Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fictional Explorations of the External World: “closely united … immensely divided”

Abstract

While received notions of Virginia Woolf as a writer primarily if not exclusively concerned with mapping the contours of the internal world have been steadily eroded in recent years, the reception of Woolf as a writer of interiority has been so entrenched that James Mepham, in his 1992 survey of Woolf criticism, writes, “until recently […] the consensus view was that Woolf was not interested in the external world” (25). While Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986) initiated a major reconsideration of Woolf’s fiction, offering her “account of [the] complex relationship between the interior life and the life of society,” much remained to be said about her exploration of the nonhuman world (3). And though Douglas Mao, in a book that derives its title from one of Woolf’s short stories, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, focuses our attention on centrality of the object to Woolf and other modernists, this is by no means exhaustive of Woolf’s fictional encounters with the external world, which range far beyond the inanimate object to include all of nature.¹ This essay aims to redirect our attention to how Woolf used short fictional forms to achieve her most sustained exploration of the human relation to the external world, as she found the genre at once sufficiently capacious and circumscribed to accommodate the nonhuman presence in narrative.