Writers, Friends and Lovers: Virginia Woolf, G.E. Moore and the Aesthetics of Personal Relations
p. 107-119
Résumé
The point of departure of this paper are the connections between G.E. Moore’s ethical proposal in chapter VI of Principia Ethica, ‘The Ideal,’ and the aesthetic sensibility of Lily Briscoe, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Bernard, in The Waves. For Moore, ‘personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves.’ I would like to argue that, similarly, for Woolf, the creative act is intimately related to personal relations and the sharing of human emotions.
Texte intégral
1 Bloomsbury, Moore and “The Ideal”
1The influence of the philosopher G.E. Moore on the Bloomsbury Group, and in particular, on Virginia Woolf, has been very much discussed, remaining a source of controversy and disagreement. This influence has been mainly analysed at two different, but interrelated, levels: at the level of epistemology and at the level of ethics. Among those who have focused on the disagreements or disparities between Moore and Woolf, we find critics such as Sim, who has argued that ‘Woolf tended to be drawn to the more idealist and literary philosophers she read, such as Plato, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Wordsworth and McTaggart, as opposed to the rational-empiricist and analytic style of philosophy esposed by her father and contemporaries such as Moore and Russell,’1 or Hussey, for whom ‘the Moorean universe, endorsed by such as Russell and Keynes, is continually questioned by [Virginia Woolf’s] novels.’2 Poole, for his part, focuses on G.E. Moore, ‘the killer of Idealisms,’3 and on his demand for logical, clear and precise verbal definitions, so much at odds with Virginia’s attention to ‘the process of human vision which allows such enormous and radical imprecisions’ (67).
2Certainly, it is not in Moore’s analytic stance that we should look for the clearest affinities with Virginia Woolf. As put by McNeillie, ‘it seems very hard to believe that so prosaic a philosopher (and Moore could be numbingly prosaic) can have been any kind of inspiration to Woolf.’4 However, as Rosenbaum has pointed out, ‘Moore’s ethics is not completely separable from his philosophy of mind or his analytic techniques,’5 and certainly Moore’s ethics, particularly his 1903 book, Principia Ethica, had an unquestionable, well-documented impact on the Bloomsbury Group, due to Moore’s immense influence on the Cambridge Society of the Apostles.
3Tom Regan explains in detail what ‘The Apostles’ meant for Moore, and what Moore meant for ‘The Apostles,’ a select group of intellectuals that met every Saturday for discussion, and that had been active at Cambridge for more than seventy years, when Moore became a member in 1894. There, Moore came into close contact with the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy, and the political writer, publisher and autobiographer Leonard Woolf, all of them associated with the Bloomsbury Group. The critic and painter Roger Fry had been a member of ‘The Apostles’ in an earlier period. In the writings of Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Keynes, there are explicit references to the tremendous influence that Principia Ethica had on them.6 Thus, Regan has defined G.E. Moore as ‘Bloombury’s prophet,’ arguing that what the Bloomsbury members found in him was ‘an ethic of individual liberation’ (24), against conventional and traditional morality.
4As regards the particular influence of Principia Ethica on Virginia Woolf, there are some unquestionable facts. In a letter to Clive Bell, dated 3 August 1908, she informs him that she is reading the book (Regan 20), and as late as 1940, 32 years later, she wrote that it was ‘the book that made us all so wise and good.’7 There are even specific references to it in some of her novels. As McNeillie explains (11), it is the book that Helen Ambrose is reading in The Voyage Out (1915), and which Richard Dalloway (mis) quotes in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
5It is not my intention to argue that G.E. Moore was the most important philosophical influence on Woolf’s aesthetic stance. To begin with, throughout Woolf’s works, we find diverse and contradictory aesthetic attitudes.8 Other names and influences should, furthermore, be brought into the discussion, such as Walter Pater—for Harold Bloom, ‘Woolf’s sensibility essentially is Paterian’9—or Plato, as argued by McNeillie (14), and many others. But when the aesthetic dimension in Woolf is placed alongside ethics, when we explore the possible ethical significance of her aesthetic preferences, important affinities between her and Moore seem to arise. Hence, it is impossible not to see a connection between the value given by Bloomsbury to art in itself and to personal relations, and Moore’s placing of intrinsic goodness in aestheticism and personal intercourse. This is the famous moment from Chapter VI of Principia Ethica, ‘The Ideal,’ in which Moore states which things have intrinsic value for him:
By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves.10
6In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre pays some attention to Bloomsbury members’ acceptance of Moorean theories and their endorsement of Moore’s definition of ‘good,’ which constitutes, for MacIntyre, a ‘plainly false, badly argued position.’11 MacIntyre’s contention is that ‘these people take themselves to be identifying the presence of a non-natural property, which they call “good”; but there is in fact no such property and they are doing no more and no other than expressing their feelings and attitudes’ (17). In order to make his point, MacIntyre quotes—quite dismissively I would say—Keynes’s examples of topics of discussion among Moore’s followers:
If A was in love with B and believed that B reciprocated his feelings, whereas in fact B did not, but was in love with C, the state of affairs was certainly not as good as it would have been if A had been right, but was it worse or better than it would become if A discovered his mistake?
