Chapter 3 draws on 1950s and 1960s cybernetics-inflected psychology, represented by W. Ross Ashby and Silvan Tomkins. Love examines the theory of language Virginia Woolf employs in The Waves (1931) and more explicitly presents in a 1937 radio talk, contextualizing Woolf’s emphasis on gaps in perception and suggestive linguistic potential in terms of Ashby’s cybernetic “black-box” thought experiment and Tomkins’s cybernetics-based theories of affect. This work illuminates Woolf’s strategy of highlighting the variety of affective responses that specific scenarios can produce for different subjects, even within the most intimate communities. The comparison shows how Woolf’s aesthetic model, through its invocation of radio’s built-in black-box aesthetic of “blindness,” teaches readers about the way cybernetic thinking inflects social and interpersonal contexts: as we attempt to interact with and relate to one another, we must rely on perceptions that are incomplete, partial, and individually inflected. By drawing audiences’ attention to this aspect of our social world, Woolf makes cybernetic thinking affectively motivated and relevant at the level of personal interaction.

Chapter 5, “The Children of Others in Woolf,” begins by acknowledging an obvious truth: no English writer is more famous for not having children than Virginia Woolf. There can be little doubt that this is because she was a woman. But critics noting Woolf’s experience of childlessness have never made much of an effort to explain why this matters for her books. It matters a lot, for Woolf returned throughout her novels to the representation of contradictory sentiments toward the question of having children. Masterpieces like To the Lighthouse and The Waves thrum with competing expressions of yearning and distaste. The late novel The Years is explicit about the ugliness of parents’ overvaluation of their own children. Woolf’s short fiction is no less complex on this theme: “A Society” imagines a birth strike by women, while “Lappin and Lapinova” dramatizes the privations of childlessness. Woolf’s novels proposed a recurring resolution of the tension between fecundity and austerity: children were to be included in the purview of fiction, but ideally at a necessary distance, as the offspring of other people.