Steve Ellis: Virginia Woolf and the Victorians

Although readings of Woolf as either a radically progressive or an ultra-reactionary figure may belong to an outdated discourse, much current criticism continues to uphold, if less absolutely, either a conservative or a modern Woolf. In Virginia Woolf and the Victorians, Steve Ellis offers a re-examination of Woolf’s comparison and evaluation of the Victorian and the contemporary that steers clear of such extremes. In a series of five chronological chapters centring around key Woolfian texts, from Night and Day and Mrs. Dalloway to The Years and the final works, Ellis provides a nuanced assessment of what he terms Woolf’s “Post-Victorian” (p. 9) retrospect: Woolf’s characteristic blend of conservatism and radicalism, her complicated simultaneous “affiliation with and dissent from her Victorian past, which reciprocally and necessarily signifies affiliation with and dissent from her modern present” (p. 2).

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