Summary

Woolf admits that the Edwardian literary convention of beginning novels with descriptions of property was useful for its time. But, she explains, she found it impossible to transmit her own experience with Mrs. Brown on the train in the same way. "All I could do," she says, "was to report as accurately as I could what was said, to describe in detail what was worn, to say, despairingly, that all sorts of scenes rushed into my mind, to proceed to tumble them out pell-mell, and to describe this vivid, this overmastering impression by likening it to a draught or a smell of burning" (9). Even this, however, would not have done the character of Mrs. Brown justice, and Woolf remarks that she let her "slip through my fingers" and notes that she blames the Edwardians for this failure because they did not provide a literary...