Woolf’s Dialogue with the New Sciences
Résumé
In this paper I will argue that Woolf’s narrative strategies in her short stories, especially the distance with which she describes reality, have been influenced by the scientific and philosophical context of her time. Indeed, Russell wrote about the multiperspectival nature of reality which included empty and occupied perspectives, the former implying an absent but potential observer. Besides, astronomy developed fully in the early twentieth century as scientists like Jeans and Hubble explored the limits of the universe thanks to the evolving technology. One often has the impression that reality in Woolf’s short fiction is depicted by a distant narrator who seems to be looking at the external world through a telescope, a powerful device which also helps to look back in time, sometimes plunging the reader in a ghostly atmosphere.
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1On February 27th, 1932, an article about the discovery of the neutron was published in the Morning Post:
The new particles are expected to provide a powerful tool for studying the inner structure of the atom, the nucleus round which the outer or planetary particles revolve. This is the region of the atom where no laws are known with certainty to be valid and where the world of ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ may, for all knowledge to the contrary, be as real as that on which we live.
2The news was largely advertised in the United States and in the British press as well. As we shall see, the interaction between science and literature to refer to the external world is characteristic of the early twentieth century. Both domains borrowed images and perspectives from one another to make reality much more tangible and objective even if this seems quite paradoxical as regards sciences. Why should we find a reference to a literary masterpiece in the scientific paper quoted above? Was literature the only tool people had in common to visualise new abstract phenomena? Likewise, why did scientific concepts find their way into fictional works? Was an update of the literary representation of reality necessary?
- 1 This is an entirely new aspect of researches on Woolf. Rather than concentrating on the text itself (...)
3In this paper I will argue that the multiperspectival nature of reality formulated by Russell, as well as the evolving technology and growing use of mathematics which enabled the development of sciences like astronomy, influenced Woolf’s way of representing the external world and her narrative strategies in her short stories especially as far as distantiation is concerned.1
- 2 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Th (...)
- 3 Holly Henry, ‘From Edwin Hubble’s telescope to Virginia Woolf’s “Searchlight”’, Virginia Woolf in T (...)
- 4 Here are a few references: James Jeans, The Universe Around Us (Cambridge: CUP, 1929). James Jeans, (...)
4In the early 20th century, people were very interested in anything that related to the new sciences like astronomy and Woolf was no exception, as is mentioned in an article in the book Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction published in 2000. In April 1929, she had the opportunity to see the ‘silver white’ craters of the moon2 thanks to her friend Vita Sackville-West who owned a telescope. It had even been suggested that Vita would have a planetarium built but it turned out to be impossible because of the expense it represented (£20.000).3 Besides, Woolf attended meetings and discussions when visiting Lady Ottoline Morrell where the greatest mathematicians and physicians of her time like Eddington, Russell, Whitehead, James Jeans and Julian Huxley met and talked about the latest discoveries. They all published books to popularise them as well.4
5What is more, articles based on sciences became more and more frequent in the press. We can refer to J. G. Crowther, a scientific correspondent for several newspapers, who left dozens of notebooks to the archives of Sussex University in Brighton. Crowther sent his articles to the Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman, Nature and kept the press cuttings. He also published books like: Science for You (1928), Short Stories in Science (1929) or Osiris and The Atom (1932). His topics could be the neutron, the electron, or the expansion of the universe and his articles were written with the intention of making these discoveries easy to understand.
- 5 J. G. Crowther, ‘Science in the Public Press’, Nature, n° 3481, vol. 138, (July 18th, 1936): 93.
- 6 Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and The Discourse of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20 (...)
