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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Analysis: “Modern Fiction”

Utilizing the traditional form of a critical essay, Woolf writes in a unique stream-of-consciousness style that seeks to persuade her reader that traditional forms themselves perhaps ought to be done away with. “Must novels be like this?” (160), she asks in one of the essay’s many rhetorical questions . Similarly, in her discussion of the short story she invokes conventional wisdom—that short stories “should be brief and conclusive” (163)—before questioning whether the story under discussion can really be called a short story at all given that it has neither of these traits. By implication, her argument also casts doubt on the characteristics that critics have used to make generic classifications (i.e., classifications related to genre ). Woolf challenges these conventions, exploring The Relationship Between Form and Content , in service of the essay’s central project: the reconfiguration of English fiction for the modern or Modernist writer. The essay “Modern Fiction” is not simply a “survey” of its declared subject matter but a pseudo-manifesto on the possibilities of both style/structure and subject matter in modern literature.

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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.

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.

Related Papers

Genres/genre dans la littérature anglaise et américaine, vol.1. Eds. Alfandary, Broqua

Anne Besnault

QUEST JOURNALS

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.

Rajesh Ganguly

On Essays: Montaigne to the Present

Thomas Karshan

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.

Linda Nicole Blair

Emily Kopley

Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers De La Nouvelle

christine reynier

Woolf Studies Annual

Krista Ratcliffe

beyza korkar

34 Modern Woolfian Fiction

Roxana Robinson is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Hunter College, and former president of the Authors Guild. She is the author of the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and nine works of fiction, including the novel Cost. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation; she has twice won the Maine Fiction Award from the MWPA; she has won the James Webb Award for Fiction and has twice been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Award for Criticism given by the NBCC.

Published: 11 August 2021
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Virginia Woolf radically transformed the novel of manners, a form defined by a domestic setting, limited emotional range, and the centrality of social codes. 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 subsequent novelists such as Ian McEwan, Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, and the author of this chapter. These writers have used domestic settings and interior voices to write about the whole of life, laying claim to Woolf’s powerful and elastic new form, the novel-of-both-manners-and-ideas. This chapter examines works by these writers to show how Woolf’s luminous prose and deep empathy, her intellectual control and literary potency, continue to illuminate and vivify the contemporary novel.

Charting the influence of Virginia Woolf is a bit like charting the influence of the Gulf Stream—a warm current that swirls its way across the planet, seeping into distant tides, washing onto unknown shores, and affecting everything it meets, even the climate. Virginia Woolf has influenced nearly every contemporary novelist writing in English, whether we know it or not. No matter how distant we might feel from her work, some trace of that vivifying current has found its way into our writing.

Woolf challenged all sorts of conventions: prose style, the patriarchy, interior monologue, plot, chronology, even the sentence itself. But for someone whose ideas were so radical, she was surprisingly cool and reserved: her voice was mild and composed. She didn’t rant because she didn’t need to. She wasn’t an outsider, shouting up at the fortress walls. She was an insider, born into the upper echelons of the literary establishment. She wasn’t intimidated by its giants; they were friends and kin. She didn’t harangue, she merely made irrefutable observations. She merely reconsidered the novel itself. She created her own prose style: meditative, subjective, and lyrical. She discarded action in favour of awareness.

In much of this, Woolf was influenced—actually, enchanted—by Marcel Proust. While reading Remembrance of Things Past , she wrote about the heady sense of possibility it offered:

But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry … Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. (Letter to Roger Fry, 6 May 1922, L 2 525)

Proust made narrative into a kind of hypnotic digression, lapsing into parenthetical asides until the sense of forward movement was lost, lulled by an endless spreading awareness that encompassed everything—sense and mind and heart. Proust’s work gave Woolf that heady moment of excitement and permission that all novelists recognize—permission to do something entirely new, to move into unexplored terrain.

Woolf adopted Proust’s immersive approach to consciousness and his inventive approach to the sentence. She stretched it to an impossible length or cropped it abruptly short, but she was never disrespectful of its language or its structure. Each sentence is clear, beautiful, and infused by the interior glow of poetry.

Poetry had always been a large part of Woolf’s life. As a child she had memorized it, and had listened to people recite it at tea, or while walking on the lawn. She knew the Victorians and Edwardians, their galloping rhythms and dramatic action, the rhymes and cadences addressing each other, meeting and repeating throughout the work. As a child she heard them; as an adult she read The Oxford Book of English Verse at breakfast (Letter to Vanessa Bell, 24 Oct 1916, L 2 124–5). Poetry was a deep part of her interior life and it informed her prose. Because her sentences are so exquisite, so close to poetry, they require reading at two levels: one for comprehension, one for delight.

Freed from the demands of plot, Woolf used interior monologue as a narrative engine, and her characters’ thoughts provide much of the story’s movement. Earlier writers had, of course, used interior monologues—Anthony Trollope’s urbane observations, Charlotte Brontë’s confessional asides—but these were carefully composed for the public. Woolf’s meditations are private. They come from the deepest recesses of the mind; dim, silent spaces where thoughts shift and flow, broken, barely articulated, flickering in and out of sight, creating the vast and complicated reef of consciousness.

