VIRGINIA WOOLF'S CRITICISM: TOWARDS
THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS ON THE

ART OF FICTION

RITA TEREZINHA SCHMIDT

If in her practice as a fiction writer Virginia Woolf wrested the
novel form from the prison-house of prevailing rules and conventions,
as a literary critic she placed herself in a position that can be defined
today as revolutionary. Revolutionary in the sense that her essays, for
all their courage and daring, expressed a wilful break from the
dominant critical discourse of her time as far as her views on the novel
were concerned. In numerous reviews and essays in which she
examined either individual authors or particular literary works, Woolf
revealed a deep concern with fiction and rendered her thoughts about
what she conceived as being its relation to life, its scope, its form as
well as about her notions of character and perspective, notions that
obviously grew out of her very own fictional practice.

It is important to point out that Woolf, in no instance, attempted
to inscribe her assumptions into a clear-cut set of definitions or
conceptual categories. Rather, her assumptions emerge throughout
her essays in a very unsystematic and, at times, imprecise form, what
may disarm one seeking for a logical development, objectivity or even
consistency on her part. Difficult as it may be, I will trace some of her
views which, seen as integrated parts of a whole, make up what could
be called WoolPs 'theory of fiction'.

It is a well-known fact that Woolf abhorred any sharp category
or dogmatic approach of the novel. She herself acknowledged the
danger that lay behind any theory of fiction. Her attitude towards
labels and categorizations was skeptical, to say the least: they might
reveal knowledge about fiction but not intimacy with it. And by



94	 Ilha do Desterro

intimacy she meant not so much a pervasive analytical knowledge of
its system but a deep understanding of its processes vis-à-vis what she
considered its proper stuff: life. As she once wrote, "to speak of
knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure.°

By not considering the novel as a framework imposed on life,
Woolf moved away from the traditional concept of her day, that is, a
coherent, finished and unified representation of life, a concept clearly
founded on the formal assumptions of modern realism. She strongly
believed that the writer should be in a continuous search for new ways
with which to give shape to his/her imagination, should be aware of the
necessity for discovering new possibilities for the exploration of
his/her territory so that his/her work would be constantly renewing
itself as part of life's dynamic process. Hence, her obstinate refusal to
say anything complete or that would sound as a final statement about
the novel.

The novel, which Woolf considered the youngest and the most
vigorous of the arts, underwent drastic changes during her lifetime, not
only in terms of form and composition but also in terms of the
theoretical assumptions that were raised in discussions about the
genre. As a rebel against the dominant conventions of fiction writing,
Woolf endeavored to stretch the concept of fiction beyond that which
had been accepted by her predecessors, from Defoe to Galsworthy and
Wells, for she understood that the novel could not keep on being
limited and contained, any longer, in those "ill-fitting vestments" that
tradition had provided it. These "vestments" included a method based
on static descriptions of 'milieu' and objetive registering of neatly,
clear-cut visible actions. According to her, this was a fundamental
failure of fiction in relation to life. She wanted to evolve a definition
of fiction that would account for a reality beyond the surface of facts
and events, a reality that would bring together the solid fact and its
spiritual reality — in her artistic terms, granite and rainbow. When she
said, in "Modern Fiction", "we are not pleading merely for courage and
sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little
other than custom would have us believe it,' 2 she was really claiming
for new assumptions that would definitely change the outlook of the
novel and its tradition in the context of English literature and criticism.

In "Phases of Fiction", Woolf was explicit about what she viewed
as some weaknesses in the tradition of fiction writing in England,
though she gave credits to the accomplishments of Sterne and Henry
James, for their psychological explorations, and of Jane Austen for the
articulated consistency of the world of fiction and the world of human
values. With a half-serious, witty, sometimes ironic tone, Woolf
detected the so-called truth-tellers' proneness to degenerating into



Rita Terezinha Schmidt / Virginia Woolf's Criticism: ... 	 95

mere fact-recorders; the romantics' refinement that emptied the
novel's power of suggestion; the comedians' failure to convey intimacy
due to their large-scale figures; the satirists' tendency to confine
fiction within the scope of the writer's personality and the
psychologists' mysticism whose concern with the intellect overpowered
the capacity for feelings.3

