Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence by Rachel Crossland (review)

When evaluating scholarship on science and literature, should we ask, "'Are sources of influence other than scientific examined and safely dismissed?'" (p. 182). Crossland's trim, well-researched, and persuasive book explicitly writes against Lance Schachterle's premise; writers and scientists, not to mention philosophers, artists, and psychologists, all work with "shared discourse," a term borrowed from Gillian Beer (p. 9). Influence not only flows from science to literature, but exists in culture's common concerns. The same anxieties that sparked Niels Bohr's complementarity may have also inspired Roger Fry's post-impressionism or Orlando's shifting pronouns. The result is a book of cultural history and textual analysis that deftly leverages physics to understand several modernist preoccupations. Crossland's three sections correspond to three "New Physics" concepts, published by Albert Einstein as three papers during his 1905 Annus Mirabilis: the photoelectric effect's dualities, special relativity, and Brownian motion. One by one, Crossland neatly maps these ideas onto the works of Woolf and Lawrence.

Though focusing mainly on Woolf and Lawrence may seem to limit the evidence Crossland can muster toward a culture-wide argument—notably, Crossland will expand beyond these two novelists in her final chapter—this relatively narrow scope counterintuitively produces a powerful effect. Instead of a more conventional formula that starts with science before moving to readings, Crossland self-consciously uses a multidisciplinary structure divided chronologically; first she discusses texts from before "a specific chronological moment," then texts from after that moment (p. 13). (In part 1, on Woolf, the moment is Louis de Broglie's 1925 wave-particle dissertation, and in part 2 it is Lawrence's 1921 reading about Einstein's relativity; part 3 reverts to the traditional science-first form.) Crossland's focused, chronological structure demonstrates, often surprisingly, that works by Woolf and Lawrence that come before the relevant science, and that "would be ascribed to influence if they appeared" after, "are in fact more likely to be due to some broader cultural context" (pp. 12–13). In reconceiving the standard structure, Crossland deprivileges science, instead emphasizing how entangled and multidimensional the relationship between literature and science really is.

Crossland begins with a usefully succinct theoretical introduction, positioning her research as balanced between the "restrictive idea of influence on the one hand and the somewhat hazy concept of the Zeitgeist . . . on the other" (p. 7). This is not a false promise; for example, in part 2, even as Crossland spends several heavily footnoted pages documenting Lawrence's serious reading in relativity, Crossland then shows how Lawrence may have been more unaccountably swayed by the Zeitgeist's misinterpretations of Einstein's theory. With scaffolding from Beer and N. Katharine Hayles, Crossland settles on "shared discourse," a middle road between direct influence and amorphous zeitgeist. To use the same example: Lawrence's "theory of human relativity" (p. 74) explicitly references Einstein in its very terminology, but also reveals Lawrence's immersion in mainstream, cultural ideas about relativity.

The book succeeds not only because of the admirable coordination between structure and argument, but also because Crossland's attention to physics opens up abiding questions in the careers of these two authors. In the first chapter on Woolf's early work, both Woolf and the scientists struggle to reconcile binaries; the scientists' data proves light is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle, while Woolf moves between, on the one hand, the indistinguishable "dreams and realities" of Night and Day and on the other hand the "very black-and-white" "either/or" of Jacob's Room (p. 41). Perhaps its no coincidence that once Woolf figures out her "inclusive 'and,'" about the same time Bohr hits on complementarity in 1927, Woolf writes her most famous and most transcendent works: To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves (p. 42). Crossland describes both physics' and also Woolf's reconciliation with the principle of...