LIFE ESCAPES: VIRGINIA WOOLF, "MODERN NOVELS," AND THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

            On 10 April 1919, an anonymously-published essay appeared in the daily edition of the Times Literary Supplement.  Entitled “Modern Novels,” the essay represented some of its author’s earliest thoughts on the practice of modern novel-writing.  Written in a distinctive, highly evocative prose style and harshly critical of tradition, it comes as no surprise that the anonymous author of this essay was Virginia Woolf, who was just six years away from publishing Mrs. Dalloway, her masterpiece and a watershed moment in the authorial practice she advocates for in “Modern Novels.”  In the essay, Woolf demands the immediate cessation of the perceived Victorian practice of describing characters’ external rather than internal lives, with Woolf deriding certain “traditional” authors such as John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett as “primitive” and “materialist.”   

            At the time of Woolf’s publishing, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) was the premier organ of English literary taste, a bastion of tradition.  Woolf wrote for it regularly, and it published other notable names like T.S. Eliot and Henry James.  Interestingly, however, the distinctly modernist approach to writing that Woolf advocates for in “Modern Novels” seems to run completely contrary to the spirit of the TLS—Woolf’s insistence upon honesty and the careful observation and exploration of everyday life for inspiration largely fails to characterize the majority of pieces—fictional, critical, or otherwise—that appeared in its pages until the advent of the modernist period.  How, then, are we meant to reconcile Woolf’s militant tastes and the voice she had in the traditionally-minded TLS? 

            The author of this essay contends that we are to interpret this ostensible hypocrisy through thinking of Woolf and the authorial process she describes in “Modern Novels” as fundamentally reform-minded.  Rather than utterly destroy the establishment, Woolf calls for a gradual, albeit far-reaching, realignment of literary tastes and sensibilities along the lines of the philosophy she outlines in her essay.  In this interpretation, we can reasonably observe that Woolf seems to be using the TLS’ resources—its finances, its circulation, its reputation—as a tool for the spread of her new approach to novel-writing.  The ultimate success of her efforts is evident in the novel tradition as it exists today.