So, these are some of what forms Woolf’s literary heritage—a cool, radical feminism; a dreamlike running commentary; intensity of the moment; sentences like jewellery. Woolf made a slow incantatory reflection into an integral part of fiction. As Proust had done for her, she offered future novelists that heady moment of permission: a view into new meadows.

The name of novelists influenced by Woolf is legion, but a small sampling would include Michael Cunningham, Rachel Cusk, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Tessa Hadley, and this writer.

Michael Cunningham’s lovely 1998 novel, The Hours , freely borrows from Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). Cunningham translates many of Woolf’s characters and scenes into contemporary life, shifting genders and sexual orientation and introducing new narrative lines. His fluid, glinting prose style pays direct homage to hers.

Woolf’s novel presents a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a society matron who’s about to give a party. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf wrote about sexist bias against such subject matter. ‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’ ( ARO 56). In Mrs Dalloway , Woolf implicitly asked the question, ‘Can a novel about a society hostess be significant?’

Woolf’s beautiful and capacious answer, of course, is yes. What Woolf wants to know, as she takes up her pen in the morning, is what it’s like to be human. A woman’s story will be just as important as a man’s.

Mrs Dalloway consists mostly of Clarissa’s musings, but it also includes the suicide of Septimus Smith, a young veteran suffering from shell shock. Smith hears voices and sees visions of his dead comrade. He longs to end the tumult, but that’s not why he jumps to his death. He does so to escape the doctor who’s about to seize control of his life. Woolf’s complicated narrative includes war, empire, trauma, and power. Death. These are far more than the concerns of a hostess, but Woolf takes those seriously, too, because they are also part of what it is to be alive.

Michael Cunningham’s novel refers to Woolf’s in obvious ways: the characters, the lyrical style, the interior commentary, the party, the suicide. But Cunningham enters the earlier text’s fabric in other, more profound ways. For the reader, suicide has an ominous significance in Woolf’s book that the writer can’t know, since it’s not only a reference to the trauma of war, but also a dark foreshadowing of her own end. Cunningham addresses this by directly confronting Woolf’s death—by chronicling it.

His book opens in the last hour of her life, as Woolf walks towards the River Ouse. With startling fluency Cunningham conjures up Woolf, the war, her bond with Leonard, and her madness. In six pages we arrive at the moment of her death.

It’s shockingly bold of Cunningham, to dare to write in Woolf’s voice, to invite the comparison between his writing and hers, to declare ownership of her thoughts during the last half-hour of her life.

I was deeply sceptical of the idea that another writer—especially a man!—could speak in her voice. Certainly the words would sound bogus, the voice forced.

But the book is shockingly good.

Cunningham’s style—pellucid and elegant—mirrors Woolf’s. Simple declarative sentences are interspersed with lucent observation.

She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can’t see them. 1

By the third line, after ‘Leonard’ and ‘Vanessa’, we know who this woman is. ‘Purposefully’ and ‘river’ identify the day and the hour; ‘murmuring voices’ remind us of the reason. What gave me pause was ‘the scattering of incandescent sheep, tinged with sulfur’. That descriptive language, precise and hallucinatory, seemed eerily like Woolf’s. I wondered if Cunningham had found a portal to her mind.

Even more boldly, Cunningham then includes Woolf’s own writing. Here is perhaps the last thing she ever wrote, a sacred text, the farewell note to Leonard.

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of these terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. 2

What’s remarkable about the juxtaposition of the two voices is that it’s apparently seamless. There seems to be no jointure between Cunningham and Woolf. When I read that passage I felt a kind of chill: the two voices seemed miraculously to be the same.

Cunningham, like Woolf, creates a web of consciousness that contains everything—memory, reality, fact, emotion, humour, and pathos—a fine jumble of gossamer threads, airy and strong, which makes up the private, meditative state that dominates both Mrs Dalloway and The Hours . This state of awareness is central to Woolf’s writing: it’s the state into which we often slip, the solitary part of life that paces, unseen, alongside the public one.

Mrs Ramsay muses on it in To the Lighthouse (1927):

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself, and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. ( TL 85)

With the last sentence Woolf moves from interior realism into a dream-state of metaphor: ‘Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading’. What is this ‘it’? Consciousness? The world? She doesn’t identify it, but she doesn’t need to: we understand her on an intuitive level, not a rational one. Something dark and spreading, unfathomably deep: this is the landscape of the dream. This is the way we use mysterious iterations of the natural world to represent our most private feelings.

Michael Cunningham dips into metaphor and dreamscape as easily as Woolf does. Here, his character of Woolf is asleep and dreaming:

It seems, suddenly, that she is not in her bed but in a park, impossibly verdant, green beyond green—a Platonic vision of a park, at once homely and the seat of mystery, implying as parks do that while the old woman in the shawl dozes on the slatted bench something alive and ancient, something neither kind nor unkind, exulting only in continuance, knits together the green world of farms and meadows, forests and parks. Virginia moves through the park without quite walking; she floats through it, a feather of perception, unbodied … Virginia moves through the park as if impelled by a cushion of air; she is beginning to understand that another park lies beneath this one, a park of the underworld, more marvelous and terrible than this; it is the root from which these lawns and arbors grow. It is the true idea of the park, and it is nothing so simple as beautiful. 3

This magical shifting between real and surreal, from fact to metaphor, allows our understanding to expand, encompassing something greater than ourselves. This takes place not in the realm of reason, but of poetry and intuition. This fluid, effortless shift is part of Woolf’s legacy, and one that Cunningham uses to great effect.

