As Woolf refashioned her early empirical realism into a modernist practice, her work began to reflect a deeper engagement with the Renaissance, including the works of an old friend, Sir Thomas Browne. While she was finishing Night and Day (1919), she was embarking on a new direction in short fiction. “The Mark on the Wall” and other stories collected in Monday or Tuesday (1921) reflect, in their impressionistic fragmentation, her new position that “inconclusive stories are legitimate.” Although that statement comes from a review of a collection by Chekhov,¹ it is a conclusion she was also gleaning from Browne.

In September 1919, she remarks that while “making way with my new experiment” in prose style—an experiment that culminated in Jacob's Room (1922)—she “came up against Sir Thomas Browne, & found I hadn't read him since I used to dip & duck & be bored & somehow enchanted hundreds of years ago.” She “had to break off, send for his books … & start little stories” (Diary [The Diary of Virginia Woolf] 1: 297). “Solid Objects,” a story begun in 1918 (Letters [The Letters of Virginia Woolf] 2: 299) but not published until 1920,² recalls Urn Burial in its focus on the collection of treasures buried, broken, and rediscovered in a new context. More generally, it embraces Browne's sense of wonder at the cryptic expanse of the world.

The story involves two men walking along a shore, one of whom, John, stumbles upon a piece of glass so worn it has become “almost a precious stone” (103). Inspired to look for other such treasures, he searches grass fields, railroad rights-of-way, abandoned houses, all in hopes of finding “[a]nything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble.” He is detained from a political meeting when he finds a shard of china “shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points” (104)—like the five-pointed items catalogued in The Garden of Cyrus. Finally, he loses his bid for a seat in Parliament.

That the defeat is less important to John than the discovery of what might be a meteorite, still less important than the random mystery of the meteorite next to the round stone and the pointed piece of china, is something his politically ambitious friend cannot understand. He is baffled by the serene disengagement of this man who has ruined his career for the sake of a few solid objects. But the narrative offers a correction: it is only his “political career” (106) that is jettisoned. The objects have worked on John, as the shards of ancient burial urns did on Browne, to call into question customary measures of success. “Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments,” marvels Browne. “In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation, and obscurity their protection.”³

Structurally, Browne's influence extends to Jacob's Room, where Woolf uses techniques of diffraction to keep Jacob just out of view—unknown and obscure—even through his death in the first world war. The story's episodic unfolding is further complicated by the unstable narrative voice. Through seemingly arbitrary shifts from “I” to “we” to “you,” Woolf attempts, as Pamela Caughie claims, to “liberate” readers from the assumption that the novel should provide a naturalized depiction of the world, with its constricting social structures (71-72). Employing a similarly destabilizing habit of interrupting the narrative with essayistic flights into abstractions that are in turn subverted or contradicted, Woolf recalls the spiraling rhetoric of the Religio Medici.

A reference to a London neighborhood, for example, provokes an imagined voyage to the New World: “‘Holborn straight ahead of you,’ says the policeman. Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story. … [T]his (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter's day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores. … As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways,” the passage concludes. “Yet we keep straight on” (Jacob's Room 94-95). Browne, whose Christianity moved him to emphasize continuities over chasms, nevertheless wrote, in Woolf's words, “[w]ith such a conviction of the mystery and miracle of things, he is unable to reject, disposed to tolerate and contemplate without end” (Essays [The Essays of Virginia Woolf] 3: 156).

But, as Woolf herself remarks of the experience of reading Browne (Essays 3: 370), isolated segments hardly convey the point. A sustained reading of “Solid Objects,” Jacob's Room, and Browne's meditations on his literal and figurative New Worlds more fully demonstrates the similarities of narrative voice. Through constant shifts of tone and attention, both writers compel a “sacrifice of independence”⁴ on the reader's part—in turn prompting a highly personal engagement and response.

Notes

1. “The Russian Background,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 August 1919, rpt. in Books and Portraits 123-25 (cited in Dick 1).

2. In The Athenaeum on 22 October 1920 (see Dick 299n), rpt. in Dick 102-07. I speculate that Woolf completed the story after her 1919 encounter with Browne. “Reading,” written some time in 1919, supports this notion with its emphasis on Browne, in particular with the following sentence: “How charming, for example, to have found a flower on a walk, or a chip of pottery or a stone, that might equally well have been thunderbolt, or cannon ball, and to have gone straightway to knock upon the doctor's door with a question” (Essays 3: 154).

3. From Urn Burial, in Browne 176. For a different reading, see Panthea Reid [Broughton] 54-56. Citing the influence of Roger Fry's formalist aestheticism alone, she argues that John should be viewed unsympathetically because he forsakes a life of political action for “art.” Although Reid's reading is persuasive on its own terms, it seems to me partial. Recognizing the simultaneous influence of Browne introduces a tension that is more consistent with Woolf's lifelong wrestling over what role (if any) politics ought to have in art—an issue Reid later acknowledges in her reconsideration of the story in Art and Affection (240-41).

4. The phrase is from J. R. Mulryne (64), who notes a discordance between Browne's “intimate and confessional” voice and his “distant or ironic relationship” to that voice (60); Mulryne argues that the literary effect of the Religio Medici arises from the way the reader is asked to negotiate this tension. Similarly, in “Reading” Woolf noted the difficulty of maintaining distance from the “I” of Browne's persona; in her reading, Browne is the first writer to prompt “the whole question, which is afterwards to become of such importance, of knowing one's author” (Essays 3: 156).

Works Cited

Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici and Other Writings. Intro. Frank L. Huntley. New York: Dutton (Everyman's Library), 1951.

Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Dick, Susan, ed. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

Mulryne, J. R. “The Play of the Mind: Self and Audience in Religio Medici.” Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays. Ed. C. A. Patrides. Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri P, 1982. 60-68.

Reid, Panthea. Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

———. [Panthea Reid Broughton.] “The Blasphemy of Art: Fry's Aesthetics and Woolf's Non-‘Literary’ Stories.” The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri P, 1993. 36-57.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1977-84.

———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 3 vols. to date. New York: Harcourt, 1986-.

———. Jacob's Room. 1922. London: Hogarth, 1965.

———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1975-80.