literary expression.

The Bloomsbury Group was a collective of intellectuals, writers, and artists active in the early 20th century in London. Virginia Woolf was a prominent member of this group, which advocated for artistic and intellectual freedom and played a significant role in the development of modernist literature.

In “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf subtly challenges traditional gender roles and societal expectations placed upon women. She portrays women as complex individuals with their own desires, struggles, and agency, highlighting the limitations imposed upon them by a patriarchal society.

Hi, We are actually a team of professional English teachers. Mr. Ali Hussain and Mr. Ali Ijaz are the authors of this website. Teaching literature and writing allows us to share our love of reading with young minds. We hope that our passion for the subject will help to open the minds and doors of opportunity for students. It is our hope that students will be positively influenced by what we have to offer.

ANALYSIS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ESSAY "MODERN FICTION"

an English novelist and critic who made an original contribution to English Novel. Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation. It also acts as a guide for writers of modern fiction to write what they feel, not what society or publisher want them to write. Virginia Woolf"s "Modern Fiction" details how modern fictional writers and authors should write what inspires them and not to follow any special method. She believed that Writers are constrained by the publishing business, by what society believes literature should look like and what society has dictated how literature should be written. Woolf believed it is a writer"s Job to write the complexities in life, the unknown, not the important things.

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Women and Fiction" penned by Virginia Woolf, is an attempt to unveil the obliterated history of female writers as well as to announce the arrival of a new and charged English woman who is a voter, wage earner as well as a responsible citizen. This radical change transforms her writing from being personal into impersonal. She is no more impulsive, an angry woman writer. She is no more emotional rather she is intellectual, she is political. The interests of her father and her brother are now replaced by her interest; in short,this is a turn toward the impersonal.

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In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing.

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Beth C. Rosenberg is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers (1995) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf and the Essay (1997). She is currently working on a comparative study of Virginia Woolf and Elena Ferrante.

Published: 11 August 2021
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Woolf’s essays fall into many genres, including book reviews, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and occasional pieces. As a student of the essay and its history, she studied the form from Montaigne, Hazlitt, Pater, and Beerbohm and through their work she learned to make the essay her own, reinventing the genre to argue for a uniquely female and feminist perspective. Woolf’s deep understanding of the essay’s form, her drive to construct a female literary history and female narrative form, culminate in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she employs a feminist rhetoric of affect and emotion. Woolf’s particular contribution to the essay includes a new kind of literary history that focuses on women, gender, and politics. Hers is a uniquely feminine and feminist voice created through a visceral and sensual rhetoric that addresses the body’s response to experience and exploits emotions in order to persuade her readers.

Virginia Woolf’s essays fall into many genres, including book reviews, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and occasional pieces. Her topics range from the home of Thomas Carlyle in ‘Great Men’s Houses’ (1932) to aerial battles in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940) to the nature of sickness in ‘On Being Ill’ (1926). She documents seemingly trivial events, like a moth’s struggle to escape a window frame in ‘The Death of the Moth’ (1942) or a walk to a stationer’s store in ‘Street Haunting’ (1927). Her memoirs ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939) and ‘Am I a Snob?’ (1936) are highly personal narrative essays. She theorizes the nature of fiction in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923) and ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925). She writes the biographical essays in ‘Lives of the Obscure’ and essays on women writers who were unstudied in Woolf’s time, such as ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ and ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’, as well as women writers she revered like ‘Jane Austen’ and ‘George Eliot’. Woolf’s deep understanding of the essay’s form and history, her drive to construct a female literary history and female narrative form, culminate in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she employs a feminist rhetoric of affect and emotion. Woolf’s particular contribution to the essay includes a new kind of literary history that focuses on women, gender, and politics. Hers is a uniquely feminine and feminist voice that is created through a visceral and sensual rhetoric that addresses the body’s response to experience and exploits emotions in order to persuade her readers.

As a student of the essay and its history, Woolf studied the form from the only models available to her, and these were almost exclusively male. Montaigne, Hazlitt, Pater, and Beerbohm are among her greatest models—and through their work she learns to make the essay her own, turning from the masculine tradition that she was trained in and reinventing the genre to argue for a uniquely female and feminist perspective. Woolf’s theory of the essay, what it should say and do, includes an emphasis on voice and personality, a conversational tone, and a style that is clear yet visual and aesthetic. Ultimately, she breaks from her predecessors by expanding nineteenth-century aestheticism to include tropes of emotion—anger, love, and enthusiasm, among others—that are commonly associated with women. Rather than weaken her rhetoric, the use of emotion empowers it, making her prose appeal to a visceral and bodily knowledge in the reader.

Woolf’s essays do not deploy the detached critical tone or a sense of absolute authority that her friend T.S. Eliot affected. Compared to her contemporaries, Woolf’s essays were considered impressionistic and antiquarian. Her casual conversational tone, where the reader is her peer, and her subjective responses to art and life were misunderstood and dismissed. She strove for a personal voice that the common reader understands. She refers to the soul, the inner self, but it is really the psychological and aesthetic self that she describes; Woolf’s inner self is defined by her gender and, through style and voice, she presents a female experience. She also uses fictional techniques, creating story out of her subject, to engage the reader and stimulate both the imagination and emotions. Her form of argumentation is based on an intuitive logic, where she emphasizes affective responses to cultural and economic conditions. This mode of writing, for Woolf, is the antidote to the masculine essay of reason, logic, and ego, flaws she found even in the male essayists she adored.

Woolf’s earliest exposure to the essay was through her father, Leslie Stephen. Stephen, an influential essayist and biographer in his own right, introduced the idea of the essay as an integral part of literary history. Not only did he write full-length biographies of figures such as Samuel Johnson and George Eliot, but he published essays on literature, history, biography, and agnosticism. Woolf was intimately familiar with his Hours in a Library (1874–1879), An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (1893), Studies of a Biographer (1898–1902), and his contributions as editor to The Dictionary of National Biography (1882–1891). Through Stephen, Woolf was introduced to the notion of literary history, which is not only a guiding principle of many of her essays but essential to her use and critique of the essay form.

Woolf began her essay-writing career as a book reviewer. 1 While she published reviews as early as 1904, and while, from the start, she strove to do more than simply assess a book but to put it in a larger context and develop her point of view as a critic, she always had the essay and its form in mind. Some of her early works, such as ‘Haworth, November, 1904’ (1904), ‘Journeys in Spain’ (1904), and ‘A Walk by Night’ (1905), take the tone of her later more personal and occasional essays. The style of the book reviews is more conventional, limited to space, topic, and an editor’s hand. The essays, on the other hand, have a clear and definitive voice, point of view, and personality, and they engage with the reader in a more affective and sensory way. Her apprenticeship in essay writing taught Woolf to use greater aesthetic and visual language to make abstract ideas and experiences concrete; she also develops and refines the novelist’s sense of story and character in her non-fiction. It is in the essays too that she follows her attraction to nineteenth-century aestheticism, which she learns from Pater and Hazlitt, and where she vividly articulates the rhetoric of emotional response to and in non-fiction.

Woolf revised and collected some of her reviews and published them as collections of essays, The Common Readers , first series (1925) and second series (1932). Anne Fernald notes the ‘difficulty in comprehending this impressive collection as a whole’, arguing that the essays are organized according to a voice and point of view that belong to ‘a kind of every person, a blank common reader’ and yet Woolf ‘slips in’ women writers and unknown female histories. 2 Future work on Woolf’s self-edited collections will help us to understand her as an essay writer with agency and purpose, one who makes her own aesthetic and structural choices, not the passive, imitative subject of a male-dominated literary history.

