On 27 June 1925, as she completed To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf's concerns with stylistic and formal innovation were displaced by a concern with the literary marketplace. The phrase Woolf contemplates for her latest work was apparently intended as advertising copy; a book's title page would not have referred to it as 'new'. Had she classified To the Lighthouse as an 'elegy', as the diary entry goes on to suggest, she would have given it a place in literary tradition, but she would also have given it a generic category. Her later decision to subtitle Orlando 'a biography' resulted in some bookshops failing to display it alongside other fiction (D3, p. 198), and, in the longer term, may have contributed to its exclusion from the canon of her novels. The literary marketplace valued innovation, but its emphasis on the uniqueness of each new work was opposed by a deeper tendency to view the book as a commodity, and all commodities as interchangeable. And from the perspective of the market, even uniqueness is ultimately valuable only because it makes the commodity more marketable.

The aesthetic phenomenon of modernism needs to be understood in its relation to the social and historical phenomena of modernity, and Woolf's modernism is no exception; the difficulty is that no single definition of modernity is entirely adequate. Woolf’s diary for 27 June 1925 vividly illuminates the interface between formally innovative writing and the commercial orientation of modernity. But this was by no means the first point of contact: the work, like all modernist works, was not conceived in isolation from modernity, but in dialogue with it; sometimes in reaction against modernity, sometimes drawing aspects of modernity into its form and texture. Woolf may be compared to her modernist contemporaries by virtue of this dialogue, but differentiated from them in its details and tone.

The entry on Virginia Woolf in the old Dictionary of National Biography, a piece by David Cecil (who married a daughter of the Bloomsbury Group), speaks of 'the shimmering felicities of her style' and concludes that in her work 'the English aesthetic movement brought forth its most exquisite flower'. In such light, where the language of biography trespasses upon eulogy and teeters floridly towards obituarese, we might recall how Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, the DNB's founding editor, pursued a policy of 'No flowers by request' when briefing his contributors. Stephen died in 1904. The incumbents at the dictionary in Cecil's day were obviously more relaxed about floral arrangements. They let him get away with not just a flower (a Wildean lily?) but a whole bouquet. For what after all is or was the English aesthetic movement? To put the question is not to suggest that there are no lines of relation between the diverse stock of, say, John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and that of a no less diverse Bloomsbury Group. Rather it is to ask, what is the nature of that relation? If it is at all important, how important is it in the cultural formation of Bloomsbury?

What impact, during the modernist period, could a writer, writing as an artist, hope to have in the public sphere? In the mid-nineteenth century, Alfred Lord Tennyson was able to write a profoundly personal poem that simultaneously engaged some of the most troubling controversies of his time: the challenges posed by the developing geological and biological sciences to the very foundations of a society based on religious faith. In Memoriam was not only immensely popular throughout the full spectrum of the Victorian reading public; the poem itself made a significant and influential contribution to the debates. By the modernist period, not only had the reading public become more fragmented and diversified - a phenomenon Virginia Woolf confronted in her essay 'The Patron and the Crocus'; in addition, literature itself had moved, due in part to the increasing predominance of scientific discourse, into a more private, and hence less socially influential, space. In consequence, most discussions of modernist public engagement focus on genres that directly and transparently target communal ears: non-fictional writing disseminated through periodical essays, newspaper journalism, letters to editors and radio broadcasts.

But can we meaningfully divide Virginia Woolf's writing into two generic and locational halves? We have before us a writer whose total œuvre, as Anna Snaith has cogently argued, negotiated and contested the nineteenth-century division of male and female into gendered public and private separate spheres. Furthermore, lingering in that putative separation threatens not only to lose the public significance of Woolf's fiction; it also, I suggest, generates readings likely to miss the full public import of her non-fictional works as well.

In To the Lighthouse, the novel in which Virginia Woolf most vividly depicts the Victorian family roles she observed as a child, Mrs Ramsay's adoring but restive older daughters, Prue, Nancy and Rose, 'sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps, a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace'. The patriarchal code; the world of finance and acquisition; the Empire: all these three, fused here in the daughters' unarticulated protest, are intimately linked in Woolf's writings and in her analysis of the world. Indeed, as she shows, for Mrs Ramsay herself and for English gentlewomen like her the three are inseparable. Only a few lines earlier, we learn that Mrs Ramsay 'had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance' (TL, p. 9). David Bradshaw has pointed out that it is no co-incidence that the picture of a refrigerator that her young son James is cutting out is from the pages of the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, the enterprise that specialised in providing the colonial establishment with the goods needed to maintain a civilised English life throughout the Empire. Skye, where To the Lighthouse is set, was not one of the Empire's most distant outposts, but it was one none the less, with the English Ramsays, as it were, representatives of the crown.

