The Stephen Inheritance: Virginia Woolf and the Burden of the Arnoldian Critic

Several of Virginia Woolf ’s essays from ‘Hours in a Library’ (1916) to ‘Phases of Fiction’ (1929) demonstrate her ambivalent engagement with the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold. Burdened on one hand by her father’s and uncle’s public arguments with Arnold in the periodical press and on the other by her contemporaries’ distaste for Victorian criticism, Woolf strove to articulate her own critical method in a series of controversial conversations with her predecessors.