Proust, Woolf, and Modern Fiction

Virginia Woolf began reading Marcel Proust in 1922. In an essay "On reading Novels," published in the Times Literary Supplement on July 20, 1922, she comments on the development of the novel since Henry James. Already, she notes, "the years have mounted up [since James's last novels]. We may expect the novel to change and develop as it is explored by the most vigorous minds of a very complex age. What have we not, indeed, to expect from M. Proust alone?" (1) Four months later, Proust died. The "Hommage" to him that the Nouvelle Revue Francaise published on January 1, 1923 included a rather bland testimonial from a group of English writers--among them, Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, and a number of Bloomsbury figures. (2) Leo Bersani has commented on the role that Proust's death played not only in cementing his reputation but also in completing his work since, as Bersani puts it, "for Proust, literature depends on death." (3) Parallels between Woolf's works of the 1920's, notably Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu show how much this recently deceased master of modern fiction meant to Woolf as she was writing her major works. Woolf's reading of Proust also helped to shape her influential definitions of modern fiction, although his role in her work has been underestimated by critics who tend to emphasize her English-language precursors. (4) In her diary and letters, Woolf continually meditated on the influence Proust might have on her own fiction. Even before she began reading him, in a letter of January 21, 1922 to E. M. Forster, Woolf wrote of Proust in terms that seem haunting in light of her later suicide: "Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but I'm shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again." (5) She actually began reading him by early May of that year, when she wrote to Roger Fry, But Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures--there's something sexual in it--that I feel I can write like that and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. (6) Woolf continued to read Proust as the various posthumous volumes were published. From 1922 on, she continually compared her own writing to that of Proust, whom she considered "far the greatest modern novelist." (7) Throughout the 1920's and 1930's she discussed Proust with her friends and acquaintances, including E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, H. G. Wells, Roger Fry, and W. B. Yeats. Although she mentioned Proust occasionally in her essays, she paid far greater attention in her published critical works to contemporary English-language novelists. Woolf was perhaps more conscious of the question of her literary influences than almost any major novelist, and she developed important theories about influence and tradition. She famously sought to establish a female literary tradition, and wrote that "we think back through our mothers if we are women," and that women needed to have their own kinds of sentences: "The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully." (8) Woolf had a similar idea about the relationship between English writing and writing by foreign authors. She even hesitated to take Conrad as a model because he was Polish-born. (9) She sometimes suggested that the fact of Proust's writing in French militated against his serving as a model for her own work. Woolf had published Jacob's Room in late 1922 and, after a period of some depression, had returned to work on Mrs. …