Virginia Woolf and Nature PDF

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V I RGI N I A WOOL F A N D
T H E ST U DY OF NAT U R E
Reflecting the modernist fascination with science, Virginia Woolf’s

representations of nature are informed by a wide-ranging interest in
contemporary developments in the life sciences. Christina Alt analyses
Woolf’s responses to disciplines ranging from taxonomy and the new
biology of the laboratory to ethology and ecology and illustrates how
Woolf drew on the methods and objectives of the contemporary life sci-
ences to describe her own literary experiments. Through the examinaÂ�
tion of Woolf’s engagement with shifting approaches to the study of
nature, this work covers new ground in Woolf studies and makes an
important contribution to the understanding of modernist exchanges
between literature and science.
c h r i s t i n a a lt is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University

of Ottawa. She has contributed to numerous collections on the work of
Virginia Woolf.
V I RGI N I A WOOL F A N D
T H E ST U DY OF NAT U R E
CHRISTINA ALT
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo
Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521196550
© Christina Alt 2010
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the

provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part
may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2010
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and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Acknowledgements page vi
List of abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1 The natural history tradition 14
2 The modern life sciences 38
3 ‘To pin through the body with a name’:Â€
Virginia Woolf and the taxonomic tradition 72
4 Laboratory coats and field-glasses:Â€Virginia Woolf
and the modern study of nature 106
5 Representing ‘the manner of our seeing’:Â€literary
experimentation and scientific analogy 168
Notes 192
Bibliography 208
Index 220
v
Acknowledgements
This book began as a dissertation, and I would first like to thank

my doctoral supervisor Sally Bayley for her unstinting support and
for enriching my work through the guidance that she so gener-
ously offered. I am grateful as well to Hermione Lee and Valentine
Cunningham for their cogent advice and direction in the early stages
of this project and to Michael Herbert and Mary Joannou for their
keen insights and kind encouragement.
I am deeply grateful to the Commonwealth Scholarship CommisÂ�
sion for the scholarship that made possible my early work on this pro-
ject and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for the doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships that supported
the later stages of this work. Lincoln College provided a community
in which to live and study and supported my research through grants
for conference attendance, and I would like to thank Stephen Gill and
Anne-Marie Drummond in particular for their advice and kindness.
I am grateful to Marius Kwint at the University of Oxford History
of Art Department for allowing me to attend his graduate seminars
on the history of collection, and I would like to thank the staff at
the Bodleian Library, the University of Oxford Zoology Library, the
British Library, and the Entomology Library at the Natural History
Museum for assisting my research.
I am extremely grateful to my postdoctoral supervisor Donald
Childs for advising me on countless particulars, reading draft chap-
ters, providing perspective on revisions, and helping me to navigate
the publication process, as well as for the unfailing support and guid-
ance that he has offered in the years since I first encountered Virginia
Woolf in his undergraduate classroom. I am similarly grateful to
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Nicholas von Maltzahn for being a constant source of advice and
support and for checking in with words of encouragement at regu-
lar intervals over many years. It has been a pleasure returning to
the University of Ottawa, and I would like to thank Craig Gordon
and Anne Raine in particular for their insight into related areas of
research. I am grateful as well to Patricia Rae, Edward Lobb, Marta
Straznicky, and Tracy Ware for their support during and after my
time at Queen’s University.
The opportunity to present work at the annual Virginia Woolf
Â�conferences held between 2003 and 2009 allowed me to test my devel-
oping ideas, and I am grateful to the many scholars who posed helpful
questions and suggested promising lines of inquiry that strengthened
my arguments. I am extremely grateful to Ray Ryan and Maartje
Scheltens at Cambridge University Press for guiding me through
the publication process and for their advice, support, and patience
throughout. I would also like to thank the Press’s anonymous readers
for their valuable suggestions, and I am grateful to Joanna Garbutt,
Sarah Roberts, and Janet Tyrrell for their help during the production
of this book.
I am fortunate to have an incomparable group of friends who
have offered support and distraction as needed:Â€ Heather Beatty,
Sue Bowness, Natalie Chow, Fiona Cochrane, Angela Deziel,
Alex Faludy, Dorritta Fong, Johanna Fridriksdottir, Ariel
Lebowitz, Dilshad Marolia, Nicole Milligan, Jasmine and Morgan
Nicholsfigueiredo, Lucy Paul, Sarah Robinson, Eleanor Sheppard,
April Warman, Louisa Wynn-MacKenzie, and everyone at Aboliçao
Capoeira. Above all, I thank my mother, Bea, for listening endlessly
and talking me through; my father, Fred, for his unwavering sup-
port; and my grandmother, Li, for oatmeal cookies, bird facts, and
tippy-chair revelations. Without their unceasing love and encour-
agement, this book would have been impossible.
Portions of this book have already appeared in print. The analysis
of A Room of One’s Own that appears in Chapters 4 and 5 was published
in a somewhat revised form as ‘Virginia Woolf and the “Naturalist-
Novelist”’ in Virginia Woolf and the Art of Exploration:Â€ Selected
viii Acknowledgements
Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf,
ed. Helen Southworth and Elisa Kay Sparks (2006), and an earlier
version of the discussion of Eleanor Ormerod that appears in Chapter
4 was published as ‘Pests and Pesticides:Â€Exploring the Boundaries of
Woolf’s Environmentalism’ in Woolfian Boundaries:Â€ Selected Papers
from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf,
ed. Anna Burrells, Steve Ellis, Deborah Parsons, and Kathryn
Simpson (2007). These works are reprinted here with the permission
of Clemson University Digital Press. An earlier version of the treat-
ment of Jacob’s Room that appears in Chapters 3 and 5 was published
as ‘Virginia Woolf and Changing Conceptions of Nature’ in Virginia
Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 1:Â€Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice,
ed. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari (2010); it is reproduced with the
permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Abbreviations
Works by Virginia Woolf

AROO A Room of One’s Own
BTA Between the Acts
CE Collected Essays (4 volumes)
CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction
D The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 volumes)
E The Essays of Virginia Woolf (4 volumes)
F Flush
HPGN Hyde Park Gate News
JR Jacob’s Room
L The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 volumes)
MD Mrs Dalloway
MEL Melymbrosia
MOB Moments of Being
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
PA A Passionate Apprentice
RF Roger Fry
TG Three Guineas
TTL To the Lighthouse
TW The Waves
TWHD The Waves:Â€The Two Holograph Drafts
TY The Years
VO The Voyage Out
Wo r k b y M a r i e C a r m i c h a e l (S t o p e s)
LC Love’s Creation
ix
Introduction
In Birds and Man (1901), the nature writer W. H. Hudson attacks the
preoccupation with specimen collection that had long characterised
the natural history tradition, describing preserved bird specimens as
‘a falsification and degradation of nature’ and presenting the speciÂ�men
collector as stricken by ‘the curious delusion that the lustre which we
see and admire [in a living bird] is in the case, the coat, the substance
which may be grasped, and not in the spirit of life which is within and
the atmosphere and miracle-working sunlight which are without’.1
In place of this artificial preservation, he recommends the observa-
tion of living birds in the wild and speaks of the enduring power of
his memories of such sightings, ‘this incalculable wealth of images of
vanished scenes’.2
The opposition that Hudson sets up between the capture of speci-
mens and the observation of living creatures reflects a broad shift in
the study of nature that began around the turn of the century, and this
shift resonates beyond the study of nature to a change in outlook that
characterised Virginia Woolf’s literary modernism. Woolf alludes
to the study of nature as a means of articulating wider ideas about
the perception and description of life. In ‘The Lady in the Looking-
Glass:Â€A Reflection’, two views of a room and its occupant are jux-
taposed. The room as it appears reflected in a looking-glass has an
‘arranged and composed’ quality, as though the reflected forms ‘had
ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality’ (CSF
217, 216). The ‘stillness and immortality’ conferred by the looking-
glass recall the permanence of a preserved specimen, immortal only
in death (217). Against the static reflections of the looking-glass,
Woolf sets the appearance of the room viewed directly, as if by ‘one
1
2 Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature
of thoseÂ€naturalists who, covered with grass and leaves, lie watch-
ing the shyest animalsÂ€– badgers, otters, kingfishersÂ€– moving about
freely’ (215). Viewed from this perspective, the room appears full of
lights and shadows ‘pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately
with high-lifted feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as
if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink
was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veined with silver’ (ibid.).
Through her description of the deadening vision of the looking-glass,
Woolf suggests the error of seeking to fix and preserve the ‘eternal
truth’ of one’s subject; however, through her representation of the
naturalist’s perspective, she maintains that another view of life is pos-
sible for the observer who remains attentive to ‘the transient and the
perishing’ (217, 216).
