OTHER AUTHORS FREQUENTLY STUDIED WITH WOOLF

Comparisons with the works of other writers can be productive in elucidating Woolf's major themes and techniques. Such comparisons are also a telling indicator of certain contexts the student needs to understand in order fully to understand her work, especially the importance of gender and modernism. These parallels are good indicators of how academics place the major elements of Woolf's writing, helping readers to understand her changing critical reception.

In recent years Woolf has been positioned as a striking example among the new modernist female novelists of the early twentieth century, and in this light her writing has been analyzed alongside the works of such contemporaries such as Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, and May Sinclair. All had a narrative method or intention informed by issues of feminism. Further, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf can be regarded as involved in reforming or revolutionizing the novel genre itself. They were conscious of their role as women forging new identities as women writers and aware that they were working in a field of creativity being reshaped by modernism. Interestingly, in some of Woolf and Mansfield's conversations about writing, Richardson's work provided a source of debate. Both appreciated Richardson's writing as representing an advance in the technique of fiction,

Both Woolf and Richardson used stream-of-consciousness techniques in their novels. In the work of each there is a strong impression of a female consciousness, relating the thoughts and impressions of characters in flux and uncertainty. In To the Lighthouse Woolf does not present Lily Briscoe's consciousness as if she were omniscient but dramatizes her inner thoughts and experiences as if the reader shared these impressions experientially in a fragmented way. The reader can gain a sense of Lily's doubts about the Ramsay family relationships by filling in the thoughts that are implicitly present, at least in Lily's unconscious:

The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to contrive it at all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy! Here was another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to have a shot at a bird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging Lily's hand like a pump-handle as he passed, which caused Mr. Bankes to say, bitterly, how she was a favourite. There was education to be considered (true, Mrs. Ramsay had something of her own perhaps) let alone the daily wear and tear of shoes and stockings which those “great fellows,” all well grown, angular, ruthless youngsters, must require. As for being sure which was which, or in what order they came, that was beyond him.¹

Woolf switches the point of view between genders, contrasting Lily's and Bankes's responses to the children. Lily notices the maternal sacrifice; Bankes, the expense. Woolf conveys the conflictual patterns and rivalry in the Ramsay parents. There is also a gender conflict, with Lily a new woman drawn to expressing her own view and individuality. Given this impressionistic sense to the novel, the reader is unsurprised that the sexes disagree in such a society.

Gender is an important theme in Woolf and Richardson. Both used the figure of the new woman and from this viewpoint made clear the frustrations and desires of characters such as Lily Briscoe and Richardson's Miriam Henderson in the Pilgrimage novel sequence (1915-1938). This enabled them to highlight a sense of the retrogressive social forces remaining from patriarchal and Victorian structures. Both writers depict capable and yet often confused young women undergoing a change in behavior signaling the movement of women further toward independence. The human dimension is strong. In Backwater (1916), the second novel in the Pilgrimage sequence, Richardson presents the central dilemmas Miriam faces as she seeks some common ground with others. Like Lily, she finds it among women, as when she befriends a newly arrived young student teacher at her small private girls' school. The young Irish girl contrasts with the suburban commercial environment that Miriam detests. Miriam ponders this contrast at night in a North London garden: “Charlotte. Charlotte carried about a faint suggestion of relief. Miriam fled to her as she sat with the garden light on her hair, her protective responsible smile beaming out through the endless blue of her eyes. Behind her painstaking life at the school was a country home, a farm somewhere far away. Of course it was dreadful for her to be a farmer's daughter. She evidently knew it herself and said little about it.”²

In both Pilgrimage and To the Lighthouse the institution of the family seems capable of stabilizing life and identity as a source of personal rootedness, but it fails since the central characters become aware of its other dynamics that subvert women. Both Lily and Miriam are drawn to domestic strengths as a site of expressing female power but perceive the family's social demands and limitations: “Miriam wanted to put her [Charlotte] back into her farm, and sometimes her thoughts wearily brushed the idea of going with her.”³ Such uncertainty expressed through the young female characters is hardly surprising, especially since both Woolf and Richardson shared with Sinclair a strong sense of the vicissitudes of real life for women at the end of the Victorian period and the need to identify the dimensions of this gender-based oppression. Richardson and Sinclair responded to Victorian constraints well before Woolf commenced writing her major works.

Beyond her role as a new woman novelist, Woolf is seen critically and historically as part of Bloomsbury and an innovative modernist movement. These literary and social factors brought her into close contact with Mansfield, E. M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot; these connections have suggested to academics further contexts for examining critical similarities and contrasts. Within this Bloomsbury and aesthetic context, many critics have looked for parallels among the writers belonging to this social network in their responses to philosophy, particularly the work of G. E. Moore and Henri Bergson, and in their literary reactions to Postimpressionism, as seen in their responses to the famous 1910 art exhibition at the Grafton Galleries.