Early critics such as Winifred Holtby and Ruth Gruber recognized the significance of Woolf’s essays. 3 Leonard Woolf would later collect the essays in four volumes and publish them between 1966 and 1967. 4 Leonard’s Collected Essays , as Andrew McNeillie points out, was a kind of extended Common Reader , 5 without annotations or even notes on date and place of first publication. However, in 1989 McNeillie began to edit a six-volume series of collected essays, including footnotes and appendixes. It took over twenty years for the collection to be completed, with Stuart N. Clarke editing the last two volumes. 6

The 1970s and 1980s focused more on Woolf’s feminism, politics, and novels. 7 None address Woolf’s use of the essay to create literary history, let alone a specifically female history. Woolf began to articulate her theories of the essay long before she wrote her own. Her focus, throughout her essay-writing career, was on voice and the speaking ‘I’. She rejected what she calls the ‘egotistical’ I of her contemporaries to argue for a more authentic personality that could communicate her experience to her audience, whether that experience was aesthetic, personal, or in the world. Woolf believed that essays should deal with truth, not fact, reflect the movement and change of our being, be passionate and emotional, have a ‘fierce attachment to an idea’ ( E 4 224), and, ultimately, give pleasure to their readers. In the 1920s, she not only refined her first-person voice but brought a more self-consciously gendered perspective, first by writing about women and their unknown histories, and then by finding the means to create a uniquely feminine subjective voice and rhetorical style.

The female voices and styles she creates in ‘Street Haunting’ and ‘The Death of the Moth’, for example, illustrate her innovative approach to the essay. Both essays are ostensibly about small, trivial subjects and use first person to suggest an intimacy with the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. Though the underlying themes about death and the nature of the self are abstract, the language she uses in both essays is concrete and specific. The power of a moth that struggles against death is compared to the human struggle: ‘One could watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death’ ( E 6 444). Woolf is concerned with the metaphysical, and her use of first person brings a personal tone often associated with the feminine. A walk to buy a pencil can allow us to ‘leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men’ ( E 4 490–1). Here the narrator talks of empathy for ‘those wild beasts, our fellow men’, also a traditionally female emotion. Metaphor and connotation, diction, the appeal to the reader’s senses to see, hear, and feel what she is describing, allow her style to become highly aesthetic as it persuades on intuitive and emotional levels through the colour of her prose.

To write her own feminine and feminized version of the essay, Woolf culled from her male predecessors techniques that they themselves did not identify as ‘feminine’. From Pater, Beerbohm, Montaigne, and Hazlitt, she learns techniques that bring a confidential trust between the author and her reader: a voice that reflects the personality of the author, the desire to create pleasure for the reader with a conversational and accessible tone, movement of thought, artful, sensuous, and emotional language, and the use of a painter’s visual imagery. Though she gives the most detailed attention to male essayists, she is aware of her own historical position. Woolf applies the lessons she learns to many essays about individual woman writers and the obscure women who made writing possible for men, including ‘Lives of the Obscure’, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’, and ‘Outlines’ in The Common Reader , but it is not until A Room of One’s Own that she confronts the problems of writing as a woman about women through a distinctly female rhetoric where emotion and affect become modes of persuasion.

Woolf’s more detailed thoughts on the essay’s power to move its readers are sketched out in ‘The Modern Essay’, written in 1922 for the Times Literary Supplement ( TLS ), which covers fifty years of essay writing, is historical and chronological in structure, and theoretically frames Woolf’s ideas about how ‘certain principles appear to control the chaos’ ( E 4 216) of the essay’s form. In this essay she writes of two Victorian essayists, Pater and Beerbohm, whom she greatly admires. She spends a considerable amount of space defining the history and nature of the essayist’s audience. According to Woolf, the most significant change in audience came at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader changed to a modern one. The change ‘came from a small audience of cultivated people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated’ ( E 4 220). The modern ‘public needs essays as much as ever … The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply’ ( E 4 222). The ‘light middle’ brow reader wants to read but hasn’t the time to wade through a beautifully wrought essay of more than fifteen hundred words. Woolf states that to ‘write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad’ ( E 4 223). The challenge for the modern essayist is how to bring pleasure to a reader preoccupied by modern life while revealing the true personality of the writer.

The guiding principle of the essay is that it should ‘give pleasure’, and everything in the essay ‘must be subdued to that end’. A good essay will ‘lay us under a spell with its first word’ and in ‘the interval we may pass through the most various experiences’. It must ‘lap us about and draw its curtain across the world’. This is seldom accomplished by the essayist, Woolf claims, though the reader is partially to blame: ‘Habit and lethargy have dulled his palate’. To produce pleasure in the reader, the essayist must know ‘how to write’. This is not just a matter of reproducing knowledge on a page, but an essay ‘must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture’ ( E 4 216). Though the essay’s purpose is to reproduce knowledge, pleasure is derived from the writer’s ability to communicate knowledge while nothing blatant, explicit, or jarring appears on the writing’s surface.

The knowledge communicated is ‘some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to shape it’. The good essay ‘must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out’ ( E 4 224). The way the essay does this is to let the personality of the writer come through and embrace the reader, an act seemingly so easy but difficult to achieve. How does an essay achieve its ‘permanent quality’? It is through concrete and visual language, according to Woolf, that the essayist can provoke an affective response from her reader. No phrase is wasted, no word is lost. Her study of the essay’s history, and her attention to her male precursors, taught her how to use language to move her reader’s emotions.

The first writer who taught Woolf how to appeal to affect is Walter Pater, and her response to him defines a style she tries to achieve in her own essays. Perry Meisel’s study on Woolf and Pater establishes Pater’s influence on Woolf by way of Pater’s aestheticism. He traces Pater’s figurative language, particularly the image of the ‘hard gemlike flame’ of aesthetic experience, in Woolf’s novels. 8 Her notion of the ‘moment’, Meisel argues, is Pater’s influence. 9 Woolf also learned from Pater the power of nineteenth-century aestheticism, its use of colourful rhetoric as well as its focus on the reader’s visceral and bodily experience of language. Woolf borrowed from Pater techniques that make her prose appeal to our senses—taste, sight, sound, touch—to give something other than a concrete fact. It is through our bodies’ senses that Woolf communicates to us. If our senses help to define our experience, then the emphasis of emotions, too, are expressions of our physical bodies and part of the vocabulary of aestheticism.

Woolf describes Pater’s aestheticism and how he uses it in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci:

[H]e has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision. … Only here, in the essay, where the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness, the true writer like Walter Pater makes the limitations yield their own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he will get shape and intensity. ( E 4 218)

Even within the conventions of the essay, which limits Pater to ‘facts’, he is able to give these facts their own quality that Woolf names ‘vision’ and ‘truth’. These abstract qualities—not objective facts—are what the essay writer must strive for. Even as Woolf moves through the history of the essay into the twentieth century, she demands these qualities and ultimately passes harsh judgement on the essay writer who can’t achieve them.

