In August, 1925, Virginia Woolf published an essay titled “American Fiction” in the London Saturday Review, where she serenely ruled out the importance of a number of leading U.S. novelists, including Henry James, the well-respected (but now forgotten) Joseph Hergesheimer, and, perhaps most eyebrow-raisingly, Edith Wharton. Wharton’s masterpiece “The Age of Innocence” had been published just four years earlier, winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction—the first for a female author. Woolf was careful to say that it was impossible to “dismiss” such “distinguished names,” but she added that their praises were qualified because they were “not Americans,” by which she seemed to mean that, although these authors were born and raised in America and often wrote books set in their country of origin, they had become foreigners after years of living abroad, and had, osmotically or chameleonically, taken on the artistic traditions of their adoptive cultures. Instead of the invigorating innovation of a Walt Whitman, who had the sense to stay home (and whom Woolf extolled as “the real American undisguised”), these transplanted authors wrote what sounded like classic British fiction; or, as Woolf put it, “They do not give us anything we have not got already.”
Wharton, for one, was less than pleased, and she wrote to a friend, “Mrs. Virginia Woolf writes a long article … to say that no interesting American fiction is, or should be, written in English; and that Henry, Hergesheimer and I are negligible because we have nothing new to give—not even a language!” She added, sarcastically, “Well—such discipline is salutary.”
Wharton was then sixty-three. What aging author would be happy to see herself dismissed by a writer twenty years younger—especially one then being celebrated for advancing a modernism that was threatening to make Wharton’s own accomplishments obsolete? Just three months before writing her essay on American fiction, Woolf published “Mrs. Dalloway,” a work in the mold of Joyce’s revolutionary “Ulysses,” which first appeared in book form in 1922. Having initially rejected “Ulysses” as indecent and boring—and having declined to publish it at the Hogarth Press, the tiny publishing operation she ran with her husband—Woolf had a change of heart, partly under the influence of another displaced American writer, T. S. Eliot, who convinced her that “Ulysses” was a masterpiece. Woolf, despite a lingering ambivalence, was sufficiently swayed as to attempt “Mrs. Dalloway,” a novel written in the stream-of-consciousness style pioneered in “Ulysses” and also, like Joyce’s novel, set on a single June day and quenched of almost all conventional plot or character development.
Critics exalted “Mrs. Dalloway” as an important advance in literature. In the Saturday Review, the critic Gerald Bullett unfavorably compared Wharton’s latest, “A Mother’s Recompense,” with “Mrs. Dalloway,” calling Woolf “a brilliant experimentalist,” while Wharton was “content to practice the craft of fiction without attempting to enlarge its technical scope.” This injury also did not escape Wharton’s notice, and she defended herself to a friend in a letter, unapologetically calling her novel “old-fashioned” and saying, “I was not trying to follow the new methods.” That she disapproved of those methods was clear when she added, “My heroine belongs to the day when scruples existed.” (Elsewhere, she rejected the modernism of Joyce and Woolf, calling the former’s work “pornographic,” the latter’s “exhibitionism.”)
All things considered, Wharton is an old-fashioned writer. Even “The Age of Innocence,” with its narrative of a young man bowing to societal strictures in his choice of a wife, more closely resembles that of Jane Austen than the work of an avante-gardist like Joyce. And, while the novel does hint at the advent of the modern consciousness—contrasting the New York mores of the eighteen-seventies (when the main action is set) with the postwar New York of 1920, when Wharton was writing—it nevertheless hews to the understood rules that a novel must be a dramatically arranged series of events that unfold in the course of weeks, months, or years (not a single day), involve a set of characters within a defined social setting (not an entire city, like Dublin), and culminate in a moral or emotional crisis that lends meaning to the fate of the hero or heroine (not one character rescuing another from a drunken collapse in a red-light district, followed by the unmediated erotic musings of an unfaithful wife). “The Age of Innocence,” for all its brilliance—and there is an argument for its being one of the best American novels ever written—does not “enlarge fiction’s technical scope,” except in one startling respect.