Richardson developed many aspects of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, a term actually coined by Sinclair (drawing on William James's psychological theories) in order to describe Richardson's writing style. Woolf was aware of the efforts and theoretical ideas of both of these writers, partly from reading and partly as a result of belonging to the Bloomsbury intellectual network. She acquired firsthand knowledge of the ideas of Mansfield, whose writing also employed the new stream-of-consciousness technique. From Jacob's Room onward, Woolf adapted this style of narration that was associated with modernism but also offered a markedly female form of expression, and she added a density of poetic and symbolic reference points. This combination allowed a heightened emotional sense well beyond the single consciousness that dominates Richardson's Pilgrimage sequence and Sinclair's Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922). This can be seen at work in Mrs. Dalloway, in which the narrative mirrors Clarissa Dalloway's sense of her world and identity:

Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be.⁴

The focus of attention moves rapidly in this brief passage. Woolf narrows the viewpoint and Clarissa's consciousness from the universalized experience of women to the specific conditions of her platonic marriage, the image of disrobing tellingly more spiritual than sexual and the chastity of the bed symbolized by the taut, white sheets.

In To the Lighthouse Woolf integrates moments of the consciousness of both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay so as to give a glimpse of their inner selves:

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climbed high, not for a second should he find himself without her.⁵

In this burst of reported exchange the reader glimpses Mr. Ramsay's fractiousness, his dependency, the full nature of his demanding personality, and the maternal and caring role constructed by these dynamics for his wife. Her assurance is both motherly and somehow mediated by a sense that even for Mrs. Ramsay it is extravagant, almost parental. Yet, despite this interiority of emotion and feeling, the narrative reflects an impressionistic worldview of the external features of reality, but made multiple by the shifts in consciousness. This technique was central to Woolf's writing from Jacob's Room onward, often conveying a male perspective as a balance to merely presenting a woman's viewpoint through the focus of a single consciousness.

Woolf recognized that there were differences between her own writing and Richardson's: “I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce and Richardson to my mind: is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce & Richardson, narrowing and restricting.”⁶ In addition, Richardson's themes are arguably more domestic and individual, while Woolf conveys a much more metaphysical sense of broader issues, as in Jacob's Room, in which Jacob Flanders is turned into an icon or symbol for the generation of young men lost in World War I. There is a strange quality of underdevelopment in his character and, finally, poignancy in the worn and abandoned slippers his mother holds up at the end of the novel. If, like Richardson, Woolf demonstrates resistance to Victorian constraints, she adds a narrative sense of parody and irony, turning them into tools of attack directed at tradition and patriarchy. Jacob's Room is wide-ranging, covering childhood, widowhood, university traditions, prostitution, and the commodity that women may become; travel, romance, the classical heritage, implied homoerotic bonding, war (implicitly), and bereavement. There is an objective and subjective sense of equilibrium, whereas in Richardson's fiction the narrative draws the reader far more comprehensively into the protagonist's particular experience, with certain qualities of realism.

Although there are limits to the stylistic similarities in Woolf and Richardson, clearer comparisons emerge in their choice of themes. In Backwater the semi-autobiographical young protagonist represents the aspirations of young, middle-class Englishwomen in the early twentieth century, still constrained by social and economic traditions. Miriam Henderson is forced by necessity to teach in a small private school in a world of lower-middle-class villas after working as a governess in Germany, a period chronicled in Pointed Roofs (1915), the first novel in Pilgrimage:

She and her mother had seemed quite modern, fussy, worldly people when they had first come into the room. From the moment the three ladies had come in and begun talking to her mother, the things in the room, and the view of the distant row of poplars had grown more and more peaceful, and now at the end of an hour she felt that she, and to some extent Mrs. Henderson too, belonged to the old-world room with its quiet green outlook shut in by poplars. Only the trams were disturbing. They came busily by, with their strange jingle-jingle, plock-plock, and made her inattentive. Why were there so many people coming by in trams?⁷

Miriam's reaction signifies an entry point into a world of problems, challenges, threats, and puzzlement for a young woman eager to make her own way and forge a sense of independence. This theme is also found in The Voyage Out and Night and Day. In Backwater the internal struggle is defined in a mixture of social and quasi-religious terms as Miriam finds herself at odds with the world of the school and her pupils: “They were quite happy. Her feelings and thoughts, her way of looking at things, her desire for space and beautiful things and music and quietude would never be their desire. Reverence for things—had she reverence? She felt she must have because she knew they had not; … North London would always be North London, hard, strong, sneering, money-making, noisy and trammy.”⁸ Reverence was one of the key Victorian values under attack from the forces of modernism.

