Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Discuss the use of subjective points of view in Woolf’s representation of character.

How does social and historical change relate to the representation of character in Woolf’s essay?

How does Woolf deploy various narrative voices to depict and discuss characterization?

How does Woolf make use of quotations from and references to other authors?

What role does literary experimentation play in Woolf’s argument about the representation of character?

What does Woolf mean when she writes that Mrs. Brown isn’t traveling from “Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English Literature to the next” (16)?

Woolf writes, “A writer is never alone. There is always the public with him” (19). What roles and responsibilities does she think the reader has in the representation of character in Modernist novels?

Woolf writes of Edwardian styles of characterization that “for that age and generation, the convention was a good one” (17), but “the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use” (18). What is the relationship between literary convention and historical context in Woolf’s essay?