Cunningham uses Woolf’s characters and style as though they were his own. His work is so closely aligned with hers that reading it is a kind of hallucinatory experience, as though Cunningham has persuaded Woolf to reorder her book in a new version. It is both unsettling and marvellous.

Cunningham explores his own issues: gender and homosexuality, the AIDS epidemic, the effects of the next world war. Like Woolf, Cunningham writes about ordinary people and sees women’s lives as important ones. Woolf offers a hint of homosexuality; Cunningham proposes a world in which gay can mean settled, normal, bourgeois.

I was mesmerized by Cunningham’s imaginative tribute to Woolf. It was so daring! Jane Smiley once said that she wrote her novel The Greenlanders because she admired Scandinavian literature so much that she wanted to join its company. I admired the idea that a fiction writer could simply enter the literature of another time and country by choice, through an act of empathetic imagination.

Michael Cunningham may have been even more daring than Smiley, in entering a country guarded closely by those who feel such a deep ownership of Woolf. Hasn’t she spoken to us in so many ways, in our most interior places? Hasn’t she spoken about how men demean women, and doesn’t he belong to that tribe of demeaners? Isn’t she a woman, and doesn’t that make her more ours than his?

Yes to all those questions, but I think Cunningham has earned the right to join the Woolfian community. Except for the fact that I put all my fiction in one room, in alphabetical order, I would put The Hours among the Woolfiana—the diaries, letters, essays, biographies, Bloomsbury books, and other works that cluster around Woolf’s literary persona.

His book is in with all the other novels, including Woolf’s. I can’t even put Cunningham’s book next to hers, because of the alphabet. Still, I can feel the invisible connection, the charged thread crisscrossing the shelves, running between Woolf and Cunningham; also between her and her admired friend E. M. Forster, Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, John Updike and the others, tracing the river of her influence through the literary oceans.

One of Woolf’s skills is her ability to create a community and enter inside every person within it. Her voice is intimate and authoritative: in To the Lighthouse , she speaks as six-year-old James Ramsay and as the elderly, widowed William Bankes. She seems to hover over the household, ready to alight on whom she will illuminate.

Zadie Smith, in White Teeth , shifts similarly between the minds of the characters. The two writers inhabit different communities: Woolf’s world consists mostly of the educated upper middle class (even Septimus Smith, a modest clerk, seems very like the others, and is untrammelled by class issues). Smith revels in diversity and draws on a wide variety of ethnic origins, politics, race, religions, accents, and classes.

The opening of White Teeth echoes of the plot from Mrs Dalloway , with an attempted suicide by an English war veteran who is married to an Italian wife—though here it’s the wife, not the husband, who has lapsed into madness, and the husband, Alfred Archibald Jones, survives his attempt.

But Smith’s tone is very different from Woolf’s; Smith’s voice is light, knowing, and sardonic. Both writers offer close observations of London, but their cities are very different.

As Clarissa Dalloway stepped out of her house in Westminster,

It was June. The King and the Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it, wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery … and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. ( MD 4–5)

Woolf mocks the political establishment, but she loves the leafy bowers of Westminster and the unwitting charm of the aristocracy.

Smith mocks everything, with exuberant irreverence. The man who saves Archie’s life is Mo Hussein-Ishmael. Like Clarissa, he lives in London, and like her, he feels a vital connection to it—though this is not because his people had been courtiers in the time of the Georges. Mo is Muslim and runs a halal butcher shop. He plays his own version of cricket by leaning out the window and swiping at pigeons with a cleaver. After laying waste to that morning’s flock,

Mo wiped the sweat off his forehead, snorted, and looked out over Cricklewood, surveying the discarded armchairs and strips of carpets, outdoor lounges for local drunks; the slot-machine emporiums, the greasy spoons, and the mini-cabs—all covered in shit. One day, so Mo believed, Cricklewood and its residents would have cause to thank him for his daily massacre; one day no man, woman, or child on the Broadway would ever again have to mix one part detergent to four parts vinegar to clean up the crap that falls on the world. The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit. Mo was the only man in the community who truly understood. 4

Smith offers the chaotic wreckage of the immigrant’s London, one far outside the network of Oxbridge and those connections who could get you a minor secretaryship when you’ve failed in India and need a job back in England. Smith’s London is not full of parks; no ponies gallop there, no debutantes walk their woolly dogs. Most of Smith’s characters come from the Asian subcontinent and the Caribbean. They are not white; they are not affluent. They are impecunious outsiders, enterprising and intrepid, determined to wrest some kind of success from this incomprehensible British world. They are more active and vigorous than Woolf’s characters; they must be.

Unlike Woolf’s nearly plotless works of introspection, Smith’s tale is a tangled skein of action and complication. Smith chooses not to move into the darker, more troubling depths of Woolf’s narrative. Smith’s characters struggle and flail on a choppy surface, while Woolf’s drift deeper into the surge, falling through bands of light and darkness.

