Two Kinds of Modern Fiction by David Lodge

Modern Fiction Modernist Fiction

Realistic (Edwardians) 1930. Also known Henry James
as traditionally/conventional/social. It was a Virginia Woolf
blending of public and private experience, D.H. Lawrence
inner and outer history conveyed through a
third person past tense authorial mode of
narration or the autobiographical-
confessional mode.
1930 1914
Orwell
Greene
Isherwood
Modernism (1940)
Realism (postwar period)

The literary situation during Edwardian times was influenced by French realists and
naturalists. The introduction of innovatory ideas from the continent of Europe initiated by the
English Decadents fizzled out in the Edwardian era.
This literary situation was about to change for two reasons:
1. Ezra Pound whose personal mission was to make London the center of a new avant-
garde was approaching fruition. He had modernized himself on his own. 1914.
2. The Great War sending many to their deaths on the battlefield. After the convulsion
of the Great War the Edwardian certainties and complacencies were unable to
reassert themselves.
Modernist fiction is pioneered in England by James and Conrad. It reaches its fullest
development in the work of Joyce.

It is experimental or innovatory in form displaying marked deviations from preexisting

modes of discourse.
It is concerned with consciousness and also with the subconscious and unconscious
working of the human mind.
The structure of external objective events essential to traditional narrative art is
diminished in scope and scale, or is almost completely dissolved in order to make
room for introspection, analysis and reflection.
A real modernist novel has no real beginning, since it plunges us into a flowing
stream of experience with which we gradually familiarize ourselves by a process of
inference and association and its ending is usually open or ambiguous, leaving the
reader in doubt as to the final destiny of the characters.
To compensate for the diminution of narrative structure and unity, alternative
methods of aesthetic ordering become more prominent such as allusion to or

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 imitation of literary models or mythical archetypes, and the repetition-with-variation
of motifs, images, symbols, - a technique described as rhythm, Leitmotif and
spatial form.
It eschews the straight chronological ordering of its material, and the use of a reliable,
omniscient and intrusive narrator. It employs, instead, either a single, limited point of
view, or a method of multiple points of view.
It tends towards a fluid or complex handling of time, involving much cross-reference
backwards and forwards across the chronological span of the action.
Formalism is the logical aesthetic for modernist art, though not all modernist writers
accepted or acknowledged this. From the position that art offers a privileged insight into
reality there is a natural progression to the view that art creates its own reality and from there
to the position that art is not concerned with reality at all.
Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random, it leaves myriads of ends untied,
untidily, said Johnson.

Modernism:
Modernity came into being with the Renaissance and was defined in relation to
Antiquity. It was characterized by the development based upon industrialization, socio-
economic changes generated by scientific and technological discoveries and innovations,
population movements, urbanization, the formation of national states, and mass political
movements, all driven by the expanding capitalist world market.
The ideals of Modernity have been the great projects, utopias or not, that made man
look forward to the future. During modern times we witness the rise of a myth: the Myth of
Progress, which sees time and history as an arrow always pushing forward, and every single
historical moment is the overcoming of the moment before.
There is this attitude of imposing the new, the Avant Garde, equality and freedom for
all men.
Modernism:
It refers to these art works or principles behind their creation produced since the end of
the nineteenth century. It concerns a particular set of cultural or aesthetic styles. Modernist
writers reject the artistic conventions of the previous age, emphasize experimentation and
the aim of finding an inner truth behind surface appearance. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,
Proust, Kafka, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats.

They reject realism

They tend to be self-conscious, deliberately remind the reader that they are art works
rather than seeking to serve as windows on reality.
They reject: well-made plot the rounded and lifelike characters.
It starts really during the late nineteenth century, when a sense of the passing of the
Victorian period was already in the air.