Woolf goes on to quote images from Pater’s work, like ‘ “the smiling women and the motion of the great waters” ’, as examples of how Pater’s concrete language appeals to our senses and emotions; his writing reminds us ‘that we have ears and we have eyes’. Pater’s style is one where ‘every atom of its surface shines’ ( E 4 218), a style Woolf finds grounded in the physical world and is also found in her own intensely visual style, her use of metaphor and connotation, and her desire to give the reader a visceral, bodily experience of language. If Pater has flaws for Woolf, it is his insistence on detachment and objectivity in his tone and his inability to write as himself, to use the human, individual voice to speak to his audience.

Unlike Pater, Woolf’s essays distinguish themselves by their constant intimate tone, loaning itself to a more feminine point of view. Her use of first person, singular and plural, is deliberate. It is a rhetoric that appeals to affect and emotion, the visceral response that moves the reader along a train of thought. She learns this from Beerbohm who, unlike Pater, is an essayist who cultivates a speaking voice in his essays. Woolf writes that in Beerbohm’s essays readers of the 1890s found themselves ‘addressed by a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves’. Beerbohm uses the ‘essayist’s most proper but most dangerous delicate tool’ by bringing ‘personality into literature’. He does so ‘consciously and purely’ ( E 4 220). We know that the ‘spirit of personality permeates every word he writes’. It is only ‘by knowing how to write that [Beerbohm] can make use in literature of [the] self; the self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous opponent’. There are many essayists who show ‘trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print’, though Beerbohm ‘possessed to perfection’ the art necessary to bring personality to the essay ( E 4 221). Although the use of first person, especially to write about experience, is typically understood as the feminine mode of writing, Woolf learns from Beerbohm how to bring personality and voice to her writing. Her use of a personal voice is most obvious, for example, in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), where she speaks in first person to pull her reader into her experience of observation on the train. In this essay she also brings to our attention the imaginative impulse that goes into creating a personality, as she does with the character of Mrs Brown, whose personality is so clearly defined that it resonates in the mind long after we have finished reading.

Woolf continued to develop her narrative voice and personality studying other essayists. Two years after publishing ‘The Modern Essay’ Woolf published ‘Montaigne’, which was first a review of Essays of Montaigne for the TLS in 1924 and later published in The Common Reader . She explains the vitality of voice in Montaigne’s essays. We ‘never doubt for an instant that his book was himself’ ( E 4 72). He brings art to ‘this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfections’ ( E 4 71). The revelation of the self, to ‘tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand’ through language is ‘not easy’ ( E 4 71). Montaigne teaches Woolf that the essayist does not condescend or tell others how to live their lives, but rather traces the flexibility of identity and its ability to reflect self-consciousness in the narrative.

When Woolf writes of Montaigne’s determination to represent his ‘soul’, she is referring to his subjective self, his personality, his voice. This inner self is ‘the strangest of creatures … so complex, so indefinite’ that a man might spend his life trying to discover her ( E 4 74). Yet there is the ‘pleasure of pursuit’ of the self. Montaigne can say nothing of ‘other people’s souls’ since he can ‘say nothing … about his own’ ( E 4 74). Woolf learns from Montaigne how to focus on her personality, her own truth and perception of the world and experience; it is the art of presenting a unique self through the writer’s voice that Woolf practices throughout her essay-writing career.

Montaigne’s essays are then an ‘attempt to communicate a soul’ for ‘Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness’ ( E 4 76). A version of this assertion will reappear in Mrs Dalloway (1925), when Septimus contemplates suicide and his message for the world in Regents Park ( MD 75). The ability to communicate the self is healthy, truthful, and brings contentment. But real communication is difficult. The successful essayist can share her thoughts, ‘to go down boldly’ into the self and ‘bring to light those hidden thoughts which are most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing’, to tell her own truth and therefore connect with others ( E 4 76). The essayist’s most authentic communications reveal what is most difficult for the reader to acknowledge—dark thoughts that potentially tell us things about ourselves we don’t want to be aware of. We are all ‘ordinary men and women’ in Montaigne’s essays ( E 4 77). Montaigne shows Woolf how to look deeply into her own responses and feelings, to communicate those to her readers without demanding that they follow her.

For Woolf, William Hazlitt brings together voice and style, and he models for her how to make her language visual and engaging. His essays are written with the language of a visual artist and stylist. It is Hazlitt’s self-consciousness as he writes that Woolf feels is his greatest contribution to the essay form. In her essay ‘William Hazlitt’, a revised TLS review that was republished in The Common Reader: Second Series , she introduces Hazlitt’s essays favourably: ‘His essays are emphatically himself. He has not reticence and he has no shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks’ ( E 5 494). He also tells us ‘exactly what he feels’ ( E 5 494) and has ‘the most intense consciousness of his own experience’ ( E 5 494).

In addition to Hazlitt the thinker there is ‘Hazlitt the artist’. This man is ‘sensuous and emotional, with his feeling for colour and touch … with his sensibility to all those emotions which disturb the reason’ ( E 5 498). As she did with Pater, Woolf comments on the aesthetic qualities of Hazlitt’s essays. She calls attention to the sensuality and emotionality of his language, his ‘feeling for the colour’ of language, and how his ‘sensibility’ is open to all ‘emotions’ that overcome reason ( E 5 499). Hazlitt’s inner conflict is reflected in his style as he vacillates between thinker and artist. In his essays, we sense the movement of his thought: ‘[H]ow violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody—how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and demands our sympathy’ ( E 5 499). It is this movement of tone and mood, from logic to emotion, which Woolf admires.

It is Hazlitt’s visual language that Woolf attempts to imitate. Hazlitt has the ‘great gift of picturesque phrasing’ that allows him to “float … over a stretch of shallow thought’ ( E 5 500). He has the ‘freest use of imagery and colour’ and the ‘painter’s imagery’ that keeps his reader engaged. And though there are weaknesses in his essays—they can be ‘dry, garish … monotonous’—each essay has ‘its stress of thought, its thrust of insight, its moment of penetration’. His aim is to ‘communicate his own fervour’, and according to Woolf he succeeds ( E 5 501). Hazlitt’s ability to articulate his ideas through his visual language, to pursue his ideas in the finest detail, allow ‘the parts of his complex and tortured spirit [to] come together in a truce of amity and concord’ ( E 5 502). In the end, there ‘is then no division, no discord, no bitterness’. Hazlitt’s ‘faculties work in harmony and unity’. His sentences are constructed with determination and energy: ‘Sentence follows sentence with the healthy ring and chime of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil’. His ‘words glow and the sparks fly; gently they fade and the essay is over’ ( E 5 503). Hazlitt is a craftsman who cobbles his words together with such expertise that they explode with energy. He brings passion to his essays through his imagery, figurative language, and consistency of style. The tension between the thinker and artist is refined and unified with his prose. These qualities become useful for Woolf’s essays and her feminist rhetoric.