Richardson focused on the urban culture of London as a major element of modernism. In Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway this urban movement and flurry is seen in the disturbance caused by a plane skywriting overhead, the mysterious sweep of a limousine containing an unspecified important personage, and the space of young Elizabeth Dalloway's imagination: “Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger. …”⁹

In Backwater Richardson makes much of Miriam's difficulties in engaging in or empathizing with courtship and sexuality, a problem faced by some women in Woolf's fiction as well. In the works of both writers, aspirations toward careers and financial independence determine the lives of many female characters. In Woolf's Night and Day Mary Datchet works for suffrage as the central cause of her life, and in To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe resists marriage in order to discover an aesthetic response to life. For Miriam the struggle is more particular and prosaic. Finding the idea of marriage unpalatable, she aspires beyond teaching, which she finds restricting. Such characters are determined to through limitations and attempt some redefinition of themselves without following social role models or patterns. Yet, in general, Richardson depicts femininity in a positive light. More like Sinclair in her cutting portrayal of the title character of Life and Death of Harriet Frean, Woolf was capable of parody and reservation toward her female characters. As Susan C. Harris comments of Florinda in Jacob's Room, “It must be admitted at the outset that Florinda cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to be a misunderstood genius. Even in a novel where conversation is fragmentary and most dialogue is less than profound, Florinda's utterances stand out as phenomenally banal. …”¹⁰

In Life and Death of Harriet Frean Sinclair's narrative technique involves allowing and in fact insisting that the reader piece together the situation without expository detail. As Erich Auerbach has commented of To the Lighthouse, “The situation in which the characters find themselves can be almost completely deduced from the text itself. Nowhere in the novel is it set forth systematically, by way of introduction or exposition, or in any other way than as [in the textual world].”¹¹ Sinclair's novel also features a character type familiar from Woolf's work, the famous Victorian father. The patriarch is portrayed as representing an established order of male middle-class success that has eclipsed the next generation, particularly the daughters. Like Woolf in Night and Day, Sinclair parodies this Victorian image since the patriarch, Hilton Frean, has merely been a minor writer, journalist, and businessman who loses most of his own money and badly advises his friends into ruin. Harriet evokes his presence like a talisman and myth to decreasing effect as the new generation emerges: “‘My father was Hilton Frean.’ She had noticed for the last fifteen years that people showed no interest when she told them that. They even stared as though she had said something that had no sense in it.”¹² For many years Woolf herself tested whether academics and intellectuals had heard of her father, noting his declining reputation, much as Hilton Frean's declines.

In Life and Death of Harriet Frean, as in Woolf's Night and Day and The Years, the achievements of the Victorian era are shown as illusory, and the supposed moral superiority of the Victorians collapses when the fuller truths of the past emerge. Harriet resists the modern, chastised in her literary tastes by a friend: “‘It's silly,’ Lizzie said, ‘not to be able to look at a new thing because it's new. That way you grow old.’”¹³ As in The Years, the fate of spinsterhood is evoked as one of the consequences for daughters embedded in a structure requiring them to care for others or defer their own aspirations.

These themes are also central to Mansfield's short story “Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1922), in which they are treated symbolically. The mysteries of the dead father's room are depicted as threatening and undesirable, like the underbelly of empire and patriarchy with which the women of Mansfield's generation had lived for so long. As with Woolf, the bemusement of older women left without new perspectives and few skills for coping with domesticity is conveyed both sympathetically and yet satirically.

The Victorian ethos dies with the parental generation in all of these novelists, and its tenets become hollow and unconvincing. Harriet Frean cannot retrieve her mother's reading taste; a sense of aimlessness and the “horror of emptiness” overwhelm her as she “clung to the image of her mother; and always beside it, shadowy and pathetic, she discerned the image of her lost self.”¹⁴ Lily Briscoe abandons her initial portrait after Mrs. Ramsay's death and begins anew: “How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. And we all get together in a house like this on a morning like this, she said, looking out of the window. It was a beautiful still day.”¹⁵ This elegiac sense of death and continuation is strong in the works of many modernist writers.

The work of many modernist female writers reveals a clustering of images around dichotomies such as youth versus age, transition versus historical continuity, and the female force for social progress versus male conservatism. Woolf combines all of these elements in Between the Acts in both the normative world of the village and the pageant. The setting at a modest country seat and the characters' intrigues evoke Forster's Howards End (1910), and the disillusionment of age has much in common with the aging process described so poignantly by Sinclair in Life and Death of Harriet Frean. Harriet finds herself a spinster after the death of her parents and discovers that not only the world has changed, but she finds herself feeling anachronistic, out of touch with the young. This theme is central in Mansfield's stories “Daughters of the Late Colonel” and “Miss Brill” (1922), as well as in Woolf's chronicle of the Pargiter family, The Years. North Pargiter meets his aunt Eleanor after his return from Africa and hers from India: “Eleanor is just the same, he thought; more erratic perhaps. With a room full of people—her little room had been crowded—she had insisted upon showing him her new shower-bath. ‘You press that knob,’ she had said, ‘and look—’ Innumerable needles of water shot down. He laughed aloud. They had sat on the edge of the bath together.”¹⁶ Eleanor finds London transformed and alien, as does North himself; despite his aunt's warning, he cannot drive in a London full of traffic lights. In Life and Death of Harriet Frean this generational divide is set out in a far more melancholy fashion; Harriet's world changes into one in which neighbors no longer call formally, and she finds herself both proud and lonely.

