December 1910: When It All Changed

  “In or about December, 1910, human character changed”. So asserted Virginia Woolf in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge in May 1924, and later published as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (Collected Essays, Volume 1, 1925, p.320 [MBMB]). This has become a famous observation, marking the emergence of Modernism in Britain, and it has been taken up by many literary and cultural historians. For Irving Howe, the date identified a “frightening discontinuity between the traditional past and the shaken present … the line of history has been bent, perhaps broken”, so that the essence of Modernism lies in “a revolt against the prevalent style, and unyielding rage against the official order (The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, 1967, p.13). After 1910, “modern authors were sharply aware of themselves as participants in a new cultural order that was in many ways radically disconnected from that of the past”, observes Chris Baldick, for whom Woolf’s claim stands as “the most famous statement of the case” that Modernism in England began in 1910 (The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 10, 1910-1940: The Modern Movement, 2004, pp.6-8).

The year 1910 marked “the beginning of real Modernism in England, separating it from the more tentative anticipations of the Edwardian era”, according to Paul Edwards, who places this shift in the context of a breakdown of the existing social order characterized by the “insubordination” of the lower classes, labour unrest, the women’s suffrage movement, parliamentary turmoil, and the intensifying Irish crisis, which, as The Times later observed, threatened to become “one of the greatest crises in the history of the British race” (“Futurism, Literature and the Market”, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, 2004, p.132). To this can be added the massive demographic transformation that doubled the population of Great Britain in the 50 years prior to 1910, while a major part of the agricultural sector passed out of production, along with the rural society and culture it supported, creating great cities (London alone had a population of seven million in 1910), and generating a new concern with urban and cosmopolitan themes in literature and the arts. Consequently, 1910 signalled the sudden disintegration of “old social hierarchies”, as Stephen Coote observes, forcing literature to “rediscover itself in a new and altogether more fluid world”, while the realist novel of the previous period had to be “superseded by one in which objective reality is replaced by the impressions of subjective consciousness”, so that after 1910, “the writer’s principal concern [was] with states of mind” (The Penguin Short History of English Literature, 1993, p.651).

Nineteen-ten opened “the Heroic Age of the modern novel”, according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (6^th ed., 1993, p.1687), in which three main influences determined the future direction of English fiction. The first was the recognition that the sense of a common culture that had informed the Victorian Age had evaporated and that the crises of the plot could no longer be resolved by recourse to changes in the social, marital, or financial status of characters involved. The second involved a new sense of the nature of time, which was no longer depicted as a sequential series of chronological moments to be recounted by the novelist, but rather as an episodic flow of irregular speed and direction through the consciousness of the subjects at the centre of the narrative. The third was related to this, and involved a radically more sophisticated model of the human mind, incorporating insights from psychoanalysis about the role of sexuality, and the nature of memory and fantasy. Ultimately, “the view that we are our memories, that our present is the sum of our past, that if we dig into the human consciousness we can tell the whole truth about people without waiting for a chronological sequence of time to take them through a series of testing circumstances, inevitably led to a technical revolution in the novel” (p.1688).

“Several convenient pegs with which to fasten Woolf’s perception of radical change to 1910” are identified by Philipp Blom in The Vertigo Years (2008), his cultural history of the pre-war years, and he invokes broader European cultural changes as “the background against which we have to see the artistic revolution Virginia Woolf described” (pp.282-3). The search for the “really crucial event, the wholly significant work, the annus mirabilis” of Modernism has been described by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in “The Name and Nature of Modernism” (Modernism, 1976), and they believe Woolf’s claim successfully compressed “an enormous cultural change into a brief moment of time”, although they also note that D. H. Lawrence claimed in Kangaroo that it was in 1915 that the old world ended, while Richard Ellmann recommends 1900, and others look to the years after the war (p.33). Peter Gay, in Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (2007), accepts Woolf’s essay as a Modernist manifesto decrying the ‘externalism’ and ‘materialism’ of the Edwardians and calling for a new focus on the interiority of character in the novel, but he also points out that no less a figure than Thomas Hardy had, as early as 1891, “commended a literary agenda more searching than the scientific exploration of surfaces”, and called for greater attention to “the finer qualities of existence” and the “inner realities” (p.183).

