31 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfMr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1929A 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
Authorial Context: The Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf was a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, and her work was strongly influenced by this context. The Bloomsbury Group, also known as the Bloomsbury Set, was a group of English writers, intellectuals, and artists who worked in the first half of the 20th century. They formed a loose collective of relatives and friends who shared a common philosophy and met to discuss their ideas and work. Many of them studied at the University of Cambridge and Kings College, London. They were socially as well as artistically experimental, espousing feminism, pacifism, and freer sexuality. A famous description of them, often attributed to the American writer Dorothy Parker, quips that “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”
They did not have a single artistic or intellectual agenda but shared a sensibility or philosophy that celebrated the importance of the arts. Their works were influential across many fields including literature, criticism, economics, and aesthetics. They also helped to shape attitudes to pacificism, feminism, gender, and sexuality.
Though there were different members of the Bloomsbury Group at different times, the 10 core members included: art critic Clive Bell; painter Vanessa Bell (also sister of Virginia Woolf); fiction writer E. M. Forster; painter and art critic Roger Fry; painter Duncan Grant; economist John Maynard Keynes; literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy; biographer Lytton Strachey; essayist, novelist, and publisher Leonard Woolf (also Virginia Woolf’s husband); and Virginia Woolf, a fiction writer and prolific essayist.
Literary Context: Modernism
Modernism is a movement in the arts and philosophy that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a response to the perception that society was undergoing broad transformations and attempted to capture and represent these changes such as urbanization, industrialization, and war. It sought to create new forms of philosophy, art, and social organization. The poet Ezra Pound, a prominent and influential Modernist writer, proposed the motto “make it new” as a touchstone for the Modernist movement. Artists abandoned traditional forms of art, considering them outdated, obsolete, and unable to capture the complexities of the modern world.
Modernism specifically rejected realism both as an artistic convention and as an ideology. It was dubious of the certainties of the Enlightenment and many adherents of Modernism were also atheists. It was a period characterized by a reassessment of old certainties. Modernism was defined by a consciousness of social and artistic tradition, and it produced formal experimentation in many fields. To capture the complex nature of modern life, Modernism turned to techniques such as stream of consciousness in fiction, abstraction in the visual arts, and atonality in music.
Modernism did not, however, entirely abandon the traditions of the past. Some Modernists were particularly invested in techniques like reprise, rewriting, revision, and parody of older works. In his influential 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot wrote that we: “often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [an author's] work, may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” This self-conscious interrogation of inheritances from the past can be seen in Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which engages with the question of how art adapts, what it has in common with the past, and where it innovates. She also parodies the writing of older writers, imagining how they would depict Mrs. Brown using their characteristic styles.
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By Virginia Woolf
