Behind The Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Behind The Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett Jane de Gay BEHIND THE TIMES: VIRGINIA WOOLF IN LATE-VICTORIAN CONTEXTS, by Mary Jean Corbett. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 312 pp. $48.95 hardback; $23.99 ebook. Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Victorians has long attracted interest, as critics have questioned her claims that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" to show that she had a complex, ambivalent attitude towards an era she never fully laid to rest.1 In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Corbett shows that late Victorians and modernists coexisted in the same time and occupied the same spaces: Woolf was born and brought up in the late-Victorian era, an era of progress and radical thinking that saw the New Woman, increasing frankness around sexuality, and an acceleration in the suffrage movement. Yet Woolf denied the existence of this radical previous generation, instead taking mid-Victorians like Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot both as foils and points of reference in order to present the Victorians as passé and highlight the innovations of her own generation. Building on the work of Alison Booth, who showed that Woolf deliberately underplayed past women writers, and Marion Dell's analysis of Woolf's ambivalence towards her mother and aunts, this book fleshes out the picture of the generation that Woolf ignored.2 Concentrating on Woolf's nonfiction, including diaries, memoirs, essays, and journalism, but also with discussions of The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and The Years (1937), Corbett explores Woolf's reaction to women writers and activists who remained active into the modernist era but whom she pushed into the past. These include the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), who was her aunt; prolific novelists Lucy [End Page 406] Lane Clifford (1846-1929) and Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (1851-1920); and the feminist New Woman writer Sarah Grand (1854–1943), who outlived Woolf by two years. Corbett also sets these women within their interconnecting circles, so the book encompasses a wide range of writers, including Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee, Clementina Black, and Elizabeth Robins. This elegantly structured book has five substantive chapters bridged by short interludes highlighting particular concepts. The introduction critiques the distinction that Woolf attempted to draw between the antiquated world of her upbringing in South Kensington and the experimental world of Bloomsbury, showing that Woolf lived alongside radicals in the former and that in moving to Bloomsbury, she and her siblings were not blazing a trail but entering a space where earlier generations had experimented in art and life. Ritchie, the author of Old Kensington (1873), was one such figure, so chapter one, "Gender, Greatness, and the 'Third Generation,'" explores Woolf's complex relationship with this popular writer whom she wanted to relegate to the past. In a reading of Night and Day, Corbett shows how Woolf's rejection of Ritchie by representing her as the comical Mrs. Hilbery goes alongside a turning-away from late nineteenth-century women writers who had "grappled with the representation and the regulation of sexuality" (p. 63). An interlude on Grand highlights the politics of the New Woman to lead into a chapter on Woolf's engagement with debates on social purity in The Voyage Out. Corbett sets this novel, with its story of sexual ignorance and experience and its guarded references to prostitution, in relation to the work of Grand and her precursor Josephine Butler. This discussion fills an important gap in Woolf's work, though it would have been useful to provide some touchstones with more familiar material, for example by exploring how this relates to Woolf's discussion of shame and its connection with her Puritan heritage in her memoir essay "A Sketch of the Past" (1939). Woolf's moral qualms do come to the fore, however, in chapter three, "'Ashamed of the Inkpot': Woolf and the Literary Marketplace," where Corbett explores Woolf's discomfort with the...