Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Note on the Text
- Prologue
- 1 Women's Future, Women's Fiction
- 2 A Shape that Fits
- 3 Women and Writing: A Room of One's Own
- 4 Writing the City: ‘Street Haunting’ and Mrs Dalloway
- 5 The Novel as Elegy: Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse
- 6 Writing Lives: Orlando, The Waves and Flush
- 7 Fact and Fiction: The Years and Three Guineas
- 8 Into the Heart of Darkness: Between the Acts
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - Writing the City: ‘Street Haunting’ and Mrs Dalloway
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Note on the Text
- Prologue
- 1 Women's Future, Women's Fiction
- 2 A Shape that Fits
- 3 Women and Writing: A Room of One's Own
- 4 Writing the City: ‘Street Haunting’ and Mrs Dalloway
- 5 The Novel as Elegy: Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse
- 6 Writing Lives: Orlando, The Waves and Flush
- 7 Fact and Fiction: The Years and Three Guineas
- 8 Into the Heart of Darkness: Between the Acts
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In recent years, there has been substantial exploration of the relationships between modernism as a literary and artistic movement and modernity as a state of human history and social relations, whose beginning is variously dated, but usually taken to precede modernism. The work of Virginia Woolf is of particular significance here. In her writing we find those features associated with literary modernism – fluid characterizations and explorations of subjectivity, experiments with temporality – in conjunction with the depiction of aspects of modernity – the centrality of the city as metropolis and an acute and often uneasy awareness of time and historicity.
The modern city is of particular significance for a number of reasons. Most importantly for literature, the city came to function as a metaphor for the trajectories of narrative itself. Its new forms of transport and the chance encounters it sustains also provided powerful metaphors for human relationships. For women, specifically, entry into the public spaces of the city was used to mark their liberation from enclosure in the private, domestic sphere. Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage is in part a celebration of Miriam Henderson, her protagonist and alter ego, journeying in and around London, finding opportunities, despite economic hardship, for self-creation and relationships denied to the heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. Woolf 's second novel, Night and Day, is enacted against the backdrop of London. In Jacob's Room the mapping of the city becomes an analogue for the exploration of human ‘character’. In The Years Woolf charts the changing relationships of her protagonists to the city over half a century. London is central to Flush (Woolf's ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel) and to Orlando.
Woolf also recorded and dramatized her relationship to London in her diaries. The following entry was written in January 1919, while she was at work on Night and Day:
Here I was interupted on the verge of a description of London at the meeting of sunset & moon rise. I drove on top of a Bus from Oxford St. to Victoria station, & observed how the passengers were watching the spectacle: the same sense of interest & mute attention shown as in the dress circle before some pageant. A Spring night; blue sky with a smoke mist over the houses.
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- Virginia Woolf , pp. 61 - 83Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004