In Woolf's works, small domestic exchanges are charged with wider significance. On the night of Minta Doyle's engagement to Paul Rayley in To the Lighthouse, her thoughts create an impression of the divide that exists between Mr. Ramsay and the everyday world around him created by his wife: “She was by way of being terrified of him—he was so fearfully clever, and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of Middlemarch in the train and she never knew what happened in the end; but afterwards she got on perfectly, and made herself out even more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a fool.”¹⁷ Mrs. Ramsay perceives Minta to be one of the young women of whom her husband makes favorites, giving her an acute sense of aging: “But indeed she was not jealous, only, now and then, when she made herself look in her glass, a little resentful that she had grown old, perhaps, by her own fault. (The bill for the greenhouse and all the rest of it).”¹⁸ As in Life and Death of Harriet Frean, age and its effects are presented through domestic scenes rather than through metaphysical or spiritual statements. The latter are nevertheless seen in the interstices of the texts. Like many modernists, these writers attempted to create a density of themes from an often sparse and mundane surface. Harriet Frean's recognition of aging comes through her social need and the realities of isolation; for Mrs. Ramsay it comes with an undercurrent of sexual dynamics and rivalry. Both perceive the social consequences of traditional womanhood and the ways in which it divides older women in particular from the world of social interaction.

The frequent comparisons made between Forster and Woolf cannot always be sustained through close textual analysis or evidence. Where similarities exist, they are most commonly justified on a number of fronts: personal acquaintance, a shared Bloomsbury existence, a modernist sensibility, some closeness of worldview, the use of pictorial images, and some generally common themes. In The Free Spirit: A Study of Liberal Humanism in the Novels of George Eliot, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Angus Wilson (1963) C. B. Cox sees the two writers as emerging from or representing a liberal tradition responding to war and crisis, the advances of the twentieth century, and the collapse of moral certainty. In Woolf's case this overview ignores a range of her writing and her intellectual imagination. Cox finds a mystery or mysticism in Forster that typifies the Bloomsbury Group, a “liberal humanism [which] is bolstered up by a romantic and irrational faith in some kind of supernatural reality,” which in Woolf is an uncertainty and deliberate inconclusiveness.¹⁹ The biographical reasons for looking at Woolf and Forster together are compelling, since for many years they had an extremely close relationship, Woolf as eager for Forster's reaction to her novels as for anyone, apart from her husband. Initially, she felt she had a great deal to learn from Forster; although he was only three years older, he was already a famous author by the time Woolf was struggling to write her first novel. Both moved in Bloomsbury circles and shared many of the same influences. For instance, Woolf and Forster attended Roger Fry's lectures on art and aesthetics, and it was Fry who pressed for more “art” in the novel. This apparent common ground shifted, and Woolf and Forster famously disagreed on the depth (or “rounded” quality) of characters required in the modernist novel. In 1927 Forster questioned Woolf's ability to refer to “life” and “humanity,” an objection she found vague.²⁰ Forster found her too aesthetic. Their argument over characterization suggests the differences between their fictional representations of reality. Woolf veered toward the fragmentary and chaotic in The Waves, the comically satirical in Orlando; neither can be seen as part of Forster's ambition. He saw her work, for all its cleverness in conveying the surfaces of life, as flawed by the lack of rounded characters.²¹ Woolf's response was that Forster's works, such as Howards End, lacked sufficient coherence or fusion of its elements and was still too novelistic, or artificial, in its representation.

Other parallels have been drawn between the ways both Woolf and Forster were marginalized, she as a woman and he as a homosexual. In this sense, both inhabited the fringes of society. In many ways this is an oversimplification. Both writers lived in influential and well-to-do contexts. Forster was not significantly hindered in a public sense by his sexual preferences. Nevertheless, both felt their identities to be at odds with their world, as is reflected in the characters and the general themes of conflict with social norms found in their writing. Whatever their disputes, neither Woolf nor Forster presented a conventional ethic, and both had a sense of some unity or coherence that was not strictly that of the realist novel, however elusive the aesthetic center might be in Woolf's work. The straightforward and economical prose of Forster is not as poetic and lyrical as Woolf's, but both covered a similar social territory. They chronicled the changing lives of the upper-middle classes, with their rural and colonial connections and lives offsetting London life. Woolf and Forster tended toward elitism. According to John Batchelor, “Like Forster, [Woolf] is murderously hostile towards middle-class suburbs”;²² Batchelor sees the same social tensions in Between the Acts as in Howards End, conflicts of the town and the country upper-middle classes with their diverging views of life.