Ian McEwan shares Woolf’s record of productivity and her glittering felicities of style, as well as a deep attentiveness to the moment. He records them with such precision and exactitude, it’s as though each moment has been arrested for the purpose of his thorough investigation.

His novel Saturday opens with a quote from Saul Bellow on:

what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society … which spent billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home … As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. 5

This murmured account reads like a gender-reversed description of the intention of Mrs Dalloway ; just as Woolf does, it moves from the urban to the natural world.

Like Clarissa, the protagonist of Saturday has a domestic task. ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’ ( MD 3); Henry Perowne is going to make a family dinner. ‘Perowne’s plan is to cook a fish stew. A visit to the fishmonger is one of the simpler tasks ahead.’ 6

Both novels observe the classical unities of time, place, and action. They take place within a twenty-four-hour span, and explore the intimate complexities of family, as well as those of work, politics, and culture. Both raise questions of morality and humanity. Both are narrated with fastidious precision, mostly from the point of view of the protagonist:

Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It’s not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He’s never done such a thing before, but he isn’t alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed—he always sleeps naked—feeling his full height, aware of his wife’s patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he’s doing out of bed; he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream of some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It’s as if, standing there in the darkness, he’s materialized out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered. 7

Here are many echoes of Woolf: the close rendering of time and place, the specificity of detail, the mandarin prose, the deep attentiveness to consciousness itself. Like Clarissa, Henry Perowne is supernally aware of the life he is living.

Dr Henry Perowne, like Clarissa Dalloway, enjoys an agreeable affluence. He’s educated, upper middle class, and successful; he loves his work, his spouse, and his children. He feels gratitude and humility for this; he feels fortunate that he can contribute to the world.

Perowne feels part of some larger plan, benign, unknowable, one that tends mysteriously towards good. ‘ “There’s grandeur in this view of life.” ’ 8 This phrase from Darwin drifts into Perowne’s mind on waking. Mrs Dalloway, resting before her party, thinks, ‘What she liked was simply life. “That’s what I do it for”, she said, speaking aloud, to life’ ( MD 109).

When Perowne looks out over his square, his thoughts—proprietary, interested, appreciative—mirror hers:

He likes the symmetry of black cast-iron posts and their even darker shadows, and the lattice of cobbled gutters. The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic—cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers

And, in an unmistakable nod to Mrs Dalloway’s crazy singing woman:

the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls. Go away! She’ll shout for hours at a time, and squawk harshly, sounding like some marsh bird or zoo animal. 9

Henry Perowne, like Clarissa, takes pleasure in London’s material presence; they both have a guileless trust in the civilization it represents. They both find comfort in their surroundings.

Standing here … gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of facades, scaffolding and pitched roof, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece—millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work. 10

Both Clarissa and Perowne witness aeronautical mysteries: Clarissa sees a stunt-pilot write an illegible word against the sky in letters of smoke. Perowne sees a plane hurtling towards Heathrow, one engine aflame against the night. 11 Woolf’s vision is remote, whimsical, amused; McEwan’s is private and dark, disturbing. These enigmatic visions seem like intimations of metaphysical mysteries of human endeavour, technology and commerce, and the bottomless blue of the empyrean itself.

One of the most appealing things about both writers’ work is the presence of literature itself, rippling beneath the text. References to fairy tales, poetry, plays, novels, and novelists all appear, like small bright portals into other landscapes.

To the Lighthouse begins with Mrs Ramsay reading a fairy tale to her son James. Like a Chinese box, ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ opens into another version of the Ramsays’ own story: the fisherman’s wife is impossibly selfish and demanding, and her imperious requests have catastrophic consequences. Mr Ramsay, famously selfish, famously demanding, strides up and down on the lawn. He recites poetry, and one of his texts is ‘The Castaway’ by William Cowper, in which a sailor is swept overboard and left to drown. This reiterates Mr Ramsay’s worst fear: that he and his work will be forgotten. ‘ “We perished”, and then again, “each alone” ’, he mourns, with voluptuous self-regard, ‘ “But I beneath a rougher sea/Was whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he” ’ ( TL 224, 225). Both Woolf’s novel and Cowper’s poem contain the slow drumming of the sea, the imagined one of the poem set against the real one, which murmurs in the background throughout Woolf’s book. The two are connected like lines of harmony, rising and falling against each other to make the melody.

In Woolf’s work, all the characters know poetry. Even Clarissa Dalloway—(who isn’t clever, and barely reads anything except memoirs, in bed)—quotes from Cymbeline . Poetry was central to Woolf’s prose—rhythm and rhyme and cadence were part of her literary consciousness; they thrummed throughout her prose.

In McEwan’s Saturday , poetry is also rampant: both Perowne’s father-in-law, old Grammaticus, and Perowne’s daughter Daisy are poets. Strangely, though McEwan’s voice is grounded in a kind of ultra-reality, here poetry takes on an urgent nearly magical power. Because, though this is a story about medical science, one which contains the risk of great physical harm, it is poetry that saves lives. The Perowne house is invaded by marauding thugs who threaten mayhem. Daisy, who is most at risk, reads one of her own poems out loud to the strange assembly. The grave, beautiful language and the humanity of its message have a transformative effect, and that small shift in mood allows for a different ending to the story.

