12 - Virginia Woolf and the public sphere

Summary

What impact, during the modernist period, could a writer, writing as an artist, hope to have in the public sphere? In the mid-nineteenth century, Alfred Lord Tennyson was able to write a profoundly personal poem that simultaneously engaged some of the most troubling controversies of his time: the challenges posed by the developing geological and biological sciences to the very foundations of a society based on religious faith. In Memoriam was not only immensely popular throughout the full spectrum of the Victorian reading public; the poem itself made a significant and influential contribution to the debates. By the modernist period, not only had the reading public become more fragmented and diversified - a phenomenon Virginia Woolf confronted in her essay 'The Patron and the Crocus'; in addition, literature itself had moved, due in part to the increasing predominance of scientific discourse, into a more private, and hence less socially influential, space. In consequence, most discussions of modernist public engagement focus on genres that directly and transparently target communal ears: non-fictional writing disseminated through periodical essays, newspaper journalism, letters to editors and radio broadcasts.

But can we meaningfully divide Virginia Woolf's writing into two generic and locational halves? We have before us a writer whose total œuvre, as Anna Snaith has cogently argued, negotiated and contested the nineteenth-century division of male and female into gendered public and private separate spheres. Furthermore, lingering in that putative separation threatens not only to lose the public significance of Woolf's fiction; it also, I suggest, generates readings likely to miss the full public import of her non-fictional works as well.