6In an article entitled ‘Science in the Public Press’ published in July 1936 in Nature, Crowther explained that this growing interest both on the part of the reading public and the editors was due to several factors, the first being that: ‘Government departments which spend money on research, and scientific workers who are supported by public money, feel that the public should understand the value of the work it is supporting’.5 Crowther compared this attitude with that of scientists in the nineteenth century who enjoyed doing research but did not consider it necessary to be of practical value for the community. The second reason was that: ‘The policy adopted by large industrial corporations of supporting research in order to invent valuable new processes has provided another motive for the extension of public interest in science’ (Crowther 1936, 93). The point is, the larger the public debate, the more industrialists could boast of the fact that they had made these inventions possible. Keeping the public informed through these sorts of advertisements would enable these corporations to sell related goods. Thus, the editors’ attitude had to change for, from a business point of view, the public who was eager for new scientific discoveries had to be satisfied: ‘Recent questionaires on the popularity of different types of articles have shown that scientific articles are more popular than many editors with a literary training had believed’ (93). People were interested in sciences to such an extent that when Einstein published a paper in 1929 in a German publication, the London department store Selfridges pasted it on its window and crowds gathered around to read it.6
7Due to evolving technologies, the means used to observe the universe developed rapidly, led to huge progress in astronomy and thus popular interest grew. If the very first astronomical lenses were made by Galileo who, already in the early years of the seventeenth century, saw the craters of the moon and observed that the Milky Way was composed of numerous stars (1609), it took more than a century to find out that nebulae often had a spiral structure. This occurred in 1845 when William Parsons, known as Lord Rosse, built a 72-inch reflecting telescope (Henry 2003, 13).
- 7 Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1989) 102.
8Woolf wrote the short story ‘Solid Objects’ the same year the biggest telescope in the world (100 inches) was set up on Mount Wilson, California in 1919. There were great expectations both from the scientists and the public. Indeed, this instrument was to revolutionise astronomy when a few years later Hubble discovered that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way (1923) and that it was constantly expanding (1929). Such perspectives on the universe were contemporary of Woolf’s work and may have affected her narrative strategies. In the incipit of the short story published in 1920 the narrator describes an enigmatic scene: ‘The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black spot’.7 Gradually, the reader finds out that: ‘it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs; and moment by moment it became more unmistakable that it was composed of the persons of two young men’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 102).
9One may wonder where exactly the narrator can be to see reality like this. Does he use some kind of optical device? And why should he be so distant? In this short story, a young man called John becomes totally obsessed by a collection of banal objects to the extent that he ruins a promising career and becomes ostracised in a life which is empty though full of these objects. He regards these bits and pieces of china, glass and iron as extraordinary; he says about the first object in glass that it is almost a ‘precious stone’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 103), about the second in china that it is ‘freakish’ (105) and about the third made of iron that it is ‘alien to the earth’, ‘the cinder of a moon’ (106). Not only do these comparisons reveal an interest in remote and unknown objects but they also create a mise en abyme: the character who perceives reality from a distance, ‘something fixed and distant in his expression’ (107), is depicted by a narrator who also gives the impression that he perceives the external world as if he were far away looking at the earth with a telescope.
10If one can talk about ‘narrative scoping strategies’ in some of Woolf’s short stories as Holly Henry suggests (Henry 2003, 51), this can be found both on the level of the descriptions and of the dialogues: ‘“Politics be damned!” issued clearly from the body on the left-hand side’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 102). There are two dialogues, each time between John and his friend Charles, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the text. The reader who has only a partial vision of the scene, can only read fragments of conversations. Except at the end when one realizes that the communication between both men is impossible because they seem to have different perspectives on the external world which ends up in an awkward discussion and a complete misunderstanding: ‘he had a queer sense that they were talking about different things’ (107).
11This is only one example of distancing between a narrator and his character who lives in total isolation. But there is a later short story where form and content are even more brilliantly combined to convey a sense of distance. In ‘The Searchlight’, written between 1929 and 1941, the manuscripts of which are at Sussex University, the telescope plays an even larger role in spite of its invisibility. The difference between the first draft entitled ‘What The Telescope Discovered’ and the last one is that the story of a young man is transformed into that of Mrs Ivimey’s great-grandfather for, in the last draft, Woolf reframed the narration by placing it in a more contemporary period, which leads once more to a mise en abyme since the person who observes is herself observed: ‘A shaft of light fell upon Mrs Ivimey as if someone had focussed the lens of a telescope upon her. (It was the air force, looking for enemy air craft)’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 272).
- 8 J. G. Crowther, ‘The Universe, How Big is It?’, Manchester Guardian (July, 25th, 1928) 68.
- 9 Bertrand Russell, ABC de la Relativité (1965 ; Paris: 10/18, 1997) 61.