In her writing, Woolf repeatedly draws upon disparate approaches
to the study of nature for analogies through which to suggest con-
trasting methods of seeing and recording life. In an effort to unpack
the significance of Woolf’s allusions to nature and its study, this book
offers an account of the trends that shaped the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century life sciences, demonstrates Woolf’s familiar-
ity with these developments, and outlines the coherent position that
she adopted in relation to disciplines ranging from the taxonomic
tradition of natural history to the new biology of the laboratory and
the emerging disciplines of ethology and ecology.3 Woolf’s engage-
ment with the contemporary life sciences illustrates her sense of a
shared outlook linking modern developments across the arts and sci-
ences and her conviction that shifts in focus and approach occurring
in one field could provide a means of articulating new aims and strat-
egies in another.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw consider-
able change in the life sciences. Most famously, evolutionary theory
was the focus of continuing study and debate, but there were other,
concurrent developments. Taxonomic natural history, centred on the
collection of specimens and the classification of species, had absorbed
the attention of British naturalists for much of the nineteenth century,
but in the closing decades of the century the museum-based taxo-
nomic tradition was supplanted by the new biology of the laboratory
Introduction 3
as the predominant approach to the study of nature. The new biology
shifted attention from the classification of endless species to subjects
such as morphology and physiology, the study of the structure and
functioning of organisms. The focus on cataloguing organic forms
was replaced by a desire to understand life processes, and taxonomic
natural history came to be viewed as an outmoded practice by the
new generation of laboratory biologists.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the study of
nature underwent further expansion as a result of the growing interest
in studying living organisms in action in their natural environment.
Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, and ecology, the study of
the interrelationships among organisms and between organisms and
their environment, both emerged as scientific disciplines around
the turn of the century. Ethology developed through work such as
Edmund Selous’s, H. Eliot Howard’s, and Julian Huxley’s studies
of territorial behaviour and courtship in birds, while ecology had its
origins in the plant sciences, with early studies of plant distribution
and vegetation dynamics leading to the establishment of the British
Ecological Society and the Journal of Ecology in 1913.
Woolf was familiar with the developments taking place in the life
sciences over the course of her lifetime. She grew up in the closing
days of what David Elliston Allen describes as ‘the long high summer
of Victorian natural history’, botanising with her father and collecting
and classifying butterflies and moths with her siblings under the dir-
ection of the Reverend F. O. Morris’s mid-nineteenth-century works
of popular natural history.4 As an adult, Woolf was equally familiar
with developing trends and perspectives in the modern study of nature
through the work of naturalists such as W.Â€ H.Â€ Hudson and Jean-
Henri Fabre, treatments of laboratory biology and applied biology
by Marie Stopes and Eleanor Ormerod, and surveys of the Â�biological
sciences such as H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G.Â€P.Â€Wells’s The
Science of Life, which discussed subjects ranging from taxonomy and
evolution to ecology and behaviour. Articles on plant and animal life
were so common in newspapers and popular periodicals that Woolf,
when constructing a representative list of the contents of The Times
in ‘An Unwritten Novel’, included ‘the habits of birds’ among the
paper’s typical offerings:Â€‘births, deaths, marriages, Court Circular,
the Â�habits of birds, Leonardo da Vinci, the Sandhills murder, high
wages and the cost of living’ (CSF 106). Woolf’s representations
of nature and its study were thus shaped by a cluster of competing
and co-operating disciplines within the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-Â�century life sciences made known to the public through
works of popular science and nature writing.
All of this suggests that in order to fully understand Woolf’s own
views of nature it is necessary to consider the study of nature as it
was practised in her lifetime. I therefore read Woolf’s descriptions
of nature and its study in the context of contemporary developments
in the life sciences, drawing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century formulations of the life sciences, and in particular on descrip-
tions of nature and its study intended for a popular audience, in order
to recover the conception of the life sciences available to an early
twentieth-century non-specialist reader. In adopting this approach I
emulate scholars such as Gillian Beer, Michael H. Whitworth, Holly
Henry, Elizabeth G. Lambert, Donald J. Childs, David Bradshaw,
and Craig Gordon, whose work refers to the early twentieth-century
scientific context and to popular formulations of science as a means of
comprehending modernist responses to disciplines ranging from the
new physics and astronomy to evolution, eugenics, and the biomed-
ical sciences.
As part of a wider effort to demonstrate the ‘omnivorousness of
[Woolf’s] appetite for understanding’, Beer has asserted the import-
ance of challenging the long-standing assumption that Woolf was
‘ignorant of and uninterested in science’.5 To this end, she has con-
sidered Woolf’s responses to disciplines ranging from evolutionary
theory to the new physics. Building upon this foundation, Whitworth
and Henry have examined Woolf’s engagement with the new phys-
ics and astronomy in the work of popular science writers such as
Arthur Eddington and James Jeans; Lambert has analysed Woolf’s
borrowings from Darwinian arguments; Childs and Bradshaw have
considered Woolf’s responses to eugenical ideas; and Gordon has
demonstrated Woolf’s use of language and concepts drawn from a
cluster of turn-of-the-century biomedical sciences. Such scholarship
Introduction 5
reveals Woolf’s receptivity to a wide range of scientific disciplines
and demonstrates the value of reading Woolf in relation to late nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century scientific trends. The current
study contributes to this body of work by opening new areas of the
life sciences to examination. By considering Woolf’s perceptions of
the clash between taxonomic natural history and the new biology,
and her responses to emerging disciplines such as ethology and ecoÂ�
logy, it broadens understanding of Woolf’s engagement with modern
scientific developments.
Research into the scientific frame of reference available to an early
twentieth-century audience can add substance and particularity to
the interpretation of nature in Woolf’s writing. Woolf’s representa-
tions of nature were for a long time read in broadly symbolic terms in
a continuation of an interpretive tradition stretching back to classical
and biblical associations of the butterfly with the soul and the ant
with industry. Avrom Fleishman regards the butterflies and moths
in Woolf’s writing as ‘associated with the human soul in an emblem
of long tradition’; Judy Larrick Robinson cites the Greek and early
Christian view of insect metamorphosis as symbolic of the soul’s
escape from the body; and Rachel Sarsfield traces the use of insect
imagery through Greek literature, scripture, Shakespeare, Milton,
the Augustan satirists, and the Romantics as background to her con-
sideration of Woolf’s insect symbolism.6
Interpretations of Woolf’s nature imagery that draw upon this
symbolic tradition can result in persuasive readings of her work, but a
scientific frame of reference adds rigour and specificity to the under-
standing of Woolf’s nature imagery. In her analysis of Woolf’s use
of images of insect metamorphosis, Christine Froula initially notes
the analogy that Woolf sets up in the short story ‘The Introduction’
between a butterfly’s emergence from its chrysalis, an event that
marks its attainment of physical and sexual maturity, and Lily Everit’s
newfound sense of ‘being a woman’ as she attends her first evening
party (CSF 179).7 However, Froula subsequently dismisses the ana-
logy between emergence and maturation in favour of an interpret-
ation more in keeping with the long-standing symbolic association of
metamorphosis with spiritual (re)birth. She argues that ‘the chrysalis
figure’ in Woolf’s writing ‘describes not the sexual maturity of a
woman’s body but the miraculous births of her own creative imagin-
ation, transformations no less wonderful than those of natural pro-
creation’, and she suggests that the moth imagery in Woolf’s later
writing ‘figure[s] the artist-self to which Woolf gave birth through
the painful labor of her first novel’.8 To thus relate artistic creation to
procreation by way of chrysalis imagery is to disregard the fact that
the emergence of a butterfly or moth from its chrysalis marks not its
birth, biologically speaking, but rather its attainment of adulthood.
Froula rejects a purely biological interpretation of Woolf’s insect
imagery on the grounds of the determinism of a narrowly biological
understanding of women’s social roles. However, while Woolf cri-
tiqued the ways in which biology was used to justify the restriction
of women to limited gender identities, she did not abandon the use of
biologically accurate imagery as a result. She persisted, for example,
in her use of metamorphosis and emergence as an analogy for mat-
uration. In ‘Sketch of the Past’, she recalls ‘thinking; feeling; living’
at the age of fifteen ‘with the intensity, the muffled intensity, which
a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and
antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quiver-
ing beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its
eyes dazzled, incapable of flight’ (MOB 130) It is through the physical
particularity of this description that Woolf conveys the acute sensi-
tivity and vulnerability that she felt as she sought to emerge from the
‘unformed’ state of adolescence into adulthood (ibid.). Woolf’s faith-
fulness to biological fact, a product of her long acquaintance with the
study of nature, lends force to her imagery and suggests the value of
reading her representations of nature through the lens of science.
Familiarity with shifting trends in the study of nature can also aid
in the interpretation of Woolf’s representations of the natural world.