Forster's Howards End resembles Woolf's Night and Day, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Years in its periodization, family conflicts, and the intricacies of the characters' relationships, but Forster's novel is more specifically concerned with the territory of romance, where intrigue and morality are conventionally developed in structural terms. The family and situation of the two sisters is reminiscent of that of Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, as young women, when Forster knew of them through their brother, his friend and fellow scholar Thoby Stephen. The plot of Howards End is based on the interaction of two families, a common theme in many novels; houses become sites of emotional and social meaning, as in Woolf's fiction. In Forster's depiction of the upper-middle class, as in Woolf's, the reader is aware of the strong subtext of symbolic and literal wealth.

Woolf and Forster used painting as a point of reference in their fiction. Both responded, especially after the mid 1920s, to the work of French art critic Charles Mauron, who was a close friend of Fry and translated Forster's books into French. Woolf admired the force with which artists dealt with life, influenced by Fry to see a miracle in the work of Paul Cézanne. Another often-cited similarity between Woolf and Forster is the influence of Bergson: in both writers memory and the complexities of time are presented as constitutive of character. Memory is linked by concepts of time and space. The eponymous country house in Howards End is not only a repository of the past but also indicative of an emotional definition of culture and character. To the Lighthouse also develops this complex of courtship, family, and identity.

There were ideological differences between Woolf and Forster that affected characterization in their writing. In the final section of To the Lighthouse, “The Lighthouse,” the dominant but misinformed or misguided male persists in the figure of Mr. Ramsay in his grief and confusion:

But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, [Lily] could do nothing. Every time he approached—he was walking up and down the terrace—ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not paint. She stooped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube. But all she did was to ward him off a moment. He made it impossible for her to do anything. For if she gave him the least chance, if he saw her disengaged a moment, looking his way a moment, he would be on her, saying, as he had said last night, “You find us much changed.”²³

This male quality stifles Lily's creativity and makes of her art a repetitiously mechanistic act until Mr. Ramsay's influence has been diminished by distance.

Forster's view of women in A Passage to India (1924) does not challenge traditional assumptions about them. He was perhaps instinctively less empathic toward women and entered less into their world. His irony often plays off of womanly attitudes: “The Bridge Party was not a success—at least it was not what Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested were accustomed to consider a successful party. They arrived early, since it was given in their honour, but most of the Indian guests had arrived even earlier, and stood massed at the further side of the tennis lawns, doing nothing.”²⁴ Jane Marcus claims that Forster was less than sympathetic to what he regarded as the extremes of Woolf's feminism; as Marcus points out, there is some evidence for traditional misogynist leanings among the homosexuals of Bloomsbury. In Howards End Forster parodies the new feminism with the character Margaret Schlegel. After her chauffeur strikes a cat with the car, Margaret insists on returning to the scene. When her demand is ignored, she leaps from the still-moving vehicle, injuring herself slightly, and walks back down the road, where a man from the second car in their traveling party tells her not to worry, as the animal was only a cat, and the servants are handling the situation with the pet's owner, a distraught little girl: “‘the chauffeurs are tackling the girl.’ But Margaret walked forward steadily. Why should the chauffeurs tackle the girl? Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants—the whole system's wrong, and she must change it.”²⁵

The famous dispute between Woolf and Forster over her hoped-for election to the London Library committee exemplifies many of these tensions between them, both over their writing and their different views on gender. The incident demonstrates Forster's failure to recognize not only the importance of feminism for Woolf but also its central role in social change. Forster spent many years after Woolf's death praising her work but maintaining this central reservation over her feminism. In the final analysis, Forster's world was quite different from Woolf's, in both life and fiction.