For Woolf, these weaknesses revealed that the sense of life had
escaped from fiction reducing it to an apparatus that caught life only
an inch or two wide. And it was precisely this narrowness that Woolf
addressed over and over in her essays. In "Phases of Fiction" she
pointed out that the novel was the only form of art which sought to
make us believe that it was giving a full and truthful account of life. In
a way, she was not saying something completely new. In fact, Henry
James in a much earlier essay, "The Art of Fiction", had affirmed that
the only reason for the existence of the novel was because it tried to
represent life, life without rearrangement nor compromise so that it
achieved a kind of revelation, it touched truth. Yet, he never came to
define what he understood by life or truth. Woolf, on the contrary,
never missed the opportunity to dwell on these categories. For her, life
was not only the concrete, the visible, the audible and the credible; it
was both the inner and the outer, the objective and the subjective, the
conscious and the unconscious, fact and vision, experience and what
lay beyond experience. As she beautifully tried to capture it in the
metaphor in "Modern Fiction," "life is not a series of gig-lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end."4

Woolf's claim for life, spirit, truth, reality in fiction, meant a claim
for an all-encompassing realism, not just the realism of presentation
practiced by her contemporaries. At the center of this claim lay what
she herself described as the struggle and tension between two powers:
life and art. If, on the one hand, she asserted that fiction drew its
sustenance from life, on the other she was inclined to affirm that
fiction competed with life. Such is the notion put forth in "Phases of
Fiction": life and art ran so close to each other they often collided.
Here, no doubt, Woolf displayed a very complex position in relation
to the status of fiction, a position that partakes of an elusive, almost
impalpable dimension. She seems to be saying that the nature of fiction
is incompatible with design and order, yet its very existence demands
some distance from life, and this means certain kind of ordering and
design.

In a sense, Woolf shared with E. M. Forster, her contemporary,
some of his views presented in Aspects of the Novel. 5 Forster stated



96	 Ilha do Desterro

that the novel was a work of art with its own laws which were not those
of daily life. Without being a formalist in the strictest sense of the
word, Forster was advocating for the novel some basic principles of
composition that would enhance its aesthetic qualities. Basically, he
was addressing the old dialectic of form x content, whereas Woolf had
in mind something larger, the very dialectic between art and life. How
to balance between	 these two forces was what she tried to
conceptualize at another moment in "Phases of Fiction":

It is the gift of style, arrangement, construction, to put us at
a distance from the special life and to obliterate its features;
while it is the gift of the novel to bring us into close touch
with life. The two powers fight if they are brought into
combination. The most complete novelist must be the
novelist who can balance the two powers, so that the one
enhances the other.6

On this account, one might understand the reasons for her
dissatisfaction with Henry James' novels and, particularly, with Joyce's
Ulysses, in "Phases of Fiction" and "Modern Fiction". In her point of
view, both were unable to attain a balance between style and
arrangement, and the content they intended to convey. James was too
rigid in design and wearing in detail while ordering human experience,
whereas Joyce was too disordered in his lifelike imitation of thought's
processes.

In "The Novels of E.M. Forster", Woolf developed further the
notion of balance into what she called "single vision", much like Lily
Briscoe's vision in To the Lighthouse, which crystallizes part of Woolf's
implied theory of art. Surprisingly, in this essay, WoolPs attention
shifted to the pair content + craft, especially when she argued that
there had to be a balance between what was objectively portrayed and
what was abstractly implied. On these grounds she criticized Forster's
novels, for he had not succeeded in achieving balance between a
photographic picture of reality and its transformation into a
transcendental image, the result of which was an elusive and confusing
kind of revelation in the end. For Woolf, the singleness of vision bore
the quality of making the high moment of revelation unmistakable, and
this was made possible not only by contriving a conjuring trick at the
critical moment of the narrative but also by choosing carefully a few
facts of high relevance from the very beginning. Such is the point of
view that underscored her criticism of D.H. Lawrence in "Notes on
D.H. Lawrence." She detected in Lawrence's novels a continuous
process of cohesion and dissolution, the result of his incapacity of
bringing distinct parts/ideas into equilibrium.



Rita Terezinha Schmidt / Virginia Woolf's Criticism: ...	 97

In "Life and the Novelist", Woolf returned to the relationship
between life and fiction, asserting that in order to turn life's raw
material into fiction, the writer's task was "to take one thing and let it
stand for twenty.' ? Her position here points to the notion of selection
which would be (at least this is what it seems to be implied here) at
the basis of symbolism. It is important to observe, at this point, that
no matter how much the notions of selection and arrangement were
emphasized by Woolf, the insistency of her urge to convey "this
varying, this unknown and uncircunscribed spirit", to record "the atoms
as they fall upon the mind, in the order in which they fall" and "to trace
the pattern however disconnected and incoherent in appearance which
each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness," 8 opens up the
possibility of disorder and fragmentation in the fictional world. This
contradiction was summed up in "Phases of Fiction", where she stated
that the novel could amass data and could select, it could record life
and could synthesize it. The tension that informs such statement is
itself present in Woolf's own fictional practice.

