[Vwoolf] “Modern Novels” (1919) in Essays, Vol. 3

[Stuart N. Clarke]

I have just found a substantial passage omitted in error from “Modern Novels” (1919) in Essays, Vol. 3, last line of p. 32, between “justify” and “this,”. The passage is almost the same as that in “Modern Fiction”, Essays, Vol. 4, pp. 159-60. I have checked the TLS, 10 April 1919, p. 189, for the former, and the first edition of The Common Reader (1925), pp. 187-8, for the latter.



The central section below is the missing passage. What is added in ‘Modern Fiction” is in square brackets.





We have to admit that we are exacting, and, further, that we find it difficult to justify 



our discontent by explaining what it is that we exact. We frame our question differently at different times. But it reappears most persistently as we drop the finished novel on the crest of a sigh—Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that[,] owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit seems to make from time to time[,] Mr. Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confession of vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely better the matter by speaking[,] as critics are prone to do[,] of reality. Admitting the vagueness [which afflicts all criticism of novels], let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, 



this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. 





Stuart


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