The Train Carriage

The train carriage appears during Woolf's anecdote about Mrs. Brown. She encounters Mrs. Brown on a train and immediately starts imagining stories about her life. But the train carriage also serves as a point of reference for Woolf when she is criticizing the Edwardians. Woolf explains that if Edwardian writers were writing about the character of Mrs. Brown, most of them would ignore the immediate setting of the train carriage and turn their attention outward to the countryside, the city, or even a utopia. Mr. Bennett, Woolf says, would keep his attention in the train carriage, but his work would be so muddled with contextual details that he still would not be able to portray the character of Mrs. Brown with any accuracy or intrigue.

England

England is Woolf's primary geographical subject as she engages with prominent English writers over the past thirty years. She...