routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

422 The twentieth century: 1900–45
poetic (rather than realistic) symbols. Other examples are The Rainbow,
The Waves, Kangaroo and Heart of Darkness. This contrasts with the
normal practice of nineteenth-century novelists. The nineteenth-century
novelists do not avoid symbolism but it is associated with clearly
identifiable places, people or human qualities. Examples are Mansfield
Park, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch. The use of
poetic symbols suggests a more indirect, oblique, and tenuous approach
to reality. For a writer such as Virginia Woolf, who has no definite or
fixed vision of reality, the suggestiveness of these symbols is an essential
part of her art.
Virginia Woolf was also a highly influential journalist and critic. In
A Room of One’s Own (1928) she gives a unique account of why a
woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write
fiction. It has become a classic statement of feminism. Some of her
many reviews and critical essays are collected in The Common Reader
(1925; second edition, 1932). With her husband, Leonard Woolf, Virginia
founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. The press published Virginia Woolf’s
own work and the work of other Modernists such as T.S. Eliot.
Here is an example of Virginia Woolf ’s prose style: a brief extract from
To The Lighthouse. Lily Briscoe is one of the characters who return to the
Ramsays’ holiday home. Mrs Ramsay’s efforts to persuade Lily to marry
have come to nothing but her influence is still pervasive. The extract
reveals some of the thoughts and feelings passing through Lily’s mind:
But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her
design which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot
or so, oh, the dead! She murmured, one pitied them, one brushed
them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at
our mercy. Mrs Ramsay had faded and gone, she thought. We
can override her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned
ideas. She recedes further and further from us. Mockingly she
seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying,
of all the incongruous things, ‘Marry, marry!’ (sitting very upright
early in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in the
garden outside). And one would have to say to her, it has all
gone against your wishes.
We can note here how Virginia Woolf represents Lily’s ‘stream of