Woolf was not entirely sure about James Joyce's goals as a writer, but she was convinced that his approach to his craft was worth studying. "Whatever the intention of the whole there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity, and that the result difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important." What especially appealed to her was his willingness to move beyond narrow definitions of literary possibility. "He disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious," she wrote in "Modern Fiction," endorsing a point of view strikingly similar to her own credo. Aside from Joyce's own work, there were no clear precedents in literature for "The Mark on the Wall."

Woolf was as much a modernist innovator as the great figures of that movement working in other areas—Picasso, Stravinsky, Pound, or Eliot.