(16–17)
7For MacIntyre, this kind of discussion illustrates that what derives from Moorean ethics is ‘a highly impoverished view of how “good” may be used’ (16). However, I would like to argue that the exploration of ‘good’ that we find in Virginia Woolf’s works is far from impoverished, a view of ‘good’ that must have been influenced by Moore to a certain extent, especially at the beginning of her literary career. And, if as Keynes’s passage implies, ‘good,’ for Moore’s followers, was to be found in love and friendship, in Woolf’s novels, the treatment of these two dimensions is far from frivolous or superficial.
8My focus is going to be on To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), which present what could be seen as a fictional reworking of the main proposal of Moore in ‘The Ideal.’ It is important to note, however, that in ‘The Ideal,’ Moore does not convey his aesthetic argument in creative terms, but in terms of reception: his concern is with states of consciousness related to the enjoyment and the appreciation of the beautiful. As Keynes put it, ‘nothing mattered except states of mind... These states of mind were not associated with passion or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to “before” and “after”.’12 These states of contemplation and communion are indeed experienced by Lily and Bernard, but my point is that Woolf, as writer and creator, goes beyond Moore’s conception of the aesthetic, as she depicts Lily’s and Bernard’s respective aesthetic experiences as not only contemplative, but also and more importantly, creative. However, I would like to argue that their creative achievements—in different media, painting and storytelling respectively—depend, in a fundamental way, on the Moorean concepts of human intercourse and personal affections. In this way, the painter or the writer emerges as the human being not only able to enjoy and create aesthetic beauty, but also as the human being able to appreciate the mental and corporeal qualities ‘of the person towards whom the affection is felt’ (Moore 251), and to convey them in his work. In doing so, my argument will go beyond the strict connection between Moore and Woolf, as I intend to emphasise the important role that personal relations and the relation between the individual and humanity play in Woolf’s conception of the writer and the literary work.
2 To the Lighthouse and the Search for Unity
9In To the Lighthouse, the question of knowing and loving people, and the concern about the possibility of conveying that knowledge and that love, either through language or through painting, are central. And that knowledge, when it is traversed by love, will bring unity to both the artistic work and personal relations: ‘it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings— are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.’13 In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), probably Woolf’s best well-known literary manifesto, critics have come back, again and again, to her opposition between materialist and spiritualist writers, and her definition of the task of the novelist as that of conveying life and the activity of the mind. Less attention has been paid to the last part of the essay, in which Woolf turns to the Russian writers14 as an example of the kind of fiction English writers should produce:
If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit. ‘Learn to make yourself akin to people.... But let this sympathy be not with the mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart, with love towards them.’ In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness.15
10In the Russian literary tradition, Woolf finds evidence of the fact that sympathy and love must be at the heart of every great writer. The absence of those qualities constitutes one reason why Mr Ramsay’s intellectual project is condemned in To the Lighthouse: ‘To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to render the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally.’16 Earlier in the novel, Lily had experienced an intense moment, in which she stood ‘apparently transfixed, by the pear tree’ while ‘impressions poured in upon her’ of Mr Ramsay and Mr Bankes, those of the latter being much more positive than those of the former. She felt ‘transfixed by the intensity of her perception... so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity,’ and deeply intrigued by the following questions: ‘How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?’ (29).
11Her perplexity, then, is related to her thoughts and feelings for the people surrounding her, and the personal relations she finds herself enmeshed in. Thus, as opposed to Mr Ramsay’s search for a truth without feelings, ‘it was not knowledge but unity that [Lily] desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay’s knee’ (60). What the narrative traces is the way Lily manages to integrate this knowledge of unity into his artistic activity, a process in which her love of Mrs Ramsay and her desire for intimacy with her are central. We see this at the end of the novel, when Lily’s moment of artistic achievement—her final ‘vision’ (237), as she draws a line in the centre of the canvas and finishes the painting she had been unable to paint when Mrs Ramsay was alive—depends on the final insight she gains into Mrs Ramsay’s human or social achievement.