Symbolic readings of Woolf’s nature imagery that allude to the study
of nature tend to treat it as an unchanging practice represented by
the taxonomic tradition of specimen collection and classification that
Woolf encountered as a child. Harvena Richter presents the moth
hunt as a metaphor for ‘[Woolf’s] own creative process’:Â€she regards
the moth hunter as representative of the writer, ‘searching to pin
Introduction 7
down words and ideas that flit in the dark places of the brain’, and she
equates the moth, dead and ‘“composed”’ in the poison pot, with the
writer’s ‘completed work’.9 However, Richter also argues that Woolf
identified with the moth’s ‘sense of being pursued, being destroyed
by unknown and hostile forces’.10 There is an element of contradic-
tion inherent in this argument that the moth hunt is at once emblem-
atic of Woolf’s writing process and symbolic of threat. Judy Larrick
Robinson offers a similarly conflicted argument in her suggestion that
the capture of insect specimens ‘served as a metaphor for [Woolf’s]
desire to “net” new forms and meaning in her novels’, while the sym-
bol of the moth, ‘trapped, hunted, poisoned and exhibited’, acted as a
warning regarding the fate of women in patriarchal society.11 Rachel
Sarsfield draws attention to the internal contradictions of such read-
ings and seeks to resolve them through the argument that ‘Woolf’s
desire to capture “life” in her writing paradoxically conflicts with her
view that to “pin” or define it will inevitably be as destructive an act
as the killing and pinning of the butterfly/moth that she consistently
associates with life.’12 Sarsfield regards this as a perennial tension in
Woolf’s work and one that ultimately drove her to despair of the effi-
cacy of writing. Sarsfield contends:
In setting up the associations that she did between lepidoptera, life and writing
eventually Woolf backed (or pinned) herself into a corner:Â€seeing language as
lepidoptera and vice versa, it was perhaps inevitable that she should ultimately
conclude that ‘when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die’.
This conclusion is a fatal one for a writer to come to, and … may have been
literally fatal to Virginia Woolf.13
Sarsfield’s conclusion of Woolf’s fatal pessimism offers one means of

resolving the contradictions of Richter’s and Robinson’s arguments.
However, other interpretations present themselves if one extends the
idea of an analogy between the study of nature and the writing of fic-
tion to include approaches other than specimen collection. Sarsfield,
like Richter and Robinson, accepts the taxonomic tradition of natural
history as the sole scientific frame of reference within which to ana-
lyse Woolf’s comparison between the pinning of a specimen and the
representation of a subject in writing. Yet, if associations with the
practice of specimen collection suggested to Woolf the drawbacks of
treating the capture and pinning of one’s subject as one’s narrative
goal, emergent scientific disciplines that focused on the observation
of living organisms in action in their environment offered alternative
analogies through which to conceive of the description of life in fic-
tion. To interpret Woolf’s allusions to nature without reference to the
full range of scientific trends that shaped modernist attitudes towards
the natural world is to perceive only a fraction of her meaning.
Another critical perspective relevant to the consideration of Woolf’s
representations of nature and its study is ecocriticism. Ecocriticism
encompasses a wide range of approaches to the study of literature and
environment, from place studies and animal studies to ecofeminism
and ecophenomenology. Ecocritics such as William Howarth and
Glen A. Love advocate the use of scientific explanations of nature
as a means of grounding ecocritical interpretation in fact:Â€Howarth
asserts the need for greater ‘ecological literacy’ among ecocritics,
while Love argues that ecocritics ‘have much more to gain than to
fear from the company of the sciences, particularly the life sciÂ�ences’.14
Ecocritics working in this vein often draw on current scientific argu-
ments, seeking, as Love states, ‘to ground today’s ecocriticism in
today’s best science’.15 I share Love’s sense of the value of employing
a scientific frame of reference, although in accordance with my inter-
est in modernist exchanges between literature and science, I focus
specifiÂ�cally on the life sciences in their late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century form.
Since the rise of ecocriticism as an interpretive framework, Woolf
has become a not uncommon subject for ecocritical analysis. Scholars
such as Josephine Donovan, Carol H. Cantrell, Louise Westling, and
Bonnie Kime Scott have noted Woolf’s attention to the natural world
and have presented her as a ‘proto-ecofeminist’ and an author whose
work displays an ‘ecological humanism’Â€– an awareness of humanity
as part of the natural worldÂ€– that is only now ‘beginning to become
publicly explicit through ecological thinking’.16 There is abundant
evidence in Woolf’s writing of her alertness to the more-than-human
world. To repeat two frequently cited examples, in the ‘Time Passes’
section of To the Lighthouse, Woolf decentres the human through her
Introduction 9
description of the slow action of nature upon the Ramsay house, in
the midst of which human events are relegated to brief parenthetical
asides; and in the village pageant at the centre of Between the Acts,
‘nature takes her part’, filling the gap and continuing the emotion
when the energy of Miss La Trobe’s play seems in danger of dissipat-
ing, in a manner that highlights the constant interaction and exchange
between human beings and the natural world (BTA 114).17
There is clearly a great deal of scope for the ecocritical interpret-
ation of Woolf and much valuable work has already been done in this
area. It is worth noting, however, that ecocritical readings of Woolf
often take current environmentalist assumptions and ecocritical theoÂ�
ries as their starting point and treat Woolf’s writing as a prescient
anticipation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century views.
Kelly Sultzbach states that ‘Woolf’s work predates environmental sci-
ence’ and concludes as a result that Woolf’s writing demonstrates a
‘prescient awareness of an environmental ethic’.18 L. Elizabeth Waller
presents Woolf as all the more remarkable because she had ‘no true
environmental visionaries with whom to conspire’, and Charlotte Zoë
Walker likewise suggests that Woolf anticipated the environmental
movement of the latter half of the twentieth century, ‘express[ing]
poetically what Rachel Carson argues scientifically in Silent Spring
[1962] and elsewhere, that all life is interrelated, is a “vast web of life,
all of which needs to be taken into account”’.19
However, the argument of Woolf’s prescience can be disputed
through reference to Woolf’s contemporary scientific context.
Ecology emerged as a recognised scientific discipline in Britain dur-
ing Woolf’s lifetime and its central tenets were disseminated to the
general public by popular science writers:Â€in a chapter on ecology in
Botany; or, The Modern Study of Plants, published in 1912 as part of the
People’s Books series, Marie Carmichael Stopes describes ecology as
‘a very recent branch of botany … only taken up in England in the last
ten years’ that considers the plant in relation to ‘its environment and
its neighbours’; in popular works of ornithology such as How Birds
Live (1927) and The Art of Bird-Watching (1931), E.Â€ M.Â€ Nicholson
Â�recommends the study of bird ecology to his readers; and in their
chapter on ‘The Science of Ecology’ in The Science of LifeÂ€– a book
that Woolf mentions reading between December 1931 and February
1932 (L iv:Â€ 410, 418; D iv:Â€ 68)Â€ – H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and
G.Â€P.Â€Wells describe ecology as ‘a fresh way of regarding life, by con-
sidering the balances and mutual pressures of species living in the
same habitat’.20 Woolf’s attention to the world beyond the human
and her awareness of the intricate interrelationships among organ-
isms in a shared environment can thus be understood as a product
of her familiarity with the work of contemporary nature and science
writers. Furthermore, because early ecology displayed concerns that
distinguish it from present-day conceptions of ecology, it is useful to
read Woolf in relation to the science of her time.
Of all Woolf’s ecocritical interpreters, Louise Westling has gone
furthest in grounding Woolf’s representations of nature in early twen-
tieth-century science. In ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World’
she offers a compelling ecophenomenological reading of Woolf’s work
and suggests that Woolf’s ecological humanism had a scientific basis.
However, Westling does not draw her scientific frame of reference
from the life sciences. Instead, she notes Woolf’s familiarity with the
new physics, judges Einstein’s outlook to be ‘surprisingly ecological’,
and by way of ‘the epistemological lessons of relativity, wave the-
ory, and the interdependency of observer and phenomenon observed
from quantum physics’ links Woolf to ‘an ecological humanism that
parallels physics’.21 Westling’s argument draws ecocriticism, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and the new physics together into
a complex web of interconnecting ideas. However, the links between
Woolf’s ecological thinking and the early twentieth-century emer-
gence of ecology as a scientific discipline in its own right remain to
be considered.
There are indications that scholars are beginning to read Woolf’s
nature imagery with early twentieth-century perspectives on nature
and the life sciences in mind. Ian Blyth has noted the frequent appear-
ance of rooks in Woolf’s writing and has demonstrated the accuracy
of Woolf’s observations of these birds through reference to the works
of contemporary nature writers such as W. H. Hudson and E. M.
