Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett

Virginia Woolf may have thought back through her mothers—and her aunts, cousins, and other kin, both biological and cultural—but she was not always willing to admit it. In this rich, wide-ranging, and thoroughly researched study, Mary Jean Corbett unravels Woolf's complicated relationship to the older generation of women to whom she was indebted. For, as Corbett shows, while Woolf constructed an unbridgeable gulf between her old-fashioned "Victorian" foremothers and a younger generation of modernist intellectuals, the reality was that both "factions" more often than not occupied the same spaces and grappled with the same issues, although their means of approaching them differed. While scholars are aware that Woolf's relationship to other women writers can be described as ambivalent at best (Katherine Mansfield being one of the better-known examples), I was shocked by the vitriolic disavowal of the older generation of women writers on display throughout Corbett's study. While "taking down" Woolf is not Corbett's aim, this book certainly succeeds in taking Woolf back, firmly integrating her into the cultural environments pivotal to her development and reading her alongside nineteenth-century women writers from whom she derived (unacknowledged) inspiration. As Corbett puts it: "the first 'great' feminist writer of the twentieth century … was complicit in the exclusion of others from the women's tradition she did so much to establish" (7). Behind the Times goes a long way towards correcting this injustice.

In her introduction, Corbett draws on Woolf's early short story "Phyllis and Rosamund" (1906) and essay "A Sketch of the Past" (1939–40) to argue that Woolf constructs a generational gulf in spatial terms by presenting South Kensington as the site of an outdated Victorian past and Bloomsbury as the locus of youthful modernity. Corbett then shows that this opposition downplays the radicalism associated with both locations in the late nineteenth century, as influential women—Margaret "Maye" Dilke, Constance Black (later Garnett), and Eleanor Marx among them—moved between these areas at the turn of the century. Despite being aware of such individuals, who were often connected to members of her own family, Woolf portrays the older and younger generations as occupying two entirely different worlds when they were in fact sharing the same drawing rooms and lecture halls.

Chapter one, "Gender, Greatness, and the 'Third Generation,'" focuses on Night and Day (1919), a novel that contemplates relations between younger generations and their "great" nineteenth-century forebears. Corbett argues that Woolf focuses on grandparents—usually grandfathers—in order to skirt around the intermediate "maternal generation" who threaten to complicate this bond, a dynamic seen in Woolf's appreciation of her almost-grandfather William Makepeace Thackeray, compared to her deprecation of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (her step-aunt through the first marriage of her father, Leslie Stephen) (31). Corbett then turns to Woolf's reviews of twentieth-century memoirs of the 1890s, which depict this era as a primarily "male affair" (36). Woolf does not interrogate this neglect of women writers, as we might expect, but instead allows this distorted image to stand, as it serves her own purposes—to diminish the fin de siècle period as a "twilight" age and to bury her older rivals. For, as Corbett shows, Woolf was highly aware of the likes of Vernon Lee and Alice Meynell, who were still very much alive when she was launching her career.

In the first of four "interlude" sections (an innovative structural choice through which Corbett interweaves thought-provoking anecdotes) and in chapter two, "New Women and Old: Sarah Grand, Social Purity, and The Voyage Out," Corbett turns to debates around censorship, candor in fiction, and feminist realism. Despite rejecting literature with a purpose, such as the New Woman writing of Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, and Sarah Grand, Corbett argues that Woolf engages with debates around prostitution and "social purity" feminism in her debut novel The Voyage Out (1915). Examining Rachel Vinrace's reading, Corbett makes a convincing case that Rachel is reading Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) and that this controversial novel shadows Woolf's own fictional engagement with the "conspiracy of silence" that keeps women ignorant of male sexual behavior, thereby exposing them to danger (85). By uncovering corruption, Grand's fiction is a form of feminist activism, a fictional equivalent to the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts led by social reformer Josephine Butler.

