ABSTRACT
Woolf’s dual formulation-first, demarcating her generation strictly from the Victorians, and second, identifying private feelings and relationships as the crucial sphere of the later generation’s achievement-was echoed by much of the fiction and critical writing of her time, not least in Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. It has, if anything, gained further credence from the torrent of introspective biographies that have poured forth as the last of Woolf’s contemporaries leave the scene. It has also had a decisive influence on thinking about twentieth-century intellectual and high-cultural life, with historians falling roughly into two camps. One tendency has been to depreciate the biographical importance of such characters, to see their introspection as a necessary retreat from a public realm dominated after the First World War by different players-“masses” and “classes”—and different values-the material rather than the moral or aesthetic. A second tendency, evident in Noel Annan’s recent (auto)biography of “Our Age” (his age, the children of the Victorians), has been to celebrate the turn to private life as a kind of victory over a public life dominated by hypocrisy, repression and corruption.2