Nicholson; Richard Espley, while discussing the trope of animality in
Woolf’s writing, has considered her familiarity with and responses to
Introduction 11
the London Zoo; and Michael Herbert has judged To the Lighthouse as
a regional novel in part through a comparison of the novel’s descrip-
tions of scenery and wildlife with early twentieth-century descrip-
tions of the flora and fauna of the Isle of Skye.22 The 2010 conference
on Virginia Woolf and the Natural World, which had yet to take place
when this book went to print, will without doubt immensely enrich
this area of Woolf studies.
In addressing the influence of disciplines such as the new biology,
ethology, and ecology on modernist writers such as Woolf, this study
complements existing work on the cultural impact of the physical and
biomedical sciences and of evolutionary theory in particular. In stud-
ies of the cultural influence of the life sciences, evolutionary theory
often receives the bulk of scholarly attention. This focus is under-
standable and justified, on the grounds of both the far-ranging social
impact of the controversies over evolution and the explanatory power
of evolutionary ideas. Yet other disciplines within the life sciences
also had a demonstrable influence on popular conceptions of nature
and similarly reward consideration. The historian of science Charles
Coulston Gillispie maintains that methodological and institutional
innovations within the study of nature bore as much responsibility for
the development of the modern life sciences as the ‘theories that moti-
vated and divided’ scientific practitioners.23 Revisionist historians
such as Adrian Desmond and Paul White likewise assert that modern
biology is as much a product of the nineteenth-century displacement
of taxonomic museum work by the new biology of the laboratory
as a result of disputes over evolutionary theory.24 Similarly, in the
early twentieth century, alongside the search for a theory that would
reconcile Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, the discip-
lines of ethology and ecology gained institutional status and brought
about a return to fieldwork with a new focus on the observation of
living organisms in their natural environment. These emergent dis-
ciplines influenced the public perception of nature just as much as
did the search for a new evolutionary synthesis, not least because the
scientific study of the behaviour and interrelationships of organisms
had a recreational equivalent in activities such as bird-watching. By
considering a cluster of approaches to the study of nature in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this work draws attention to
the breadth of the turn-of-the-century life sciences and the complex-
ity of the interrelationships between their component disciplines, thus
providing the basis for an analysis of the corresponding complexity of
Woolf’s responses to developments in the study of nature.
This book is concerned with Woolf’s perceptions of trends within
the life sciences. Her representations of nature itself have a place in
this discussion, but her responses to differing approaches to the study
of nature constitute the central focus of this work. The first two chap-
ters of the book therefore survey the approaches that characterised
the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life sciences. The
first chapter examines taxonomic natural history as both a scientific
discipline and a popular pastime in nineteenth-century Britain, and
discusses Woolf’s childhood encounter with taxonomy by way of
mid-Victorian works of popular natural history. The second chap-
ter considers the disciplines that arose to challenge the taxonomic
tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, among
them the new biology of the laboratory, ethology, and ecology. The
remaining chapters of the book discuss Woolf’s own allusions to the
life sciences. The third chapter surveys Woolf’s attitudes towards
the taxonomic natural history tradition and the associated practices
of collection and classification. The fourth chapter examines Woolf’s
responses to the emergent disciplines of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries through her references to subjects such as
Mendel’s laws of inheritance, laboratory work, pest extermination,
bird-Â�watching, and habitat niches, as well as her allusions to nature
and science writers such as W. H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries, Jean-
Henri Fabre, and H.Â€G.Â€Wells. Reading Woolf’s writing on nature
and its study in conjunction with the work of her scientific contem-
poraries demonstrates the coherence of Woolf’s views on develop-
ments in the life sciences and the extent to which these views reflected
the scientific outlook of her time. The final chapter returns to the
contemplation of Woolf’s nature imagery and, with contemporary
developments in the life sciences as a frame of reference, examines
the ways in which Woolf employs disparate approaches to the study
of nature as anaÂ�logies through which to Â�consider the representation
of life in fiction.
Introduction 13
In Quantum Poetics:Â€ Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of
Modernism, Daniel Albright states that ‘[p]hysics, biology, literature,
music, painting, each has its separate technique and separate pur-
pose; but they radiate out of some common center’.25 Woolf’s use of
developÂ�ments in the life sciences as a means of contrasting methods
of seeing and describing life suggests her sense that modern develop-
ments in every field expressed a common shift in focus and approach
and that developments in the study of nature might therefore serve as
apt analogies for literary experimentation.
Chapter 1
The natural history tradition
Due to the unique conditions governing the life sciences in Britain

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a result of
which stagnation gave way to rapid change, Woolf was familiar with
a range of scientific approaches to the study of nature. The linger-
ing influence of the ‘so-called “classics”’ of mid-nineteenth-century
popular natural history ensured Woolf’s childhood familiarity with
the taxonomic tradition in its quintessentially mid-Victorian form;
however, rapid changes in the life sciences in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries meant that she also witnessed the rise of
laboratory biology, ethology, and ecology as alternative means of
studying nature.1 The next two chapters provide the historical and
scientific background necessary to understand late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century developments in and perceptions of the life
sciences.
This chapter focuses on the taxonomic tradition of natural history,
a necessary point of departure for any discussion of the develop-
ment of the modern life sciences, for the new disciplines that arose in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined themselves
against this tradition. The practitioners of the emerging disciplines of
this period were inclined to be dismissive of taxonomic work, view-
ing it as a preoccupation that had impeded the progress of the life
sciences in Britain, and this bias in the outlook of Woolf’s scientific
contemporaries was an important element of the intellectual context
in which Woolf’s own perceptions of the various disciplines of the
life sciences were formed. This outlook was arguably reductive, fail-
ing to acknowledge either the extent to which modern developments
were enabled by earlier taxonomic work or the continuing need for
14
The natural history tradition 15
taxonomic knowledge, but it is true that pursued to the exclusion of
other approaches to the study of nature (as it had been in Britain for
much of the nineteenth century), taxonomic work had a narrowing
effect.2
Woolf’s writing is liberally scattered with allusions to specimen
collection and the classification of species, the practices that formed
the basis of taxonomic natural history. She speaks of butterfly nets,
poison pots, setting boards, and butterfly boxes smelling of camphor
(a preservative); tin botanical cases and pressed flowers; crabs cap-
tured from tidal pools, collections of seaweed, and marine curios-
ities preserved in little glass jars; schoolboy natural history societies
and explorers who died in South American jungles leaving behind
collections of bird skins. She describes beetling expeditions, visits
to the Insect Room at the Natural History Museum, sugaring for
moths, despatching butterflies with sulphur fumes, and poring for
hours over reference works to identify fantastically named species
such as the Heart and Dart and the Setaceous Hebrew Character. Yet
Woolf is wary of the outlook inculcated by the taxonomic ordering of
nature, which she links to broader social concerns. In ‘A Society’, for
example, Woolf alludes to the fact that ‘the least insect in Japan has
a name twice the length of its body’, to illustrate the insatiable need
of those who have cultivated their intellect along the lines laid down
by Â�patriarchal society to assert their authority over the world around
them (CSF 129). A critical view of mid-Victorian scientific institu-
tions and practices was a distinguishing feature of the modern sci-
entific outlook, and Woolf’s suspicions of the taxonomic tradition of
natural history are thus in keeping with the early twentieth-century
view of taxonomy as a narrow and limited approach to the natural
world. This chapter surveys the history of the taxonomic tradition
of natural history and explains the associations, both scientific and
cultural, that the practice had acquired by the end of the nineteenth
century that shaped Woolf’s responses to it.