12Her previous uncertainty regarding her feelings for Mrs Ramsay had been conveyed in the following terms: ‘What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself... For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing— nothing that she could express at all’ (165). As she remembers the moment of the past that she wants to transform into painting, she experiences the following ‘daily miracle [s]’ or ‘illumination [s]’: ‘This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together’ (183). Mrs Ramsay brings unity into personal relationships, just as Lily must bring unity into her painting: the ‘danger’ (62), she reflects, is that ‘the unity of the whole might be broken’ (63). Thus, as put by Torgovnick, Lily’s final achievement in the novel ‘comes from recognizing that Mrs. Ramsay created harmonies in human relationships similar to the harmonies Lily creates in paint.’17
13This parallel between Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay is especially interesting for our purpose, because it implies an equivalence between aesthetic enjoyment and the enjoyment of human intercourse, borrowing Moore’s categories. If Briscoe’s achievement is an artistic one, Mrs Ramsay’s lies in the domestic and familial spheres: in her qualities as mother, wife and host.18 Thus, one of her main achievements is a social event, namely, the dinner, in which ‘nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her’ (96). In this quotation, Mrs Ramsay’s ability to create a sense of social and collective harmony around the table is presented as precisely that, an act of creation, which obviously recalls Briscoe’s. That is why critics such as Miller have seen Mrs Ramsay as an artist, with the ability of losing her sense of self and become anonymous (17). This idea is reinforced when Lily realises that the ‘power’ of Mrs Ramsay’s ‘soul’ lies in the way ‘she brought together this and that and then this’ (182), producing ‘something’ which ‘stayed in the mind almost like a work of art’ (183, my emphasis). This ‘almost’ probably indicates that whatever intrinsic value Woolf attaches to personal relationships, they do not possess the quality of permanence and endurance that works of art have. In fact, there are several reflections throughout the novel about the ‘inadequacy’ (47), the ‘self-seeking’ (49) and ‘frail’ (103) character of human relationships.
14However, and this is my main point, the novel seems to suggest that in order to carry out the act of artistic creation, it is necessary to have, at least, a certain understanding of those human relationships: ‘the novel seems quite serious in suggesting that visual imagination indicates general sensibility and sensitivity to others’ (Torgovnick 138). We find this idea in A Room of One’s Own, when Woolf defines the novel as ‘a structure leaving a shape on the mind’s eye.’ This shape, according to Woolf, ‘starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the “shape” is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being.’19 Again, human relations constitute the very genesis of artistic creation, in this particular case, novel-writing. And in the case of Lily Briscoe’s painting, those human relations are also the object of the artistic act. Lily paints Mrs Ramsay in her role as mother, holding her son, James, a most suitable expression of her capacity to create a ‘community of feeling with other people’ (131).
3 The Waves and the Language of Love
15The Waves is a novel about friendship, and about the impossibility of telling the story of one’s life without telling the story of the lives of others. In her ‘Introduction’ to this novel, Deborah Parsons argues that ‘Woolf speculated on the collective rather than individual aspects of identity, and her aim was to focus on the breaking down of conventional character and the impermeable boundaries of identity, of self and world, and of self and other.’20
16Certainly, as we read the monologues of six characters, six friends, as they progress through the different stages of life, the effect created is not so much that of the development of six different and independent lives, but of one single existence made up of six interrelated voices or personalities. If as put by Miller, Woolf enjoyed a ‘sense of the communal nature of existence’ (32), it is difficult to find a novel that conveys better than The Waves, both from a thematic and narrative perspective, this communal sense of existence. As with To the Lighthouse, what interests me, referring again to Moore’s categories in ‘The Ideal,’ is the way in which personal affection and human intercourse are put into relation with the aesthetic act, this time carried out by Bernard, the storyteller of the group.
17Bernard, like Lily, experiments what Keynes referred to, as pointed out above, as Moorean timeless states of contemplation. Since he was a child, he has been ‘sensitive, percipient. Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears’ (163). The perceptions he receives, hence, are the perceptions received by his friends, which highlights his dependence on Percival, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda, whose friendship is endowed with powers superior to those of religion and even literature: ‘Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends’ (150). This dependence turns out to be even existential, since Bernard experiences his self not as an ‘I’ but as a ‘we’:
When I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call ‘my life,’ it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs.
