‘We are sharply cut off from our predecessors,’ she writes. ‘A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible for our fathers’ (p. 27). This loosening-up of the mental, moral, and material conditions of life is experienced by both Peter Walsh and Elizabeth Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway. When Elizabeth walks down the Strand, for example, she senses that the ‘accumulated robustness’ of both the sky and society have been shifted by the First World War, whereas Peter Walsh reflects that the ‘five years—1918 to 1923—had been … somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different. Now, for instance, there was a man writing quite openly in the respectable weeklies about water-closets.’5

A similar spirit pervades one of Woolf’s most iconic essays, ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), in which she remarks that ‘All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children’ (p. 38), having just made her much-quoted assertion ‘that on or about December 1910 human character changed’ (p. 38). Once again, Woolf insists that from amidst the ‘smashing and crashing … the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction’ (p. 51) which is all too audible in the 1920s, a new, more truthful, and so more credible and creditable form of the novel will arise; it will be peopled with characters that are psychologically true to life and not just with regard to their apparel and/or domestic settings. ‘I believe that all novels … deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic and alive, has been evolved’ (p. 42). Similarly, at the end of the equally famous ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ Woolf prophesies that ‘One of these days Mrs Brown will be caught’ (p. 36), perhaps sensing even then that shortly afterwards she herself would help to capture her and rename her Mrs Ramsay or Mrs Dalloway or Lily Briscoe. James Joyce called her Molly Bloom.

‘“Impassioned Prose”’ was written while Woolf was at work on To the Lighthouse and there are intriguing connections between what she has to say in her essay about the current state of prose in England and what she achieves in her fifth novel. For in To the Lighthouse, as in De Quincey’s autobiographical writings, ‘Scenes come together … like congregations of clouds which gently join and slowly disperse or hang solemnly still’ (p. 60). And what Woolf writes further on in this essay about De Quincey’s method is equally applicable to her own: ‘his most perfect passages are not lyrical but descriptive. … they are descriptions of states of mind in which, often, time is miraculously prolonged and space miraculously expanded’ (p. 61). As she phrases it in ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’:

It may be possible that prose is going to take over—has, indeed, already taken over—some of the duties which were once discharged by poetry. … and that in ten or fifteen years’ time prose will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before. That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured even more. We shall be forced to invent new names for the different books which masquerade under this one heading. And it is possible that there will be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. (pp. 79–80)

This essay first appeared in 1927, and within four years (not the ‘ten or fifteen’ that Woolf thought would need to elapse) she had published The Waves, her own consummate ‘play-poem’,6 which magisterially brings to fulfilment her predictions for the novel of the future.