As the nineteenth century opened, taxonomic natural history was
already firmly established as the dominant approach to the study of
nature in Britain. Taxonomy as a branch of the life sciences is con-
cerned with the classification of living (and extinct) organisms, with
their naming and arrangement in a system. The scientific classifi-
cation of organisms is based on the physical and, more particularly,
Â�structural attributes of an organism, on the number, form, Â�proportion,
and situation of its organs. Physical specimens form the material basis
of the classification of species, and the specimen collection is there-
fore integral to taxonomic work. Modern taxonomy had its origins in
the seventeenth century in the work of naturalists such as John Ray,
but it was Carolus Linnaeus in the eighteenth century who stand-
ardised the approach and made it universally practicable. Linnaeus
simplified taxonomic work through his introduction of an artificial
system of classification, that is, a system according to which species
were distinguished on the basis of a single key feature, rather than
through a complete analysis of the organism. He chose to classify
species on the basis of their reproductive organs, a feature closely
related to one of the defining characteristics of a species, its ability to
interbreed within its own group and its inability to interbreed viably
with other groups. He also instituted a binomial system of nomen-
clature according to which each organism was given a succinct two-
part name indicating genus and species that replaced the longer, less
standardised descriptive names used by earlier classifiers. To name a
species in the Linnaean manner was thus to locate it within the exist-
ing taxonomic hierarchy. Linnaeus defined the botanist as one ‘“qui
nominibus noscit nominare”, who can give the right names’, and to
approaches other than classification he ‘scarcely accorded the rank of
science’.3
Despite the dominance of taxonomy, however, another model for
the study of nature existed at the end of the eighteenth century in
the behavioural work of Gilbert White, a clergyman-naturalist and
author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Although
White, like his contemporaries, engaged in taxonomic work, tax-
onomy was never his foremost concern. June E. Chatfield argues
that White’s ‘prime interest was in the behaviour of animals and he
had comparatively little regard for the traditional work of zoologists
and botanists who did, and intended to do, no more than give names
to new species’.4 White observed the habits of animals, monitoring
the changing appetite of a tortoise preparing itself for hibernation,
commenting on the differing behaviour displayed by members of the
same bird species in different localities, and noting the ways in which
birds’ songs changed with the season and with their business.5 He was
also alert to environmental impacts, noting the effect of wind direc-
tion on the species that reached Britain in a given year and the influ-
ence of diet upon the colouring of birds’ plumage.6 He argued that
while taxonomy had its place, the naturalist ‘should be by no means
content with a list of names … Not that the system is by any means to
be thrown aside; without system the field of Nature would be a path-
less wilderness:Â€ but system should be subservient to, not the main
object of, pursuit.’7 Likewise, while he shot animals for study, White
did not collect for collection’s sake. The twentieth-century naturalist
and conservationist E. M. Nicholson argues that, while other natu-
ralists in this period had ‘the beginnings of the collecting craze’ in
them, White was unusual among his contemporaries in remaining
‘altogether immune from the leprosy of collecting’.8
White undoubtedly served as an inspiration to many Victorian
naturalists. He was admired as ‘a template’ of the English parson-
naturalist and read for his perception of God’s creative power in the
variety of the natural world.9 The Natural History and Antiquities of
Selborne went through scores of reprints over the course of the nine-
teenth century. (As the popularity of White’s book was primarily due
to his treatment of nature subjects, these portions of the book were
often republished alone as The Natural History of Selborne.) However,
Lynn Barber argues that ‘although almost all Victorian naturalists
professed to admire Gilbert White, remarkably few succeeded in
emulating him’ in his behavioural approach to the study of nature.10
It would not be until the rise of ethology at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth that the behaviour of the
living organism in its own environment would re-emerge as a central
focus of the study of nature. Barber concludes that ‘it was Linnaeus,
rather than White, who set the pattern that natural history was to
take for the entire first half of the nineteenth century’.11 The single-
mindedness with which the taxonomic approach was pursued would
later be regarded as lamentable by some:Â€writing from the vantage
point of 1913, the turn-of-the-century botanist F. W. Oliver declared
Linnaeus’s long and pervasive influence to be proof that ‘the evil that
men do lives after them’.12 Oliver’s comment appears extreme, but it
reflects the frustration felt by proponents of the modern life sciences
over the extent to which the interests of taxonomists had controlled
the study of nature in nineteenth-century Britain.
Ta xon o m i c n at u r a l h i s t o ry i n t h e
n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u ry
While the taxonomic tradition of natural history had its origins in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians of science agree
in characterising the nineteenth century as The Heyday of Natural
History, ‘the golden age of natural history collecting in Britain’, ‘the
age of museums’, and ‘the hey-day of the English parson-naturalist’.13
Taxonomic work continued at an ever-increasing rate throughout
the nineteenth century:Â€to take bird species as an example, Linnaeus
recorded 444 species of birds in 1758 and by 1817 Cuvier could list 765,
but in 1862 Richard Owen gave an estimate of 8,000 bird species.14
The most obvious reason for the continuation of the taxonomic
project into the nineteenth century was that the task of classifying the
world remained unfinished:Â€as John Willinsky notes, ‘This effort to
name … the whole of the living realm ranks among the more ambi-
tious and presumptuous projects in science (and it is not over yet).’15
However, the nineteenth-century intensification of taxonomic work
requires further explanation. One reason may be found in technical
developments. Certain practical preconditions necessary to the full-
fledged pursuit of natural history were only achieved around the
turn of the century:Â€advances in firearm technology made the collec-
tion of specimens more efficient; even more important was the dis-
covery of a reliable means of preserving natural history specimens.
Until the close of the eighteenth century, there was no commonly
known method for the long-term preservation of animal specimens,
with the result that ‘virtually all pre-1800 specimens … have long
ago disintegrated’.16 However, with the publication of the formula for
Jean-Baptiste Bécouer’s ‘arsenical soap’ in 1800, it became possible to
preserve animal specimens from insects and decomposition without
harm to the specimen, and ‘by 1830 Bécouer’s recipe, or modifica-
tions to it, were in use everywhere’.17 This development was crucial
to the rationalisation of taxonomic work. It permitted the specimen
collection to function as a permanent reference tool, thus providing a
key to the standardisation of nomenclature and enabling taxonomy to
progress on a more scientific basis.18
The impact of these new preservation techniques on the scope and
focus of specimen collection was immense. With the development of
reliable preservation methods, the appeal of collection increased and
the number of collectors grew. Naturalists, both expert and recre-
ational, devoted themselves to amassing collections on an unprece-
dented scale. While in the eighteenth century, ‘collections of more
than 3000 birds had been the exception’, the largest private collections
of bird specimens in the nineteenth century held tens of thousands of
skins.19 The largest private insect collections grew to contain millions
of specimens, and so many people busied themselves with entomo-
logical collecting that John Lubbock described the period as ‘the age
of collections of insects’.20 Nineteenth-century collectors aimed at
comprehensiveness, seeking out representative species, rarities, and
aberrations to complete their series. In 1881, the specimen collection
was given independent institutional form with the founding of the
British Museum (Natural History) and the monumentalisation of the
natural history collection in Britain was complete.
The practice of taxonomic natural history persisted as the focus
of serious and popular science in Britain longer than it did on the
Continent. Certain national conditionsÂ€ – Britain’s imperial status,
a national inclination towards inductive science, a tendency to yoke
Â�science to religion, and a lack of state support for scienceÂ€– combined
to make Britain particularly suited to the practice of taxonomy in the
nineteenth century, while delaying other developmentsÂ€ such as the
professionalisation of the life sciences, the rise of the laboratory, and
the turn to morphological and physiological workÂ€that had already
begun in France and the German states. These conditions gave to
Victorian natural history a simultaneous ubiquity and stasis against
which both later practitioners of the life sciences and modern cultural
observers such as Woolf would react.
All the nations of Europe participated in the project of classifying
the world, for collecting and classifying the plant and animal life of
foreign lands served as a means of demonstrating control over them.
For Britain in particular, however, with its vast empire, the continuous
influx of specimens from its colonies made it difficult to see beyond the
immediate task of classification. As the botanist F.Â€W.Â€Oliver declared
of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century in Britain, ‘taxoÂ�
nomy was the ruling preoccupation of the period under consider-
ation, a direct outcome of colonial expansion and consolidation. Fed
on unlimited supplies of new material from the ends of the earth the
taxonomic habit became supreme.’21
A national inclination towards inductive reasoning also drew
British naturalists to taxonomic work. British science had long pro-
ceeded on Baconian lines, following the inductive method based
on reasoning upwards from observed fact ‘rather than on intuitive
leaps or mathematical abstractions’, and the taxonomic cataloguing
of nature accorded well with this inclination.22 This commitment to
inductive reasoning suited the politics of the time as well:Â€Victorians
sought ‘a philosophy of science which went with stability and gradual
reform rather than revolution, and which discouraged speculation’.23
Taxonomy, concerned with fact rather than theory and emphasising
the existence of order and hierarchy in the natural world, was an ideal
science in this regard. Taxonomic natural history was viewed as a
safe, moderate alternative to the new biological sciences developing
in conjunction with political unrest on the Continent.24
The continued yoking of science to religion further limited the
scope of scientific investigation. The study of nature as an end in
itself, along the lines of the German idealisation of Wissenschaft,
was a feature of the professionalisation of science in progress on the
Continent that had no parallel in Britain for much of the nineteenth
century.25 The study of natural history in Britain was most often justi-
fied through reference to the doctrine of natural theology, which held
that ‘the complexity and appearance of design in the natural world
provided evidence of the existence and nature of a Divine Creator’;
the study of nature was thus presented as a means of recognising
God’s creative power.26 William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802),
which provided the authoritative nineteenth-century articulation of
this argument, was reprinted almost annually throughout the nine-
teenth century and was made compulsory reading for undergradu-
ates at Cambridge and Durham as a way of providing them with ‘a
scheme for fitting scientific knowledge into their world view’.27
However, while promoting the study of nature, the doctrine of
natural theology engendered a paradoxical lack of curiosity in the
functioning of nature. Paley, for instance, argued that the complexity
of nature was proof that ‘there must be an intelligent mind, concerned
in its production, order and support’, and this led him to conclude
that ‘[t]hese points being assured to us by Natural Theology, we may
well leave to Revelation the disclosure of many particulars, which
our researches cannot reach’.28 Barber judges that ‘natural theology
was basically inimical to scientific inquiry’ in that it permitted a fall-
ing back upon the argument that natural phenomena were as they
were because God had so ordained them.29 While encouraging the
cataloguing of natural forms as a means of appreciating the existence
of design in nature, natural theology engendered resistance to both
evolutionary speculation and the secular science of the new biology
developing on the Continent.30
Another factor that perpetuated the British preoccupation with
taxonomy was Britain’s slowness to professionalise the study of sci-
ence. For most of the century, both formal education in the sciences
and opportunities to conduct paid scientific work were lacking. Paul
White summarises the backward state of science in nineteenth-Â�century
Britain with the observation that ‘[a]t mid-century, the sciences in
Britain had little of the career structure and few of the defining insti-
tutions of today, such as the large research laboratory with its team of
experts, the academic department, or the university degree’.31 Until
mid-century, it was not possible to take a degree in the life sciences
anywhere in Britain and even after the introduction of a natural sci-
ences degree at Cambridge in 1848, the degree was long ‘despised’ as
new-fangled.32
Additionally, in Britain the state provided little support for the
life sciences, a fact that D. S. L. Cardwell attributes to ‘the extra-
ordinarily parsimonious self-help system’Â€ – the product of a wider
laissez-faire mentalityÂ€– under which British science was pursued in
the nineteenth century.33 The British Museum’s natural history collec-
tions did not gain independent institutional status until 1881 (nearly
a century later than Paris’s Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle),
and before that time they received inadequate funding from the state.
