Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” makes use of first-person narration, a style in which the voice of the author is personal and admits limitations. It takes the perspective and voice of the person speaking. The first line of Woolf’s essay is an example: “It seems to me possible […] that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel” (3). This is self-deprecatory and, by using the first person (indicated by “I” and “me”), it challenges established ideas of the author as the ultimate authority, inviting the reader to think for themselves. This device is thematically important because, as Woolf puts it, “this humility on [the reader’s] part” and “these professional airs and graces on [the writer’s]” are responsible for “corrupt[ing] and emasculat[ing]” literature. The voice of Woolf’s essay seems intended to create what she calls in this essay a more “equal alliance” between reader and writer (23).