But rather than positioning Victorian women writers as a purifying force, Woolf frequently portrayed them as prostitutes themselves. Chapter three, "'Ashamed of the Inkpot': Woolf and the Literary Marketplace," examines her ambivalent response to Lucy Clifford (Mrs. W. K. Clifford) and Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs. Humphrey Ward), both successful writers with connections to Woolf's family. Corbett argues that Woolf's unflattering comments, characterizing Clifford as a "hack" and Ward as a sellout, reflect uncertainty around her own career in the late 1910s and early 1920s: "she confronts her own position in the marketplace, in comparing herself to—and competing with—other women writers" (128, 127). The precarity of Woolf's career is apparent in an interlude on "Duckworth and Company," owned by Woolf's half-brother Gerald Duckworth, which published her first two novels, placing her in "mixed company" with John Galsworthy and Elinor Glyn (148). Through such details, Corbett offers insight into a period in which Woolf's literary prestige was by no means assured. Woolf's anxieties around her career meant that successful literary "mothers" became simultaneously models to avoid and objects of envy.

Woolf's own mother, Julia Stephen, takes center stage in chapter four, "'To Serve and Bless': Julia Stephen, Isabel Somerset, and Late-Victorian Women's Politics," which deals with Woolf's attitude towards philanthropy. In her portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf represents philanthropy as a facet of idealized Victorian womanhood. But the angel, as Corbett shows, seldom remained in the house; rather, she circulated among the homes of the impoverished and inebriate, traversing the boundaries between private and public in the name of domestic reform. Isabel Somerset (Stephen's cousin) also engaged in charity work, eventually becoming president of the British Women's Temperance Association. Corbett explores Somerset's connections to social-purity activism, linking back to Grand and Butler. Highlighting the eugenic theories fueling such campaigns, Corbett connects Woolf's critique of philanthropy to her dislike of all forms of conversion and coercion, as expressed in Mrs Dalloway's personification of "Proportion" and in later essays such as Three Guineas.

Woolf's suspicion towards collective movements also informs her portrayal of suffrage, the focus of chapter five, "'A Different Ideal': Representing the Public Woman." Here, Corbett returns to Night and Day, arguing that the depiction of suffragists Mary Datchet and Sally Seal is informed by Woolf's real-life friendships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Janet Case, and Ray Strachey. While Woolf originally dismissed these "public women" as throwbacks to an earlier era, her attitude shifted as she contemplated her own aging. Becoming aware of her own maturity in the 1930s, Woolf began to acknowledge political activism as "a different ideal," divergent yet contiguous to her own aesthetic project (Diary 1:155–56, quoted in Corbett, 216). In keeping with this, in the afterword Corbett shows that in The Years and Between the Acts, Woolf represents the past and the present as overlapping rather than opposed, suggesting how the past lives on in the present and informs the future.

As the above summary suggests, Corbett's detailed study is the product of rigorous research across the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking in a plethora of social, political, and literary contexts. One sometimes gets the sense that Behind the Times contains enough research to fuel three monographs rather than one. For that reason, it is unsurprising that occasionally one gets tangled up in biographies, dates, and acronyms; so many interesting women are discussed (to varying degrees) that it is difficult to keep track of who they are and how exactly they connect to Woolf. For this reason, I think it would have been very helpful to have a family tree or "dramatis personae" as an appendix, so that the reader could easily trace these interlocking networks at a glance.

This is a minor quibble, though, in light of Corbett's considerable achievement. One of the many pleasing aspects of Corbett's approach is her generosity towards other scholars. In a study that focuses on "professional and personal solidarity with other women writers," she puts her argument into action by generously acknowledging critical work from scholars across the Victorianist, fin de siècle, and modernist spectrum (145). Although it is likely that Woolf scholars will be most eager to pick up this book, scholars of the long nineteenth century and twentieth century will find rich and relevant material within its pages. For too long Woolf has been placed on a pedestal as the "exceptional" modernist woman, despite the efforts of scholars to challenge this narrative, partly because Woolf carved out this position for herself. Corbett offers us a different Woolf, one entangled and immersed in a world richly populated with exceptional women: perhaps a messier, more complicated picture, but one truer and all the more interesting for that.