Another recurrent notion that permeates Woolf's essays is the
notion of perspective, which she conceived as a crucial element for the
artist to control experience. From her point of view, object and subject
have onlx a relative importance since "it's all a question of one's point
of view." On this account, she praised Sterne whom she considered
the forerunner of the moderns exactly because his angle of vision
dared innovation. It enabled him to avoid the weight of exterior facts,
bridging thus the gulf between outer and inner realities. She explained:

It is no use going to the guide book; we must consult our
own minds; only they can tell us what is the comparative
importance of a cathedral, of a donkey, and of a girl with a
green satin purse.1°

For Woolf, the correct perspective would avoid "the egotism of
subjectivity and the dehumanization of objectivity,"" according to
WoolPs critic Jane Novack. She considered the ego aggressive and
domineering whereas objectivity, a disease that eventually could lead
to the worshipping of solid objects in detriment of their spirituality.
Basically, perspective meant adjustment to a proper scale of human
values. In "Letters of Henry James", Woolf criticized sharply his point
of view. His obsession with old houses and with the glamour of great
names stemmed from his warped human values. The ideal perspective
implied thus a moral, social, psychological, and probably rhetorical
balance.

WoolPs idea of a perspective imbued with human values takes us
to what she considered to be the foundation of fiction, that is,



98	 Ilha do Desterro

character.	 Her definition of character, illustrated through an
imaginary Mrs Brown in the essay "Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown",
reached far greater depth than the current concept which defined
character in terms of 'milieu', the material circumstances in which it
was placed. The main target of her criticism was the practice of her
contemporaries, Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, who sacrificed the
individual for the sake of 'reality', that is, their characters were
virtually overburdened with a mass of details and grasped vis-à-vis no
other world than the objective, material one. Not that the material
world should be discarded altogether but that subjectivity, the
character's inner life, should be presented as its counterpoint. Thus,
she declared:

I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner
opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with
character, and that is to express character... not to preach
doctrine, sing songs or celebrate the glories of the British
Empire.12

Mrs Brown, the lady in the corner, embodies Woolf's ideal of
character in its totality, meaning character apprehended at a moment
when individual life and common life are intersected, when human
nature and exterior reality partake of a self-contained whole which
does not bear the weight of the authorial voice nor is subjected to the
author's person lity. Such ideal, in Woolf's point of view, had been
attained only by Sterne and Austen whose detachment and somewhat
impersonality of narration had allowed them to show an interest in
character in itself, in things in themselves and, consequently, in the
books themselves, the reason why their novels produce such a
thorough sense of satisfaction on the readers, in the end.

Woolf's concept of character demanded a revision of the concept
of fictional form. As Jean Alexander points out in The Venture of Form
in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, 13 the inherited forms of fiction writing
could only suggest the conflicts between reality and the conventions of
form, could only suggest the complexity of character and life without
really raising the problematic issue of which form would be more
adequate for the novelist who wanted to capture and explore, in depth,
life beyond the surface, as Woolf would have it. Woolf rejected the
traditional notion of form as the visual structure through which
content was organized because this notion was incompatible with the
vision of life the novel was supposed to convey. Though sometimes
Woolf may not sound altogether consistent on this point, she was well
aware of the difficulties in conceiving form without allowing for some
kind of artificial framework. Only on theoretical grounds was she able



Rita Terezinha Schmidt / Virginia Wooifs Criticism: ...	 99

to solve these difficulties by arguing that form was the embodiment of
the simplest of devices through which all novels come into existence,
that is, it was a shape made out of emotions. In fact, in A Room of
One's Own (1929), she came to be very explicit about what she had
meant in her essays. When she asserted that the novel was a structure
leaving a shape on the mind's eye, a shape that first started with some
kind of emotion, she was defining form not as something interposed
between the reader and the book itself, but as the primary impulse of
emotion underlying both the writing and the reading processes.
Reading back her essay "On re-reading novels", we come near to
understanding Woolf's uneasiness with the very word 'form', especially
on discussing Percy Lubbock's definition in his book The Craft of
Fiction, first published in 1921. Woolf claimed that the word 'form'
belonged to the visual arts and that fiction derived from a different
process which had nothing to do with "seeing" but with "reading".
According to her point of view, any text acquired meaning only
through "moments of understanding", which allowed the reader to
grasp the text's insights and to realize why the story had been written.
Here, she was, in fact, addressing the moment of empathy that
regulates the reader's relationship with the text, with the story and
feelings conveyed. It is in this context that the novel "is not form which
you see, but emotion which you feel, and the more intense the writer's
feelings the more exact without slip or chink its expression."14