(156)
18Bernard’s faith in the power of words is shown early in the novel, as we see him carrying a notebook, in which he enters his phrases in alphabetical order: ‘a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered’ (19). But he ends up realising that life cannot be subjected to method or order, and hence, to a narrative line: ‘But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning? Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it’ (151). Life, then, is what Bernard must narrate; life, as described by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own: ‘the common life which is the real life and not... the little separate lives which we live as individuals’ (148–149). It is this ‘common life’ that Bernard lives as he says that ‘this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another’ (158). In the way he incorporates both the male and female sex into his sense of identity, Bernard seems to be endowed with an androgynous mind: a mind, Woolf explains in A Room of One’s Own, neither ‘purely masculine,’ nor ‘purely feminine’; a mind that is ‘naturally creative, incandescent and undivided’; a ‘porous’ mind (128). Certainly, that is the case of Bernard, who describes himself as ‘immeasurably receptive, holding everything’ (164).
19If he can’t find ‘the true story’ (123), it is because there is not a true story. Instead, there is ‘a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sighs’ (144). This quotation underlines the way in which life can only be matched, or told (and always inadequately) by an inarticulate, broken, interrupted language, so different from the neat phrases contained in Bernard’s methodical notebook. Previously Bernard had pointed out: ‘How I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement’ (135). ‘Some little language such as lovers use’: Miller argues that there is, here, the suggestion that ‘redemption lies in the resurrection of the word through love’ (62). What interests me is why the language of lovers should be longed for: because of its irrational quality, but also because of its being a language of personal affection, a language with ‘the power... of communicating feelings,’ borrowing Mrs Dalloway’s words as she extols ‘the enormous resources of the English language.’21
20Iris Murdoch has argued that ‘falling in love is for many people their most intense experience, bringing with it a quasi-religious certainty, and most disturbing because it shifts the centre of the world from ourself to another place.’22 According to Murdoch, a love relationship ‘can prompt a process of unselfing wherein the lover learns to see and respect, what is not himself’ (17). Certainly, Woolf, who condemned the ‘damned egotistic self’ of James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson,23 believed that this ‘process of unselfing’ is one that the writer must go through. However, as shown in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, this rejection of the egostistic self does not imply a fall into impersonality, as Lisa Low argues,24 but rather, the writer or the artist must abandon his or her self in order to be able to include other selves, and to become aware of the other selves inhabiting his or her own self:
‘Louise and Neville,’ said Bernard, both sit silent. Both are absorbed. Both feel the presence of other people as a separating wall. But if I find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke rings—see how phrases at once begin to wreathe off my lips.... I do not believe in separation. We are not single. Also I wish to add to my collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of human life. My book will certainly run to many volumes, embracing every known variety of man and woman.
(36)
21This is a key passage to understand Bernard’s literary project, and Woolf’s, by implication. Bernard is endowed with a capacity and a feeling that Louise and Neville do not possess. Parsons states that ‘the notion of identity that Woolf intended the characters in the novel to express is... not singular but symphonic’ (x). However, in this particular passage, Louise and Neville do perceive their identity in singular terms, and it is Bernard, the storyteller, that creates that symphonic sense of communal identity. The writer is the one that needs to have that experience in order to carry out his writing, which must embrace every known variety of human life. In fact, in the last section of the novel, his friends’ voices disappear and Bernard is the one who, in a biographical fashion, sums up his story and the stories of his friends, which is the same story, after all; the story of those, with whom he was ‘drawn into... communion by some deep, some common emotion’ (70).
22The relation between literature and love establishes some points of connection between Woolf and Murdoch. For Iris Murdoch, ‘the essence of art is love’ for the following reason:
In the creation of a work of art the artist is going through the exercise of attending to something quite particular other than himself. The intensity of this exercise itself gives to the work of art its special independence. That is, it is an independence and uniqueness which is essentially the same as that conferred upon, or rather discovered in, another human being whom we love.25
23In this essay, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ Murdoch explicitly refers to the Bloomsbury members, arguing that her conception of the exercise of the imagination as an exercise of love is what provides Bloomsbury’s idea of the ‘independence, self-containedness,’ and ‘itselfness’ of the work of art with a moral quality: ‘Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness’ (216). We have seen how Bernard sometimes experiences his love of others as communion; on other occasions, however, he experiences his friends’ otherness: ‘Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known’ (156). In any case, if as Murdoch has put it, love is the ‘indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others’ (216), Bernard, as well as Lily Briscoe, has that capacity. In order to create, artists—like the Russian writers that Woolf so much admired—must have the capacity to love.