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 It was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and
verse.
Modernists experimented with literary forms and expressions: MAKE IT NEW
Three major influences on the changes in attitude and technique in modern novel:
1. The writers realization, awareness, that the general background of belief which
united him with his reading public, had disappeared: the values that had been shared
by most people were shaken. The writer needed to find ways of convincing the reader
that his own private sense of what was relevant was truly valid. As examples:
Virginia Woolf tried to solve the problem by using some of the devices of poetry in
order to suggest the writers own sense and vision fo the world.
James Joyce reacted against the general background of belief by using multiple
points of view simultaneously, the author being objective and committed to none of
them.
2. A new view of time: Time was a continuous flow in the consciousness of the
individual. The difference between time scientifically speaking and psychologically
considered.
3. The nature of consciousness: consciousness is multiple, the past is always present
in it at some level and is continually affecting ones present reactions.
The view that man is his memories, that his present is the sum of his past, that if we dig
into a mans consciousness we can tell the whole truth about him. By exploring in depth into
consciousness and memory rather than proceeding lengthwise along the dimension of time,
a writer could write a novel dealing with only one day in the life of the heros life (Ulysses
and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf).
The interior monologue and stream of consciousness techniques are methods used by
some writers to describe the inmost thoughts and feelings of their characters. In place of the
objective description or conventional dialogue, we are shown the characters thoughts and
feelings. The characters impressions, or reminiscences are given often repetitively and
without any logical sequence or syntax, as they flow through his consciousness.
Education Act of 1870
In England, another influence is the growth of popular education as a result of the
Education Act of 1870, which led to the rapid emergence of a large, unsophisticated literary
public. A public that was literate but not in any real sense educated increased throughout
the nineteenth century, and one result of this was the splitting of the reading public into
highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows. Many writers react by creating an art for the
intellectual elites.
Development of the short story enriched by the new techniques
Literary Criticism: the debate over the nature and function of reading and writing. They
provide frameworks which determine how we read, and more generally, how we make sense
of experience, how we interpret.
The French Symbolists: In the nineteenth century, in Paris and associated with other
labels: decadence, aestheticism, neo-romanticism. It is also connected with Impressionism

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in painting. Symbolism contains elements of all these trends, but it is distinct in its aesthetics
and mystique. It had great repercussions through the early decades of the XX century.
In England, we witness the development of the Aesthetic movement. It starts during
the late Victorian period (1868 to 1901) and is generally considered to have ended with the
trial of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Aestheticism, with its insistence on art for arts sake,
defied somehow the assumptions about the nature and function of art held by ordinary
middle-class readers. It represents the same tendencies of Symbolism or Decadence in
France and may be considered as the British branch of those movements. It belongs to the
anti-Victorian reactions and had post-romantic roots. The poet becomes alienated from the
society in which he lives. A work of art is an independent organic form with universal
significance. It attempts to make art socially utilitarian.
The aesthetic writers thought that art should provide refine sensuous pleasure, rather
than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art did not have a didactic purpose. They
developed a cult for the beautiful. Characteristics:
- suggestion rather than statement,
- sensuality,
- use of symbols, and
- synesthetic effects, that is, correspondences between words, colors and music.
Decadents: Yellow nineties with a superficial fin-de-sicle aesthetic. The poet tends to be
concerned not with the fruit of experience but with the experience itself. The poetic
interest is focused on corruption and morbidity, feverish hedonism, with stress on Art of
Arts Sake or lart pour lart

Class notes:

The possibility of utopia, the construction of the perfect society. The systematization of knowledge.
The rise of religion, philosophy, the great master narratives. The legitimating discourses of legitimacy:
Communism, revolution, racism, nationalism, Nazism, imperialism. Urbanization in the cities. The
center of modernity was in Europe, the formation of the idea of the nation state: political
organization.

Modernism as a cultural movement. It starts in the art, architecture in the XIX century. Literary in the
decades of the XX century. Latin America: Modernismo began earlier. European Modernism can be
translated as Avant Gard (the first line in the battlefield).

England was still the cultural center of the United States.

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T. S. Eliot (1888 1965)
Thomas Sterns Eliot born in Missouri.

Influenced there by the anti-romanticism, Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, the