Woolf adapts the essay form to express a woman’s experience, sometimes her own, sometimes others’, in literature, education, marriage, and the domestic sphere. From her male precursors and teachers she borrows their more ‘feminine’ and unconventional techniques of style and rhetoric. The freedom to use an individual voice and personality, to show thoughts moving and changing, to communicate a truth that is not a fact, to use language visually and sensually to appeal to our visceral senses are the lessons she learned. These things are used most forcefully in A Room of One’s Own , which on the one hand is a personal essay that utilizes first person, and other hand is a treatise, a call for a collective history of women in culture, meant to appeal to a woman’s sensibility and experience. She not only lists a range of writers who might be considered part of her great tradition of women’s writing—Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, among others—but she analyses the historic and socioeconomic conditions of women in society. Woolf introduces specific themes, such as female friendship and love, women’s education, the desire to write, and the inability to do so, financial, social, and economic barriers the female artist must confront. These themes have been well discussed by feminist and modernist literary scholars from the time of its publication to the present. In addition to the critical issues that confront women writers, Woolf addresses other innovative and provocative qualities in this long and experimental essay. It is Woolf’s reinvention of the essay form that really reflects her genius and ingenuity. Unlike male essayists before her, she brings gender to her understanding of form, and she goes beyond their influences by adding to and amplifying the rhetoric of affect and emotions.

Written in 1929, A Room of One’s Own challenges our understanding of the personal essay with its mixture of non-fiction and fiction. 10 From the first paragraphs, Woolf undermines our assumptions about the narrator in her essay. Based on a series of lectures Woolf gave in 1928 at Newnham and Girton, the essay immediately calls into question the authority of the speaker: ‘ “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has not real being’ ( ARO 4). It contains a full-voiced narrative persona whose thought represents the movement of an active and lively mind in direct conversation with her audience.

The accessibility of the speaker is found in her playful tone: ‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?’ ( ARO 3). The first sentence is an equivocation, an uncertainty, a small rebellion. We know from the start that Woolf does not plan to make us secure in her meaning. Her narrative wanders like the river she sits by to contemplate her subject. The narrator alludes to Montaigne’s tenet that truth and fact are not the same things. She will not be able to tell her audience the ‘truth’ about women and fiction; nor will she be able to hand them ‘after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of [their] notebooks’ ( ARO 3). This is because ‘fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact’, and she proposes ‘making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist’ to tell the ‘story’ of the two days that preceded her lecture ( ARO 4).

She tells us that hers is an ‘opinion upon one minor point’, an idea she is fiercely attached and loyal to throughout the essay, ‘that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ ( ARO 3). Like Hazlitt, she will develop in our presence (if we as readers should consider ourselves part of her audience) ‘as fully and freely’ as she can ‘the train of thought that led [her] to think this’ ( ARO 4). At this point she undermines any confidence the reader might have that Woolf is the narrator or that the speaking ‘I’ is identified with the author. The ‘I’ in A Room of One’s Own becomes a fictional construct, one meant to engage and entertain the reader. In fact, ‘lies will flow’ from her lips, though ‘there may be some truth mixed up with them’ ( ARO 4). It is her audience’s responsibility to ‘seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping’ ( ARO 4). Here the influence of her predecessors is clear—the essay is meant to address truth, reflect a mind in process, and contain a clear speaking voice (even if the ‘I’ of the narrative is fictional).

She begins to narrate the extended argument A Room of One’s Own will make about the importance of a female literary tradition for women writers. It is not only what she says, but the way she presents her case by appropriating the techniques of essayists like Montaigne and Hazlitt; she never dwells too long on any subject, and her thoughts move along to Oxbridge, an invented university modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. Also invented is Fernham, the women’s college she compares with Oxbridge. Her aesthetic and sensory language to make a socioeconomic argument provokes readers into a visceral and instinctual realm, the realm of connotative and fictive language, where we can see, taste, and feel the differences in social class. The narrator walks by the library at Oxbridge and admires the grand spires and buildings of this awe-inspiring institution. She contemplates how much gold and silver it has taken to build it and eventually describes the sumptuous meal she eats. These images are tangible, vivid, and appeal to a range of senses. In comparison, the language used to describe the women’s college is stark, empty, and has no aesthetic attraction. Colourful, concrete, sensory language is associated with the power and authority of one institution while the lack of aesthetic description reflects the powerlessness of the other. This is done to make an argument, using a more feminine, concrete language to point to inequities of experience.

The use of aesthetic language in her essays, encouraged by Pater and Hazlitt, resembles what we find in Woolf’s great novels from the 1920s, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (1927), where she also tries to convey some abstract truth for her readers. What we do not find in those novels, or in many of her earlier essays, is a tone of disaffection with the status quo . What begins in A Room of One’s Own as a kind of restlessness, like the narrator who unconsciously walks off the path, quickly grows into discontent and frustration, dissension, hostility, and anger, and then back. In this essay, Woolf alludes to and describes a range of emotions and uses them as rhetorical tropes to persuade her readers of a female logic, one that is visceral, sensual, and bodily. For Woolf, emotions are the body’s response to experience, and aestheticism’s attachment to the senses is a way Woolf exploits emotions to her purpose.

A Room of One’s Own appeals to the reader’s emotions, names and discusses emotions, and employs tropes of emotion and affect to move the reader to a female and feminist point of view. There is the appeal to enthusiasm, for example, found at the end of the essay when Woolf calls on her readers to work in ‘poverty and obscurity’ ( ARO 86) to help Judith Shakespeare come into being. The most powerful and disturbing affect that Woolf invokes is anger. It is the affect of anger, an emotion that is most provocative, aggressive, inappropriate, and unreasonable that she uses most successfully. Woolf names anger, both in women and men, when she visits the British Museum to research the history of women.

Woolf’s representation of anger has been discussed by feminist critics Jane Marcus and Brenda Silver, among others, who argue that Woolf’s anger (emotion) is repressed, sublimated, or destructive. 11 These readings view anger as a psychological construct rather than a rhetorical figure. They see these passages as Woolf’s expression of her personal anger instead of a rhetorical trope functioning within the tradition of the essay. Rhetorician and feminist Barbara Tomlinson argues for a ‘socioforensic discursive analysis’. 12 Discursive analysis, by focusing on how emotions function rhetorically, allows us to reveal underlying ideologies and authority in social discourse. It demands that we analyse ‘textual emotion in the light of larger discourses about social power’. 13 Narratives move through a ‘modulation’ of emotion, some moments stronger than others, and textual markers of anger in Woolf’s essay reveal what Tomlinson calls its ‘textual vehemence’, a critique of the institutional forces that undermines traditional modes of writing and argument. 14

Sara Ahmed’s work on emotion and affect also helps us to look at what she calls the ‘emotionality of texts’. 15 Her method calls on us to investigate how ‘texts name or perform different emotions’. 16 Most important to understanding Woolf’s use of emotion is Ahmed’s ideas that emotions are ‘performative’ and that they ‘involve speech acts’. She argues that emotion is not ‘in’ texts, but rather ‘effects of the very naming of emotions’. 17 Woolf’s essay names anger, her own and others’, and by doing so reveals and exposes what is hidden under the rhetoric she critiques. In what ways does she ‘perform’ anger in her essay and how does it affect the reader?

In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf hypothesizes that emotions, while expressed through the body’s physical responses and grounded in an aesthetic ethos, are tools of persuasion. In acknowledging the rhetorical power of emotion, Woolf reverses a Victorian taboo against emotional prose, tempts her critics to dismiss her, and, at the same time, evokes an older history of the essay as a genre open to recording a range of responses. The contribution Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own makes to the history of the essay is an increased awareness that we cannot separate gender from personality, voice, and point of view, since these things are a function of the body. Building on Pater’s aestheticism and Hazlitt’s painterly language, Woolf writes a careful, sensual, sensory, detailed prose; in addition to the reader’s aesthetic response, Woolf hopes for an emotional one, where emotion resides in the interaction between the naming of emotion and emotion itself. Woolf’s representation of emotions reveals the ways she makes her own theory of personality in non-fiction; not only does her essay contain a distinct voice and strong sense of audience but she also uses affect to communicate the power of her experience.

