Modern Fiction (Virginia Woolf) – as a Manifesto of Modernist Novel.

Modern Fiction is an essay by Virginia Woolf, written in 1919 but published in 1921 with a series of short stories called Monday or Tuesday. Virginia Woolf was known as a critic by her contemporaries and her essay Modern Fiction is a criticism of writers and literature from the previous generation. It also acts as a guide for writers of modern fiction to write what they feel, not what society or publishers want them to write.

       To a great extent, I believe that Modern Fiction by Virgina Woolf does operate as a type of manifesto of modernist novel. A manifesto functions as both a statement of principles and a bold, sometimes rebellious, call to action. By causing people to evaluate the gap between those principles and their current reality, the manifesto challenges assumptions, fosters commitment, and provokes change. In this essay, Woolf elucidates upon what she understands modern fiction to be. Woolf states that a writer should write what inspires them and not follow any special method. She believes writers are constrained by the publishing business, by what society believes literature should look like and what society has dictated how literature should be written. Woolf believes that it is a writer's job to write the complexities in life, the unknowns, not the unimportant things.

        She criticizes H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy for writing about unimportant things and called them materialists. She suggests that it would be better for literature to turn their backs on them so it can move forward, for better or worse. While Woolf criticizes the aforementioned three authors, she praises several other authors including - Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, William Henry Hudson, James Joyce and Anton Chekhov - for their innovation. This group of writers she names spiritualists, and includes James Joyce who, Woolf says, writes what interests and moves him.

       Woolf wanted writers to focus on the awkwardness of life and craved originality in their works. Woolf’s essay Modern Fiction focuses on how writers should write or what she hopes for them to write. Her overall hope was to inspire modern fiction writers to write what interested them, wherever it may lead. Woolf does not suggest a specific way to write; instead she wants writers to simply write what interests them in any way that they choose to write. Woolf wanted writers to express themselves in such a way that it showed life as it should be seen not as “a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged”.