Italian Renaissance, and Indian mystical philosophy.
He went to England shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
He was assistant editor of the Egoist and The Criterion (literary magazines who
paved their way of modernist works, they published Avant Gard works as a didactic
source)
His poetry first appeared in 1915, when The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was
printed in Poetry Magazine. In 1922 The Waste Land was published.
In 1927, he became a British subject and joined the Church of England.
He sought to make poetry subtler, more suggestive, and at the same time more
precise.
He had learned from the Imagists the necessity of clear, hard and precise images.
IMAGISM: A school of poetry (1909 1917) in England. Poetry should use ordinary
language, be innovative as regards technique, be free to deal with any subject, and work
through hard, precise clear imagery rather than through allowing the authors own voice to
intrude into the poem. It was a reaction against Romanticism. Their leader was Ezra Pound
(1885-1972). They prefer the urban landscape. Absolute attention of any unnecessary word.
Metaphysical poets: a group of poets writing between roughly, 1610 and 1680.
Metaphysical poetry is both intellectual and emotional, exploring both intellectual matters
and emotional or psychological ones. It uses ordinary speech as well as terms drawn from
the science of the day and scientific concepts also-. Technical devices associated with
schools are paradox, (an apparently self-contradictory statement that on closer examination
is shown to have a basis of truth. A paradox concentrates the readers attention on what is
being said, an apparently nonsensical statement: One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
/ And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.
The conceit, an intricate or far-fetched metaphor, which functions through arousing
feelings of surprise, shock or amusement. The poet compares elements which seem to have
little or nothing in common.
Love and religion were probably its most common subject matter. Andrew Marvells
To His Coy Mistress
Eliot saw in the French Symbolists how an image could be both absolutely precise
in what it referred to physically and at the same time endlessly suggestive in the meanings
it set up because of its relationship to other images.
Jules Laforgue also influenced him with the combination of precision, symbolic
suggestions and ironic mockery in his poetry. He was also influenced by other XIX century
French poets like Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarm.
There is a romantic element in Eliots poetry, but it is combined with a dry ironic
allusiveness, a play of wit, and a colloquial element, which are not normally found in poets
of the romantic tradition.

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 Eliots real novelty was his deliberately elimination of all merely connective and
transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate
juxtaposition of images without overt explanation of what they are doing, his use of oblique
references to other works of literature. Prufrock presents a symbolic landscape where the
meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged
by echoes, often ironic, of Hesiod and Dante and Shakespeare. Even a reader ignorant of
most the literary allusions can often get the feel of the poem and achieve some
understanding of what it says.
In an essay called Hamlet Eliot reveals something of the theory behind his method
of writing: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective
correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate
in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. This theory is central
to modern poetry as it was to imagism: SHOW, DONT TELL.
Eliots early poetry, middle 1920s, is concerned with The Waste Land, with aspects
of the decay of culture in the modern Western World. After his formal acceptance of Anglican
Christianity, we find a penitential note in much of his verse, and a note of searching for
spiritual peace, with a lot of allusions to the Bible, to liturgy, and to mystical religious literature
and to Dante. Ash Wednesday. The so-called Ariel poems present or explore aspects of
religious doubts or discovery or revelation.
1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. His positive qualities: his cunning, his fine craftsmanship,
his original accent, his historical and representative importance as the poet of the modern
Symbolist-metaphysical tradition.

Class Notes:

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell, a metaphysical poet. A conceit, a far-fetched metaphor. A
complex analogical relation. This is another feature as well as the paradox, a contradiction stating a
general truth. A possible contradiction. *The Flood: hyperbole, the deluge. *Jews: biblical allusion.
End of times. *Vegetable love: conceit. Theme: seize the day.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Prufrock was conceived in 1910. The poem was not completed until the summer of
1911. The epigraph and the opening lines establish both the importance of Dante and the
structure of the poem and the parallels ironic, pathetic and comic which Eliot constructs
between the poet of the Divine Comedy and Prufrock.
The other major influence was Bergson, in particular Introduction la
Mtaphysique. It appears that Eliot modelled Prufrock on Bergsons scheme. The

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mechanism of Prufrocks fluid psychological processes, the visions and revisions (line 39)
and the recollections, associations and fantasies from line 50 onwards, accord with the
scheme elaborated by Bergson in Matter and Memory.
Title: The name J. Alfred Prufrock follows the early form of the poets signature T. Stearns
Eliot.
l.1: in the Inferno, Dante is conducted through the underworld by the Latin poet Virgil. You
in The Love Song is merely some friend or companion, presumably of the male sex. Eliot
said that Prufrock was in part a man of about forty and in part himself, and that he was
employing the notion of the split personality. On yet another occasion, he referred to Prufrock
as a young man.
Eliots use of the image illustrates what he referred to in 1917 as the element of
surprise so essential to poetry.
l. 13-14: Laforgue: Dans la pice les femmes vont et viennent/En parlant des maitres de
Sienne. In imitating Laforgue almost Word for Word, Eliot introduces an element of parody,
re-rendering the French in a tripping rhyming couplet, set off as a chiming chorus (repeated
at lines 35-6).
l. 15: fog: the smoke that blew across the Mississippi from the factories.
ll. 23-48: there will be time, echoing the words of the preacher in Ecclesiastes
ll. 28, 38: indecisiveness of Hamlet in avenging his fathers death
l. 44: the word order is French, not English.
There several references to Hamlet in lines 111, 117-118, 119.
Biblical references

Class notes:

Epigraph: a paratextual device. A dialogic relationship with the text.

