Modern Fiction

James Joyce, born in 1882 in Dublin, was one of the giants of the Modernist literary movement. He attended University College Dublin before going to Paris, where he planned to study medicine. Finding himself unqualified, he instead struggled in various professions while writing, supported by benefactors who included Harriet Shaw Weaver and Ezra Pound. His first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published serially in The Egoist between 1914 and 1915, and his short-story collection Dubliners was published the same year. It was then that Joyce began his greatest undertaking, Ulysses, an experimental narrative recounting the events of one day in Dublin.

Woolf and the Hogarth Press had been approached as potential publishers of the whole of Ulysses (which was being published episodically in the Little Review), but this never came to pass. Among the likely reasons for this was that Woolf’s opinion of Joyce’s brilliance was tempered by her dislike of what she viewed as his vulgarity. Nevertheless, reading the novel while herself working on the story that would become Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf found a work that almost achieved what she describes in “Modern Fiction”: a novel that in her estimation came “closer to life” than anything had before (161). Though Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), was his most experimental in form and linguistics, Ulysses for Woolf had a resounding impact in its ability to “reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (161).

Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who became renowned as an innovator in both genres. Chekhov was born almost a generation prior to Woolf in Russia in 1860. After a difficult childhood that involved his father’s bankruptcy, his mother’s breakdown, and a subsequent descent into poverty, Chekhov trained as a physician while writing sketches for periodicals to support himself. He began to write short stories too and, gaining attention and acclaim, committed himself to depicting Russian life in his own unique style. His most lauded play, The Seagull (1896), rejects the melodramatic conventions of 19th-century theater and has been compared to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its pessimistic existentialism. Chekhov’s works gained a wide audience both during and after his life, garnering admiration from figures as diverse as Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Lenin, and Peter Kropotkin, all of whom believed his work had a profound impact on their own lives.

Woolf wrote multiple essays addressing Russian literature in general and Chekhov specifically. In “Modern Fiction,” she sets his short stories up as an ideal of what Modernism might aspire toward in its exploration of the “dark places of psychology” (162). Woolf describes “Gusev,” first published in a Russian newspaper in 1890 and partly inspired by a visit to a Russian penal colony in the North Pacific, as a story that no one but a Russian would have thought to write. So strange is its emphasis, so obscure is its purpose, and so vague is its conclusion that the story seems to Woolf an influence that modern English fiction sorely needs.

Arnold Bennett, a British novelist, playwright, and essayist born in 1867, is the prime target of Woolf’s criticism in “Modern Fiction.” Bennett is best known for his Five Towns series, which depicted detailed and specific scenes of life in rural Staffordshire.

In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf invokes Bennett’s novel The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), which chronicles 70 years of the lives of two sisters, and the Clayhanger series. The latter was published between 1910 and 1918 and, according to The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction, “set the seal on Bennett’s reputation as the laureate of the commonplace” (Kemp, Sandra, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter. “Clayhanger.” The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1997). This description of Bennett’s ability to depict the minutiae of life is telling, as is its appearance within a book on Edwardian (rather than Modernist) literature. It is this focus on “making things shipshape and substantial” that Woolf critiques in “Modern Fiction” and that earns Bennett the title of a “materialist” (159).

Woolf explores Bennett’s work in more detail in her later essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924). The essay begins with Woolf observing an unnamed woman in a train carriage, whom she names Mrs. Brown and attempts to describe with a variety of literary methods. Bennett’s form of realism, which attempted to create detailed and accurate characters, is widely divergent from Woolf’s impressionistic description.

Since Woolf’s criticism of Bennett’s work, some critics have suggested that she and other writers who made similar critiques were motivated by class snobbery. Such critics praise the warm and careful detail of Bennett’s novels.