That there was a great cultural shift consistent with Woolf’s claim is also accepted by Bernard Bergonzi in his analysis of “The Advent of Modernism: 1900-1920” (The Sphere History of Literature in the Twentieth Century, 1970), although he resists abrupt ‘revolutionary’ depictions of the event. He also cites Frank Kermode’s recommendation of 1900 as the pivotal date, because that year saw the publication of key works by Freud, Husserl, Russell, and Planck that “transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relations of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty”, placing indeterminacy within the very nature of things (p.22). This ‘scientific revolution’ version of Woolf’s claim is developed by Jeff Wallace, who claims that Woolf was showing how “the established form of the novel is no longer appropriate to a modern epistemology in which the notion of objectivity has been problematized by relativity physics and the subjective sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis” (“Modernists on the Art of Fiction”, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, 2007, p.19).

Consequently, 1910 saw “a new-born universe”, as Peter Conrad put it in Modern Times, Modern Places (1998), in which a new science and a new aesthetic converged as the modern mind “thronged with as many random happenings as a city street; it contained scraps and fragments, dots and dashes, like the incoherent blizzard of marks on a modern canvas [that] represented nothing” (pp.14-5). Such a vision echoes Woolf in her essay on “Modern Fiction’, where she described “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”, receiving “a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent … an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (Collected Essays, Volume 2, 1925, p.106). But along with science there seems here also to be mysticism or mental disturbance, as Woolf sees life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end [revealing an] unknown and uncircumscribed spirit” (p.106).

In making her claim, Woolf was responding polemically to an article by Arnold Bennett, who had claimed that “the foundation of good fiction is character-creating”, and that Woolf and her generation of novelists were not of first rate importance because they were “unable to create characters that are real, true, and convincing” (MBMB, p.319). In framing her response she arranged the relevant writers into two camps, capitalizing on the death of Edward VII and the accession of George V in 1910 to mark the dividing line. Consequently, Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy were derided as passé ‘Edwardians’, obsessed with describing the mere external details of the world; while E. M. Foster, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, James Joyce, and herself were cast as avant-garde ‘Georgians’, who were alone capable of grasping the far more profound inner dimensions of life.

In her view, the world of the Edwardians and its associated certainties had passed away, along with its art, “in or about December 1910”, and the Georgians had a new world to deal with, one that had left their predecessors behind and required an entirely different creative focus. Therefore, to ask the Edwardians “how to write a novel – how to create characters who are real – is precisely like going to a boot maker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch” (MBMB, p.326). In response to Bennett’s claim that her characterization lacked realism she reacted in accordance with the relativistic new physics and asserted the central role that subjectivity would play in Modernism: “What is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennett and quite unreal to me” (p.325). She also disparaged Bennett and the rest for their ‘materialist’ focus on the external facts in constructing a narrative, to the exclusion of the inner world where lay the crucial richness of character, which she insisted only the ‘Georgians’, such as herself, could accurately explore. As Gay observes (p.186), Woolf is being rather “wicked” here, because she is misrepresenting Bennett quite significantly. Indeed, as Samuel Hynes observes in A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990) “she did not argue with Bennett, she satirized and parodied him [while] her summaries of his novels, and of those of Galsworthy and Wells, are inaccurate and unjust” (p.400). Regrettably, her essay, “more than any other critical piece of its time … taught post-war readers how to think” about this crucial period of English literary history (p.399).

Surprisingly, given the invocation of Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Einstein, relativity, quantum physics, mysticism, social revolution, and civilizational collapse by many commentators, Woolf herself supported her claim about 1910 and the epochal change it signalled by invoking “a homely illustration … the character of one’s cook”. As she saw it, “the Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable: the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat”. Faced with such presumption, as the leviathan transformed itself into a butterfly, Woolf asked: “Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?” (MBMB, p.320).

On the other hand, such change didn’t extend to Woolf herself in 1910. Even though she had come to share her Bloomsbury home with only her brother Adrian, “the servants continued … to open the door to visitors, shop for food, cook the meals in the basement, clean the grates, set the fires, wash the clothes, [and] apply for permission to go out”. “Why we have them, I can’t think”, mused Woolf, but she never lived without them (Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996, pp.238-9, 356).

Beyond the quantum physics, the flighty cook, bothersome servants, and the rest, it has often and plausibly been suggested that what Woolf really had in mind in selecting this date was the exhibition at the Grafton Galleries of “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”, which ran from 8 November 1910 to 15 January 1911 (and was remembered, ninety-nine years later, with the exhibition, ‘Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne & Beyond: Post-Impressionism from the Musée D’Orsay’, at the National Gallery of Australia). As her biographer concludes: Woolf’s “choice of date acknowledges that from this moment changes in art and changes in writing would seem inextricable to her” (Lee, pp.287-8).

