ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf maintained that fiction is and ought to be about character. In her May 18, 1924 lecture to the Cambridge Heretics Society, called “Character in Fiction,” she expanded on points she had earlier made in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Sir William Bradshaw himself does not feel, and fails to give proper importance to the feelings and emotions in himself and in others. In considering Aristotelian and literary accounts of moral virtue, it is appropriate to consider whether the Poetics rather than the Nicomachean Ethics would provide the better basis for comparison, particularly in the case of Virginia Woolf, who read and appreciated the Poetics. According to Aristotle, the morally virtuous person is the phronimos, the person of practical intelligence, who deliberates and chooses well, and whose choices are aimed at achieving happiness. Moral intuition enters Aristotle’s theory in two places: in determining final ends and in determining just what the virtuous act is in a particular case.
