“…on or about December, 1910, human character changed.”
Monday, November 29th, 2010
Dr Hilary Emmett, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland
In a statement that has become iconic in literary circles, Virginia Woolf pronounced during a paper read to the Heretics club at Cambridge University in 1924 that “…on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” This lecture, “On Character in Fiction,” subsequently published as the essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” was nominally about the future of the English novel and was formulated as a response to novelist Arnold Bennett’s criticism of the authors we now know as Modernists. These now canonical authors—James Joyce, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey and Woolf herself—were written off by Bennett as “unable to create characters that are real true and convincing.”
Riffing on an anecdote about her own mysterious encounter on a train with an elderly, impoverished, but impeccably groomed woman, whom she names Mrs Brown, Woolf offers her vision of the novelistic character. With a few fiendishly accurate brush strokes she summarises for us the traits of the French, Russian and English novel. The French novelist, she suggests, sacrifices all that is individual about a character, the better to give a “more general view of human nature.” The Russian seeks to “pierce through the flesh to reveal the soul,” in order to ask of life “some tremendous question which would sound on and on in our ears after the book was finished.” The English novelist, however, would make Mrs Brown into a “‘character’; he would bring out her oddities and mannerisms; her buttons and wrinkles; her ribbons and warts.”
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