The Post-Impressionist paintings provoked public outrage. “London was shocked to discover”, one critic concluded, “the existence of a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting”, and this was coupled with fears of widespread political violence as the event coincided with a coal-miners’ strike in Wales, the Suffragette movement, and fears of a German invasion (Francis Spalding, British Art Since 1900, 1986, p.37). “Into the genteel world” of such old-hat “dream merchants” as Whistler, Sergeant, Rossetti, and Millais, burst a new wave, and “the effect was extraordinary”, as reviewers condemned the works as “hysterical daubs”, “crude intolerable outrages”, and “childish rubbish” (Blom, p.281). Inevitably, the perpetrators were denounced as savage, sterile, unmanly, morbid, diseased, and degraded – although that was largely the point, as an avant-garde German art critic and champion of Post-Impressionism observed at the time: “Your civilization is your disease … my barbarism is my restoration to health” (p.281) – an early portent of the ‘treason of the intellectuals’ who would bow to barbarism in the post-war decades.  

The exhibition had been organized by Roger Fry, who had just become a friend of Woolf (who was then still Virginia Stephen), her sister Vanessa and her brother-in-law, Clive Bell. When Woolf later wrote Fry’s biography she describes oxymoronically the scene in 1910 as Fry prepared the exhibition, with paintings by Picasso, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne resting on chairs: “So he talked in that gay crowded room, absorbed in what he was saying … fantastic yet reasonable, gentle yet fanatically obstinate, intolerant yet absolutely open-minded, and burning with the conviction that something very important was happening” (Roger Fry, 1940, p.152). And indeed, as an art historian remarks: “Modern art in Britain is often said to date from 1910”, with Fry’s exhibition (Spalding p.37).

Fry repeated the dose with his Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912 (for which Leonard Woolf acted as secretary, shortly after he and Virginia had married), and the response was the same, with the public deriding the works and the critics confirming their prejudices. Nevertheless, the show revealed that an essential shift had occurred from the tradition, beginning with the Renaissance, that regarded a painting as a window onto the world and that had culminated in the Impressionist attempt to capture even the most transitory and evanescent effects of nature as they occurred. Now the Post-Impressionists were exploring alternative paths forward: “either by making more emphatic the underlying structure, as in the work of Cézanne, or by emphasizing their own expressive response and therefore selecting and to some extent rearranging the visual facts”, as with van Gogh (Spalding, p.39).

The exhibition’s central message and its impact can be measured by a comparison of two paintings by Duncan Grant, a close friend of Vanessa and Virginia. One, James Strachey, painted in 1910 before the exhibition, shows the subject reclining in a chair, surrounded by books and various motifs: it is quite representational and rather dull. The other, The Tub, painted in 1912, is of an almost unrecognizable female nude apparently washing her hair while standing in a tub made to look like the bottom half of a giant melon. There is no attempt to provide perspective or any sense of depth and a thick black line encompasses both the nude’s upraised arm and the mirror behind her to emphasize this intended effect. The figure is squat and monolithic in a fashion reminiscent of Picasso’s Two Nudes (1906) and Braque’s The Bather (1907), but it also communicates a sense of ugliness and even loathing that is accentuated by its sickly yellow colour and an inexplicable black lump between its legs right at the centre of the lower third of the painting. Whereas Picasso and Braque were exploring structures of perception and representation with their cubist experiments, Grant was expressing a deeply subjective, emotional response to his subject.

Grant epitomized the Bloomsbury Group as it was taking shape at this time and, above all, the promiscuous sexual behaviour that occurred within this close knit set. Around 1910 he began to play an increasing role in the lives of Virginia, her family and friends, as a “vague, charming, bohemian presence … a queer faun-like figure, hitching his clothes up, blinking his eyes, stumbling oddly over the long words in his sentences … as he gently infiltrated himself into the centre of their lives” (Lee, p.270).  At various times, he was the lover of Adrian Stephen (Virginia’s brother), Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, but also had a child by Vanessa Bell (Virginia’s sister), christened Angelica. Another of Grant’s lovers was David Garnett, whose enthusiastic reader’s report led to the acceptance for publication of Woolf’s first novel by the firm of her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. Garnett was present at the birth of Angelica in 1918 and declared that when she was old enough he would marry her, the daughter of his male lover, which he did in 1942, when he was 50 and she was 24, after which they had four daughters, before they separated. Such were the movers and shakers of Modernist culture.

