ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was not yet in 1910 the modernist novelist she later became, but in this article she is already dismissing the methods of the great Victorian novelists, and formulating the principles of modernist writing. She returned to Gaskell’s novels in the following few years, pronouncing her in 1915 ‘a modest, capable woman’ (Woolf Letters, ii, p. 64), but growing ‘rather bored’ with Sylvia’s Lovers. ‘What I object to in the mid Victorians,’ she told her friend Lady Robert (Nelly) Cecil, is their instinctive fluency - as if Mrs G. sat down to her writing with the cat on her knee’ (ibid, p. 66). A journal entry of 1923 refers to reading ‘such a white dimity rice puddingy chapter of Mrs Gaskell at midnight in the gale’ (Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 2 (1980), p. 263). All the same, she thought Wives and Daughters must be better than Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale. Clearly Woolf kept trying, but she was never going to become an enthusiastic convert. What is interesting about her article on Gaskell for The Times Literary Supplement is the way it rehearses many of her arguments for the famous attack on her Edwardian predecessors, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, published much later in 1924.