12First, the short story illustrates the fact that man occupies a very relative position in the universe: James Jeans’ influence cannot be denied. He was Britain’s reference in terms of astronomy. His books and his broadcasts on the BBC popularised concepts like ‘humans’ ephemeral and non-priviledged position within the frame of cosmological space and time’, concepts which were discovered following Hubble’s research (Henry 2000, 143). Then the story also makes it clear that time and space vanish and merge: a fusion takes place between the different periods mentioned and the place where the story is set. What Mrs Ivimey says is a good example of it: ‘The stars seemed very permanent, very unchanging. The roar of London sank away. A hundred years seemed nothing’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 271). If one puts the writing of this short story back into its scientific context one remembers that, as Crowther wrote in 1928: ‘In the last analysis, space and time cannot be separated in the study of the position of things in the universe. [. . .] Consequently it has been necessary to develop a system of space-time co-ordinates for the purpose of prospecting the universe’.8 Indeed, up to then, the universe had been observed in purely spatial terms as if time were insignificant and everything simultaneous. But when in 1905 the relativity theory questioned the idea of simultaneity which was relative to one observer, scientists started to consider the universe in terms of events (something occurring at a given time) and not of objects.9
- 10 Liliane Louvel and Claudine Verley, Introduction à la nouvelle contemporaine de langue anglaise (To (...)
13In this text where Mrs Ivimey’s dramatic narration is highlighted by the searchlight, the way the two young people meet is depicted through ‘narrative scoping strategies’ since ‘the very structure of the sentence evokes the view made possible by a telescope’ (Henry 2003, 53). Indeed, because of ellipses and interruptions, the reader is only supplied with fragments of the scene so that he can never see it completely unless he ‘supplement(s) what is missing, to fill in the blanks that dot the narrative’.10 People reading and listening to Mrs Ivimey’s story understand that without a telescope she would never have been born. In a way, Mrs Ivimey uses the invisible telescope to look at her own genesis contrary to what happens in another other short story ‘The Symbol’ where the character, sitting on her balcony with her binoculars, witnesses the death of several young men who fall climbing a mountain. Death is absolutely omnipresent in this story written between 1940 and 1941 where the character thinks of her mother’s last days and refers to the mountain as a symbol, maybe the ultimate destination. Each text concentrates on a different end of life with a double distance: that of the optical device combined with a position on a balcony. The fact that spatial and temporal distances coalesce is quite characteristic of Woolf’s narrative scoping strategies. Incidentally, a telescope also relates distant time and space since looking out into space means looking back in cosmological time (Henry 2003, 54). Consequently, we may assume that if the narrator of a story considers reality through the lenses of such a time machine she/he can only catch a glimpse of spectres.
- 11 George M. Johnson, ‘A Haunted house: Ghostly Presences in Woolf’s Essays and Early Fiction’, Virgin (...)
- 12 A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Mentor Books, 1948) 85.
- 13 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 4–5.
- 14 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1917; London: Routledge, 1989) 152–53.
- 15 Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table, Woolf, Russell, Fry and The Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: (...)
- 16 Erich Auerbach, Mimésis, La Représentation de la Réalité dans la Littérature Occidentale (Paris: Ga (...)
14The presence of spectres in Woolf’s fiction has given rise to diverse hypotheses. One could say like George M Johnson in his article on the ‘ghostly presences in Woolf’s essays’11 that this predominance can be explained by her reading and reviewing of Henry James’ ghost stories. But I’d rather say like Whitehead in Science and The Modern World that as we watch the universe through telescopic lenses we realize that ‘there is something happening in the stars, something happening within the earth, and something happening on the far side of the moon’.12 Some places are characterised by the absence of human beings but they exist nevertheless. Furthermore, the myriads of stars as well as the gigantic distances between them convey a feeling of emptiness and atomism. In The Universe, Jeans compared the universe to a station in Paris and stars to a few grains of dust floating around the place, concluding that the universe is essentially devoid of matter (Jeans 93). But space is not the only place where emptiness can be found. Once Russell had made a distinction first between sensation and sense-data and then between perception and perceived object,13 he came to the conclusion that there must be elements and things which exist even though nobody is looking at them. Therefore he invented the concept of ‘private world’ to define spaces which exist whether someone is looking at them or not.14 Thus ‘private worlds’ can be occupied or not. In this latter case one calls them ‘empty perspectives’ as Ann Banfield does.15 Or else it means they are occupied by the sense organs of a human observer. Consequently, Russell admitted that there were several possible points of view on the external world. In literature as well writers can use and add up different perspectives to convey a global vision of reality. This would correspond to Auerbach’s analysis of Woolf’s fiction when he said that Woolf used a ‘représentation pluripersonnelle de la conscience’.16 (multipersonal representation of conscience) These various points of view, however, have to be linked to form a whole or at least a design. I quote Ann Banfield: ‘As with Russell’s logical constructions, the novel’s perspectival language must contain representations of unoccupied perspectives for the sake of continuity’ (Banfield 316).