Virgil guides Dante in the different circles. He found historical characters in Inferno. The persona goes
all the way in search of a woman. The epigraph from Inferno. He writes in tercets hectometer. When
Eliot wrote Prufrock he was an agnostic. Eliot decided to become a religious person. Then he preaches
in his writing.

Its subgenre is the dramatic monologue. It flourished during the romantic period. A critical moment
sets the persona thinking. It has the influence of the theater.

The apostrophe is included in the text. We dont have a you.

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Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Born in Idaho.
He left for Europe, was active in literary circles.
In the 1920s he lived in Paris.
In 1945, Pound was imprisoned in Rome by American troops for his support of the
fascists to be tried for treason. He was declared insane and committed.
Following his release from hospital in 1958, he returned to Italy.
Pound is often accused of being archaic and self-consciously modern. A constant
innovator, also reviving old forms and introducing into English elements from the
poetry of other languages.

A Retrospect
The manifesto for Imagism. Three principles agreed upon:
1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in
sequence of a metronome.
A few donts:
An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time. It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
A list of donts for those beginning to write verses: to begin with, consider the three
propositions:

Demanding direct treatment

Economy of words
The sequence of the musical phrase
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable
work.

Language:

Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.

Dont mix an abstraction with the concrete. The natural object is always the adequate
symbol.
Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.
Dont imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.

He wrote the manifesto for Imagism. MAKE IT NEW.

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He was anti-Semitic. He referred to them as usurers. His innovations: he went back to old mode
poetry.

He was inspired by Anglo Saxon, Chinese, Japanese poetry. A progressist/anarchist. He was influenced
by the Haiku, a 17 syllable poem divided into 3 lines. Haiku means cutting. It represents a
juxtaposition of ideas. 2 elements become one. Theres always a kigo that concentrates the season
(a seasonal word). Pound starts writing modernist haikus. He writes about the new element: the
urban landscape/life.

Alba. A simile: *The beloved one sleeping/the lilies of the valley. He doesnt call the poem Dawn
because of Baudelaires influence: the evocative bewitchment of words.

In A Station of the Metro. The train and the bough. Modernist element: the train and the city, public
transport.

After Imagism came Vorticism, which consisted of images suggesting movement.

The Garret. The apostrophe is the beloved one. Its about a couple waking up together. *Dawn enters
with little feet/like a gilded Pavlova => A conceit (simile). Light entering like a dancer. A conversational
style. Colloquial rhythm. Antipoetic in rhythm. *Butler: related with the wealthy English class. Theme:
The reality of happiness/the idea of happiness. *Gynogenesis: the beginning of the day. Waking hour.
Desire vs. reality.

Joyce and the Short Story:

Joyce (1882-1941) produced a short story which is as carefully as a lyric poem.
Dubliners as a work in the naturalist tradition. It offered a portrait of a particular
culture, yet, the portrait it provides can only be a series of sketches and impressions.
The naturalist school in France claimed to have brought the scientific spirit into
fiction by means of the accurate, carefully-documented and deliberately impartial portrayal
of social conditions and psychological states. The naturalistic writers were materialists,
holding that humanity was part of the biological kingdom and was subject to the universal
laws of heredity and environment. The popularity of this form and its techniques owes
something to the advent of impressionist painting. Established rules of composition were
ignored and the paintings were executed deftly and rapidly so as to capture the impression
before it was lost.
The literary equivalent to capturing the moment was the so-called slice of life which
attempted to recreate a particular emotional atmosphere. (he called it odor)
In France, Maupassant was regarded as the master of this form, but Joyce took it
further than Maupassant had done.
Joyces technique is extremely detached and impartial. None of his characters
strikes us as primarily a mouthpiece.

