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Virginia WoolfModern Fiction
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Modernism
Modernism is the term used to describe a break with the traditions of art and literature that began at the turn of the 20th century and intensified after World War I. Woolf, along with James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, was one of the pioneers of Modernist writing.
Modernism is characterized by experimentation, an irreverent attitude to tradition, authority, and the canon, and disillusionment with institutions and society itself. Modernist writing and art often contain fragmentary and denaturalized images or language. In particular, literature began to experiment with new techniques such as stream of consciousness, which rejected conventional narrative and even sentence structure and instead attempted to accurately convey the thoughts of a character as they passed through their mind. It is this new style that Woolf is attempting to both explain and justify in “Modern Fiction.”
As World War I progressed, one of the most important elements to influence Modernism was the sense of the speed and dynamism of this new age, in which technology was advancing at an unprecedented rate. Modernist artists and writers sought to find a way to get to grips with this new, ephemeral world; new narrative styles, poetic forms, and publication techniques were developed in the attempt.
Modernist visual art also pushed against conventions of method and technique, as can be seen in Picasso’s cubism, Mondrian’s abstract geometry, and Matisse’s radical fauvism. These artists, like their literary counterparts, experimented with ways of seeing and depicting the world, and many critics have compared Woolf and Picasso in, for example, their unusual, subjective depiction of time.
Historical Context: The Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group is the name given to a circle of English writers and artists who, in the second and third decade of the 20th century, met at the houses of Clive and Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) in the Bloomsbury area of London. Although the group’s members were mostly from upper-class backgrounds and had studied at Oxford or Cambridge, they came to be known as renegades within their respective creative spheres. The group included the novelist E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, art critic Clive Bell, painter Duncan Grant, and Woolf’s husband, Leonard.
In their rebellion against the conventions of Victorian politics and lifestyle, Woolf’s views on modern fiction were highly influenced by the ideas developed within and alongside this group. Woolf’s grouping of certain writers within “Modern Fiction”—Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, for example—may reflect the Bloomsbury Group’s influence on her thinking. Some of Woolf’s more political work likely also drew on discussions and debates within the circle, where questions of philosophy and religion were posed alongside those of literature and art. G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) and A. N. Whitehead’s and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) were among the works the Bloomsbury Group analyzed and discussed.
Woolf’s later essays, including “Three Guineas” and, most famously, “A Room of One’s Own,” explore radical and antiestablishment ideas beyond the literary realm. Moreover, the group’s liberal beliefs about sex and the relationships that Woolf engaged in within the group—including a 10-year affair with Vita Sackville-West—would impact her innovative and often unorthodox fiction. Woolf’s individuality and the individuality of her work were both born in part out of this collective.
Historical Context: The Hogarth Press
In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf purchased a printing press and brought it to Hogarth House, their home in the suburbs of London. That year, with Virginia as compositor and with Leonard manning the press, they published a collection of their own stories. The press would go on to publish some of the most important writers of the era, including T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, Russian writers (newly available in translation) such as Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, and many of Woolf’s own works. Hogarth Press editions often included artwork done by others in the Bloomsbury Circle set, including covers by Vanessa Bell, Graham Sutherland, and William Nicholson.
Beyond the press’s historical and literary importance, it was also highly influential for Woolf herself, allowing her from the early years of her career to gain insight into the inner workings of the publishing world and to exert some influence over what was published alongside her own work. Her musings in “Modern Fiction” are not therefore simply idle or self-directed; rather, they come from someone who could influence not only what the “proper” stuff of literature was, but what the “stuff” of literature was. The theories propounded in this essay influenced Woolf’s business and through it her subscribers and purchasers. The Hogarth Press put the Woolfs in a position to publish whatever they wished, and in “Modern Fiction” Woolf is both considering what that might be and perhaps defending herself from critics of her choices.
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