Form or Content? Form and Content? Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster Discuss the Poetics of the Modern Novel

In the 1920s, British publishers produced a number of books that queried the nature of the “modern novel.” A useful way into the questions they were asking is through the dialogue between Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster in their reviews of one another’s books and in the books they wrote about the novel. In 1926, Forster reviewed Woolf’s novels through Mrs Dalloway in The New Criterion. Throughout 1927, Woolf wrote in letters to Vita Sackville-West and her sister Vanessa, as well as in her diaries, that she was reading all of Forster’s novels to write an article on his work to be published in the Atlantic Monthly in November of 1927. In 1926, Forster was asked to write the Clark Lectures for Trinity College, delivered in the spring of 1927, that were to become Aspects of the Novel, and sought Woolf’s advice. She wrote Phases of Fiction as a kind of answer to his idea that we love novels because they let us occupy a world where people can be understood. They argued about something that preoccupies us still. Should a novel teach you how to live, how to see other people’s lives and challenges; should it have a message? Or should it be beautiful, imaginative, or well crafted? (There is no right answer to this simplistic question.) Forster thought of the novelist as a kind of educator who would produce something with a clear meaning. As well, he thought that the author’s preoccupations with form or beauty compromised its usefulness. Woolf, perhaps because there were many influential visual artists in her circle, thought the novel should be itself, that its form and its beauty were not add-ons, but were an integral part of the pleasure we took in a novel and part of art’s autonomy.