The free-ranging, commodious style of ‘On Being Ill’, written around the same time as ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, also looks forward to the poetic fluidity of The Waves.

Modernism’s ‘smashing and crashing’ also impacted on the life-writing of the period, and ‘The New Biography’ and ‘The Art of Biography’ are two essays in which Woolf turns her attention to the new approach to the genre instigated by Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). In between these two essays, published in 1927 and 1939 respectively, Woolf brought to completion the mischievous and unprecedented Orlando (1928), and Flush (1933), her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog. But her earlier Night and Day (1919) is no less clearly indebted to Strachey’s inspiring overhaul of life-writing, and what Woolf has to say in ‘The New Biography’ about the Victorian biographer ‘toiling … slavishly in the footsteps of his hero’ (p. 97) could not be more applicable to Mrs Hilbery’s pious, unending, and unfinishable life of her father, the great Victorian poet Richard Alardyce, in Woolf’s second novel: ‘The conscientious biographer may not tell a fine tale with a flourish, but must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless documents’ (p. 97). Indeed, it is the discovery of ‘documents’ revealing that her father and mother were not as happily married as she had imagined them to be that completely throws Mrs Hilbery and ensures that her life of her father will always remain an ‘amorphous mass’ (p. 97). Likewise, the gaping lacunae of Jacob’s Room (1922) are Stracheyan to the letter: ‘Many of the old chapter headings—life at college, marriage, career—are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial distinctions,’ Woolf writes in ‘The Art of Biography’. ‘The real current of the hero’s existence took, very likely, a different course’ (p. 121), the truth of which the brief and largely undocumented life of the prodigiously elusive Jacob Flanders bears out to the full.

Written at the height of her powers as a Modernist and with Modernism’s banging and crashing continuing to resound in her ears, ‘Leslie Stephen’ is marked by love and reverence rather than any anti-Victorian desire to smear her father or his milieu. Many of the most prominent essayists of the Victorian age had been either friends or acquaintances of her father’s and many had visited Woolf’s house during her childhood. As mentioned above, her essays have a close affinity with those of Beerbohm and Butler, but other exponents of the form, such as George Eliot, Macaulay, J. A. Froude, and Walter Pater, and before them Montaigne, Hazlitt, and above all Charles Lamb, all left their mark on Woolf’s conception of the essay. Yet her

approach to the history and to the nature of the genre was always marked by an attempt to identify within what she saw as a male tradition an alternative line of descent to which she could affiliate herself. This she outlined by stressing the connection between the essay and autobiography, but a type of autobiography which she insisted was essentially non-narrative and presented the self as a conglomeration of moments of perception and reflection.7

This is particularly evident in such essays as ‘On Being Ill’ and ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, but it is perhaps most conspicuous in the autobiographical pieces posthumously gathered together as Moments of Being (first published in 1976).

Woolf was a stupendous observer not just of herself but also her environment and her culture at large, and the essays in the ‘Looking On’ section of this collection reveal her pleasure in being part of the vivid, often dazzling kaleidoscope of the inter-war period. ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, ‘The Docks of London’, ‘Oxford Street Tide’, ‘Thunder at Wembley’, and ‘Flying over London’, in particular, show her rapturous immersion in the everyday world of the capital. Urban ‘rambling’ (p. 177) offered Woolf deliverance from the bookish captivation she so deeply loved but from which she occasionally felt the need to escape. However, although wandering the streets of London enabled Woolf to shed the restrictive harness of her gender and the handicap of her class—in exactly the same way as Clarissa does when she steps outside her imposing house at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway to buy the party flowers herself—this does not mean that she ever switched off as a writer. Quite the contrary: Woolf walked the streets of London on the qui vive and wrote the essays in the ‘Looking On’ section both to keep up with the pace of the city and also, for her reader, as a kind of vade mecum to a world of flux and change.

In the same way that Woolf felt the ‘materialist’ novelists were missing the essence of life with their emphasis on external reality and that fiction needed to reorient itself if it was to stand any chance of keeping abreast of modernity, so the thrust of these later essays is on the commercial hustle and bustle of Oxford Street, the unceasing activity of the London docks, and other aspects of what Woolf called elsewhere ‘the crowded dance of modern life’.8 As she puts it at the beginning of the same essay from which this quote is taken (a review-essay which is not of sufficiently high quality overall to be included in this volume) when writing about the novelist:

The novelist—it is his distinction and his danger—is terribly exposed to life. Other artists, partially, at least, withdraw; they shut themselves up for weeks alone with a dish of apples and a paint box, or a roll of music paper and a piano. When they emerge it is to forget and distract themselves. But the novelist never forgets and is seldom distracted. He fills his glass and lights his cigarette, he enjoys presumably all the pleasures of talk and table, but always with a sense that he is being stimulated and played on by the subject matter of his art. Taste, sound, movement, a few words here, a gesture there, a man coming in, a woman going out, even the motor that passes in the street or the beggar who shuffles along the pavement, and all the reds and blues and lights and shades of the scene claim his attention and rouse his curiosity. He can no more cease to receive impressions than a fish in mid-ocean can cease to let the water rush through his gills.9

Deborah Parsons and other critics have likened this all-seeing, pavement-tramping Woolf to a flâneuse, free to roam, observe, and write about whatever takes her fancy.10 And the connection is clearly compelling—especially when Woolf writes, as she does in ‘Oxford Street Tide’, that the ‘charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass. Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a different pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired and attempted by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England’ (p. 201). Rather than a highbrow’s disdain for ‘the garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street’ (p. 199), Woolf is uplifted by the transitory ebb and flow of the London crowd and the shiny, gaudy thoroughfares through which they surge.