Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Virginia Woolf was a British author of novels, short stories, and essays. Her work exemplifies the qualities of Modernist literature that she describes in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Her key works include the novels The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). In Mrs. Dalloway, one of her most famous and widely studied works, the action of the novel takes place on a single day and employs a stream-of-consciousness narration in which the reader is privy to the waves of thought that cross the mind of the titular character. This is one style of narrative that she describes and analyzes in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”

Woolf’s nonfiction includes autobiographical writing (including extensive diaries) and numerous essays and reviews. Her major book-length work of nonfiction, A Room of One’s Own (1929), explores the material conditions of authorship, arguing that a person, especially a woman, must have financial resources to become a writer.