The first time we see the representation of anger is in the second chapter of A Room of One’s Own . We find the narrator at the British Museum researching her talk on women and fiction. Woolf takes us through her argument that institutions of great literature, like the British Museum, contain nothing to help the female writer develop as an artist and individual—there is no tradition for her to follow. Her frustration is revealed in her unconscious sketching of Professor X, and the sketch itself reflects her own, as yet unacknowledged, anger. She describes her sketch of the Professor: ‘His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote. … Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly’ ( ARO 24). In the physical expression of his body, we see his anger as he jabs his pen, a phallic allusion, to kill the ‘noxious insect’ he condescends to write about. Not only is he angry, but his anger makes him ‘ugly’, much in the same way women’s anger has historically been represented.

Woolf consciously uses the trope, if not of the ‘angry feminist’, then of the ‘angry woman’. She subverts this highly charged metaphor to argue against the ideological power of the male intellectual institutions by making the Professor angry too, with all the traditional associations of irrationality and inappropriateness. Not only does the narrator become aware of men’s anger toward women, but with a conscious reflection on the sketch, she becomes aware of her own. The narrator knows that what she has done is transfer her anger onto her drawing. The sketch is a manifestation of an emotion, a symptom communicated through her body with her pen to her page. When she reads about the inferiority of women the first thing she notices is her bodily response: her ‘heart leapt’, her ‘cheeks had burnt’, and she was ‘flushed’. Not only are her emotions felt through her body but she understands how it is an anger that ‘mixed itself with all kinds of emotions’ ( ARO 25). The narrator’s anger is expressed through her body and senses and is inextricably linked to the aesthetic response Woolf wants to inspire in her reader. Her sketching begins the act of naming emotion.

Where Professor X is angry at women, and the narrator becomes aware of her anger toward him, the story of Judith Shakespeare escalates anger to violence and rage. Through this visual anecdote Woolf comments on the psycho-manipulation of anger toward women by men. Judith Shakespeare endures her father’s anger through his violence: ‘She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage’ ( ARO 36). Judith’s ‘hate’ is manifested through her cries, and her body becomes the site of emotion and severe punishment. Knowing that his anger will not change Judith’s mind, her father turns her pain into his ‘hurt’ and ‘shame’, emotions he uses to persuade her. These appeals do not stir pathos in Judith, but rebellion. Judith seeks freedom, circumstances lead to suicide, and the narrator asks: ‘[W]ho shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?’ ( ARO 37). Anger is trapped in the body, which literally feels the sensation of ‘heat’, of passion and fury, but finds no expression. However, Woolf has expressed it for us, by naming the emotion and connecting it to female experience and allowing the reader to feel Judith’s rage through a language that is sensory, visceral, and undoubtedly female.

Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own that it is ‘useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure’, just as she goes to the male essayists Montaigne, Pater, Beerbohm, and Hazlitt for pleasure. She too ‘may have learnt a few tricks from them and adapted them to her use’ ( ARO 57). From the history of male essayists Woolf inherited—and reinvented for her own use—the sensual, visceral, and painterly language of aestheticism. Hers is a rhetoric of affect and emotion, and she makes a literary space for herself and the women essayists who follow through a decidedly female strategy—the employment of emotions that in the past were considered weak and unconvincing. The narrator’s anger at the Professor and Judith’s anger with her father reverses conventional readings of the trope of the angry woman by showing how anger moves the subject to action. By making anger explicit, Woolf gives it new power. It is an anger of one’s own and is used both as resistance and a vehicle for change.

Not only does she use anger and rage to illustrate the socioeconomic inequities women suffer but Woolf’s notion of a female literary history also hinges on the emotion of anger. In chapter 4 of A Room of One’s Own , Woolf begins to piece together her literary history. Intense emotions, like anger and fear are flaws in the fiction of women who precede Woolf. She begins with the seventeenth-century poet Lady Winchilsea. Woolf finds her poetry ‘bursting out in indignation’ ( ARO 44). Had she ‘freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment’ ( ARO 45) her poetry would have been much better. By the nineteenth century women writers had ‘training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion’ ( ARO 51 ). She praises Jane Austen for writing ‘without hate, without bitterness, without fear’ ( ARO 71), while she finds Charlotte Brontë unable to transcend her emotions in writing. Describing Brontë’s anger, Woolf cites a long passage from Jane Eyre that explains how ‘women feel just as men feel … they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer’ ( ARO 52). The entrance of Grace Poole at this point in the novel is an ‘awkward break’ that represents the ‘marks and jerks’ of the novel, and by noticing these ‘one sees that [Brontë] will never get her genius whole and entire’. Woolf finds that Brontë writes ‘in a rage where she should write calmly’ ( ARO 52). But Woolf also acknowledges that ‘she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects but upon those of her sex at that time’ ( ARO 53). For Woolf, anger is a deformity in women’s fiction—it scars and stains it.

Woolf was conflicted about the purpose and role of emotions in women’s writing, but she knew that it is through affect that the woman writer writes. Naming emotion engages the reader and influences her to see the world differently. Like the ‘dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister’, the contemporary woman essayist must draw ‘her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners’ ( ARO 86). Woolf sees herself as part of a cultural family, where the physical body expresses the emotions of experience. Using the techniques of clear prose, the speaking voice, the portrayal of a mind in the process of thought, and concrete and aesthetic imagery to help express the passionate intensity of her subject, she creates A Room of One’s Own , an essay that has profoundly influenced female essayists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Woolf’s late nineteenth-century education in biography, history, and literary criticism creates a foundation for her interest in genealogy, lineage, and canon formation. Her own essays helped her to understand the tradition and development of the genre. She disregarded gender in her evaluations of male essay writers because, beyond techniques and formal qualities she found helpful to her own writing, there were no allusions to gender in their work. She uses her inheritance from Montaigne, Pater, Beerbohm, Hazlitt, and others to create in her own essays, including A Room of One’s Own , what she herself lacked, a defined tradition of women’s essay writing that allows further possibilities in content and form.

Selected Bibliography

Brosnan, Leila , Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 ).

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Dubino, Jeanne , ‘Virginia Woolf from Book Reviewer to Literary Critic, 1904–1918’, in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino , eds, Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 ).

Fernald, Anne , ‘ A Room of One’s Own, Personal Criticism, and the Essay’, Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer 1994 ), 165–89.

Goldman, Mark , The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as a Literary Critic (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1976 ).

Gualtieri, Elena , Virginia Woolf’s Essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000 ).

McNees, Eleanor , ed., Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments , 4 vols. (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1994 ).

Rosenberg, Beth , and Jeanne Dubino , eds, Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 ).

Saloman, Randi , Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014 ).

For more on Woolf as a reviewer, see Chapter 17 ‘Woolf as Reviewer-Critic’ in this volume, where Eleanor McNees describes in detail Woolf’s history as a book reviewer. See also Jeanne Dubino , ‘Virginia Woolf from Book Reviewer to Literary Critic, 1904-1918’ in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino , eds, Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 25–40 .