The Post-Impressionist exhibition had occurred at a propitious time, as British artists, writers and intellectuals were coming to grips with the implications of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). Indeed, in 1910 Virginia had been occupying her evenings at the fireside struggling with Moore’s magnum opus, which had been a revelation for a generation of Cambridge graduates: “it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything”, as Keynes recalled (John Skorupski, English Language Philosophy: 1750-1945, 1993, p.152). In particular, she was grappling with Moore’s highly aestheticized conception of ‘the good’, which “provided an escape from fin-de-siècle miasma” for the “determinedly Modernist intellectuals” of Bloomsbury (pp.152-3). Moore himself gave a series of lectures in 1910-1911 (later published as Some Main Problems of Philosophy), in which he listed three main topics for philosophy: firstly and primarily, the compilation of a metaphysical inventory of kinds of things that are in the universe (!); secondly, an epistemological inquiry into how humans are able to know things; and, thirdly, an ethical inquiry into the good, as Moore had developed his conception in Principia Ethica.

In 1910, the concept of the good was central to the intense interest in Moore’s philosophy. Moore understood the good (and goodness) as a non-natural entity or quality that exists outside of time and does not present itself through mere sensory experience. It resists definition, with any attempt to do so likely to commit the famous ‘naturalistic fallacy’, where the ‘is’ of attribution is confused with the ‘is’ of identity. Consequently, “pleasure is good” cannot be taken to mean that pleasure is identical to good, but only that it partakes of the good (an argument that not incidentally reveals the poverty of Utilitarianism). In fact, good is only identical to itself. Moore’s famous analogy was with the colour yellow: neither yellow nor the good can be grasped or communicated in terms of their constituent parts. They are irreducible bedrock entities or qualities that can only be shown or intuited, and not deduced through reasoning or penetrated through analysis. While it may be possible to explain to a blind person that yellow is an example of a phenomenon called colour and is associated with a certain part of the light spectrum, this no more provides them with access to ‘yellow’, than explaining ‘goodness’ analytically to an ethically and aesthetically bankrupt person would provide them with access to the good.

The implications of this conception for aesthetics were enormous, especially as Moore had used the logic of his intuitionist argument to show how the creation and contemplation of beauty in works of art and literature and in idealized personal relations were supreme goods and therefore the highest pursuits to which civilized people could be called. The good, the beautiful, and their pursuit were shown to be irreducible ends in themselves, and Clive Bell quickly made the notion into the basis of a theory of civilization and civilized behaviour, in which such a pursuit and the exalted inner state it was presumed to create alone gave value to life. It was a theory that also lubricated the intellectualized ‘higher sodomy’ in which many of the male members of Bloomsbury famously indulged.

In 1910 the exclusivism and elitism inherent in this aestheticist vision was not lost on Virginia, who drew upon her own experiences in the intellectual hothouse of Bloomsbury to create the character of Rachel Vinrace in her first novel, The Voyage Out, on which she was then working, and which “reflected [her] own journey to this point” (Lee, p.237). Rachel’s voyage is not only across the sea but into adult womanhood as she struggles to establish herself amongst the highly articulate men who surround her on the trip. Rachel feels constantly under the gaze of a man she wishes to marry and of his friend, a character based on Strachey. As they discuss unfamiliar and difficult ideas, she feels they are waiting for her to blossom into someone worthy of their company. Ultimately, despairing that she may never realize or embody the idealized inner life they so value, Rachel descends into a feverish delirium, her body and the world around her becoming translucent as she floats in and out of consciousness, unable to pursue a train of thought, haunted by tunnels, deformed women, and oozing walls, and thus, overwhelmed by the crisis, she dies.

As such a denouement suggests, the year 1910 corresponded to a period of turmoil in Virginia’s life, especially with regard to her mental health, her older sister Vanessa, and her own sexuality. It is vital to consider such issues because, as Jane Wheare observes in her assessment of The Voyage Out: “Woolf was essentially an autobiographical writer … there is a legitimate inquiry to be made into her private life and opinions [and] a knowledge of Woolf’s life will certainly deepen our response to all her work” (in Julia Briggs (ed.) Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, 1994, p.6).

Virginia suffered from mental illness throughout her life and the symptoms of this have been carefully documented, not only by herself in her diaries, essays and books, but also by her husband Leonard, in a carefully maintained diary, and this material has been closely analyzed (e.g., by Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, 1992). The illness seems most likely to have been bipolar disorder (manic-depression), periodically of such severity that it involved rapid cycling between depression and mania, and also such psychotic symptoms as delusions and hallucinations. The onset of the illness corresponded sometimes to personal tragedy, such as the death of parents, with the death of her mother in 1895 and father in 1904 apparently precipitating severe attacks, although the death of a brother in 1906 was not followed by a major episode. Many years in this early period passed without notable episodes of the illness.

In was in 1910 that Virginia began the pattern that dominated the rest of her life, cycling rapidly through severe periods of mania and depression in March, June, July, August and September. Over the next five years, as she struggled to write and publish her first novel, and married Leonard, she entered into a nearly continuous sequence of manic-depressive episodes, often very severe, involving hallucinations and delusions. In September 1913 she attempted suicide and nearly died, and by 1915 she was extremely ill and bed-ridden, and required four live-in nurses. She was, as she recalled, “mad & seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall [and listening] to the voices of the dead” (Lee, p.352).

In 1910 another area central to Virginia’s life was reaching crisis-point. Her life-long intimacy with Vanessa had been fractured in 1907 when the latter married Clive Bell, and Virginia and her brother Adrian moved away from the home they had all shared. From this time, “Virginia saw herself as an acolyte locked out of the temple that was Vanessa”; indeed, “she was the worshipper outside, while Clive had free access to the goddess” inside (James King, Virginia Woolf, 1994, p.130). Her sister had always been “the central character in Virginia’s family story”, and “their rivalrous, mutually demanding and often critical intimacy was so deep as to be almost indescribable”; Vanessa “shape-shifted through Virginia’s life, taking the role of mother, lover, conspirator and muse, but always characterized as silent , sensual, maternal, powerful, generous and implacable”; ultimately, “to put it simply, Virginia was in love with her sister” (Lee, p.118-9), and this had extended, it seems, to periods of sexual intimacy (King, p.79).

Given Clive’s trespass upon this realm of intimacy, it was inevitable that Virginia developed negative feelings towards him in the years around 1910, exemplified by “her sexual distaste at his closeness to Vanessa”; and she recoiled at this “funny little creature twitching his pink skin and jerking out his little spasm of laughter”; while at the same time her own feelings for her sister’s “sensuality and power intensified”, and she visualized how Vanessa’s “hair swept across her forehead, and she was tawny and jubilant and lusty as a young God” (Lee, p.233). Vanessa quickly fell pregnant to Bell, and now, “added to the loss of Vanessa, was a corresponding feeling of jealousy at her sister’s fecundity”, with Vanessa giving birth to two sons, in 1907 and 1910 (King, p.131). This jealousy found expression not only in Virginia’s barely contained desire to wreck the new marriage, but also in her affair with the obviously virile new father, whom she now found irresistible, as they both coped with Vanessa’s preoccupation with the new babies.  In this affair she revelled in “conspiracy and flirtation”, and longed to be in her “lover’s arms” in a relationship that nevertheless seems possibly not to have been completely consummated, probably reflecting Virginia’s own indeterminate and frequently nightmarish orientation to sexuality, rather than any scruples about her behaviour (p.166).

Virginia’s sexuality was riddled with contradictions at this time, and a sexually “epiphanic moment” had occurred late in 1908, when she was 26 (King, p.129). As she sat with friends, Lytton Strachey had wandered in and pointed at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress: “Semen?” he inquired. “Can one really say it”, Virginia thought to herself, before dissolving in laughter: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. Sex permeated our conversation …We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of the good … A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us” (Moments of Being, 1985, p.213.).

Although this seminal tsunami was “a great advance in civilization”, the adventurousness remained restricted to discussion: “I was always sexually cowardly … My terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery”, she reflected, while she found that the Cambridge young men who visited were more interested in each other than in her, so that “the love affairs of buggers” dominated the conversation: “Had Lytton ‘copulated’ with George Mallory? Was Duncan dropping him for Maynard? Who had been to bed with Rupert Brooke?” It was all a boasting “game in which she had to compete” with these clever young people, while nevertheless remaining chaste herself, leading Strachey to observe: “You see, she is her name” (Lee, pp.243-4).

Strachey himself appeared as a solution to Vanessa’s problem with her sister, and she came to think that Virginia should marry the promiscuous enfant terrible. Vanessa perceptively recognized that Strachey’s obvious penchant for “homosexuality – or buggery as it was called by Virginia and her friends – was obviously a major obstacle”, although it did promise to provide “sensitivity, imagination, and wit” in conversation, which apparently the heterosexual gentlemen of their acquaintance were unable to deliver (King, pp.137-8). On the other hand, Virginia “intensely disliked what she considered to be effeminate demeanour on the part of some male homosexuals” (p.138). Ultimately, as it turned out, the biggest obstacle to this “alliance between a bugger and a half-inclined Sapphist” was their competitiveness and jealousy of each other as they struggled to write and publish their first books and break into the front rank of the literary world (p.139).

Even while Vanessa persevered through 1910 with the hunt for a suitable husband for Virginia, the latter was “being set up as a virginal ice-maiden”, as her family and friends “began to construct, by contrast with … the heterosexual eroticism [of] Vanessa, an image of [Virginia as] a chaste, chill, sexually inhibited maiden” (Lee, p.244). This construction received significant impetus from the failure of the sexual side of Virginia’s marriage in 1912 to Leonard Woolf. Woolf, Clive Bell reported, “f**ks her once a week but has not yet succeeded in breaking her maidenhead … It gives her little pleasure”; while Vita Sackville-West (Virginia’s later lover) reported that Woolf had had no sexual relations with anyone but her husband and that that had been “a terrible failure, and was abandoned quite soon” (Lee, p.331). Another account quotes Leonard as recalling how, on their honeymoon, he had tried to make love to his wife but “she had got into such a violent state of excitement that he had had to stop, knowing as he did that these states were a prelude to her attacks of madness” (p.331).

Virginia was emotionally stunted, according to this emerging narrative, because of the near-incestuous attentions of her older half-brother, George Duckworth, when she was nineteen or twenty. The impact of these was apparently mortifying, and may have later found expression in a passage in The Voyage Out. There the heroine is kissed in an unwelcome fashion and subsequently descends into a nightmare in which she is walking down a long tunnel that remorselessly tapers into a vault in which she is trapped alone with a deformed little man who squats on the floor gibbering, with long nails, and a pitted, animalistic face, while around them the walls ooze with congealing damp.

Clumsy and unwelcome as Duckworth’s attentions appear to have been, they were “more emotional than penetrative”, according to all the available evidence (Lee, p.158), and Virginia’s accounts of them are nearly always associated with related traumatic memories of how he insisted that she and Vanessa accompany him to parties and other society events, opportunities other girls may have relished. Instead, the two sisters found themselves out of their depth and deeply humiliated at their social ineptitude and what they came to see as George’s embarrassing social climbing. Accounts of Duckworth’s doltish behaviour came to be “running jokes” in Virginia’s gossipy “competition with people who had more scandalous sex lives”, and “she used George as an explanation for her terrifyingly volatile and vulnerable mental states, for her inability to feel properly [and] for her sexual inhibition” (pp.158-9).

This construction of Virginia as a victimized and shrivelled sexual being was later augmented by her devotees after her death, with another narrative of traumatic incestuous assault. This was built on recollections mentioned by Woolf for the first time at the end of her life, involving a much earlier incident with another half-brother, Gerald (to whose publishing company she nevertheless offered her first novel), who had apparently groped her in an exploratory fashion under her clothes when she was a young child. Looking back across half a century, she associated this event with memories of shame and guilt as she watched herself in a hallway mirror – a “looking-glass shame” that “lasted all my life” (Lee, p.125). This encounter came to be the focus of much speculation, as Virginia became the focus of a massive personality cult in the last decades of the twentieth century.

It was “a life-threatening act of extreme sadism which froze [her] sexuality and ignited her madness”, according to feminist scholars who believed the event caused all Woolf’s later difficulties, including her eating problems and panicky fear of illness, her terrifying dreams of a hideous, animalistic face in a mirror, and her “deepest depressive fear – that she does not actually exist behind the face in the mirror” (Lee, p.126). Alternatively, it has also been suggested that the guilt and shame may have arisen because she enjoyed the erotic experience, and the mirror gazing may have been associated with narcissistic masturbation. Furthermore, “she may have displaced her real erotic feelings of attraction to her father on to her memories (or her inventions) of abuse by her half-brothers” (p.126).

Such constructions are a great weight to place on the available evidence, as Lee demonstrates with relentless thoroughness in her 892 page biography. Moreover, as she remarks, “there were many more long-term, problematic and influential features in her childhood than this, and it distorts the thick complexity of her family life to isolate and emphasize this one” (p.127). One might also question the double-standard that so fiercely condemns the behaviour of Woolf’s half-brothers and blames it for all her woes, while condoning or ignoring the equally reprehensible sexual behaviour of her older sister towards Virginia. Nevertheless, “what matters most … is what Virginia Woolf made out of what happened”, in both her own personal relationships and her books, and despite “the gap between the available evidence and the story she drew from it [she] herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging” (p.158).

Consequently, around 1910, Virginia’s identity as a victimized “virginal ice-maiden” began to solidify, and even Leonard Woolf spoke of his future wife as “Aspasia, one of the Olympians, cold, pure, and remote”, while Clive Bell visualized her dressed in white muslin, floating over the world, “with your wild, romantic vision sweeping away beyond the horizon, beautifully fixed and desolate” (Lee, p.244). Meanwhile, she made “private jokes … about feeling hot and ready for affection” (Lee, p.245), while she continued to lament how young men seemed “so uninterested in her that she would spend her days as a virgin, an aunt, and an author” (King, p.131).

It was this image of Woolf that later prompted Wyndham Lewis to mock her pretensions and lampoon her attack on Arnold Bennett in her famous essay. Taking “the cow by the horns”, as he put it, he ridiculed Woolf’s self-portrayal as the timid “feminine principle”, the “introverted matriarch” of Bloomsbury, peeping out “from the security of the private mind”, at the intimidating outside world dominated by the “big, beefy brute, Bennett” (Men Without Art, 1934, pp.158-71). Indeed, as we have noted, there was a fundamental unfairness in Woolf’s assault on Bennett’s reputation, because she and those whom she was promoting to the vanguard of Modernism in the post-1910 world had in fact no monopoly over a novelistic focus on subjectivity, consciousness, and the inner lives of fictional characters. In fact, her attempt to portray “the modern turn towards the evocation of subjectivity as a post-Edwardian revolt against the ‘external’ realism of Arnold Bennett and his generation” was simply a bluff to disguise the element of truth that lay in Bennett’s criticism of her (Baldick, p.190).

Indeed, the earlier writers had a capacity to create convincing characters in their stories that Woolf herself lacked, as is demonstrated by the torturous streams of consciousness that constitute so much of her novels in which so little external activity occurs. While often incredibly complex, these fail frequently to portray convincingly the inner worlds of real human beings, and seem rather like ersatz subjectivities created by projections of the delusions, fears, and obsessions of a troubled, even paranoid, authorial presence. And this presence lurks in the novels like an inquisitional god, penetrating at will into the thoughts of any character that takes its fancy, as for example in Mrs Dalloway, where we are taken into the psychological peregrinations of the lady herself, her long-ago lover, a tragically conflicted Great War veteran, and even the Dalloway’s maid, learning very little of consequence beyond an impression of how Woolf thought such people should think, and how the Bloomsbury-approved attitudes towards the war and sexuality required the suicide of the veteran.

In these endeavours, Woolf claimed to offer access to psychological ‘insights’, but these seem often to betray only a deeply overwrought mind, as for example in the opening of To the Lighthouse. Here Mr and Mrs Ramsey discuss the possibility of a trip the next day to the eponymous obelisk, while their six-year old son, James, lurks in the background, contemplating the thrilling prospect and revealing an inner world of frightening, indeed murderous, intensity. Consequently, when his father remarks that it is unlikely to be fine enough to make the voyage immediately, Woolf has James react with barely repressed homicidal rage: “Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it” (Oxford, 2000, p.8). Mrs Ramsey herself seems perpetually disengaged, musing so relentlessly and pointlessly about the people around her that it is a wonder that she accomplishes anything at all, while she remains oblivious to vital issues, like the pathological proclivities of her young son. She is certainly lucky to have a cook who can spend three days successfully producing the Boeuf en Daube for the climactic dinner that appears to give what slight meaning there is to Mrs Ramsey’s life, and, of course, she gleefully takes credit for her servant’s creation when a valued guest judges it “a triumph … How did she manage these things in the depths of the country … She was a wonderful woman” (p.136). Indeed.