It becomes clear that in Woolf's mind there was no room for the
classical dichotomy of content and form, or even a gap between feeling
and reason that her concept of fiction would not be able to come to
terms with. In these seeming oppositions she saw the possibility of a
continuous dialectical movement that would bring about, in the end,
fusion and wholeness. Thus, she stated:

There is vision and there is expression. The two blend so
perfectly that when Mr Lubbock asks us to test the form with
our eyes we see nothing at all. But we feel with singular
satisfaction, and since all our feelings are in keeping, the
form a whole which remains in our minds as the book itself.1

While Woolf dismissed Lubbock's "visual form" and posed it in
terms of an impressionistic design stemming from the writer's
emotions reaching the reader's, she also acknowledged the intellectual
necessity of form, something like craft or method that would enable
the artist to control and order experience into the complete expression
of an idea that would, ultimately, encompass a "vision of life". She put
it in these terms:



100	 Ilha do Desterro

. . . when we speak of form we mean that certain emotions
have been placed in the right relations to each other; that
the novelist is able to dispose these emotions and make them
tell by methods which he inherits, bends to his purpose,
models anew, or even invents for himself.16

In the light of this statement, we have reasons to agree with
Reuben Brower in his essay "Something central which permeated:
Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway." 17 He argued that for Woolf the
novel has a unique closeness of structure only slightly dependent on
the story and its development. Structure is actually what is there
between the lines and is only perceived by the reader in a moment of
empathy. She herself asserted that "between the sentences, apart from
the story, a little shape of some kind builds itself up." 18 This "shape"
represents WoolPs only concession to the notion of an objective
pattern which controls, orders and constitutes what she called
"fictional art".

Much of what we have said in relation to Woolf's assumptions on
the art of fiction may have sounded repetitive. Actually, her views are
so much interrelated that it is almost impossible to distinguish and
isolate the terms she used to define one thing or another, though we
can definitely identify certain differences and coherence of argument
when she deals either with point of view, character or form. It is
relevant to point out that Woolf's basic concern centered, all the way,
upon the principle of balance, which should guide the artist's task of
selecting and arranging the relations between the objective and the
subjective, the physical and the spiritual, the outer and the inner in
his/her representation or reality.

In a sense, her concern expressed a kind of dissatisfaction with
the materialism that permeated the practice of fiction writing as well
as the assumptions that informed the concepts of reality and character
of her day. By writing about fiction, she tried to imbue it with a little
more of the human spirit, tried to develop an idea of fiction as a
dynamic artistic medium which, unlike any other, would capture and
transfigure the totality of life.

In "Phases of Fiction", one of her most insightful and suggestive
essays, Woolf sensed the changes that the novel was about to undergo
in relation to the novel of the past. She welcomed these changes with
optimism and regarded fiction as still in its infancy. That was probably
the reason why she did not bother with encapsulating it within any
theoretical formulation that would sound as such. Her assumptions
transcend the boundaries of mere formalization to reach out to her



Rita Terezinha Schmidt / Virginia Woolf's Criticism: ...	 101

own experience as a writer who conspired against the powerful
crystallizations of her culture.

NOTES

1 The Waves (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1931) p.256.
2 "Modern Fiction". In: Collected Essays, vol II (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World,

Inc., 1931), p.106.

3 The truth-tellers included Defoe, Swift, Trollope, Borrow, and W.E. Norris. The
romantics were Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mrs Radcliffe. The
character-mongers and comedians were Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot.
The psychologists were Henry James, in relation to whom Woolf considered Proust
and Dostoevsky. The satirists included, above all, Sterne.

4 "Modern Fiction". In: Collected Essays, vol II, p.106.
5 England, Middlesex, 1963.

6 "Phases of Fiction". In: Collected Essays, vol II, p.101.
7 "Life and the Novelist". In: Collected Essays, vol II, p.135.
8 "Modern Fiction". In: Collected Essays, vol II, p.106.
9 "Sterne". In: Collected Essays, vol II, p.97.
10 Ibid., p.97.

11 The Razor Edge of Balance (Florida, University of Miami Press, 1975), p.63.

12 "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown". In: Collected Essays, vol I, p.324.

13 London. Kennekat Press, 1974.

14 "On Re-Reading Novels". In: Collected Essays, vol 11, p.126.
15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 In: Virginia Woolf A Collection of Critical Essays, Claire Sprague, ed. (New Jersey,
Prentice Hall Inc., 1971).

18 "The Anatomy of Fiction". In: Collected Essays, vol II, p.137.




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