In Atonement , McEwan’s 2001 novel, literature is the current in which the narrative moves. One of the main characters, Bryony, yearns to be a writer. She submits her work to Cyril Connolly, who sends her a response from Elizabeth Bowen. McEwan takes a risk similar to Cunningham’s, mimicking the voice of a famous and accomplished writer. He succeeds with a virtuoso performance, imitating her polished, intelligent style.

Woolf’s voice echoes within McEwan’s work in many ways, through the generosity of spirit, the crystalline prose, the deep attentiveness to the moment. Reading McEwan’s work makes me remember Woolf’s with pleasure, reminding me of the way in which great writing can move through the generations, slipping into our sentences, whispering into our ears, sliding onto our keyboards.

Rachel Cusk, another English writer, writes fiction, memoir, and a sort of hybrid of the two, in which a narrator recounts a story that seems autobiographical but may not be. In any case, her narrators are masters of perception.

Her short story, ‘Freedom’, is set in a beauty salon, described with blazing precision.

By now it was completely dark outside. Inside the salon, all the lights were on. There was music playing, and the droning sound of passing traffic could be faintly heard from the street. There was a great bank of glass shelves against one wall where hair products stood for sale in pristine rows, and when a lorry passed too close outside, it shuddered slightly and the jars and bottles rattled in their places. The room had become a chamber of reflecting surfaces while the world outside became opaque. Everywhere you looked, there was only the reflection of what was already there. Often I had walked past the salon in the dark and had glanced in at the windows. From the darkness of the street, it was almost like a theater, with the characters moving around in the bright light of the stage. 12

I like the fact that Cusk writes unapologetically about a beauty salon. In 1929, Woolf commented sardonically in A Room of One’s Own that women’s subjects, such as fashion, and the buying of clothes, were considered insignificant compared to men’s subjects, such as football and war. Woolf’s observation of such literary sexism surely played a part in the sea change that followed; now Rachel Cusk can write a story for The Paris Review about a woman who wants to dye her hair. Cusk needn’t apologize for the fact that women care about how they look, or that they spend time and money on it. She can write a serious story about such intimate and mundane moments in a woman’s life.

Cusk’s unnamed narrator wants to conceal her grey hair; her hairdresser warns her of a lifelong commitment. Unlike Woolf’s narrators, Cusk’s is only an observer. We don’t know her thoughts, as her hairdresser reveals a drastic life-shift, and a patron takes shattering action. The narrator sits passive and silent as her hair is washed and coloured, watching the story unfold in a series of unexpected vistas, like forest pools descending down a hillside to end in a wild cascade.

Cusk’s work is more heavily ironic than Woolf’s. Woolf uses equal strands of irony and compassion in her complicated weave, but Cusk makes irony the thicker thread. In The Fold , her 2005 novel, coolly eviscerates the romantic notion of upper-class English life. She reveals those stock literary characters, the charmingly eccentric gentry, benign guardians of the countryside, as rotten to the core. Cusk expands mercilessly on Woolf’s wry social commentary, her violent message all the more startling because of the poised elegance of her prose.

The distinguished fiction writer Tessa Hadley has written several story collections and a novel, The Past. Like Woolf, she uses a sharply precise form of descriptive observation; like Woolf she chooses the domestic world as setting.

Here is the opening of The Past :

Alice was the first to arrive, but she discovered as she stood at the front door that she had forgotten her key. The noise of their taxi receding, like an insect burrowing between the hills, was the only sound at first in the still afternoon, until their ears got used to other sounds; the jostling of water in the stream that ran at the bottom of the garden; a tickle of tiny movements in the hedgerows and grasses. At least it was an afternoon of balmy warmth, its sunlight diffused because the air was dense with seed floss, transparent-winged midges, pollen; light flickered on the grass, and under the silver birch leaf-shadows shifted, blotting their penny-shapes upon one another. Searching through her bag, Alice put on a show of amusement and scatty self-depreciation. 13

Hadley’s graceful, ruminative style, her descriptive skill, and her awareness of the natural world are all reminiscent of Woolf. So, too, is her attentiveness to the domestic setting: the novel is set in a grandparents’ house, out in a bucolic countryside. The house itself, its structure and history, and its charm, is essential to the narrative:

The house was a white cube two storeys high, wrapped round on all four sides by garden, with French windows and a veranda at the back and a lawn sloping to a stream; the walls were mottled with brown damp, there was no central heating and the roof leaked. On the mossy roof slates, thick as pavings, you could see the chisel marks where the quarrymen had dressed them two hundred years ago. Alice and Kasim stood peering through the French windows: the interior seemed to be a vision of another world, its stillness pregnant with meaning, like a room seen in a mirror. The rooms were still furnished with her grandparents’ furniture; wallpaper glimmered silvery behind the spindly chairs, upright black-lacquered piano and bureau. Paintings were pits of darkness suspended from the picture rail. Alice had told her therapist that she dreamed about the house all the time. Every other house she’d lived in seemed, beside this one, only a stage set for a performance. 14

The novel takes place during a week in the summer, when four siblings and their children gather in a rectory owned by their grandparents. The house is unchanged; the bedrooms still contain the same children’s books, the limp-cushioned armchairs, the ponderous bureaus. The outdoor landscape is still full of open meadows and rushing brooks. But, of course, the siblings have changed, and the narrative charts the slow collision between their shared past and their separate presents.

