[Vwoolf] the four great Victorians?

[Anne Fernald]

A facebook friend asks whom Orlando refers to when mentioning the four
great writers of the Victorian age. I realize I don't know, nor do I really
understand the paragraph. How do you read this?

As a reference to four novelists (she's just had volumes and volumes
delivered) (e.g. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and....who? Hardy)? Or as a
joke about the way we name an era's greats with certainty? Or....? It seems
almost certainly NOT to be the four women of A Room of One's Own (Austen,
Brontë, Brontë, Eliot)....

"Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her
order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature
meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great
names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks,
Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons--all vocal, clamorous,
prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando's
reverence for print had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to
the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high
houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion."

-- 
Anne E. Fernald
<http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/faculty/english_faculty/anne_fernald_28537.asp>
*Mrs. Dalloway, now available from Cambridge UP*
<http://www.cambridge.org/9781107028784>

Director of Writing/Composition at Lincoln Center,
Associate Professor of English
<http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/english/index.asp>
and Women's Studies <http://www.fordham.edu/womens_studies>
Fordham University
113 W 60th St.
New York NY 10023

212/636-7613
fernald at fordham.edu
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