Comparisons between Mansfield and Woolf are becoming increasingly important and influential in contributing to an understanding of the work of both writers and modernism. Woolf had few real doubts about Mansfield's abilities, even though at times their relationship had stormy patches. In a May 1918 letter to Duncan Grant, Woolf wrote, “I had a most satisfactory and fascinating renewal of my friendship with Katherine Mansfield. She is extremely ill, but is going to Cornwall with Estelle Rhys [Rice], a woman painter, whom I'm sure is the worst of woman painters. But all the same Katherine is the very best of women writers—always of course passing over one fine but very modest example.”²⁶ Despite Woolf and Mansfield's friendship, there were clear differences between the two. As Angela Smith observes, “In 1906 the 18-year-old Mansfield seems uninhibited in her sexual experiments by the mores of her society, whereas the 24-year-old Woolf sounds cloyingly childish.”²⁷ The women did not inhabit the same social set, as Woolf did with Forster, but Mansfield was known to Woolf's circle. Mansfield is not considered to have been a part of Bloomsbury itself as she was often literally separated from London and its aesthetic life by illness and travel for recuperation. Furthermore, in her lifetime and beyond there were profound differences between Bloomsbury Group members and her second husband, John Middleton Murry, whom Woolf appears almost to have despised. Nonetheless, Mansfield became a close friend and confidante of Woolf, both women regarding the relationship as one of intense friendship and rivalry. In an August 1920 letter to Fry Woolf mentioned an intended trip to London: “I'm coming up tomorrow to say goodbye to Katherine Murry. She goes away for 2 years. Have you at all come round to her stories? I suppose I'm too jealous to wish you to, yet I'm sure they have merit all the same. It's awful to be afflicted with jealousy. I think the only thing is to confess it. And it's really irrational for there's room for everyone, unlike love. (This is not clearly expressed).”²⁸ At times Woolf thought Mansfield too common and casual. In her snobbery Woolf retained an attachment to a formality that only those of a certain class could transgress.

In their writing both Woolf and Mansfield blended a poetic style with issues of gender drawn from everyday occurrences. Woolf suffered from mental problems and Mansfield from great physical distress; the fragile well-being of both perhaps led to the prominence of the theme of illness in their work. In “The Escape” (1920) Mansfield evokes the apparently neurotic disturbance of a wife traveling with her husband. The two experience conflict in a ritualistic and understated sense, similar to the complex undercurrents seen in the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. The dynamics of such relationships might be hidden from plain sight, expressed through an almost subterranean set of motifs, but they are a powerful indicator of the emotional realities of the characters. In To the Lighthouse this emerges explicitly at points:

But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it. “William, sit by me,” she said. “Lily,” she said wearily, “over there.” They had that—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle—she, only this—an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him.²⁹

In “The Escape” such marital antipathy emerges more comprehensively and openly. The unnamed wife

clutched the sides of the seat, she closed her eyes, and he knew she felt this was happening on purpose; this swinging and bumping, this was all done—and he was responsible for it, somehow—to spite her because she had asked if they couldn't go a little faster. But just as they reached the bottom of the valley there was one tremendous lurch. The carriage nearly overturned, and he saw her eyes blaze at him, and she positively hissed, “I suppose you are enjoying this?”³⁰

In Mansfield's “Bliss” (1920), as in the world of the Ramsays, the power of the word in the intellectual and artistic spheres is in the hands of men, a recurrent theme of Woolf's writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Woolf parodies the great literary tradition of Victorian men, particularly in Night and Day. In “Bliss” Mansfield mocks young modernist aspirants and arrivistes.

In both Woolf and Mansfield the interiority of many of their characters is conveyed impressionistically. In this they were evidently influenced by Russian fiction. In “The Escape” the nature of the couple is revealed through a shifting narrative presented from the perspective of the husband, the wife, and an objective viewpoint. This technique is comparable to the one found in Woolf's experimental fiction, particularly Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway. Both authors employed the stream-of-consciousness technique. Ronald Hayman pointed out as early as 1972 that if there is any question of imitation, Woolf followed Mansfield's example, making the latter a major catalyst in Woolf's development. They also shared a marked tendency to commence narratives in medias res, often in a markedly abrupt fashion. “Bliss” resembles Mrs. Dalloway both in this regard and in milieu and setting. Both writers developed similar aesthetic themes, and “Bliss” can even be read as a development of certain of Woolf's ideas in order to question them. As Kathleen Wheeler notes, Mansfield may have attempted to surpass or parody Woolf's artistic aspirations:

“Bliss” is a story of endless paradox, oxymoronic at nearly every moment. The “light in the heart” which Virginia Woolf described, the perception Woolf was reluctant to name but which she sought to bring close to her readers, is named bliss in this story. It is named, yet shown to be beyond the scope of its name, as problems of articulation and expression of feelings and perceptions (and consequently, of language and communication) become the overt subject matter of the story: how is Bertha [Young, the protagonist] to express or interpret the feeling she is having?³¹

Patricia Moran has outlined a number of significant similarities of focus, context, and theme between “Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway. Both protagonists are preparing for a dinner party as the narrative opens, their actions edged by more than a hint of a hysterical mood; they wander around in London, and they experience a sensual delight in aspects of their preparation for their entertainments, with Bertha arranging fruit and Clarissa, flowers.³² In fact, the fruit bowl in “Bliss,” which symbolizes a yearning for something beyond the mundane and domestic, is echoed in a similar fruit bowl that engages Mrs. Ramsay's subdued aesthetic and spiritual longings in To the Lighthouse.