The summer house, as a repository of family history, as setting for memories and personalities, a place in which to chronicle and celebrate and explore the whole messy, complicated organism of kin, has a precedent, of course. This is one against which all other literary vacation houses may be measured.

Never was a family so lovingly and ruthlessly chronicled as are the Ramsays, in To the Lighthouse. Shabby was the word for their rented place: ‘The mat was fading, the wallpaper was flapping. You couldn’t tell anymore that there were roses on it’ ( TL 39). But this isn’t shameful; it’s not due to poverty, though the Ramsays aren’t rich, and can’t afford to do it up. In fact, there’s a great deal of cultural value accorded to a summer house full of ancient family furniture. This kind of shabbiness is actually evidence of bounty: the Ramsays have eight exuberant children, a vast shoal of friends and a generous tradition of hospitality. Both Mr and Mrs Ramsay attract admirers, and the house is full of lively conversation and good food. The shabbiness is due to liveliness and activity: the children will track in sand, they’ll nail seaweed on the wall, they’ll dissect crabs and collect stones. The house guests will carry easels through the sitting room. There is no point in getting good chairs.

And faded chintz and sandy carpets is the other side of decorum. The striking of the gong calls the family to a candlelit table and an elegant meal; but this is a cloth laid over the churning ferment of the emotional life. The children ripple with mocking laughter at their mother’s rant; everyone remembers Mr Ramsay whizzing a soup plate out the window because of an earwig in it.

The vacation house is full of the shadowy presence of the stilled family past: the mildewed furniture can’t be replaced without destruction of a part of childhood itself. These houses, remote and insular, are always fixed on the calendar at summer.

Woolf uses the ageing of the house, in ‘Time Passes’, to represent the devastating changes within the family (the deaths of Mrs Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew). Hadley uses the ageing as a prelude to her narrative, which is an examination of the family’s history.

Hadley offers intimate, specific details—the walls mottled with damp, the fact that what quarriers do to roof slates is called ‘dressing’. I like learning these details just as I liked learning the surgical procedures that Henry Perowne had performed: clipping the neck of a middle cerebral artery aneurysm, a craniotomy for a meningioma, and relief of a tic douloureux . 15 This information is delivered with such specificity and authority that we believe that we are in the midst of a real life.

In Mrs Dalloway , Richard Dalloway happens to amble along the street with Hugh Whitbread. Whitbread sees a Spanish necklace in a shop window, and steps into the jeweller’s:

‘I should like to see Mr Dubonnet’, said Hugh in his curt worldly way. It appeared that this Dubonnet had the measurements of Mrs Whitbread’s neck, or, more strangely still, knew her views upon Spanish jewellery and the extent of her possessions in that line … Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeakably pompous. Really, after dealing here for thirty-five years he was not going to be put off by a mere boy who did not know his business. For Dubonnet, it seemed, was out, and Hugh would not buy anything until Mr Dubonnet chose to be in; at which the youth flushed and bowed his correct little bow. It was all perfectly correct. And yet Richard couldn’t have said that to save his life … Hugh was becoming an intolerable ass. ( MD 102–3)

The kind of necklace and the length of Hugh’s patronage, the little bow of the snubbed salesman—these are like small nails with studded tops, tapped in a neat line along the edges of a chair to show its shape. Here is the world, say these writers; here are the facts that define it.

One of Hadley’s recurrent themes is the driving current of illicit sexuality that runs beneath the bland terrain of middle-class life. It’s present, too, in Woolf’s work: the affairs of Minta Rayley that capsize her marriage; Mrs Dalloway’s remembered kiss from Sally Seton. Peter Walsh remembers Clarissa’s genteel shock at learning that a neighbour has married his housemaid. The family receives her, dressed like a parakeet, and talking non-stop, but when Clarissa learns she’d had his child before her marriage, she declares she can never see the woman again. Prudish, Peter Walsh thinks Clarissa. And, of course, the whole story of Orlando (1928) is a coded reference to a brief erotic fling between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

In Hadley’s work, illicit sexual encounters operate as unacknowledged moments in bourgeois lives, hidden rocks beneath the smooth current. A married woman needn’t tell about the afternoon in that empty house, or comment on the fact that a child looks like no one in the family. In the story ‘An Abduction’, a teenage girl is taken off for the night by some posh teenage boys. She gets a crush on the handsome one. They all shoplift at a local store, then move to a house absent of parents. That night the boy deflowers her; the next day she’s returned. She never tells her family. The episode forms a gap in her life, a lacuna that she can’t reveal. She’s stalled, frozen by it. She never knows how to understand it, any more than Clarissa understands how to consider Sally’s kiss, or the housemaid’s shame. These sexual episodes have a kind of secret unexplained weight in peoples’ lives, morally neutral but psychologically powerful.

Modernism offered writers new ways to approach the idea of time. Woolf does what she wants with it, stretching and shrinking it as though she’s playing an accordion. She intersperses memories of the past with moments in the present and imaginings of the future. She changes time into something else altogether, as in ‘Time Passes’, in To the Lighthouse . That was written during the General Strike in London, in May 1926, when for nine days the world did seem to stop. Here Woolf treats time itself as action, its passage recorded only through the changes of the natural world—the stately circuits of the sun and moon; the nearly invisible rise of damp, the subtle loosening of wallpaper. In Mrs Dalloway , the passage of Clarissa’s day is notated by the regular chiming of Big Ben, in one of Woolf’s most exquisite sentences: ‘The leaden circles dissolved in the air’ ( MD 4).