- 17 Catherine Bernard, ‘Capricious Friendships with The Unknown and The Vanished’, Etudes Britanniques (...)
15Indeed, one cannot deny that some texts in Woolf’s fiction are composed of non occupied perspectives, which means that the narrator is an absent but potential observer. Rooms often seem empty and objects ‘behave’ as if they were waiting for someone to perceive them. Russell gave the name of sensibilia to these elements which are in between two worlds: either ‘the neutral sensibilia fill with color if given to an observer or disintegrate into the colorless physical atoms’ (Banfield 156). Thus, in such texts, the representation of reality becomes ‘unfamiliar and defamiliarizes our perception’17 which is a typical feature of modernist writing. To illustrate this point, I’d like to refer to ‘Kew Gardens’ where the reader may wonder what sort of narrator can actually have such a perspective on the external world. There is a constant shift between the snail in the flowerbed and the conversations of passers-by and one assumes the narrator is somewhere in between. The overall atmosphere can be described as haunting especially when Eleanor says, almost like Mrs Ivimey who commented on her past: ‘Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, [. . .] one’s happiness, one’s reality?’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 91). The characters whose conversations contain long silences seem unreal and it is reinforced by the shift to the snail’s perspective which makes their position in the universe quite relative. We even get the impression that the narrator regards the garden’s visitors as insects. Besides, what is characteristic of ghostly presences is that one can see or hear them, but one cannot touch them. When the first couple walks away, the narrator says: they ‘soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches’ (91). And even permanent forms can be dissolved by light. Thus, towards the end, people are ‘dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere’. The characters mysteriously melt into the distant landscape as Miss V, in the short story entitled ‘The Mysterious Case of Miss V’, would melt into the furniture after she uttered a few words:
[. . .] when you said ‘Oh, how d’you do Miss V.’ as though you have been in the habit of meeting her everyday of your life, she would answer, ‘Isn’t it a pleasant day,’ or ‘What bad weather we are having’ and then you moved on and she seemed to melt into some armchair or chest of drawers. (Complete Shorter Fiction 30–31)
16At the end of ‘Kew Gardens’ the potential narrator sums up the characteristics of communication between ‘ghosts’: ‘their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices, yes, voices, wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire [. . .]; breaking the silence? But there was no silence [. . .]’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 95). Not only can the narrator hear disembodied voices and see forms melting but he constantly blurs the limits between sense perceptions. Even the structure of sentences seems to dissolve as is the case in the ‘complicated’ dialogue of the two lower middle class women: ‘Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says’ (93). The characters’ lack of (physical) solidity is reflected in their conversation. Ghosts juxtapose sounds and paradigms but forget to provide one with any meaning. Thus the reader has to make sense out of the fragments, and one is tempted to say that the only ‘real’ dialogue is the one taking place between the text and the reader. In any case the communication between ghosts is either composed of banalities as illustrated in ‘The Mysterious Case of Miss V’ or else it consists in sounds mixed up with the noise of the city in ‘Kew Gardens’, sometimes louder, sometimes weaker, or even visible: ‘the pattern of falling words’ (93). As the narrator occupies an empty perspective, what he perceives are only sensibilia, i.e. sense perceptions waiting to be perceived which ‘disintegrate into the colorless physical atoms’, hence the occurrence of synesthesia. The disembodied quality of the sense-data (colours, sounds) which pervade the text is not a contradiction in terms because ghosts are the only creatures able to combine senses and immateriality. Besides, the combination of sounds and sight as noted in ‘Kew Gardens’ reminds one of the short story entitled ‘The Orchard’, published in 1923, where the empty perspective enables the reader to see the sounds moving with the wind as a little girl called Miranda dozes outside. Sounds move up and down, dissolve and end up forming a pattern: ‘everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying round her, across her, towards her in a pattern’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 150). Therefore, in spite of the accumulation of sense-perceptions, some order is introduced in the narration.
