Chapter 4 - Virginia Woolf and the Problem of Generations

Summary

In an unsigned essay published in 1923 – a year after modernism’s so-called annus mirabilis – Virginia Woolf declared the independence of a new literary generation. She did so not, as one might expect, on the grounds of its recent spate of creative energy. On the contrary, her essay complains of a “barren and exhausted age … incapable of sustained effort,” whose meager output is “littered with fragments, and not seriously to be compared with the age that went before.” What sparse praise she bestows on her “contemporaries” is qualified by assertions of their deficiency: a few phrases of T. S. Eliot might endure, and Joyce’s Ulysses, a “memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster,” might persist, but as a whole the “moderns” had produced little of value to offer to the canon.