Gillian Beer

‘If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?’ queries a character in Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Both Alex Zwerdling in Virginia Woolf and the Real World and Lucio Ruotolo in The Interrupted Moment engage with the implications of this question – though neither has much to say about aeroplanes. Zwerdling concentrates on Woolf’s ‘intense interest in the life of society and its effect on the individual’; Ruotolo emphasises ‘the rhythm of broken sequence’. Zwerdling and Ruotolo recognise the urgency with which Woolf responds to the current moment in her final work. Ruotolo discovers a hoped-for continuity: what is interrupted is resumed, though changed in form by interruption. Zwerdling emphasises the diaspora of the self and of English society that is chillingly written into the book’s gossip: ‘Negation regularly has the last word.’ Ruotolo, in his book’s only surprising move, proceeds from his analysis of Between the Acts to claim Woolf for anarchism, though the anarchism for which he claims her proves to be generalised (‘All great art is anarchy’ – Gertrude Stein) and muted, a matter of ‘the liberating space of unguarded moments’.’

In her first public writing after her elopement with George Henry Lewes in 1854, George Eliot compared the position of women in England and in France: ‘in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred.’ And, writing under cover of anonymity for the Westminster Review, she declared that one reason for the achievement of women in France is ‘laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie … Gallantry and intrigue are sorry enough things in themselves, but they certainly serve better to arouse the dormant faculties of women than embroidery and domestic drudgery.’ She was then reviewing Victor Cousin’s Madame de Sablé, and Cousin had been briefly the lover of a woman whom Marian Evans (or George Eliot) already knew, and was to know better: Mary Clarke Mohl, whose style of writing and life might epitomise Marian Evans’s trenchant early views of women’s powers. Mary writes in her journal in 1826, when she was turning back from Cousin to her lover, Fauriel: