by JENNY NOYCE
An exemplar of modernism, Virginia Woolf’s revolutionary novel explored ideas—psychology, sexuality, imperialism—that roiled the twentieth century.
One hundred years ago this May, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The opening line from Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway is among a handful of famous phrases scribed by modernist authors that retain the aura of their just-barely post-Edwardian era even as they bear the distinct stamp of modernity. In her novels and essays, Woolf explored the early twentieth century’s swiftly shifting attitudes toward modern phenomena and ideas: feminism, imperialism, psychology, sexuality. Like her fellow modernists, Woolf made an “inward turn” away from realist representation and into the human mind; she insisted that a character’s internal landscape merited deep exploration. Art, Woolf believed, should attempt to represent humans’—and particularly women’s—perceptions and sensations. In making this attempt, Woolf innovated distinctive literary forms and theories that continue to influence writers and scholars well into the twenty-first century.
Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, a loose affiliation of writers, artists, and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster and others, who began meeting regularly in 1905 to discuss art, politics, philosophy, and literature. The Bloomsbury Group was a “collectivity of friends and relations who knew and loved one another for a period of time extending over two generations,” writes scholar S. P. Rosenbaum. While “it is somewhat misleading to think of Bloomsbury as a movement based on philosophical, moral, artistic, or political affinities,” the meetings were a productive site for debate and discussion wherein Woolf developed and refined many of her ideas about writing and art. “[A]ll novels,” Woolf wrote in 1924, “deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel […] has been evolved.”
In 1917, Woolf and her husband, Leonard Woolf (also a member of the Bloomsbury Group), established the Hogarth Press. Initially, the press served as the avenue for publishing their own work as well as that of friends, but by the end of World War I, the Woolfs had expanded “into a broader set of political and fictional works,” writes Ursula McTaggart, including political pamphlets, feminist works, translations, and literature by international, colonial, and working-class authors. Over time, “Hogarth translations and feminist publications stressed collective voices over authorial ownership and restructured the history of great men to include international, colonial, and female outsiders.” In so doing, the press “facilitated the construction of an alternative literary history that moved beyond the traditional British canon,” writes McTaggart, and published works now widely recognized as exemplars of modernism, including T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1923), novels by Forster and Katherine Mansfield, and Woolf’s own fiction and essays.
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