new formalist criticism. In literature, Strachey pioneered a new kind of biography in
Eminent Victorians (1918), reversing Victorian priorities by holding morally energetic
public figures up to ridicule by innuendo. If no man is a hero to his valet, Strachey may
be said to have created a valet school of biography; which has now washed
Bloomsbury’s own dirty linen. Strachey was a conscientious objector, and Bloomsbury
became associated in the public mind with the attitude expressed in ‘What I Believe’, a
1938 essay by E. M. Forster: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and
betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.’
Although their techniques are different, Virginia Woolf ’s post-war novels share a
creed with Forster’s pre-war novels: the good is to be found in moments of private
life, transient since death is final, to be found in love and friendship: life as art. These
aesthetic ethics, set forth by the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, had no
concern with religion, history, politics or morality. Reason, clarity, exclusivity and a
certain refined sensitivity outranked other values – but could not be expected of
most people. Virginia Woolf wrote of Clive Bell’s Civilisation (1928) that ‘in the end
it turns out that civilisation is a lunch party at No. 50 Gordon Square’.
Virginia Woolf ’s novels ignore external social reality except as it offers pheno-
mena to personal consciousness. She attacked the ‘materialism’ of Galsworthy and
Bennett: their heaped-up facts designed to clothe in credibility a theatrical plot-
with-characters and an action leading to a resolution. ‘We want to be rid of realism,
to penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it’, she wrote in 1919 in a
review of one of thirteen stream-of-consciousness novels by Dorothy Richardson
(1873–1957; grouped together as Pilgrimagein 1938). Woolf explored a world of
finely registered impressions – an interior, domestic, feminine world – impressions
often worked into patterns, as in the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, and of her sister
Vanessa. Beside the examples of Richardson and Joyce, she had that of Marcel
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–27). Her
first ‘impressionist’ novel (to borrow Ford’s term) was Mrs Dalloway (1925), devoted
to a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative MP, as she
prepares for a party where an old flame of hers is among the guests. Her interior
monologue is set against those of others, including that of a shell-shocked survivor
of the war.358 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), in 1936.