Any discussion of what lies behind the conversation in Woolf's novels must take into account the several modes of literary anteriority. There is the anteriority of earlier versions: if we picture writing as a chronological sequence, these will normally take the form of the various manuscripts or typescripts that precede the final text. There is also the quite different but equally significant anteriority of social or cultural context, which exerts its own pressure on what and how a writer writes. And then, behind speech, in yet another sense are ‘the things people don't say’. In Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, Terence Hewet voiced an ambition to write ‘a novel about Silence … the things people don't say. But the difficulty is immense’ (VO, 204). His (or his author's) concern with the as-yet-unsaid, or even the not-to-be-said remained a feature of Woolf's fiction from first to last – one might even see it as constituting her project, a project in which anteriority would be intimately linked to interiority (construed as a prior, and to-be-privileged mode of being). Such interiority, ‘that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness’ (‘Middlebrow’, CE ii, 202) provided the basis for Woolf's first liberated writing for the Hogarth Press in 1917, her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’.