Anne Fernald , ‘ “Writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own”: The Common Reader as Writer’s Manual’, in Eleonora Basso , Lindsey Cordery , Emilio Irigoyen , Claudia Pérez , and Matías Núñez , eds, Virginia Woolf en América Latina: Reflexiones desde Montevideo (Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 2013), 219–43 .

Ruth Gruber , Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman (New York: Avalon Publishers, 1935) ; Winifred Holtby , Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) .

Virginia Woolf , Collected Essays , ed. Leonard Woolf , 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1967) .

Andrew McNeillie , Introduction to The Essays of Virginia Woolf 1904-1912 , vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, 1989) explains the need for republishing Woolf’s essays. Since the publication of Leonard’s 1967 collection, Woolf’s journals, diaries, and shorter fiction, as well as her reading notebooks and a bibliography and guide to her literary sources and allusions have been published. McNeillie’s and Stuart N. Clarke’s editions of the essays are complete with annotations and references.

For a survey of earlier criticism of Woolf’s essays, see Mark Goldman , The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as a Literary Critic (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1976), 1–6 . See also Eleanor McNees , ed., Virginia Woolf Critical Assessments , 4 vols (Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994) .

A series of studies began to emerge in the mid-1990s that re-evaluated the importance of the essays, including Beth Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino , Virginia Woolf and the Essay (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) and Leila Brosnan , Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) ; Elena Gualtieri , Virginia Woolf’s Essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) ; and Randi Saloman’s Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) . These works situate Woolf within the traditions of the essay and non-fiction prose and illustrate Woolf’s deep understanding of the genre. They focus primarily on the aesthetic nature of her essays, her feminism, her journalistic impulses, and the influence of European ‘essayism’.

Walter Pater , Conclusion to The Renaissance , in Harold Bloom , ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 60 .

See Perry Meisel , The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980) .

Anne Fernald , ‘ A Room of One’s Own, Personal Criticism, and the Essay’, Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer, 1994), 165–89 . Fernald outlines the qualities of personal prose, which she distinguishes from personal criticism and autobiography. Woolf wrote about ‘thinking as a deeply personal act in her criticism’ (168). Fernald’s discussion ‘of the personal in Virginia Woolf emphasizes thought’ and why ‘various readers come to take Woolf so personally’ (172).

Jane Marcus , Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988) . Brenda Silver , Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) .

Barbara Tomlinson , Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 19 .

Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 19.

Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 57.

Sarah Ahmed , The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13 .

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion , 13.

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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf’s Modern Fiction Essay Analysis

Virginia Woolf‟s “Modern Fiction” details how modern fictional writers and authors should write what inspires them and not to follow any special method. She believed that Writers are constrained by the publishing business, by what society believes literature should look like and what society has dictated how literature should be written. Woolf believed it is a writer‟s Job to write the complexities in life, the unknown, not the important things.

Modern fiction is one of the most effective seminar essays in criticism which makes a clear break of modern fiction from the Victorian novel. Mrs. Woolf first traces the progress of the novel from its beginning in the 18th Century. But she traces it on basis of the philosophy of evaluation in general. According to her, the earlier novelists really did what they actually could within their limited means. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said “Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better.”

Literature, according to T.S. Eliot, is like everything else, a process which makes the present. This is why, it does not just improve, it always keep changing. Its material is not same. Mrs. Woolf agrees with Eliot on this point and says:

“We do not come to write better, we only keep on moving now a little in this direction, now in that but with a circular motion.”

Says Virgina Woolf, “It is for the historian of literature to judge whether the modern novel has really progressed from its early babblings.” As a critic, she naturally upholds her “right to judge the past with debt as well as doubt.

She Criticises M.G. Wells, Arnold Benett, John Galsworthy of writing about unimportant things and called them materialists. According to her, they put life into their novels. They are mainly concerned with the body, not the soul of the novel. This is particularly because they are all materialists and are concerned with fixities not with movements. But Mr. Benett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, in as much as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed in its craftsmanship that is difficult even for the expecting critics to see through which chink or crevice decay can creep in. Being a kind of post modernist, Mrs. Woolf would like the writer to leave the room in his room. According to her, there is nothing in a well constructed novel worth preserving for the prosperity. She suggests that it would be better for literature to turn their backs on them, so it can move forward, for better or worse. While Woolf criticizes these three authors, she praises several other authors for their innovation. This group of writers she name spiritualists, and include James Joyce who Woolf says writes what interests and move him.

Woolf wanted writers to focus on the awkwardness of life and craved originality in their work. Her overall hope was to inspire modern fiction writers to write what interested them, wherever it may lead. As a typical modern novelists and critic Mrs. Woolf advises the modern novelists to look within and see what life is like, “Mind receives a crowd of impressions- trivial, fantastic or engraved with the sharpness of steer.” So she does not like “life-like novels, nor in the tyrant plot, nor in the conventional comedy or love-interest”. “If Life like this?” “Must Novel be like this?” She asks & then adds:

“Look within and life, it seems, is very far being „like this‟. life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end.”

Mrs. Woolf make it clear that the objective of the writer in his or her creation is to look within and life as a whole. The traditionalism or materialism do not capture at that moment. Thus to trust upon life, a writer is free and he could write what he chose. Mr. James Joyce is most notable from that of their predecessors. Young writers within he attempt to come closer to life and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them. And in doing so they must discard most of conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. She praises Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conard, William Henry Hudson, James Joyce and Anton Chekhov.

As a critic her writing and criticism was often done by intuition and feeling rather than by a scientific, analytical and systematic method, Virginia Woolf Says: “Life escapes and perhaps Life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness it have to make use of such a figure.” Life for Virginia Woolf is not fixed, but a changing process. It is a flux, shower of atoms of „luminous halo”. The human consciousness is a shelter of sensation and impression. It is the duty of novelist to convey these sensation and impressions. There should be no limitations or conventions.

Thus, Virginia Woolf is the fist theorist of the “Stream of Consciousness.” So, she says: “It is a task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit of life.” To sum up, Virginia Woolf observes that “Nothing-no method, un experiment, even of the wildest-is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence.” “the proper stuff of fiction does not exist, everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought, every quality of brain & spirit is drawn upon.”

Though the novels of Virginia Woolf have well knit plot, perfect structure and coherence unlike most of modern psychological novelists belonging to „the stream of consciousness”. She strongly and significantly points out that the modern novel can grow only if a novelist is free from conventions to write from his or her own vision of life and keeps in the view the changing concept of life as revealed by modern psychology and such other scientific discoveries about the working of human mind or consciousness.

Thus Woolf‟s “Modern Fiction” essay focuses on how writers should write or what she hopes for them to write. She does not suggest a specific way to write. instead a she wants writers to simple write what interests them in any way that they choose to write. She suggests “Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers, that brings us closer to the novelists‟ intension if we are readers.” She wanted writers to express themselves in such a way that it showed life. She set out to inspire writers of modern fiction by calling for originality, criticizing those who focused on the unimportant things and comparing the differences of cultural authors, all for the sake of fiction and literature.

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ANALYSIS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ESSAY “MODERN FICTION”

“We do not come to write better, we only keep on moving now a little in this direction, now in that but with a circular motion.”

Mr. James Joyce is most notable from that of their predecessors. Young writers within he attempt to come closer to life and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them. And in doing so they must discard most of conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. She praises Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conard, William Henry Hudson, James Joyce and Anton Chekhov.