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 His settings should be utterly authentic. Joyces refusal to use invented names and
naming of actual shops and pubs are a proof of this.
In a slice of life story, character is neither analyzed at length, nor is it unfolded
through the action leading to an inevitable fate. It is sketched or sampled at a particular
moment. A typical Maupassant story revolves around an exceptional event or incorporates,
as part of its narrative development, a biographical summary of the past life of the main
character. The same is true of some of the Dubliners stories. These are an anticipation of
the Ulysses (1922) slice of life, it extends across eighteen hours in the lives of three main
characters. The slice of life story replaces extended description with the suggestive
evocation of atmospheres.
One of the devices he used is the descriptive repetition. Another device is the use of
repeated motifs in the action. The same action or relationship recurs in different forms at
various points in the plot.
Another means of charging physical details with additional significance is the use of
symbolism, again common to Eliot and Pound.
Though not present in Araby, he used Free Indirect Style to create a kind of mental
landscape through the style, to create a narrative colored by his characters internal
impressions. Free indirect style is a form of Third person narrative which mimics the
vocabulary and idioms of a particular character. It aims to convey a mode of thinking and
feeling informally and from the inside, without resorting to the explicitness of Direct Style,
Reported speech, or authorial summary. A naturalistic technique working through
impressions rather than analysis. The free indirect style is a stage in Joyces development
towards a fully fledge stream of consciousness technique, that will develop in the chapters
of Ulysses. To show the character without the intervention of the narrator, without any
authorial guidance. The narrators implicit attitude wavers between sympathy and ironic
superiority.
Epiphany: it means spiritual manifestation, an intuitive insight into reality. The revelation of
hidden significance which occurs when, perceiving an object.

Class Notes:

Irish writer. He introduced the stream of consciousness which differs from interior monologue
(Virginia Woolf) -logue (order). It lacks punctuation, it may include up to 3 lines of thought. He
popularizes the stream of consciousness.

He was against the system and the church.

Naturalism is present in slice-of-life stories.

Influence of Impressionism. He wrote about the city. All his work will be set in Dublin.

VOICE:

1st person hetero diegetic (not part of the action)

1st person intrusive

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 3rd person full omniscient
3rd person limited omniscient
3rd person selective omniscient (whatever the character sees the narrator sees. He doesnt
have access to other characters minds)

MODE:

Perspective/Point of View: Who sees. In 3rd person narrations the perception changes. We
dont know who speaks (like the Snail in Kew Gardens)
Distance: between the narrator and the character:
- Direct Style
- Indirect Style: it involves a change of tenses, modification of utterances. Dialogues
mainly.
- Free Indirect Style: the narrator imitates the voice of a character with their expressions,
clichs, euphemisms.
- Free Direct Style: Interior monologue. Thoughts. Like a first person without cues
indicating who is speaking.

Diegesis ----------------------------------------- Mimesis

(narration telling) (showing)

From Free Indirect Style to Free Direct Style (Interior monologue,

Araby. *blind: to paint the atmosphere. *the garden: it is a paradox. The priest is connected with
the bike-pump.
Presence of religion. Romantic narrator. Romantic element with an ironic twist.
He always goes back to the room where the priest has died. It works as a symbolist symbol (the
room).
Baudelaires evocative bewitchment of the words araby.
*The movement of the bracelet has to do with sexual innuendo at the same time she goes to a
retreat (a juxtaposition of images).
*The spikes on his hair are a phallic symbol
Epiphany: reality kicked in. He lost all hopes. Hes disappointed. There infatuation dies.
Things happen within the childs mind, but nothing happens in reality (modernist story)
Dublin as the center of paralysis. Slavish mentality in the people with which the Catholic church
contributed. The task of the artist is to make people aware of the possibility of change. Joyce
claimed we had to look into the future.
Theres a flow of events. Its a journey of failure. There comes a crisis and then knowledge. An
initiation journey. A coming of age story.
She is the object of desire. Shes the answer to his necessities. Her name is not important.
*Chalice/goblet: it was like a sacrifice he has to endure.
He doesnt have communication with the adults. Maybe he was an orphan.
Araby has a sensuous mythical meaning of the oriental. This is a creation of the West.
Gradation: a progression that leads him to disillusionment.
Themes: romantic love, infatuation.

A Portrait of the Artist is published together with Dubliners.

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Women Studies: Showalters Literary Theories
Feminist Critique and Gynocritics
Feminist critique is oriented toward critiquing the past and male writing.
Gynocritics focuses not on male texts, textuality, creativity and traditions but on womens
texts, textuality, creativity and traditions
Feminine, feminist, female:
The construction of the female tradition consists of three phases:
First, the feminine, when women wrote out of their subcultures and attempted to adopt the
standards and equal the achievements of male culture. These women included womens
perspective and concerns obliquely and subvertly. This phase lasted till 1880 or so, women
have been and still are writing as if they are in this phase.
Then came the phase of conscious rebellion, the feminist phase, 1880 1920: this was the
time of the agitation for the vote for women, a time of great feminist action, and writers
supported and in some cases led these political and sociological movements. Many women
take the mens side as a means of protecting themselves or because they simply have not
seen the problems.
The third phase is the female: the establishment of womans role and nature as genuine,
viable, creative, independent, and different.

