Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity. Woolf addresses what she sees as the arrival of modernism, with the much cited phrase "that in or about December, 1910, human character changed", referring to Roger Fry''s exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. She argued that this in turn led to a change in human relations, and thence to change in "religion, conduct, politics, and literature". She envisaged modernism as inherently unstable, a society and culture in flux.