This liberation of chronology has affected all subsequent novelists; narratives now swing freely through past and present, future, and other imagined tenses, through a freewheeling universe where time does what we tell it.

I was asked to include myself in this essay, and I’ll confess that Woolf is an enormous influence on my work. At times, I was worried that I’d be accused of some sort of aesthetic plagiarism, for I was filling my mind with her words and ideas, and writing my way out of that swarm.

While I’m writing a novel, I use another book as a kind of touchstone. In the mornings, before I begin to work, I pick up that book and read a few pages, sometimes just a few paragraphs. This is a book that offers a connection to my writing and some kind of literary sustenance. While I was writing my novel, This is my Daughter , in the mornings I read The Journals of John Cheever . Cheever’s beautifully simple, unadorned prose, his humility, his compassion, his interest in the family, the domestic, the spiritual, all made his journals deeply helpful to me. It was like a companion on my path, or like the path itself.

I wrote the end of my novel Sweetwater while staying alone in a house in Maine. I wrote during the day; at night I read the new translation of Anna Karenina , by Pevear and Volokhonsky. It made me hopeful about the whole endeavour of writing fiction, the idea that you could set down your ideas about marriage, and the heart, and the landscape and your spiritual relationship to it, and make it important. So, in my mind, that book became part of my own.

While I was writing my next novel, Cost , I used one book to start off every morning’s writing. I had a copy of The Hours in my study, and I’d flip it open to read a bit. I didn’t usually want the beginning or the end, and though I admired the Mrs Brown sections, they were too removed from my own book—set in the 1950s, and way down in southern California. It was Virginia I wanted, in London or in Rodmell. I loved the passage about the burial of the thrush. ‘ “Hello, changelings” ’, says Virginia, playful, magically unpredictable, when she sees Vanessa’s children. 16 It was that sleight of hand, that magical ability to speak in someone else’s voice that I was trying to find, moving across my own dim twilit landscape. How did Cunningham find those words? How did he transport himself inside her mind? That’s what I wanted to do—find my way inside the mind of my character.

In Cost, I started out in the mind of a woman in her eighties who was losing her memory:

‘Her memory was gone.’ 17

Because of the tradition of the use of third person, this statement could be made either by an omniscient observer or by Katherine herself, just as the sentence ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’ could be spoken by an interior or exterior voice.

I wanted the interior one. I wanted the characters to speak in their own voices, securely cached inside the cocoon of privacy, that place in which Mrs Ramsay loses herself in meditation, where she allows herself the deep intimacy of her own thoughts. That acknowledgement of herself was something essential, something modern. The real interior self could not be observed by the nineteenth-century narrator. Woolf identified the private self, she named the wedge-shaped darkness. This has no public persona, it exists only in the mind:

It came to Katharine like a soft shock, like a blow inside the head. She was in the yellow bedroom at her daughter’s house in Maine, standing at the bureau, getting ready for lunch. She’d just finished doing her hair, smoothing it back to her modest bun, tucking in the small combs to hold it in place. The combs were hardly necessary now, her long fine hair—still mostly black—had turned wispy and weightless, and no longer needed restraint. But vanity, like beauty, is partly habit, and Katharine still put the combs carefully into her thinning hair, though now they slipped easily out, then vanished, beneath the furniture, against the patterns of the rugs. Hair done, combs briefly and precariously in place, Katharine looked around for her scarf. It was an old soft cotton one, a blue paisley square. She’d worn it once at a birthday party, and now, for a moment, in her daughter’s guest room with its faded yellow walls, the sunlight slanting onto the worn wooden floors, the idea of the scarf and the party seemed confusingly to merge. She had a sudden sense of the party blooming around her—a blur of voices, laughter, a fireplace—a sense of pleasure at being with these people, whoever they were. Green demitasse cups, those tiny tinkling spoons, a tall brass lamp by the fireplace—or was that somewhere else? 18

Katharine’s daughter is Julia Lambert, a painter in her fifties. She’s successful enough; she shows at a good gallery and gets good reviews. There are people who collect her work, but she doesn’t enjoy the same prestige given to the men in her generation. They’ve become stars, some are superstars. This might be merit; she suspects it’s partly gender. Men’s work brings higher prices, it’s a fact.

She knows her situation is perilous: an artist can slide into nowhere in an instant, and it’s more likely to happen to a woman. Julia has to keep reminding herself that it’s the work that’s important, not the way the world sees you.

While I was writing Julia I had Lily Briscoe in mind. Lily, who wants to create, and who struggles to ignore Charles Tansley’s derisive refrain: ‘ “Women can’t paint, women can’t write” ’ ( TL 67).

Those words have power over Lily, over Julia, and over me. As I write them now, they still unsettle me. This is one reason why Virginia Woolf’s writing is so important: she calls up the self that lies silent and unnameable, and she speaks the words that have kept us mute and motionless for centuries.

