Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science

Holly Henry investigates how advances in astronomy in the early twentieth century had a shaping effect on Woolf’s literature and aesthetics as well as on the work of modernist British writers including Vita Sackville-West, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Bertrand Russell, and T. S. Eliot. The 1920s and 30s witnessed a pervasive public fascination with astronomy that extended from the US, where Edwin Hubble in 1923 definitively determined that entire galaxies existed beyond the Milky Way, to England, where London’s intellectuals discussed Sir James Jeans’s popular astronomy books and the newly explored expanses of space. In re-evaluating the cultural context out of which Modernism emerged, Henry contends that Woolf, through her own fascination with astronomy, formulated a global vision that helped shape her fiction and her pacifist politics. Henry’s study includes examinations of unpublished scientific and literary archival material and sheds new light on Woolf’s texts and recent re-evaluations of Modernism.