Snap! Criticism: What We Can Know & The British Novel of Ideas

Dan Hartland In my last column, I referred briefly to Virginia Woolf’s feelings about the work of HG Wells. They weren’t entirely rosy. Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. [… T]he Edwardians were never interested in character in itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something outside. Their books, then, were incomplete as books, and required that the reader should finish them, actively and practically, for himself. (Woolf, “Character in Fiction”, 1924.) Woolf bracketed Wells with the likes of John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett as “Edwardians”, novelists sandwiched between the “creative activity” of the Victorians and the radical project of the Modernists. These were writers marooned in a less artistically fecund age, so distracted by mere ideas that, for Woolf, they forgot to write novels. This has proven a sticky saw. It has lodged itself in the trunk of…