There was something pinched about her—a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad.…

Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments; sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband’s medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals outof saucers, indulging in long, silent stares.… There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature.…

I asked (the Edwardians)—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said: “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe—” But I cried: “Stop! Stop!” And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished forever.9

It is pure Woolf, then—it could be Woolf herself speaking—when Rachel says of her elderly aunts, who are still living their uneventful lives in England as she sails to South America:

“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s a sort of beauty in it.… It’s so unconscious, so modest. And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”

Rachel appreciates the commonplace. She is intelligent (but not spectacularly so), perceptive (but not incisive). She is so naïve as to be practically blank. In part because she is so guileless, Rachel is open to the forces of revelation that lay dormant almost everywhere. As she wanders along a river the day after a party—the first truly exciting party to which she’s ever been—she passes flowering trees “which Helen had said were worth the voyage out merely to see. April had burst their buds, and they bore large blossoms among their glossy leaves with petals of a thick wax-like substance coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson.” Most writers would be content with this: a girl walks among beautiful trees and thinks about her first real party, which has offered the possibility of love.