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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.
Index of Terms
Bond Street
Bond Street is a road in London’s West End that since the 18th century has been occupied by expensive fashion retailers and tailors. For Woolf it is emblematic of the upper-class and traditional London dwellers. Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway begins with two short stories, one of which is entitled “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923). The story describes the eponymous Clarissa Dalloway, a member of London society who embodies the sexual and economic repression of the Victorian upper-class woman, as she travels around London’s wealthy shopping district. The street also features briefly in “Modern Fiction,” where Woolf remarks that a work that succeeded in capturing life would likely have “not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it” (160). In its association with both the superficial (i.e., clothing) and the traditional, the street therefore stands in for stifling genre conventions.
Materialist
Conventionally, the term “materialist” refers to someone who prioritizes material possessions or, in philosophy, one who believes that nothing exists except matter. Woolf uses the term to denote writers who focus on things she deems insignificant, dedicating time, effort, and skill to “making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring” (159). She names certain authors as materialists and gives examples of what makes their work so as part of her argument about The Proper Stuff of Fiction. Of H. G. Wells, she says he takes too much time constructing accurate pictures of society and in doing so forgets “the crudity and coarseness” of his characters (159). Broadly, then, Woolf defines materialist writing as writing that prioritizes the external, physical world (particularly its minutiae) over the way in which human consciousness experiences that world.
Novel
The terms “novel” and “novelist” occur throughout “Modern Fiction.” The exact definition of the novel has long been debated and continues to be in the wake of Woolf’s own contributions. Generally, it might be defined as a fictional, usually prose narrative of considerable length, born (in Europe) out of Ancient Greek and Roman tradition and revived first by Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and later by the European Romantic tradition. However, just as Woolf queries what exactly a short story is or must be, she raises the question, “[M]ust novels be like this?” (160), and the entire essay seeks to redefine the novel through the Modernist lens.
Spiritual
In opposition to the materialists, Woolf places the “spiritual” writer, exemplified for her by James Joyce. Occupied not with physical things but with matters of the human spirit and soul, such writers bring their readers as close as possible to what Woolf views as “life itself.”
The spiritualist also accepts that there is much they do not know and many questions that their work cannot answer, that sometimes things are vulgar and aberrant, and that as a result their work might be incoherent or confused. This acceptance allows them to replicate the disconnected and chaotic reality of human experience.
Related Titles
By Virginia Woolf