As a critic her writing and criticism was often done by intuition and feeling rather than by a scientific, analytical and systematic method, Virginia Woolf Says:

“Life escapes and perhaps Life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness it have to make use of such a figure.” Life for Virginia Woolf is not fixed, but a changing process. It is a flux, shower of atoms of „luminous halo”. The human consciousness is a shelter of sensation and impression. It is the duty of novelist to convey these sensation and impressions. There should be no limitations or conventions. Thus, Virginia Woolf is the fist theorist of the “Stream of Consciousness.” So, she says: “It is a task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit of life.”

To sum up, Virginia Woolf observes that “Nothing-no method, un experiment, even of the wildest-is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence.” “the proper stuff of fiction does not exist, everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought, every quality of brain & spirit is drawn upon.”

Thus Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” essay focuses on how writers should write or what she hopes for them to write. She does not suggest a specific way to write. instead a she wants writers to simple write what interests them in any way that they choose to write. She suggests “Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers, that brings us closer to the novelists‟ intention if we are readers.”

She wanted writers to express themselves in such a way that it showed life. She set out to inspire writers of modern fiction by calling for originality, criticizing those who focused on the unimportant things and comparing the differences of cultural authors, all for the sake of fiction and literature.

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Introduction

ANALYSIS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ESSAY“MODERN FICTION”

Readers point of views about summary and analysis of virginia woolf’s 1919 essay, short question answers about virginia woolf “modern fiction”.

What are Virginia Woolf views on modern fiction?
Is Virginia Woolf a modernist?
What does modern fiction mean?
What are the characteristics of modern fiction?
Why is Virginia Woolf praising modern fiction in her essay modern fiction?
How did Virginia Woolf change the world?
Why is modern fiction so bad?
What are the 3 types of fiction?
What are modernist ideas?
What were the most characteristic features of modernism?
Who is considered as a modern novelist?
Is Virginia Woolf a feminist?

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Bennington College Curriculum Spring 2025

Spring 2025, virginia woolf and the craft of consciousness (lit4598.01).

In addition to being one of the major novelists of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf was also an incisive literary critic, an influential editor and publisher, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a prolific diarist, and a public figure whose lectures and essays re-shaped the discourse on women’s roles in literature and society. This course is a close study of Woolf’s major works—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves—with a special focus on her contributions to Modernism and the pioneering narrative technique of stream of consciousness. We will explore the historical, cultural, and biographical contexts of her work, but our main focus will be the study of craft. How is time assembled, alchemized, in her novels? How is interiority mapped onto landscape? Gender onto history? Does her interplay with historical texts come to inform her work’s modernity? And how is consciousness—that fickle and involuntary phenomenon of perception—approximated in language, on the level of the sentence? Engaging critically with Woolf’s work, major projects will include a midterm paper and the assembly of a semester-long reading diary that uses Woolf’s own diaries, letters, and criticism as a model for their creation.

Analysis of Virginia Woolf's Essay “Modern Fiction”

ANALYSIS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF ’S ESSAY “MODERN FICTION ”

Neelam Assistant Professor Dayanand Mahila Mahavidyalaya, Kurukshetra

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) an English novelist and critic who made an original contribution to English Novel . Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation. It also acts as a guide for writers of modern fiction to write what they feel, not what society or publisher want them to write. Virginia Woolf‟s “Modern Fiction” details how modern fictional writers and authors should write what inspires them and not to follow any special method. She believed that Writers are constrained by the publishing business, by what society believes literature should look like and what society has dictated how literature should be written. Woolf believed it is a writer ‟s Job to write the complexities in life, the unknown, not the important things. Modern fiction is one of the most effective seminar essays in criticism which makes a clear break of modern fiction from the Victorian novel. Mrs. Woolf first traces the progress of the novel from its beginning in the 18th Century. But she traces it on basis of the philosophy of evaluation in general. According to her, the earlier novelists really did what they actually could within their limited means. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said “Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better.” Literature, according to T.S. Eliot, is like everything else, a process which makes the present. This is why, it does not just improve, it always keep changing. Its material is not same. Mrs. Woolf agrees with Eliot on this point and says: “We do not come to write better, we only keep on moving now a little in this direction, now in that but with a circular motion.” Says Virgina Woolf, “It is for the historian of literature to judge whether the modern novel has really progressed from its early babblings.” As a critic, she naturally upholds her “right to judge the past with debt as well as doubt.” She Criticises M.G. Wells, Arnold Benett, John Galsworthy of writing about unimportant things and called them materialists. According to her, they put life into their novels . They are mainly concerned with the body, not the soul of the novel. This is particularly because they are all materialists and are concerned with fixities not with movements. But Mr. Benett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, in as much as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed in its craftsmanship that is difficult even for the expecting critics to see through which chink or crevice decay can creep in. Being a kind of post modernist, Mrs. Woolf would like the writer to leave the room in his room. According to her, there is nothing in a well constructed novel worth preserving for the prosperity. She suggests that it would be better for literature to turn their backs on them, so it can move forward, for better or worse. While Woolf criticizes these three authors, she praises several other authors for their innovation. This group of writers she name spiritualists, and include James Joyce who Woolf says writes what interests and move him. Woolf wanted writers to focus on the awkwardness of life and craved originality in their work. Her overall hope was to inspire modern fiction writers to write what interested them, wherever it may lead. As a typical modern novelists and critic Mrs. Woolf advises the modern novelists to look within and see what life is like, “Mind receives a crowd of impressions- trivial, fantastic or engraved with the sharpness of steer.” So she does not like “life-like novels, nor in the tyrant plot, nor in the conventional comedy or love-interest”. “If Life like this?” “Must Novel be like this?” She asks & then adds: “Look within and life, it seems, is very far being „like this‟. life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end.” Mrs. Woolf make it clear that the objective of the writer in his or her creation is to look within and life as a whole. The traditionalism or materialism do not capture at that moment. Thus to trust upon life, a writer is free and he could write what he chose. Mr. James Joyce is most notable from that of their predecessors. Young writers within he attempt to come closer to life and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them. And in doing so they must discard most of conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. She praises Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conard, William Henry Hudson, James Joyce and Anton Chekhov. As a critic her writing and criticism was often done by intuition and feeling rather than by a scientific, analytical and systematic method, Virginia Woolf Says: “Life escapes and perhaps Life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness it have to make use of such a figure.” Life for Virginia Woolf is not fixed, but a changing process. It is a flux, shower of atoms of „luminous halo”. The human consciousness is a shelter of sensation and impression. It is the duty of novelist to convey these sensation and impressions. There should be no limitations or conventions. Thus, Virginia Woolf is the fist theorist of the “Stream of Consciousness.” So, she says: “It is a task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit of life.” To sum up, Virginia Woolf observes that “Nothing-no method, un experiment, even of the wildest-is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence.” “the proper stuff of fiction does not exist, everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought, every quality of brain & spirit is drawn upon.” Though the novels of Virginia Woolf have well knit plot, perfect structure and coherence unlike most of modern psychological novelists belonging to „the stream of consciousness”. She strongly and significantly points out that the modern novel can grow only if a novelist is free from conventions to write from his or her own vision of life and keeps in the view the changing concept of life as revealed by modern psychology and such other scientific discoveries about the working of human mind or consciousness. Thus Woolf‟s “Modern Fiction” essay focuses on how writers should write or what she hopes for them to write. She does not suggest a specific way to write. instead a she wants writers to simple write what interests them in any way that they choose to write. She suggests “Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers, that brings us closer to the novelists‟ intension if we are readers.” She wanted writers to express themselves in such a way that it showed life. She set out to inspire writers of modern fiction by calling for originality, criticizing those who focused on the unimportant things and comparing the differences of cultural authors, all for the sake of fiction and literature.