Early in the century there was not even sufficient staff to organise
and maintain the collections properly, let alone to conduct research
beyond these ‘essential curatorial tasks’.34 David Knight observes
that the British Museum ‘never fulfilled the role of the Parisian nat-
ural history museum, with its lectures and research school’:Â€initially
it lacked the resources, and by the time the study of nature in Britain
had become formalised, the laboratory had replaced the museum as
the site of instruction.35 In the absence of formal science training,
opportunities for paid employment, or state support for scientific
work, the study of nature in Britain remained a largely amateur pur-
suit for much of the nineteenth century, and this amateurism impeded
scientific organisation and innovation.
The work for which Victorian science is best rememberedÂ€ –
Darwin’s theorisation of evolutionÂ€– masks the underdevelopment
of the institutions of the nineteenth-century British life sciences
and the delay in the introduction of new approaches to the study of
nature emerging on the Continent. In fact, the revolutionary impact
of Darwin’s theories and the general stagnation of the Victorian
life sciences were two sides of the same coin, for it was when set
against a conservative scientific tradition that regarded theorisa-
tion with suspicion and relied upon a theological justification for the
study of nature that Darwin’s arguments assumed the appearance of
radicalism.
Consideration of the underlying institutional, methodological, and
ideological characteristics of the nineteenth-century British life sci-
ences demonstrates that for most of the century, ‘Britain … lagg[ed]
far behind’ Continental developments.36 Incentives to taxonomic
work in the form of improved preservation techniques, an endless
supply of unclassified specimens from around the globe, a scientific
tradition favouring the accumulation of facts over speculation, and
the justification of the study of nature by means of natural theology
combined with impediments to the development of new disciplines in
the form of a lack of science education, research institutions, or pro-
fessional opportunities to ensure taxonomy’s persistence as the focus
of the study of nature in Britain for much of the nineteenth century.
It was from this scientific tradition that the popular pastime of nat-
ural history in which Woolf participated as a child was drawn.
T h e p o p u l a r p r a c t i c e o f n at u r a l h i s t o ry
Knight suggests that the nineteenth century can be regarded as the
age of science in part because in this period science was ‘not merely
an intellectual activity, but also a … social one’, and in no field was
this more true than in natural history.37 The lag in the profession-
alisation of the life sciences left the pursuit of serious research to
amateur naturalists with the result that no clear demarcation existed
between the expert and the hobbyist, and this encouraged the prac-
tice of natural history as a recreational activity. The prevailing
focus on taxonomic work made natural history particularly access-
ible:Â€when members of the public ‘opened their newspapers to read
of an “Important New Scientific Discovery” there was no danger of
it being something daunting and incomprehensible like a new the-
ory of plant biochemistryÂ€– it was almost invariably a new species
which, as often as not, would soon be exhibited in the zoological or
botanical gardens’.38
When Linnaeus first introduced his classification system in the
eighteenth century, it was regarded as sensational and even obscene,
rife with ‘botanical innuendo’, in its focus on sexual organs.39 By the
early nineteenth century, however, Linnaean taxonomy had come
to be viewed as safe and conventional:Â€ women, children, and the
working class were encouraged to study botany, a pastime deemed
‘“as healthful as it is innocent”’.40 This new respectability was due
in part to translations and reformulations of Linnaeus’s work that
masked the sexual basis of his classification system:Â€ Patricia Fara
highlights in particular William Withering’s ‘bowdlerised botany’,
which ‘translated contentious words into harmless but meaningless
English equivalents such as “chives” and “pointals”’. 41 Naturalists
themselves also benefited from this new respectability:Â€while recre-
ational practitioners of natural history in the eighteenth century were
often mocked as trivial ‘Macaroni’, 42 by 1855 Charles Kingsley could
declare:Â€ ‘The study of Natural History has become now-a-days an
honourable [pursuit].’43
The nineteenth-century approval of natural history arose in part
from perceptions of the pastime as a form of rational recreation. In
Glaucus (1855), Kingsley recommends natural history as a stimulat-
ing alternative to ‘making one more in the ignoble army of idlers’
who waste their leisure hours lounging in clubs, reading novels, and
doing fancy-work.44 In Elizabeth Fitton, Sarah Mary Fitton, and Jane
Marcet’s Conversations on Botany (1817), Linnaeus is introduced to
children as ‘a very industrious man, who had examined many plants’,
a characterisation that suggests that part of the appeal of the painstak-
ing process of specimen collection and classification (involving both
physical exertion and mental orderliness) lay in its accordance with
the nineteenth-century work ethic, which required that even leisure
activities be productive.45 In ‘An Address to Young Entomologists’,
H. T. Stainton promotes the recreational study of natural history as
a ‘useful employment’ and advises his readers to pursue the pastime
in ‘a methodical and business-like manner’. 46 Naturalists were com-
monly used as examples of self-education, of self-discipline, and of
the gospel of work in the writings of Samuel Smiles:Â€Hugh Miller,
William ‘Strata’ Smith, and Roderick Murchison were among the
exemplary figures of science that Smiles described in Self-Help, and
he later wrote hagiographies of individual naturalists such as Life of
a Scotch Naturalist:Â€Thomas Edward (1876) and Robert Dick:Â€Baker of
Thurso, Geologist and Botanist (1878).
Natural history was also promoted as a religiously orthodox and
morally edifying activity. Thanks to the justification of natural the-
ology, which promoted the study of nature as a pious as well as a
respectable pastime, natural history was viewed as supplying to an
unparalleled degree the ‘moral uplift’ required to ensure a pastime
the status of a rational recreation.47 The late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century nature writer and animal illustrator Thomas
Bewick summed up this view of the study of natural history with
his assertion that ‘a good naturalist cannot be a bad man’. 48 This
association ensured a particularly strong tradition of natural history
among the devout in Britain. Noel Annan notes that natural history
was a pastime common among Non-Conformist and Evangelical
groups such as the Quakers and the Clapham Sect (from which
Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were respectively descended). While
drawn to nature, ‘distrust of beauty as a temptress’ and disapproval
of the extravagance and cruelty of the hunt led Evangelicals and
Non-Conformists to seek a more rational and edifying engage-
ment with nature by means of the ‘botanical satchel and geologist’s
hammer’. 49
It was not only the reformist branches of the Church that were
drawn to natural history. In The English Parson-Naturalist, Patrick
Armstrong outlines the sundry contributions to the study of nature
made by the Anglican clergy. The tradition of long residence in a
single parish gave the nineteenth-century clergyman the opportun-
ity to develop ‘a unique knowledge of a rural landscape, its human
occupance and its natural history’, and these interests were regarded
as complementary.50 J. C. Loudon recommended natural history as
an appropriate pursuit for a clergyman in that it sent him ‘abroad in
the fields, investigating the habits and searching out the habitats of
birds, insects, or plants, not only invigorating his health, but afford-
ing ample opportunity for frequent intercourse with his parishion-
ers’.51 Such descriptions encapsulate the Victorian view of natural
history as a healthful, pious, edifying, and even sociable pastime.
There was an element of attempted social control in the nineteenth-
Â�century promotion of the study of nature. A celebration of the
self-taught, working-class naturalist Charles Peach in Chambers’s
Edinburgh Journal, with its idealisation of ‘virtuous, intelligent, inde-
pendent poverty’, suggests the way in which natural history was used
to promote industrious self-betterment without disruption to the
existing social order.52 Natural history was seen as a morally edify-
ing and socially moderate alternative to the dissipations of the public
house and the lure of radical politics. This view was expressed by
some self-improving members of the working class:Â€Hugh Miller, a
stonemason and self-taught geologist, explicitly juxtaposes radical
politics and scientific study in the introduction to his work of popular
geology, The Old Red Sandstone (1841), asserting:
You will gain nothing by attending Chartist meetings. The fellows who speak
nonsense with fluency at these assemblies, and deem their nonsense elo-
quence, are totally unable to help either you or themselves; or, if they do suc-
ceed in helping themselves, it will be at your expense. Leave them to harangue
unheeded, and set yourself to occupy your leisure hours in making yourself
wiser men.53
The same view is put forward in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

(1848), in which Job Legh’s absorption in natural history offers an
alternative to John Barton’s involvement in trade unionism and the
Chartist movement:Â€Gaskell contrasts Job, ‘happy as a king’ among
‘his books, and his creatures, and his plants’, with John, whose dissat-
isfaction with his life and station leads him to violence.54
The assumption of the moderating influence of the study of nature
was not wholly accurate. Radical workers of the 1830s and 1840s
employed the Lamarckian theory of evolution in support of the
argument that individuals could transform themselves and pass on
acquired traits to their offspring.55 Even in its taxonomic form, the
practice of natural history could involve a subversive element. There
was a thriving natural history tradition among artisans and factory
workers:Â€Spitalfields weavers had a long tradition of involvement in
botany and entomology, and factory workers in Lancashire (particu-
larly textile workers) also became known for their collective practice
of natural history. That their pursuit of this activity did not entirely
conform to middle-class preconceptions is suggested by the fact that
the meetings of these artisan-naturalist collectives often took place in
pubs, where a group might be permitted use of a room for meetings
and space to store its collections and reference works in exchange for
a ‘wet rent’ (the purchase of enough alcohol to satisfy the publican).56
Still, there can be no doubt that taxonomic natural history was typ-
ically regarded as a moderate pastime, emphasising order and hier-
archy. Anne Secord argues that this exemplifies the way in which
the Victorian middle class ‘reconstructed the popular’ for their own
ends, ‘render[ing] working-class scientific activity politically neutral
through control over printed texts, a preoccupation with producing
accounts of the lives of autodidacts to put forward moral lessons, and
by giving natural history a central role in rational recreation’.57 The
study of nature was not an inevitably conservative practice, but in
the nineteenth century the taxonomic tradition of natural history was
used to encourage an orderly and hierarchical world view.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the audience for nat-
ural history grew steadily in numbers and breadth. In the 1820s and
1830s, natural history was taken up with great energy by students at
the universities. (The study of nature remained an essentially recre-
ational activity for students at this time, since botany was taught only
as a supplementary subject for medical students.) By mid-century,
the practice of natural history was spreading through the expand-
ing middle class and the self-improving working class. The spread of
the pastime was encouraged by an outpouring of popular works on
the subject, part of a wider mid-century boom in popular publish-
ing made possible by increasing literacy and technological advances
in the printing trade such as the development of lithography, which
permitted the cheap reproduction of colour illustrations. Illustrated
books on natural history, which had previously been sold as luxury
items, were now within reach of all classes. Works by popular nat-
ural history writers such as the Reverend J. G. Wood, the Reverend
F.Â€ O. Morris, Philip Henry Gosse, and the Reverend Charles
Kingsley enjoyed enormous success:Â€Wood’s Common Objects of the
Country (1858), one of a series of shilling handbooks, sold 100,000
copies in a week.58 However, while natural history publications were
more numerous and more accessible than before they were also ‘of
a rather lighter character’ than previously, written in haste, ram-
bling, and larded with moralising and sentimentality.59 They were
often deliberately vague out of concern for the ‘gentle susceptibil-
ities’ of their intended audience.60 Many were also unintentionally
unreliable:Â€Stephen Moss dismisses the majority of popular books on
birds published at this time as ‘inaccurate and sentimental twaddle’.61
Allen explains the mid-century boom in books on popular natural
history with the argument that ‘books of no outstanding merit …
turn[ed] into runaway successes, due to the mere accident of entering
a particular field as the market ripen[ed]’; following this initial burst
of popularity, ‘the sheer omnipresence and familiarity of the books
themselves … succeed[ed] in ensuring them a life-span as remarkable
as it [was] undeserved’.62
The generations of naturalists brought up on these mid-century
works of popular natural history were for the most part recreational
hobbyists rather than amateur experts, and while the popularity of
natural history succeeded in making the pastime respectable, even
fashionable, it did nothing to counteract the stagnation that char-
acterised the study of nature in nineteenth-century Britain. The
popular natural history tradition can even be regarded as having
perpetuated this lag, for it was slow to reflect new scientific develop-
ments when they did occur. While one might expect that the contro-
versies surrounding evolutionary theory would have had an adverse
impact upon a popular natural history tradition grounded in natural
theology, the publication of The Origin of Species ‘had no immedi-
ate effect on the popular enthusiasm for natural history’, in large
part because contemporary controversies were not aired in popular
works of natural history.63 Throughout the 1860s and for a consid-
erable period thereafter, the best-selling natural history publications
continued to be those written by traditionalists such as Philip Henry
Gosse, the Reverend F. O. Morris, and the Reverend J. G. Wood.
These writers made no attempt to explain emerging theories in their
popular writings; rather, they sought to negate the new theories
through silence. While Gosse’s pre-Darwinian Omphalos (1857) had
attempted (without success) to reconcile the geological record with
the Genesis account of creation, The Romance of Natural History, his
1860 best-seller, makes no allusion to evolutionary debates. Instead,
the controversy that preoccupies Gosse is the debate over the exist-
ence of the sea-serpent.64 At most, popular authors such as Gosse
offered oblique rebuttals of emerging theories through the reasser-
tion of the principles of natural theology:Â€‘[t]hey went on reprodu-
cing one another’s facts, one another’s anecdotes and one another’s
assumptions about Nature year after year, decade after decade[,] …
ignor[ing] all the great scientific controversies that were waging in
the world outside’.65 Also contributing to the stagnation in popular
natural history was the continuing popularity of the mid-century
‘classics’, many of which remained in print and popular until the
end of the century.66 The perpetuation of a pre-Darwinian outlook
among recreational naturalists was in large part a consequence of
their continued reliance upon pre-Darwinian texts. As Barber con-
cludes, ‘Popular natural history existed in a peculiar vacuum, deriv-
ing its biology from Linnaeus, its philosophy from Paley … long
after these ideas had become outmoded.’67
Some nineteenth-century practitioners of natural history were
aware of the stagnation in their field and attempted to direct the
study of nature into new channels. John Lubbock, for example, was
long critical of entomologists’ preoccupation with specimen collec-
tion and taxonomic work:Â€in an article entitled ‘On the Objects of
a Collection of Insects’, published in The Entomologist’s Annual in
1856, he argued that entomologists gave ‘too much time to collect-
ing, and paid too little attention to the habits, anatomy and physioÂ�
logy of insects’, and he cautioned that ‘to make collections the end,
instead of the means,Â€ to collect merely for the sake of Â�collecting,
has a direct tendency to narrow the mind’.68 Through his later
work, Lubbock sought to widen the focus of entomology. In 1882,
he introduced a behavioural approach to entomology through the
publication of Ants, Bees, and Wasps, a study of the habits of social
insects. Lubbock’s work marked an early step in the diversification
of approaches to the study of insect life. Yet behavioural studies did
not immediately displace the entrenched taxonomic tradition. As the
example of the Stephen children will show, taxonomic natural his-
tory exerted a lingering influence over the study of nature in Britain
that persisted until the end of the century.
Wo ol f ’s c h i l d h o o d e n c o u n t e r
w i t h n at u r a l h i s t o ry
The lingering influence of the long-standing and, by the close of the
nineteenth century, near-moribund natural history tradition can be
seen in Virginia Woolf ’s childhood encounter with the practice.
Looking back on her late Victorian childhood, Woolf perceived
an element of stagnation in her influences and environment. She
commented:
we lived under the sway of a society that was about fifty years too old for us.
It was this curious fact that made our struggle so bitter and so violent. For
the society in which we lived was still the Victorian society. Father himself
was a typical Victorian. George and Gerald were consenting and approv-
ing Victorians … We were living say in 1910; they were living in 1860.
(MOBÂ€149–50)
One of the ways in which the perpetuation of a mid-Victorian out-

look manifested in the Stephen household was through the education
in natural history that Virginia received as a child, and as a result
she came to associate this pastime with the traditionalism of her
upbringing.
