‘[D]etails could wait’, Virginia Woolf interjects in the culminating image of her version of the Mrs Brown story, as recounted in her well-known 1923 essay on the subject of character in fiction. She immediately adds that ‘the story ends without any point to it’. However, she does pointedly draw attention to one particular detail: the fact that Mrs Brown carries her own bag. It is a fact she states twice in quick succession, though it is a detail tellingly overlooked by her imagined Edwardian literary counterparts, in the versions of Mrs Brown respectively allotted to each. Why is this detail worth repeating, while others can wait? Why does Woolf stress Mrs Brown's adamant refusal to let Mr Smith touch her bag, and what does this gesture imply? Why is it something only she purports to notice? And since this is, to all intents and purposes, a discussion of the changing approach to fictional character, and thus to fiction itself, in the early twentieth century, what does this particular detail add to that particular discussion?

This chapter contends that the woman's bag became a central symbolic point of focus and literary motif in portrayals of shifting gender relations during the modern period, dating back to the emergence of literature by and about ‘New Women’ at the fin de siècle. Chapter 1 showed that the ‘Woman Question’ and the thorny issue of women's desires persistently surface as key contributing factors in the declining relevance of the house in the earlytwentieth- century literary imagination.