4 Good Writers Are Good Friends
24In the critical reception of Virginia Woolf, critics have either emphasized the strong individual sensibility pervading her oeuvre and her concern with the workings of the individual mind,26 or her rejection of egotism by a flight into impersonality. However, the way in which the artistic or creative act emerges in some of her novels as depending on a sense of communality has not received enough attention. The traditional—and partly misleading—Lukácsian view of modernism as focused on the isolated individual must have been one reason for this critical tendency, as well as the necessity of distinguishing Woolf’s sensibility from E.M. Forster’s, who has unanimously become the writer of personal relations. Thus, Dowling argues that ‘Woolf and Forster exemplify two artistic responses to the Moorean vision of early Bloomsbury’: whereas “Forster’s novels are studies of friendshi... Woolf’s novels are studies of how to contemplate (aesthetically) the world.’27
25As I hope to have shown, however, a novel such as The Waves certainly constitutes a profound study of friendship. That Woolf should make this close connection between aesthetics and friendship makes perfect sense, given the idiosyncrasy of the Bloomsbury Group, as Leonard Woolf explains in Beginning Again:
There have been other groups of people who were not friends, but were consciously united by a common doctrine or object, or purpose artistic or social. The Utilitarians, the Lake poets, the French Impressionists, the English Pre-Raphaelites were groups of this kind. Our group was quite different. Its basis was friendship, which in some cases developed into love and marriage. The colour of our minds and thought had been given to us by the climate of Cambridge and Moore’s philosophy, much as the climate of England gives colour to the face of an Englishman while the climate of India gives quite a different colour to the face of a Tamil.28
26Woolf’s personal experience as a writer in the Bloomsbury Group must have influenced the way in which the collective and the communal do not merely function, in her work, as a psychological challenge to a traditional humanist conception of the ego, but as an ethical and emotional space in which the artist or the writer is able to carry out his or her work. It is through this co-dependence between personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments that Woolf enters in dialogue with Moore’s Ideal. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf asserts that ‘good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings’ (143), a clearly Moorean statement in its affirmation of the intrinsic value of literature. In the light of To the Lighthouse and The Waves, this statement could be rephrased as good writers (or artists) are good friends and good human beings.
Notes de bas de page
1 Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 23.
2 Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986) 99.
3 Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982) 66.
4 Andrew Mcneillie, ‘Bloomsbury,’ The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 13.
5 S.P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group vol. 1 (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1987) 217.
6 Tom Regan, Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G.E. Moore and the Development of his Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) 16–17.
7 Virginia Woolf, Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: Collected Letters, vi: 1936-41, ed. Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth, 1980) 400.
8 Ruth C. Miller, Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988) 3. Miller sees Moore’s influence in Woolf’s constant exploration of the idea of creation as perception (22). Similarly, Rosenbaum argues that ‘it is Moore’s dualistic account of awareness and sense-data, rather than William James’s, Bergson’s or Freud’s theories of consciousness, that underlies the preoccupation with perception in her writing’ (224).
9 Harold Bloom, ed., Virginia Woolf: Modern Critical Views (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986) 2.
10 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: CUP, 1993) 237.
11 Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) 16. It is interesting to bear in mind that according to MacIntyre, Moorean intuitionism constitutes the origin of the emotivist theory of ethics, of which his book constitutes an attack.
12 John Maynard Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs,’ The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, ed. S.P. Rosenbaum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) 86.
13 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton Books, 1978) 84.
14 Dalgarno devotes chapter 3 of her book to Woolf’s connections with Russian literature, especially, with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. She does not analyse in depth, however, Woolf’s references to the Russian writers in ‘Modern Fiction.’ See Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Christine Reynier deals with the human and ethical dimension in Woolf’s essays on the Russian writers in her first chapter of Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009).
15 Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 11–12.
16 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1964) 38.
17 Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985) 118.
18 As Torgovnick puts it, ‘Mrs. Ramsay finally “means” exactly what Lily had tried to paint in the summer spent with the Ramsays: the strong, stable, dark triangle. She is in the social sphere, the embodiment of familial love, maternity, and warm-hearted concern for others; in the private, mystical sphere, she is the “core of darkness”’ (140–141).
19 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 92.
20 Deborah Parsons, ‘Introduction,’ The Waves (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Ed., 2000) ix-x.
21 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: CRW Publishing, 2003) 198.
22 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 2003) 16–17.
23 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1920-1924 vol. 2, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) 14.
24 Low focuses on Woolf’s use of impersonality to undermine historical divisions between male and female writing. See Lisa Low, ‘Refusing to Hit Back: Virginia Woolf and the Impersonality Question,’ Virginia Woolf and the Essay, eds. Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997) 257–274.
25 Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1999) 219.
26 Thus, in his overview of the literary and artistic milieu of which Woolf was part, Allen argues that the main preoccupation was ‘the individual human being, the individual sensibility, the individual reaction.’ See Walter Allen, The English Novel (London: Penguin, 1991) 342.
27 David Dowling, Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1985) 219.
28 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (New York: Harcourt Grace Jovanovich, 1980) 25.
Auteur
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María J. López
University of Córdoba, Spain
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