Woolf asked in her diary as she revised the manuscript of Mrs Dalloway (1925) on 13 December 1924: “But is it ‘unreal’?”At issue here is the contradiction between “reality” and modernist fiction brought to the fore a year and half earlier in Arnold Bennett's critique of the characters of Jacob's Room (1922). His criticism had already prompted Woolf's essay “Character in Fiction,” in which she famously asserts, “on or about December 1910 human character changed” (E3 421). Instead of exploring the personal factors which explain why Woolf alighted on that specific date, I want to look here at the wider context of her 1910 statement, going beyond the bounds of Bloomsbury itself in quest of what Woolf calls, in an earlier version of “Character in Fiction,” “a vaguer force at work—a force which is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age or the Tendency of the age” (E3 504).

It is generally accepted that the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London played its part in Woolf's theory of character change in late 1910. But I want in this essay to venture out into what may initially appear quite unrelated directions; so my question is: to what extent can we regard Henry Parker Manning's compendium, The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained: A Collection of Essays Selected from Those Submitted in the Scientific American's Prize Competition, which was itself published in 1910, as being a factor in Woolf's mischievous theory of character and cultural transition? Is the mathematical theory of four dimensions the absent term or missing “link” in our scholarly reconstruction of her thinking about the mutation of character in the year 1910? Since her questions in the “Character in Fiction” essay—“But I ask, myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” (E3 426)—are central to her statement of cultural metamorphosis, I would like here to of fer a model of a modernist artist who posed similar questions and for whom mathematics played a major role in his most radical aesthetic thinking. Leo Stein recalls a gathering of avantgarde artists at his home in Paris around 1908-09: “There was a friend of the Montmartre crowd, interested in mathematics, who talked about infinities and fourth dimensions, Picasso began to have opinions on what was and what was not real” (Stein 75-76).