Early Novels and Stories (1915–1923)

Abstract

Between 1915 and 1923, Virginia Woolf published her first three novels (The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room) as well as some of her most iconic essays and stories. This chapter examines that work with particular attention to how Woolf’s early fiction describes modern novels, placing it in conversation with her essays on the modern novel. Woolf turned repeatedly to the problem of how to achieve the freedoms of a new modernity, and her early work struggles to imagine a new kind of novel while acknowledging that this new kind of novel does not exist: not quite yet. This chapter examines Woolf’s deliberately undetermined vision of modernity, tracing how her early work persistently ponders and imagines what a new era of writing will offer even as she refuses to specify and delimit what has yet to come to pass.