This study argues that the greatest formal innovation in Virginia Woolf’s fiction is the muting, complicating or effacing of tonal cues: textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf’s narrative prose thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. This book contends that these novelists, especially the writer, actress and ... More

This study argues that the greatest formal innovation in Virginia Woolf’s fiction is the muting, complicating or effacing of tonal cues: textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf’s narrative prose thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. This book contends that these novelists, especially the writer, actress and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins, influenced some of Woolf’s most important writings. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf borrowed arguments and examples from Robins’ prior polemical essay Ancilla’s Share. In Mrs. Dalloway and The Voyage Out she implicitly criticized Robins by revising her precursor’s major themes, using tonal ambiguity to introduce new perspectives. But Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her “essay-novel” The Pargiters, she created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.