Ultimately, 1910 may conveniently be accepted to mark the beginning of Modernism in Britain, with its shift in focus away from an external world that was becoming overwhelming in its complexity and creative challenges, towards the more accommodating realms of subjectivity and flux. However, this was not because of any contribution exclusively made by Woolf or her coterie, as she claimed in her essay. As Baldick points out in his literary history of the movement, there are several problems with such a simplified rendering of history: firstly, it ignores the previous evolution of the literary awareness of ‘consciousness’ in the novel, in which previous writers played a significant part; secondly, it gratuitously ignores the considerable extent to which the fiction of Bennett and his contemporaries also paid attention to the psychological dimension of fiction; and finally, and more grievously, it promotes the view “now enshrined in post-structuralist dogma … that any adequate depiction of consciousness in the novel is incompatible with nineteenth-century realist traditions and thus requires a radical overthrow of realism”, as somehow antiquated and reactionary (p.190).

A fairer, more accurate, and much more comprehensive view of the period would recognize that 1910 was indeed the beginning of an extremely fertile period of fiction in England, during which there was exhibited achievements of unexcelled imaginative power, but that this was accomplished by many writers other than Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence, including several works published in 1910-11 by Bennett (Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways) and Wells (The History of Mr. Polly); as well as subsequently by Compton Mackenzie, W. Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Richardson, and May Sinclair. These can be counted as English examples of the German genre of Bildungsroman, in the sense of novels about the formation of character that met the vital cultural need “to grasp in individualized terms the defining passage from ‘Victorian’ social conformity to modern autonomous selfhood” (Baldick, p.194). (From this perspective it might be observed that Woolf’s first – semi-autobiographical – novel, The Voyage Out, on which she was labouring in 1910 was a sort of anti-Bildungsroman, portraying the ‘de-formation’ of character and the disintegration of personality under the pressure to realize such selfhood, defined in terms of highly demanding philosophical and aesthetic ideals.)

Woolf should have been acutely aware of this literary efflorescence, as she was, like Bennett, a regular literary reviewer. That she chose to portray the period in the way she did can be explained in various ways. Foremost was her desire to make herself the fount, the womb, from which alone emerged the Modern novel, using 1910 as a convenient date for the start of her labour. As Hynes observes, she was compelled to destroy Bennett and everything he represented because of her need to wipe away previous literary history so that “there is no immediate past, no continuity with previous generations, no inherited subject: the novel begins again now”, with her (p.400). Moreover, by applying the label ‘Edwardian’ she “tied the novelists of Bennett’s generation – who were still active and productive in post-war England – to a remote, pre-war past and a fat, dead king”, making it easy to ridicule and dismiss them (p.401). 

Another reason for her attitude was her snobbish disdain for Bennett, who had started from modest origins as the son of a draper and worked his way through night school before becoming an extremely successful writer, journalist, and literary entrepreneur. He was, for many in the Bloomsbury set, an unbearable parvenu and an easy target, possessed of a mere “shopkeeper’s view of literature” as Woolf put it; “an insufferable little man and ridiculous to boot”, according to Clive Bell; and an annoying red-faced man, “with an air of impertinent prosperity and the aspect of a successful wholesale grocer”, as T. S. Eliot exclaimed (John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1992, p.153). None of them could stand the fact that Bennett had made a fortune from his literary activity and that he could, for example, easily rebut Eliot’s sneering reference to his having the temerity to own a yacht by pointing out that there were in fact two such vessels, and one had such a large crew that she was more accurately described as a ship.

Ultimately, Woolf’s disdainful attitude towards Bennett and the others whom she consigns to the wrong side of 1910 reflects her defensiveness in the face of novelists who enjoyed a range of life-experiences that extended well beyond the cosseted and rarefied intellectual, cultural, social, psychological, and sexual environment of Bloomsbury. This appears especially to be the case with respect to precisely that area of her writing where she sought so desperately to elevate herself (and her coterie) above Bennett and those she disparaged, that is, in regard to a genuine awareness of the psychological dimensions of life in Britain in 1910 under conditions of cataclysmic change, and of the true ‘character’ – so alien to the spirit of Bloomsbury – that the British people revealed as they soon entered into the most desperate and momentous period of warfare in their history.