The conversation Virginia Woolf has been having with her readers for over a hundred years now (her first publication was in 1904) has gone on changing, as conversations do. As a pioneer of reader-response theory, Virginia Woolf was extremely interested in the two-way dialogue between readers and writers. Books change their readers; they teach you how to read them. But readers also change books: 'Undoubtedly all writers are immensely influenced by the people who read them' ('Reading', 1919, E2, p. 157). Writers must adapt to changing conditions. Books alter as they are re-read: 'Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered' ('The Modern Essay', 1925, E4, p. 220). They are read differently by different generations: 'In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored.' Readers, therefore, need always to be aware of themselves not as isolated individuals, but as part of 'a long succession of readers' ('The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia', CE1, p. 19), joining in the conversation.

In the dialogue between Woolf and her readers, a great variety of different Virginia Woolfs have come into being. A recent reincarnation (or 'renaissance') has been of Woolf as an essayist. Not that her writing of essays and journalism, which spanned her whole publishing career, has ever been ignored. But in recent years this aspect of her work has been read in new ways.

'The greatest benefit we owe to the artist,' George Eliot once claimed, 'whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.' As richly enlarging as they are tightly controlled, Woolf's novels 'benefit' the reader in just this fashion. But while it has long been agreed that they are geared towards broadening our aesthetic responsiveness - as we read Woolf's novels, we are prompted to question how and why we read fiction and to acknowledge the limitations of our answers - it is only relatively recently that the degree to which her novels seem designed to extend our ethical and political 'sympathies' has begun to be recognised. An ideological bias, unobtrusive but palpable, is at work, for instance, in The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Years, and readers of these novels are challenged to think just as hard about the wider moral, social and political issues which the novels encompass as they are required to come to terms with the writerly goad of the texts. As early as 1908, Woolf noted in her journal that she had grown to 'distrust description' and that she wished to 'write not only with the eye, but with the mind; & discover real things beneath the show' (EJ, p. 384), and this was to become her principal aspiration as a novelist. In the same year, Woolf congratulated E. M. Forster for having won her over to what she presumed to be his own position in A Room with a View. 'To be able to make one thus a partisan is so much of an achievement, the sense that one sees truth from falsehood is so inspiriting, that it would be right to recommend people to read Mr Forster's book on these accounts alone.'

Exclaiming over 'the beauty of the writing', Lytton Strachey, in his praise for Jacob's Room, prophesied to Woolf 'immortality for it as poetry' (14 October 1922; D2, p. 207). Not long after, Woolf, during the composition of Mrs Dalloway, identified a growing poetic tendency in her writing. This chapter will trace her development of this 'more & more poetic' tendency in the four novels at the heart of her œuvre, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928) and The Waves (1931), the latter representing for many the culmination of her experimental lyric technique, a tour de force in high modernist poetic fiction. During this rich creative period, Woolf's diary frequently reflects on the poetic tendencies in her writing as well as in modern fiction more generally, and she published numerous essays touching on these matters. The novels emerge in dialogue with these private and public reflections. This chapter will draw, in particular, on Woolf's diary and her arguments in 'Poetry, Fiction and the Future' (1927) and A Room of One's Own (1929).

But what does it mean for novel-writing to become 'more & more poetic'? Here, Woolf herself connects this process with 'the violent moods of [her] soul', suggesting the poetic dimensions of her prose to be loosely understood as the expression of an intensely subjective emotion or spirituality. Figuring her growing poetic impetus as ‘crack[ing]’ and ‘bursting’, she seems to be invoking, in the year in which T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was first published, William Wordsworth’s encapsulation of poetry, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’, the very formulation of Romantic poetics against which Eliot, the leading modernist poet and Woolf’s friend, fulminates in his manifesto ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919).

On 26 July 1922, shortly after she finished writing her third novel, Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary her feeling that, in writing this novel, she had 'found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in [her] own voice' (D2, p. 186). Critics have often followed Woolf's lead in regarding Jacob's Room as a starting-point of some kind. Many monographs on Woolf discuss the novels that preceded Jacob's Room (The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919)) only in passing, or not at all, and where they are given more sustained attention they are often dismissed as 'apprentice efforts'. Woolf's comments appear to authorise developmental readings of her oeuvre, readings which assume that her early novels were attempts to work out who she was as a novelist before, in early middle age, she found her characteristic fictional voice.