Bertha and Clarissa both belong to an upper-middle-class social set with vaguely aesthetic or intellectual aspirations. Both appear to be in problematic marriages. Bertha's apparent bliss is shattered by the revelation of her husband's infidelity. In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf creates an epiphany through the resolution of such fears. At the end of Clarissa's party she feels a harmony with her friends, her daughter, and her husband, a feeling that the news of Septimus Smith's suicide cannot fragment. In contrast, Bertha faces an abyss of confusion. Women in “Bliss” and Mrs. Dalloway are vulnerable to external forces, happenstance, male authority, and an expected but unpalatable conformity. The theme of attraction between women is evident in both texts, with Clarissa as a young woman attracted to Sally Seton and Bertha to Pearl, her husband's lover, whose presence is exotic and sensual, despite Bertha's underlying sense that her marriage has been undermined. Moran notes that the women's feelings are conflicted: “Both Bertha and Clarissa self-consciously acknowledge their attractions to women, their awareness that these ‘moments’ only occur in relation to women. … Both Bertha and Clarissa insist on the immateriality of these relationships, and yet both describe them in strikingly physical and sexual terms.”³³ Yet, they appear less than forthright in their desire for passion and sensuousness within their marriages, suggesting to critics an echo of the marriages of both writers. Woolf and Mansfield both had lesbian affairs, and, as Hayman says, it seems possible that “[t]he failure of the two relationships on a man-woman level contributed to their success on a literary level and to the individual success of both women. Both had a great capacity for enjoyment, but both were very unhappy. Neither could live a normal married life, and marriage, even if it does not bring children, ought to be a protection against loneliness. They were both lonely, though for very different reasons.”³⁴

The highlighting of a character's viewpoint through the narrative is found in Woolf and Mansfield. “The Escape” opens with a monologue in free direct discourse: “It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault, that they missed the train. What if the idiotic people had refused to produce the bill? Wasn't it simply because he hadn't impressed upon the waiter at lunch that they must have it by two o'clock? Any other man would have sat there and refused to move until they handed it over. But no!”³⁵ The third-person narrative captures the consciousness of the wife and thereby creates an impression of the intense emotions associated with the situation. At the same time, the final phrase, with its rhetorical intensity, suggests that this view is partial. Woolf achieves the same effect in the opening of Jacob's Room. After several metaphorical images of Betty Flanders's tearfulness, Woolf emphasizes the sense of its separation from the concrete world by her use of the word illusion:

“So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.”

Slowly welling from the point of the golden nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun.³⁶

The two passages emphasize the gender positions of these female characters without any explicit authorial intervention or explanations. In fact, traditional expository explanation is mostly negated in Woolf and Mansfield; a sense of place and identity is suggested by the ongoing development of the link between events and emotions. This often involves metaphors or physical images of a striking kind, such as Betty Flanders's tears, with the kind of focus and exaggeration found in modern art. Woolf and Mansfield essentially keep a tight focus around the characters, sketching and indicating the minutiae of their lives in colorful fashion, drawing upon all of the senses.

Woolf and Mansfield use an almost digressive and intuitive evocation of small details, which can be read as symbolically and emotionally charged. The choice of details is often telling. In To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe thinks of the number of the Ramsay children almost as if combining admiration and horror at the reality of such childbirth. Mr. Bankes considers only the boisterousness and expense of such a large family. This gendered pattern can also be seen in the husband and wife in “The Escape.” The woman's presence is expressed through the parasol and the spilled contents of her handbag. The husband loses himself in the universalizing idea of nature, a tree in a garden. This imagery represents both emotions and gendered positions: “The little bag, with its shiny, silvery jaws, lay on her lap. He could see her powder-puff, her rouge stick, a bundle of letters, a phial of tiny black pills like seeds, a broken cigarette, a mirror, white ivory tablets with lists on them that had been heavily scored through. He thought: ‘In Egypt she would be buried with those things.’”³⁷ This combination of closeness and antipathy is like that of the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse and, less dramatically, the Hilberys in Night and Day. In the fiction of both Woolf and Mansfield, marriage is a complex fictional terrain. There are hints in both of their lives for such ambivalence about marital relationships. They intermittently depended heavily on their husbands because of illness, but they periodically resented intervention in their lives.

The writing of Woolf and Mansfield exhibits an elegiac sense of loss, with death a constant threat that undermines any lyrical, romantic optimism. The source for this sense of loss was perhaps the death of young and beloved brothers. Woolf's brother Thoby died of typhoid fever, and Mansfield's only brother, Leslie, was killed in World War I. In Jacob's Room Jacob Flanders dies in the war and epitomizes the losses civilization risks in such conflicts. In “The Garden Party” (1922) the spirit of perfection entertained by the youthful middle-class protagonist, Laura, is broken when a young working-class neighbor is reported to have been thrown from a horse and killed. Against this tragic sense of premature death, both Woolf and Mansfield explore a sense of nostalgia for youth, adolescence, and childhood, not as a site of innocence in moral terms but as a time of fresh vision and aesthetic potential. A child's view of simple objects and events is unsullied by expectations and the narrowing influence of social discourse. Additionally, underlying the fiction of both Woolf and Mansfield is an elusive, almost undefined spiritual or metaphysical sense, seen in most of Woolf's work and particularly in three of Mansfield's stories: “The Escape,” “The Garden Party,” and “Bliss.” This spiritual element combines with the elegiac theme of lost childhood in works such as the early sections of Woolf's The Waves and Mansfield's “At the Bay” (1922).