I’m thinking of the stunning narrative maneuver that Wharton deploys in the transition to the novel’s final chapter, a breathtaking vault across thirty years that brings us, in the space of a single sentence, from the library of Newland Archer’s Thirty-ninth Street town house to that selfsame library three decades later, and in which the reader learns that Archer’s wife, May, has died—a blow all the more stunning for the casual way in which it is revealed, almost as an aside, some four pages into the chapter: “He had been what was called a faithful husband; and when May had suddenly died—carried off by the infectious pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child—he had honestly mourned her.” Not an epilogue in the traditional sense, the chapter follows directly on the previous one without warning of the time gap, and it continues the main narrative, whose culminating moment is Archer’s non-meeting with Ellen Olenska, his true love.
If there is a precedent in literature for such a thrilling, disorienting leap across time—coupled with the offhand revelation of a central character’s demise, evocative of the implacable march of time and mortality—I’m not aware of it. I am, however, aware of a similar leap, done to precisely the same effect, in a novel that came out six years after “The Age of Innocence,” and two years after Woolf’s Saturday Review essay on American fiction.
The novel is Woolf’s modernist milestone “To the Lighthouse,” published in 1927, which, like “The Age of Innocence,” explores a marriage. In this case, the marriage is that of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, a middle-aged couple who play host to a handful of summer guests in their house on the coast of England. More than half the book is devoted to a single day, during which the most dramatic occurrence is the planning of a boat trip to a nearby lighthouse. Then, two-thirds of the way through, the narrative sweeps ten years into the future, and, while the setting remains the same (that summer house on the coast), the familiar cast of characters, once again assembled, has aged by a decade, except for three of them: Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children, their deaths revealed in a series of casually jolting parenthetical asides. Four pages into the chapter, Woolf writes, “Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.” A few pages later, their daughter Prue is revealed to have died “in some illness connected with childbirth,” and we learn, in a similarly offhand parenthesis, that Andrew was blown up by a shell in France. But it is Mrs. Ramsay’s death that hits hardest. Like May’s, in “The Age of Innocence,” Mrs. Ramsay’s role as prime mover in the lives of those around her is not fully understood until her passing, and the novel’s final pages, like those of “The Age of Innocence,” resound with the ghostly echo of her offstage death, even as the reader’s mind is cast back over the book to spy out the influence she had on all the other characters when she was alive.
Though I can find no record of Woolf having read “The Age of Innocence,” it seems unlikely that she would have failed to read Wharton’s most famous and celebrated book, if for no other reason than she would have been curious about the first novel by a woman to win the Pulitzer. It seems equally unlikely that she would have failed to recognize, and to be galvanized by, the startling originality in that narrative leap at the end of Wharton’s novel.
Whether Wharton herself ever noticed the parallel is lost to history, but, from our current vantage point, Woolf’s breezy dismissal of American authors, including Wharton—“they do not give us anything we have not got already”—seems, at best, questionable. Something from “The Age of Innocence” seems to have reverberated in Woolf’s mind when she sat down to write her own most famous novel, even if it was only the central image of the lighthouse, which, as readers of “The Age of Innocence” know, is a key symbol on which Wharton’s novel also turns.
Harold Bloom, in his book “The Anxiety of Influence,” discusses how poets necessarily struggle against the example set by poets who came before them, drawing inspiration from their precursors’ innovations and experiments but worrying, simultaneously, about the price to their own originality. All writers are magpies (or cannibals), never reading solely for pleasure, but always with an opportunistic eye for an effect, a technique, a simile, a metaphor, or a transition that can be borrowed and used to solve the problems presented by a writer’s own work. Woolf, with her bold experiments in form and content in her novels, and in essays like her Saturday Review piece on American fiction, was an exemplar of the modernist project of making it new. But the obvious debt she owed to Joyce and her less obvious one to Wharton show that even the greatest writers cannot free themselves entirely from the anxiety that Bloom describes.