But Woolf made something of a habit of announcing new beginnings. About ten years after she made the diary entry on Jacob's Room, shortly after the publication of The Waves, she wrote excitedly in her diary:

Comments like these mean that we should treat her (and our) hailing of Jacob's Room as the definitive realisation of her fictional voice with a certain degree of reserve. Woolf’s statement raises as many questions as it answers: did she, then, misrecognise the voice in Jacob’s Room? Do we have different voices at different stages of our lives? Or is she writing about two separate phenomena in the two diary entries? Perhaps ‘voice’, the word she used in 1922, and ‘style’, the term she preferred in 1931, are not the same thing.

Virginia Woolf's fiction explores the nature of the human condition: what makes up our consciousness when we are alone and when we are with others, how we live in time, and to what extent our natures are determined by the accidents of gender, class and historical moment. In her novels, the Great War (as it was always referred to, until the Second World War) was the defining moment, the line that separated the past from the present, always seen as an abyss or a watershed. Jacob's Room (1922) portrays middle-class English society before the war; Mrs Dalloway (1925) portrays it after the war. To the Lighthouse (1927) contrasts the two, separating them from one another with the 'Time Passes' section. Woolf began To the Lighthouse with the intention of exploring who her parents had been, but in the process of recording them she relocated them in a post-war perspective, seeing them through the affectionate yet critical gaze of a modern young woman, Lily Briscoe, who is painting a portrait of Mrs Ramsay. The effect of Lily's viewpoint in the novel was to begin to isolate and set in perspective the elements that made up the Ramsays' (and the Stephens') cultural consciousness, so that Woolf could see in what ways their particular historical moment had determined who her parents were, as well as what they believed and how they behaved.

Feminism, both as a theoretical analysis of gender inequality and oppression and as a political movement, has used literary texts extensively in making and disseminating its meanings. Literary and literary-critical texts were central to 'second-wave' feminist politics and the movement for 'women's liberation' in the late 1960s and 1970s, laying many of the foundations for the developments in feminist and gender criticism and theory that have changed literary studies so radically. The significance of literature for feminism also gives a particular place to those writers whose work spans both feminist polemic and fiction or poetry, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich and, preeminently, Virginia Woolf.

The relationship between Virginia Woolf and feminism, feminism and Virginia Woolf is, as the title of my chapter suggests, a symbiotic one. On the one hand, Woolf's feminism - which includes not just her explicit feminist politics but her concern and fascination with gender identities and with women's lives, histories and fictions - shaped her writing profoundly. On the other, feminist criticism and theory of the second half of the twentieth century have fundamentally altered the perception and reception of a writer who, in Anglo-American contexts at least, had largely fallen out of favour by the 1950s and 1960s. The immediate post-war generation tended to perceive Woolf's as an essentially pre-war sensibility. In the decades that followed, women critics and academics creating new feminist approaches found Woolf speaking very directly to their concerns, in the first-person address (albeit one in which the 'I' is diffuse and multiple) of A Room of One's Own or in the voice or voices that seemed to speak out from Woolf's newly available essays, letters, diaries and memoirs.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando, like many of her works, is shaped by her knowledge of, and fascination with, visual cultures. Orlando, Flush and Three Guineas all contain photographs and other images. All of Woolf's writings have visual tropes, and many draw on contemporary debates about the arts, and popular visual cultures. Here Orlando adopts the optical point of view of a classic Hollywood camera, with medium rather than long shots, and ends on a close-up frame. David Trotter argues in Cinema and Modernism that, as well as analogies between literary and cinematic forms in Woolf's writing, what cinema more radically taught her was how to portray 'constitutive absence', for example Mrs Ramsay's absence in To the Lighthouse, and the ways in which 'movement (in particular casual movement) defines space'.

Overview

But cinema was only one of a number of visual cultures that Woolf enjoyed and which impact on her work. In addition, she was an active photographer from childhood, she herself was photographed for Vogue, and references to advertising and architecture abound in her writings. Woolf wrote the first British essay on avant-garde cinema. Visual artefacts of all kinds, ranging from Omega Workshop crafts to the Hogarth Press book designs, were part of her visual landscape and she had a wide circle of artist friends and family. Woolf’s responses to modern visual cultures are what make her a modernist writer.

Sexuality and modernism

Virginia Woolf's prominence among early twentieth-century feminist, modernist and Bloomsbury innovators is well established, her iconoclasm most often discussed in terms of her feminist, pacifist, anti-imperialist and aesthetic theories. In Virginia Woolf as Feminist, Naomi Black aptly describes Woolf's feminism as 'deeply radical', 'drastic, basic, transformational'. Woolf called for radical reinventions of gender norms - 'For the degradation of being a slave is only equalled by the degradation of being a master.' Her pacifism was equally thoroughgoing and lifelong: her 1919 vow to oppose 'any domination of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will' (D1, p. 256, emphasis added) produced modernist classics that expose the roots of war and empire in habits of dominance and submission instilled at every level of private and public life.

Modernism is widely associated with innovation, alienation and abrupt breaks with past traditions. As Suzette Henke notes, Woolf's name is a 'watchword' for modernist innovation. When defining herself as 'modern', Woolf speaks in terms of fundamental transformations, profound alienation from existing traditions, and unmitigated breaks with the past: thus her claim that around 1910 'human character [itself] changed', and her comparison of axes 'breaking . . . crashing . . . destr[oying]' to modernist aims. As early as 1919, at the beginning of her writing career, Woolf writes, '& as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one', and she rejects the realist conventions of her literary predecessors, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) and Thackeray (1811-63), as impossible 'if one had the least respect for one's soul' (D1, p. 259).

Ancient Greek scepticism has an inherently practical character; in this respect it is unlike some of its modern counterparts, but typical of ancient Greek philosophy. This practical aspect is explicit in the Pyrrhonist tradition, all of whose leading members emphasized the tranquility (ataraxia) the sceptical outlook supposedly engendered, by contrast with the mental turmoil associated with a dogmatic outlook. But it is apparent in the Academic tradition as well. Both Arcesilaus and Carneades are reported to have offered means by which it would be possible, consistently with sceptical suspension of judgement, to engage in choice and action of a recognizably human type; and in both cases these strategies are described as capable of generating happiness (eudaimonia - Sextus, M 7.158, 184), which ancient Greek ethics generally took to be the mark of a well-lived human life. The Greek sceptics, therefore, have their eye on the question whether and how scepticism can be lived; and so one can speak, in a broad sense, of an ethical dimension that is always in the background in Greek scepticism, whatever the topic under discussion at any given time. However, it is also true that the topics discussed by the sceptics are sometimes themselves ethical. That is, they have to do, precisely, with how to live one’s life; they concern such matters as the good and the bad, justice, or the goal (telos) of human life. In what follows, I focus mostly on the treatment of these issues in Sextus Empiricus, for whom our evidence, here as elsewhere, is by far the best.

Nineteenth-century British historians tended to analyse historical causation in terms of the agency of individuals: in this historiography, then, events were understood as having been brought about by human actions rather than by large-scale impersonal forces. In keeping with this trend, literary historians writing during the same period also tended to understand authorship in relation to personal qualities which they attributed (accurately or otherwise) to a particular writer’s character. This typically involved a delineation of what Edmund Gosse towards the end of the century termed (in his A Short History of Modern English Literature (1898)), in a comment made about Ben Jonson, 'temperament'; or, in Walter Pater’s more famous definition made in the 1880s, 'soul': literary representation, Pater explained in his essay 'Style', could best be understood as the expression of 'a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition'.

Such a view was not in keeping with contemporary European thinking, however. For example, in his widely read Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) the French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine elaborated a hereditary and environmental theory of authorship, defining creativity in terms of a conjunction of 'la race, le milieu, et le moment' - a proposition not dissimilar to that of Goethe’s pithy injunction, as paraphrased by the English journalist John Morley, that to 'understand an author, you must understand his age'. By contrast, even in a writer as self-consciously cosmopolitan as Matthew Arnold, who was famously critical of English parochialism, we find a residual belief in the power of the individual.

SEXTUS AND DESCARTES

In a ground-breaking paper, Myles Burnyeat brings into focus what is surely, from a contemporary standpoint, the most striking difference between the scepticism found in Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism and that which animates Descartes' Meditations: Sextus' failure to pose in full generality the sceptical problem concerning our knowledge of the external world. For while Sextus and Descartes both question our capacity for knowing the real natures of things, Descartes goes beyond this “essential” scepticism to pose an “existential” problem: how do we know that the external world even exists?

What accounts for this difference? A tempting answer, in part Burnyeat’s own, contrasts the practical concerns of Sextus with the theoretical orientation of Descartes. Pyrrhonian scepticism is a way of life: the sceptic lives adoxastos (conventionally rendered “without belief”), letting his actions be guided by natural capacities and acquired habits rather than reasoned judgements. Conceiving scepticism as a way of living in the world, Sextus can hardly doubt the world’s very existence. By contrast, Descartes treats scepticism as a mere methodological device, to be taken seriously only in the context of inquiries into “first philosophy,” a context in which all practical concerns are temporarily set aside. Freed from practical constraint, Descartes can push scepticism to an unprecedented extreme.