ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay “Modern Fiction” pursues the much discussed debate between her and Arnold Bennett as to the merits of each one’s literary practices and of the modernist and Edwardian schools of writers they respectively came to stand in for. Referring by name to three of the best-known authors of the early twentieth century, Woolf remarks:
Labeling them “materialists,” she narrows their fault primarily to an “enormous” and “misplaced labor” put to the task of “making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring” (153). “Is life like this?” she asks. “Must novels be like this?” (154).
