In the following essay, Henley examines the debate over novel writing in general, and Aspects of the Novel in particular, between E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

In his "Introductory" to Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster invites his audience to imagine the glorious company of English novelists "seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room - all writing their novels simultaneously." And so I invite you to adopt a similar stratagem and picture the two novelists who are the subject of this study - Forster and Virginia Woolf - seated, as they often were in fact, on either side of a smaller table in a more intimate room, a room in Forster's Cambridge lodgings, or at tea in a Bloomsbury townhouse or at Monk's House, the Woolfs' weekend residence in Sussex.

Woolf describes one such session in a letter...