ABSTRACT
The war between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf has probably received more critical attention than it deserves. Form is intimately related to the relationships between these social phenomena. In order to begin to understand the relationships between gender and form, we need to understand the other relational forces with which they were surrounded, and to which they owe at least part of their symbolic positions. While patriarchal structures were also in place at the railway bookstall, their exertion of control was very different. It allowed travelling readers some license to relax into the myth of a tolerant bourgeois family framework that protected their interests and reputations even as it created new forms in order to give them what they wanted. Without the mass production of cheap classics which lessened their distinctive rarity, the empty space at the top of the canon might have invited a very different form of literary innovation.