Finally, though, in the writing of both Woolf and Mansfield childhood cannot be extended into the world of the adult without a curious distortion of identity and a lessening of independence, a territory also explored by Sinclair in Life and Death of Harriet Frean. The domestic world in Mansfield's “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” conveys the kind of containment Woolf depicts as a factor in the lives of older women, those who grew up in the Victorian period. In Mansfield's story the death of the father signifies the symbolic and literal end of all of those apparent certainties. This domestic sphere often has larger implications. Patriarchy and the British Empire are inextricable, part of an overwhelming social force reaching a crisis point. As Smith observes of “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” “As with Jacob's Room, there is an implicit link between domestic tyranny and the empire. …”³⁸ Smith also notes that in both works, “Masculine domination of women and their roles is inscribed, often literally, on the landscape and architecture depicted by the text.”³⁹ In Jacob's Room the mayor of Scarborough, where the Flanders family lives, is a symbol throughout the town; men are the coordinates of reference in the British Museum reading room; and underpinning all of this emphasis on male power is the classical university education that Jacob encounters in the monuments and statuary of Greece. In “The Garden Party” Laura's middle-class, youthful ebullience is contained by men beneath her in the social order: a workman setting up the tent for the party and, in a bizarre fashion, the young man who was killed when thrown from his horse, to whom she feels she must excuse herself for her family's party. For Woolf and Mansfield illness, suffering, and personal loss became paradigms for how their own lives were structured. As Smith observes,

The essence of the comparison between Woolf and Mansfield lies, not in their assertions of friendship or of similarity, but in the fact that the reader of the personal writings is repeatedly made aware of the “queer sense of their being ‘like’” in their casual use of the same metaphors and phrases, and in the unconscious echoes of one in the other's psychic and private experience. This is nowhere more evident than in their sense of imminent disintegration, through disease and death, and in their experience of the liminal as a place of habitation, rather than of transition, a place which they recognize as they re-enter it, and which is made tolerable only through memory.⁴⁰

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 22.

2. Dorothy Richardson, Backwater, in Pilgrimage, volume 1 (London: Virago, 1979), p. 233.

3. Ibid.

4. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 31.

5. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 38.

6. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 2 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981), p. 14.

7. Richardson, Backwater, p. 189.

8. Ibid., p. 322.

9. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 135.

10. Susan C. Harris, “The Ethics of Indecency: Censorship, Sexuality, and the Voice of the Academy in the Narration of Jacob's Room,” Twentieth Century Literature, 43 (Winter 1997): 423.

11. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 528.

12. May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriet Frean (London: Virago, 1980), p. 160.

13. Ibid., p. 115.

14. Ibid., p. 110.

15. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 146.

16. Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 308.

17. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 98.

18. Ibid., p. 99.

19. The Free Spirit: A Study of Liberal Humanism in the Novels of George Eliot, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Angus Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 95, 109.

20. David Dowling, Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Works of Forster and Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 88-92.

21. Ibid., p. 88.

22. John Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 31.

23. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 148.

24. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1989), p. 58.

25. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1989), p. 213.

26. Woolf to Duncan Grant, 15 May 1918, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, volume 2: The Question of Things Happening, 1912-1922 (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 241.

27. Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 44.

28. Woolf to Roger Fry, 1 August 1920, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, volume 2, p. 438.

29. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, pp. 82-83.

30. Katherine Mansfield, “The Escape,” in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981), p. 200.

31. Kathleen Wheeler, “Modernist” Women Writers and Narrative Art (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 124.

32. Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 67.

33. Ibid., p. 68.

34. Ronald Hayman, Literature and Living: A Consideration of Katherine Mansfield & Virginia Woolf (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972), p. 7.

35. Mansfield, “The Escape,” pp. 196-197.

36. Woolf, Jacob's Room (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), p. 7.

37. Mansfield, “The Escape,” pp. 197-198.

38. Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, p. 220.

39. Ibid., p. 211.

40. Ibid., p. 69.

Additional coverage of Woolf's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; British Writers, Vol. 7; British Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1914-1945; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 104, 130; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 64; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 36, 100, 162; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 10; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; Exploring Short Stories; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Nonfiction Classics for Students, Vol. 2; Novels for Students, Vols. 8, 12; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 7; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 4, 12; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 5, 20, 43, 56, 101; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; and World Literature Criticism.