REFERENCES 1. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction”. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature ” The Twentieth Century and Beyond. Ed. Joseph Black 2006.227 Print. 2. Fishman, Solomon. “Virginia Woolf on the Novel”. The Sewanee Review 51. 2(1943): 321-340 Jstor. Web 21 February 2012. 3. Goldman Mark. “Virginia Woolf and the critic as Reader.” PMLA 80.3 (1965):275-284 Jstor.web.21 February 2012. 4. Madison, Elizabeth C. “The Common Reader and Critical Method in Virginia Woolf”, Journal of Aesthetic Education 15.4 (1981)” 61-73.Jstor.web.21 February 2012

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Modern Fiction (essay)
Modern Fiction (essay) " Modern Fiction " is an essay by Virginia Woolf. The essay was published in The Times Literary Supplement on April 10, 1919 as "Modern Novels" then revised and published as " Modern Fiction " in The Common Reader (1925). The essay is a criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation.
A Short Introduction to Woolf's 'Modern Fiction'
A short summary and analysis of Virginia Woolf's 1919 essay. Virginia Woolf's essay 'Modern Fiction', which was originally published under the title 'Modern Novels' in 1919, demonstrates in essay form what her later novels bear out: that she had set out to write something different from her contemporaries. Analysis of this important short essay reveals the lengths that Woolf was ...
PDF Modern Fiction
The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 fo 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984. Modern Fiction In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. ...
Modern Fiction Summary and Study Guide
Virginia Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction" was first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1919 as "Modern Novels." A revised version was published as part of Woolf's collection The Common Reader in 1925. Woolf was a key figure in British Modernism, and the essay itself explores the idea of "modern fiction," contrasting it with the literature of previous generations.
Modern Fiction
Other articles where Modern Fiction is discussed: Virginia Woolf: Early fiction: …revised in 1925 as "Modern Fiction") attacked the "materialists" who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or "luminous" experiences. The Woolfs also printed by hand, with Vanessa Bell's illustrations, Virginia's Kew Gardens (1919), a story organized, like a Post-Impressionistic painting ...
PDF Analysis of Virginia Woolf'S Essay "Modern Fiction"
Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation. It also acts as a guide for writers of modern fiction to write what they feel, not what society or ...
Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf Analysis
Before delving into the analysis of "Modern Fiction," it is essential to gain an understanding of Virginia Woolf's life and her notable works. Virginia Woolf, born in 1882 in London, England, was a British writer and a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group. She produced a wide range of influential works, including novels, essays, and non ...
Modern Woolfian Fiction
Woolf expanded this to include the whole range of human experience, partly through the use of shifting interior voices who meditate on art, marriage, grief, love, ambition, empire, gender, and the sea. With one long beautiful narrative sweep, Woolf turned the novel of manners into a novel of ideas. This expansion has had a profound effect on ...
ANALYSIS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ESSAY "MODERN FICTION"
Anju Reji. an English novelist and critic who made an original contribution to English Novel. Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation.
The Essays
She is the author of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers (1995) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf and the Essay (1997). She is currently working on a comparative study of Virginia Woolf and Elena Ferrante. ... highly personal narrative essays. She theorizes the nature of fiction in 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' (1923) and 'Modern ...
PDF Historicity of Categories of Fiction: Virginia Woolf's Concept "Modern
Index Terms—Virginia Woolf, modern fiction, concept, Aristotle, category theory I. ... The essay of "Modern Fiction" by Woolf is widely considered the declaration on the theory of "modern fiction" and a focal point revolving around which her whole system of the literary criticism is centralized. From the year of 1922 on,
Selected Essays
Abstract. According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure…It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.'. One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of ...
On Virginia Woolf on the Essay
On Virginia Woolf on the Essay Carl H. Klaus. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back. upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we. shall sit down with them and talk. WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED this haunting passage ...
The Common Reader, First Series
Author: Virginia Woolf eBook No.: 0300031h.html Language: English Date first posted: January 2003 ... Modern Fiction "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" ... 1 Essays of Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton, 5 vols. The Navarre Society, £6: 6s. net.
Modern Fiction by Virginia Woolf
In 'Modern Fiction' (1919), Virginia Woolf takes issue with those Edwardian novelists writing in the early years of the twentieth century who, in a way, might be seen as relics of the nineteenth-century realism outlined above: her three targets, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells, are all labeled 'materialists' because of their preoccupation with predictable and plausible ...
Modern Fiction (Essay) || Virginia Woolf
"Modern Fiction" is an essay by Virginia Woolf. The essay was published in The Times Literary Supplement on April 10, 1919 as "Modern Novels" then revised an...
Virginia Woolf's Essayism
Explores the way Woolf used essay-writing techniques to develop her own conception of the modern novel The focus of this study is on Virginia Woolf's vast output of essays and their relation to her fiction. Randi Saloman shows that it was by employing tools and methods drawn from the essay genre - such as fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness and dialogic engagement with the reader - that ...
Virginia Woolf Project
Diventa nostra sorella! Partecipa attivamente al Virginia Woolf Project: ci daremo un sostegno reciproco! Scrivici tramite il form nella pagina Regolamento Are you an association? Become our sister! Actively participate in the Virginia Woolf Project: we will give each other mutual support! Write to us via the form on the Rules page
Poetry, Fiction and the Future
A Chronology of Virginia Woolf; The Decay of Essay-Writing; Modern Fiction; The Modern Essay; How it Strikes a Contemporary; Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown; Character in Fiction 'Impassioned Prose' How Should one Read a Book? Poetry, Fiction and the Future; Craftsmanship; The New Biography; On Being Ill; Leslie Stephen; The Art of Biography; The ...
PDF VIRGINIA WOOLF: MODERN FICTION
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but compare their opportunities with ours!
Virginia Woolf's Modern Fiction Essay Analysis
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) an English novelist and critic who made an original. contribution to English Novel. Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was. written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday.The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation.
Analysis of Virginia Woolf'S Essay "Modern Fiction"
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) an English novelist and critic who made an original contribution to English Novel. Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation.
Virginia Woolf and the Craft of Consciousness (LIT4598.01)
3) Gain comfort with and fluency in Woolf's style and analyze the implications of her stylistic breakthroughs. 4) Examine the influence of philosophy and painting on Woolf's writings. 5) Examine Woolf's influence on subsequent writers. 6) Write well-researched, deeply observant essays that explore the craft and context of Woolf's major ...
Analysis of Virginia Woolf's Essay "Modern Fiction"
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) an English novelist and critic who made an original contribution to English Novel. Modern fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf. This essay was written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. The essay is the criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation.
Six non-fiction books you can read in a day
A Room of One's Own. By Virginia Woolf. Mariner; 128 pages; $16.99. Penguin Modern Classics; £5.99. Among the most influential essays of the 20th century, "A Room of One's Own" was based ...

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