From The Voyage Out to Between the Acts Virginia Woolf interrogates the role of the artist in society and how aesthetic practices might make significant meaning in the world. One way by which she examines such concerns is through the investigation and elaboration of the art form of music. But why, one could rightly ask, does Woolf look to music (and sound, more generally) to probe such issues in her texts, particularly when, as the musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch suggests, “Allocution … is out of a job where music is concerned” (20)? In the following, I explore Woolf's deployment of aurality and its relationship to the built environment in Jacob's Room (1922) and The Years (1937) in order to further our understanding of Woolf's novelistic methods. Moreover, I argue that investigating Woolf's acoustic awareness in spatial terms reveals that the concepts of music and sound help her to articulate her social concerns about the relationship between class and gender.

Interdisciplinary and interart crossings often illuminate the formation and dissemination of fields of knowledge. When Woolf contrasts Rachel Vinrace's piano playing, for example, with Terence Hewet's novel of silence in The Voyage Out, the subject of how art makes meaning is foregrounded: “‘Why do you write novels? [Rachel asks.] You ought to write music. Music, you see’ … ‘music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there's so much’ … ‘scratching on the matchbox’” (VO 239). Additionally, as Julie Klein Thompson observes, abstract boundary work is typically conceived of in terms of geographical metaphors. Knowledge is territorialized and/or mapped in an effort to concretize an elusive, conceptual process. Correspondingly, when Woolf thinks across the borders of music/sound and literature, issues of space often arise, revealing a relationship between acoustics and geography.

Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter term this relationship aural architecture, the properties of a space that can be experienced by listening. Woolf's practice of representing and performing sonority in her texts reveals a keen understanding of the relationship between space and sound, whether by conscious design or not.