- 18 ‘Life and The Novelist’, Granite and Rainbow (New York, London: Harvest Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch) (...)
- 19 Patricia Waugh, ‘“Think of a table When You’re Not There”: The Problem of Knowledge in Modernist Pa (...)
17If one refers to some essays written by Woolf like ‘Life and the Novelist’, ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ and ‘Phases of Fiction’, she suggests that sensations ought to be selected, and ordered by the writer: ‘He can sit and watch life and make his book out of the very foam and effervescence of his emotions; or he can put his glass down, retire to his room and subject his trophy to those mysterious processes by which life becomes, like the Chinese coat, able to stand by itself—a sort of impersonal miracle’.18 Impersonality is achieved when the writer withdraws and structures sense perceptions into a design, so that the text gains solidity and permanence, enabling it to resist the test of time. This could not be the case of most of the novels of her time which Woolf compared to mere ‘talk’ because they lacked structure and offered no relief from the confusion of life.19 In ‘The Orchard’ the narrator’s impersonality enables one to perceive reality in an unfamiliar way and in spite of the profusion of sense data and sensations, all the elements end up forming a pattern.
- 20 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: The Harvester Pres (...)
- 21 See Ellmann, and Lisa Low, ‘Refusing to Hit Back: Virginia Woolf and the Question of Impersonality’ (...)
- 22 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1932; London: Faber and Faber, 1999) 21.
If one puts the concept of impersonality, a notion inherited from the Romantic poets, back into the modernist literary context it could mean either reticence, self-restraint or the poet’s transcending of his time and place, as Maud Ellmann suggests.20 Woolf referred to it but she was obviously not the only one since it was a major concern of modernist fiction.21 We may, for instance, quote T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ where Eliot defines the relation between a poet and his work, ie he should surrender to his work without looking for new emotions: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but the escape from personality.’22
- 23 J.G. Crowther, ‘Star and Atom’, Manchester Guardian (20 June 1928) 66.
18Furthermore, in a larger context which would include science, it is possible to draw a parallel between impersonality and the increasing presence of mathematics in the early twentieth century. For, it is no longer thanks to empirical observation that theories like that of relativity could be elaborated but thanks to mathematics. Mathematics enabled scientists to answer new questions that the study of matter gave rise to. Why matter? Because this is where our knowledge of the universe began. When scientists studied the very small they managed to understand the rest of the universe, as Crowther says in one of his articles: ‘many of the observed facts of stellar astronomy can be deduced from the known properties of matter by mere mathematics’.23 Studying matter in such an ‘impersonal’ way meant transcending appearances and being able to see the structure of things:
- 24 J.G. Crowther ed., Science Today, The Scientific Outlook on World Problems Explained by Leading Exp (...)
This mathematics is the codified body of all logical thought. What is the inner secret of mathematical power? Briefly stated, it is that mathematics discloses the skeletal outlines of all closely articulated relational systems.24
19Going beyond emotions and sense-perceptions to achieve a sort of formalism with the help of new tools was typical of several sectors of knowledge including literature. Thus, ordering sensations, and reaching a kind of neutrality were among Woolf’s great concerns. In the short story ‘Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer’ written in 1931, Woolf depicts a captain in his cabin surrounded by measuring instruments. This man, first compared to an old African statue, turns out to behave like a machine. His emotions are entirely controlled or even absent. A fusion seems to have taken place between the man and the objects around him. Like a robot, he cannot help measuring everything: ‘Each distance seemed already cut up into so many stages; and his last step brought him exactly to a particular plank [,] to his station in front of five hundred blue jackets’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 233). Parts of the text are written so that we perceive reality through his eyes and the effect could almost illustrate a sentence written by Russell in Mysticism and Logic: ‘If—per impossibile—there were a complete human body with no mind inside it, all those sensibilia would exist, in relation to that body, which would be sense-data if there were a mind inside that body’ (Russell 1989, 144). Woolf herself in February 1926 before writing ‘Time Passes’ had begun to think from the point of view of a world without humans: ‘I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; & the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great & astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’—It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved’ (Diary III, 62).