Foreword to A Room of Ones Own by Mary Gordon

A Room of Ones Own was published in October 1929, at a time when feminist writing was
so little in vogue. The feminist movement was connected exclusively with female suffrage.
Woolf is concerned with the fate of women of genius, not with that of ordinary women; her
plea is that we create a world in which Shakespeares sister might survive her gift, not one
in which a miners wife can have her rights to property; her passion is for literature, not for
universal justice. The thesis of A Room of Ones Own women must have money and
privacy in order to write is inevitably connected to questions of class. Genius need
freedom.
When the writers personal grievances intrude, the art is muddied, cracked. It is the fault
Woolf finds with Charlotte Bront. Serenity, selflessness, freedom from rage. Woolf says
that we who live after the First World War have lost something beautiful, some necessary
grace. The war destroyed illusions, particularly for men. Women have, for Woolf, given up
their roles as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the
figure of man at twice its natural size. Therefore, men are angry; Woolf sees this anger in
everything she reads about women when she begins her quest to discover why women are
so poor, why few women have written.
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Women are poor because, instead of making money, they have had children. The second
question is far more complex. It leads her to history. Even when they were freed from the
practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no
tradition to follow.
Woolf is certain that the experience of men and the experience of women are extremely
different, and they need different sentences to contain the shapes of their experience.
Womens writing has, in addition, been impoverished by the limited access women have had
to life. Yet the hiddenness, the anonymity of womens lives has endowed them with a great
beauty, and the challenge Woolf gives to women writers is to capture these lives in all their
variety.
The novelist imagined by Woolf, a young woman named Mary Carmichael who has money
and privacy, has not achieved it in her first book, Lifes Adventure. Miss Carmichael is a
good novelist; she writes with spirit; she has many new and interesting things to say. But
shes not a genius. She will be a poet in another hundred years time.
Modern women are frustrated and angry, their experience is limited; modern men are
obsessed with the letter I. Unless men and women can be androgynous in mind, literature
itself will be permanently flawed. It is not that she wants women to write better than men. It
is to encourage writing of genius, to discourage flawed work that Woolf is so insistent upon
money and privacy for women. And by whom are these works to be created? By
Shakespeares sister, the imaginary woman invented by Woolf who killed herself because
of the frustration of unexpressed genius.
What is important, what is essential, is that works of genius be created. One should be
concerned with the happiness of writers. The important thing is that they must express
reality; they must express their genius, not themselves.
The tone of A Room of Ones Own is exalted, but it is also conversational. It came to be
written because Virginia Woolf was asked to lecture at womens colleges on the subject of
Women and Fiction. She had felt cheated in her education, she was angry, in some ways,
as Charlotte Bront. But there was another reason for the writing of this book. Virginia Woolf
wanted to encourage the young women they seem to get fearfully depressed.

Shakespeares Sister by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Women were betrothed. Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties
was in the cradle. In the time of the Stuarts. It was still the exception for women of the upper
and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned,
he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him.
Shakespeares women do not seem wanting in personality and character. Woman
had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the
utmost importance. This is woman in fiction. In fact, she was locked up, beaten and flung

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about the room. She was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.
In real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.
By no possible means could middleclass women with nothing but brains and character at
their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together,
constitute the historians view of the past.
What I find deplorable looking about the bookshelves is that nothing is known about
women before the eighteenth century. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in
the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught
to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves. They had no money evidently. A
deceased bishop once said that it would have been impossible for any woman to write
Shakespeares plays.
Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had
Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith. His extraordinarily gifted sister,
let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see
the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar
and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one
of her brothers perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her
to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. Perhaps
she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set
fire to them. She was to be betrothed.
No woman could possibly be an actress. Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to
feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways.
This bishop was right for genius like Shakespeares is not born among laboring,
uneducated, servile people. Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must
have existed among the working classes. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. Any
woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot
herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard,
feared and mocked at. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would
have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which
might well have killed her.
Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings
prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the same of a man. Thus they did
homage to the convention (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of) that publicity in
women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses
them.
What is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation? By the
nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit for men of
letters to describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. But for women, I thought,
looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first
place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of
the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or noble, even up to the beginning
of the nineteenth century. It is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman
was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured

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and exhorted. The history of mens opposition to womens emancipation is more interesting
perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If
ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was
Shakespeares mind.

Class Notes:

She wrote many novels. She experimented with point of view and time. Mrs. Dalloway (half a day),
Orlando (four centuries)

Shes one of the founders of the feminist movement in Europe.

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