Julia, at her opening, sees a male contemporary who has become famous, as she has not:

There were moments when Julia could not help it, she burned with the pure gemlike flame of envy. Because what was the point of all this, all this groping, year after year, for something hidden and mysterious, the struggle to find the secret harmonies within the music of the world, this struggle to play the great chords of the human soul, if the world were so utterly indifferent to your efforts? … But there were also moments … that Julia was simply grateful for the life she had, grateful that she was allowed to do this —make art. 19

It’s only by steadfastly resisting Charles Tansley’s unspoken refrain, only by finding the interior refuge, that Lily and Julia are able to work:

Lily stepped back to get her canvas—so—into perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea. And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there. ( TL 232)

Lily is suspended in her own luminous consciousness like a mote in a sunbeam—serene, absorbed, productive.

The writer, too, walks that narrow plank. We never know where we will next set our feet: the next step, into the void, is an act of faith. With luck, there will be something solid below.

With every book, and every piece of writing, I remember Woolf’s statement about women’s work. Men think women can’t do it; women must put that thought from them. Men think women’s work is not important; women must remember that it is.

So while I wrote that book, every morning I read from The Hours, hearing Woolf’s voice, spoken by Cunningham. And I thought of Lily Briscoe, bracing herself against Charles Tansley’s taunts, making herself believe that she—and I—could take another step.

Selected Bibliography

Cunningham, Michael , The Hours (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998 ).

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Cusk, Rachel , ‘ Freedom ’, Paris Review 217 (Summer 2016 ), 23–4.

Hadley, Tessa , The Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015 ).

McEwan, Ian , Saturday (London: Anchor Press, 2006 ).

Robinson, Roxana , Cost (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008 ).

Smith, Zadie , White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000 ).

Michael Cunningham , The Hours (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 3 .

Cunningham, The Hours , 6. See also L 6 481.

Cunningham, The Hours , 30.

Zadie Smith , White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), 5 .

Ian McEwan , Saturday (London: Anchor Press, 2006), 1 . Quoting Saul Bellow , Herzog (New York: Viking Press, 1964) .

McEwan, Saturday , 55.

McEwan, Saturday , 1.

McEwan, Saturday , 53.

McEwan, Saturday , 3.

McEwan, Saturday , 14.

Rachel Cusk , ‘Freedom’, Paris Review 217 (Summer 2016), 23–4 .

Tessa Hadley , The Past (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 3 .

Hadley, The Past , 4–5.

McEwan, Saturday , 5.

Cunningham, The Hours , 116.

Roxana Robinson , Cost (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 3 .

Robinson, Cost , 3–4.

Robinson, Cost , 385–6.

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Virginia Woolf's Essayism

Randi Saloman
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Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Main content: 192
Keywords: Literary Studies
Published: May 16, 2012
ISBN: 9780748646494

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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. 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.

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Oxford World’s Classics: Selected Essays
Biographical Preface
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
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 Feminine Note in Fiction
Women Novelists
Women and Fiction
Professions for Women
Memories of a Working Women’s Guild
Thunder at Wembley
Street Haunting: A London Adventure
The Sun and the Fish
The Docks of London
Oxford Street Tide
Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
Flying Over London
Why Art Today Follows Politics
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
Explanatory Notes

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p. 74 Poetry, Fiction and the Future

Virginia Woolf
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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. 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.

“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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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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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 Essay Analysis
The essay "Modern Fiction" is not simply a "survey" of its declared subject matter but a pseudo-manifesto on the possibilities of both style/structure and subject matter in modern literature. Woolf was distinctly influenced by both the philosophical and artistic developments of the early 20th century that accompanied literary Modernism.
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 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 ...
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.
PDF "Modern Fiction" by Virginia Woolf
The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984. have about ao that with the of Ibe said that we that On envy is and so Modern Fiction In making any survey, even the freest and Loosest, of fiction, it is difficult not to take it yanzeð that modern practice of
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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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 ...
Summary Of Modern Fiction By Virginia Woolf
The thought-provoking essay "Modern Fiction," written by Virginia Woolf, is a compelling examination of the fundamentals of narrative and the development of literature in the 20th century. The article was published in 1921 as a part of a collection called "The Common Reader." In this fascinating essay, Woolf examines the mechanics of fiction ...
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.
Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf
One of the collection of Virginia Woolf's essays including: "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights", The Patron and The Crocus, The Modern Essay, The Death Of The Moth Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, Three Pictures, … Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf. From Project Gutenberg Australia. This eBook was produced by: Col Choat
ENGL340: Modern Fiction Essay
What is modern fiction?How is Virginia Woolf's perspective on great modern fiction?Music: Interstellar - Hans Zimmer
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.
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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 ...
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MODERN FICTION BY VIRGINIA WOOLF | LITERARY CRITICISM | DSC 9 | SEMESTER 3| DETAILED EXPLANATION & THEMES in this video first we will discuss about the essay...
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.
Analysis of Virginia Woolf's Essay "Modern Fiction"
V irginia Woolf in her Modern Fiction makes a fair attempt to discuss briefly the main trends in the modern novel or fiction. She begins her essay by mentioning the traditionalists like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy, who, while they propound new ideas and open out new vistas to the human mind, still follow the Victorian tradition as far as the technique of the novel is concerned.

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