20As one could expect, the captain’s perception of reality, given the structure of his mind, is absolutely impersonal since he ‘embodies’ an empty perspective. As a result, his vision of the external world is quite limited: ‘Of the servants who put plates before him he had never seen more than the white hands, putting down plates, taking plates away. [. . .] His eyes never raised themselves above the hands and the plates’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 233). This obviously reminds us of the above-mentioned narrative scoping strategies and of Mrs Ivimey’s invisible telescope through which she only saw an incomplete reality. At the end of this short story written approximately when the first drafts of ‘The Searchlight’ were made, the reader witnesses the definitive merging of the captain’s body with a telescope: ‘When he put his eye to the telescope the telescope became immediately an extension of his eyes [. . .]’ (233–34). This short story establishes the connection between the optical device, Woolf’s narrative technique and the sense of impersonality she was so keen on. The text is imbued with the neutrality she praised elsewhere which is due here to the coalescence of the narrator’s and his protagonist’s perspectives on reality. But the result is far from satisfying because one misses half of the external world. Therefore, we may eventually wonder if it takes a bit more humanity, and hence more confusion, to be able to capture ‘life’ or reality as a whole.
Notes
1 This is an entirely new aspect of researches on Woolf. Rather than concentrating on the text itself and its poetics in a purely structuralist analysis, or only on biographical elements, articles have been published since the 1980s establishing links between the texts and their historical, philosophical and scientific context of production. We shall adopt this New Historicist approach in the present article.
2 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980) 222.
3 Holly Henry, ‘From Edwin Hubble’s telescope to Virginia Woolf’s “Searchlight”’, Virginia Woolf in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York, London: Garland, 2000) 141–43.
4 Here are a few references: James Jeans, The Universe Around Us (Cambridge: CUP, 1929). James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge: CUP, 1930). A.S. Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation. An Outline of the General Relativity Theory (Cambridge: CUP, 1920). A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: CUP, 1926). Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of The External World as A Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (Chicago: the Open court, 1914).
5 J. G. Crowther, ‘Science in the Public Press’, Nature, n° 3481, vol. 138, (July 18th, 1936): 93.
6 Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and The Discourse of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 28.
7 Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1989) 102.
8 J. G. Crowther, ‘The Universe, How Big is It?’, Manchester Guardian (July, 25th, 1928) 68.
9 Bertrand Russell, ABC de la Relativité (1965 ; Paris: 10/18, 1997) 61.
10 Liliane Louvel and Claudine Verley, Introduction à la nouvelle contemporaine de langue anglaise (Toulouse: Presses du Mirail, 1993) 233.
11 George M. Johnson, ‘A Haunted house: Ghostly Presences in Woolf’s Essays and Early Fiction’, Virginia Woolf and The Essay, eds. Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino (London: MacMillan, 1997) 243.
12 A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Mentor Books, 1948) 85.
13 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 4–5.
14 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1917; London: Routledge, 1989) 152–53.
15 Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table, Woolf, Russell, Fry and The Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) 74.
16 Erich Auerbach, Mimésis, La Représentation de la Réalité dans la Littérature Occidentale (Paris: Gallimard, 1968)536.
17 Catherine Bernard, ‘Capricious Friendships with The Unknown and The Vanished’, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines (Automne 1999) 129.
18 ‘Life and The Novelist’, Granite and Rainbow (New York, London: Harvest Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch) 46.
19 Patricia Waugh, ‘“Think of a table When You’re Not There”: The Problem of Knowledge in Modernist Painting and Fiction’, Literature and Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century, ed. Daniela Carpi (Bologna: Re Enzo Editrice, 1997) 38.
20 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987) 4.
21 See Ellmann, and Lisa Low, ‘Refusing to Hit Back: Virginia Woolf and the Question of Impersonality’ (Rosenberg & Dubino).
22 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1932; London: Faber and Faber, 1999) 21.
23 J.G. Crowther, ‘Star and Atom’, Manchester Guardian (20 June 1928) 66.
24 J.G. Crowther ed., Science Today, The Scientific Outlook on World Problems Explained by Leading Exponents of Modern Scientific Thought, planned and arranged by the late Sir J. Arthur Thomson (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1934) 297–98.
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