Virginia Woolf 's famous pronouncement in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown that “on or about 1910 human character changed” is usually understood in reference to developments in literature, but Woolf specifically describes changes in what we might call, following Michel de Certeau, the “everyday.” In her essay, Woolf half-apologizes for citing so “homely” a figure as the household cook as evidence of larger change in society. She writes, “the Victorian cook [who] lived like a leviathan in the lower depths” has been replaced by a figure whose appearance and tastes are indistinguishable from those of any middle-class lady: “Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?” Woolf goes on to suggest that transformations in ordinary people, mundane activities, and daily life—in women's domestic responsibilities and in the relationships “between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children”— lie at the heart of radical cultural shifts.

Read in the context of her fiction, Woolf 's example of the family cook is central to her articulation of modernity and modernism. Subtle alterations in everyday activities, Woolf suggests, change the way people experience life and interact with each other and, consequently, the way that life is transmuted into literature. Woolf reminds us that everyday activities are susceptible to change: even the long-standing association of women with cooking and “scouring saucepans,” which she refers to as “the horrible domestic tradition,” was altered by modern economies and technologies. Woolf 's observations on the changing status of women—particularly the family cook—are reflective of the many ways that food, cooking, and dining, and their attendant cultural meanings, were rapidly changing during the first decades of the twentieth century, and of the ways in which these developments affected interpersonal relationships—those very relations Woolf claimed were so radically altered “on or around 1910.”

This chapter analyzes the middle-class domestic dinner party as a key site in Woolf 's articulation of British modernity. Long viewed by critics as occasions for forming, renewing, and nurturing relationships, I argue that shared meals in Woolf 's novels often function as sites of surprising alienation, fragmentation, and disunity, with characters more apt to turn against than to commune with each other.