THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

glancing insights into the identities of characters are complemented by larger symbols (a flickering lighthouse or
moving water) which are allowed to be both temporary and permanent, both ‘real’ and resonant, both constant and
fluctuating. The fictional whole thus becomes a normative expression of certain Modernist themes and modes.
Woolf’s particular preoccupation with time is closely related to her manifest interest in flux, a dissolution or
dissipation of distinctions within a fluid pattern of change and decay, which she recognizes in nature and science as
much as in the human psyche. Her universe, though effectively Godless, is not one deprived of imposed meaning and
patterning. Her narratives are variously punctuated by clock-readings and clock-soundings, by the measurement of
tides and the altitude of the sun, by history and archaeology, by ageing and dying. Whereas in her longest novel, The
Years (1937), she stresses the nature of a local awareness of the sequential passage of time from the 1880s to the
1930s, and explores the consequences and processes of waiting, learning, and ageing, she elsewhere shapes her fiction
by means of the larger consciousness of a narrator alert both to historical callibration of time and, more significantly,
to an imaginative freedom from time.
The informing presence of women characters with an aesthetic propensity, or of particular women artists, serves to
moderate and condition the larger ambitions of the narratives in which they appear. Although Virginia Woolf rarely
directly echoes the insistent narrative voice of a George Eliot, her own work does reflect what she recognized in her
pioneer essay on Eliot (1925) as a tendency to introduce characters who stand for ‘that troubled spirit, that exacting
and questioning and baffled presence’ of the novelist herself. If neither Lily Briscoe nor Miss La Trobe possesses the
cultural significance of a Romola or a Dorothea, both are allowed, as amateur artists, to act out the ordering dilemma
of the professional. In the final part of To the Lighthouse the ‘weight’ of Lily Briscoe’s painting seems to be poised as
she explores the elusive nature of mass and form: ‘Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and
evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be
clamped together with bolts of iron.’ A similar ‘visionary’ insight temporarily enlightens the amateur author of the
historical pageant around which Between the Acts (1941) is shaped. Miss La Trobe watches entranced as butterflies
(traditional images of the human soul) ‘gluttonously absorb’ the rich colours of the fancy dress strewn on the grass;
the possibility of a completer art briefly dawns on her, only to fall apart again. In both novels women’s sensibility
(and sensitivity) contrasts with the factual ‘materialism’ of a world dominated by the kind of men who ‘negotiated
treaties, ruled India, controlled finance’ or who insist, as Colonel Mayhew does in Between the Acts, that no picture of
history is complete without reference to the British Army. The Mrs Ramsays, the Lily Briscoes, and the Miss La
Trobes dream their brief dreams or are vouchsafed momentary ‘epiphanies’; the men are often left content with a
limited grasp, and presumed control, of the physical world.
[p. 517]
Virginia Woolf’s most complete, but ambiguous, representation of the life of a woman character’s mind in Mrs
Dalloway is also her most thorough experiment with the new technique of interior monologue. The novel plays subtly
with the problem of an identity which is both multiple and singular, both public and private, and it gradually insists
on the mutual dependence and opposition of the perceptions of Clarissa Dalloway and the shell-shocked ramblings of
a victim of the war, Septimus Warren Smith. Mrs Dalloway reveals both the particular originality of Woolf’s fictional
mode and the more general limitations of her social vision. When she returns to the problem of a dissipated identity in
her extraordinary tribute to the English aristocracy, Orlando (1928), she seems to seek both to dissolve and define
character in a fanciful concoction of English history and shifting gender. The book is in part a sentimental tribute to
the personal flair and ancestral fixation of her aristocratic friend and fellow-writer, Victoria (‘Vita’) Sackville-West
(1892-1962), in part an exploration of a ‘masculine’ freedom traditionally denied to women. If Woolf’s depiction of
the society of her time is as blinkered as that of E. M. Forster by upper-middle-class snobberies and would-be
liberalisms, the historical perspective which determined her feminism made for a far more distinctive clarity of
argument. In the essay ‘Street Haunting’ (published in 1942) she writes of the pleasures of a London flâneuse who
discovers as the front door shuts that the shell-like nature of domestic withdrawal is broken open ‘and there is left of
all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’. Almost the opposite process
is delineated in the study A Room of One’s Own (1929), where the existence of a private space, and of a private
income, is seen as a prerequisite for the development of a woman writer’s creativity. A Room of One’s Own is,
however, far more than an insistent plea for privacy, leisure, and education; it is a proclamation that women’s writing
has nearly come of age. It meditates on the pervasiveness of women as the subjects of poetry and on their absence
from history; it plays as fancifully as the narrator of Orlando might with the domestic fate of a woman Shakespeare,
but above all it pays tribute to those English novelists, from Aphra Behn to George Eliot, who established a tradition
of women’s writing. ‘Masterpieces are not single and solitary births’, she insisted, ‘they are the outcome of many
years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the
single voice.’ It is in this tradition that Virginia Woolf most earnestly sought to see herself, a tradition which to her
would eventually force open a way for the woman writer to see human beings ‘not always in relation to each other but