From her earliest childhood, Virginia Stephen displayed an inter-
est in nature that was encouraged and directed by her family. Her
first letter, written at the age of six to her godfather James Russell
Lowell, suggests her interest in the natural world:Â€ she writes, ‘my
dear godpapa have you been to the adirondacks and have you
seen lots of wild beasts and a lot of birds in their nests you
are a naughty man not to come here good bye your affecte
virginia’ (L I:Â€2). She was familiar with a number of the classic texts
of natural history. She read the works of eighteenth-century natu-
ralists such as Gilbert White and Thomas Pennant and recalled, ‘I
still know all my beasts from their pictures in Bewick which we were
shown before we could listen to reading aloud’ (165). The Stephen
children’s newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, records their famil-
iarity with the writing of one of the leading mid-Victorian popular-
isers of natural history, ‘the Reverend G. J. [sic] Wood’:Â€ they note
Wood’s objection in the Illustrated Natural History (1851) to the use
of the name ‘guinea pig’ for an animal neither found in Guinea nor a
member of the pig family (an objection that reflects a taxonomic nat-
uralist’s concern with nomenclature) (HPGN 160–1). The children
also received encouragement in their study of natural history from
family and friends. Leslie Stephen was an amateur botanist with a
‘habit of collecting flowers’ which he pressed and kept in albums, and
he encouraged his children to learn ‘the different tribes of plants’ and
the names of plants that grew in their neighbourhood (84, 83, 79). As
well as botanising with her father, Virginia bug-hunted with her sib-
lings, netting butterflies, sugaring for moths, and setting specimens
for display in the family ‘Museum’ (L I:Â€2). The children’s bug-Â�hunting
was begun in secrecy out of fear of parental disapproval; however,
when their activities were discovered, the children found that their
parents approved of and even assisted their efforts (MOBÂ€113). Julia
Stephen, as Woolf later recalled, ‘bought us nets and setting boards;
and indeed she went with Walter Headlam down to the St Ives pub-
lic house and bought us rum [an essential ingredient in the ‘sugar’
mixture used as a lure for moths]. How strange a sceneÂ€– my mother
buying rum. She would go round the sugar after we were in bed’
(ibid.). Leslie Stephen oversaw the creation of a family Entomological
Society, headed by a committee that consisted of Leslie Stephen,
‘president’; George Duckworth, ‘Librarian’; Thoby, ‘Larva Groom’;
Virginia, ‘Secretary Chairman & Treasurer’; and Adrian, ‘not on the
Committee’ (a detail reflecting the extent to which such organisations
define themselves in terms of those whom they exclude).Â€The Society
heard lectures from the president and reports from junior members
and supplied the associated family museum with specimens (PA 134,
5–6). The organisation of the Stephen children’s bug-hunting trans-
formed what had previously been unregulated play into an edifying
and productive pastime, a form of rational recreation. The hobby was
not only permitted but regarded as exemplary, as is suggested by the
fact that the Kay-Shuttleworth children were brought to the Stephen
house to ‘examine the bugs’ in preparation for starting their own
collection (31).
Woolf’s description of the role that natural history played in Roger
Fry’s Quaker upbringing illustrates her awareness of the pastime as a
broad Victorian phenomenon rather than a unique feature of her own
childhood. In her biography of Fry, she records that ‘science was part
of the home atmosphere’ in the Fry household:Â€Roger learned botany
at his mother’s knee, swapped specimens with his cousins (even at
the age of nine ‘careful to use the proper scientific names’), and sent
his parents letters from school ‘stained with the juice of wild flowers,
and … contain[ing] withered buds that [he] picked on his walks’
(RFÂ€19, 26, 30). Despite the seemingly benign nature of these pastimes,
they were linked to the narrowness of a pious Victorian upbringing.
In addition to the professions closed to the Quakers for reasons of
conscience, the arts were regarded with suspicion, and Woolf sug-
gests that those who ‘turned [their] attention to science’ did so in part
because they were ‘denied other outlet’ (13).69
As children of the intellectual aristocracy, Virginia and her siblings
might be seen as heirs to a scholarly tradition of Victorian natural his-
tory that included families such as the Arnolds, the Macaulays, and the
Trevelyans as well as the Hookers, the Darwins, and the Huxleys.70
Through the formation of their own Entomological Society and its
associated museum, the Stephen children imitated the institutions
of Victorian natural history, and Virginia mimicked the pose of the
scholar-naturalist in letters to Thoby, urging her brother to ‘write an
account of the [family] Museum’ on the grounds that ‘this will make
your name known in Scientific circles’ (L I:Â€7). However, their educa-
tion in natural history came not by means of this scholarly tradition,
but via another, more populist avenue. Jack Hills, suitor and later
husband to Virginia’s half-sister, Stella, gave to the Stephen children
the entomological works of the Reverend F. O. Morris. Appointed
to ‘the post of name finder’, Virginia was responsible for identify-
ing captured specimens, and she would later recall ‘spen[ding] many
hours, hunting up our catches among all those pictures of hearts and
darts and setaceous Hebrew characters’ in Morris’s books of butter-
flies and moths (MOB 113).71 An entomologist, ornithologist, and
general nature enthusiast, Morris was one of the ‘great mid-Victorian
popularisers’ of natural history.72 He first rose to prominence as a
writer with the publication of A History of British Birds (1850–7), a
work that was many times reprinted and went through two further
editions during the author’s lifetime. A History of British Butterflies
(1852–3) was even more successful, with its tenth edition appearing
in 1908. Morris epitomised the Victorian clergyman-naturalist, and
in his popular works of natural history he expounded the doctrine
of natural theology that underpinned the nineteenth-century study
of nature. In A History of British Butterflies, Morris declares that
‘an instinctive general love of nature, that is, in other words, of the
works of God, has been implanted by Him, the Great Architect of
the universeÂ€– the Great Parent of allÂ€– in the mind of every man’,
and he emphasises the moral edification to be gained from the study
of nature, which ‘infallibly lead[s] from the works of Nature up to
the God of Nature’.73 Morris employed, in the words of his son, an
‘unstudied and natural’ style, treating his subjects ‘not as scientific
hardnesses, but rather as old friends surrounded with endless remi-
niscences’.74 Subsequent judgements of Morris’s work have been less
appreciative. Writing in 1917, W. H. Mullens and H. Kirke Swann
judged that ‘Morris was too voluminous to be accurate, and too
didactic to be scientific. He accepted records and statements with-
out discrimination, and consequently his work abounds with errors
and mistakes.’75 Recent historians of natural history have confirmed
this judgement:Â€ Patrick Armstrong admits that in Morris’s popular
writings ‘much material was reproduced quite uncritically’, with the
result that his books offer ‘a feast of anecdotes and elevating tales,
many of them totally unreliable’.76 Nevertheless, Morris’s works were
regarded as classics by generations of Victorian readers, as illustrated
by the fact that, forty years after the publication of A History of British
Butterflies, it was to Morris’s works that the Stephen children were
referred in their entomological investigations.
The focus and approach of Morris’s writings on natural history
demonstrate his commitment to the taxonomic tradition. His first
published work bore the title A Guide to an Arrangement of British
Birds; Being a Catalogue of All the Species Hitherto Discovered in Great
Britain and Ireland, and Intended to Be of Use for Labelling Cabinets or
Collections of the Same (1834), illustrating his preoccupation with the
taxonomic catalogue and the collector’s cabinet. He prided himself
on his ‘admirably arranged cabinets’, convinced that ‘in this respect,
at least, if not in extent, there were few, if any, private ones in the
country to surpass them’.77 His submissions to entomological journals
reveal his attention to every stage of the collection and classification
process. He helped to popularise the practice of sugaring for moths
by forwarding P. J. Selby’s private communication of the technique
to The Naturalist.78 The spread of this practice resulted in a ‘dramatic
tipping of the scales in favour of the hunter’ and ‘a veritable revo-
lution in the range of species represented in the average collector’s
cabinet’.79 The Naturalist records his frequent, argumentative notes
regarding the correct use of Latin and Greek in scientific nomencla-
ture and the importance of appropriate descriptive names.80 He was
a disputatious contributor, fiercely defending the precedence of his
own observations and proposals and attacking anything he perceived
as an infringement on his work:Â€he accused others of plagiarism, for
example, when their observations agreed too closely with his own.81
In 1837, he realised the dream of every taxonomist, the discovery of a
new species, and, by inviting his friend J. C. Dale to formally name
the insect, he succeeded in having it named after himself, Acosmetia
morrisii.82
That Morris was preoccupied with the collection of insects is also
suggested by his manner of describing them. He refers to the life his-
tory of a species less to convey a sense of the insect’s development
than as a guide to its capture. He indicates the period during which
the Swallow-Tail (Papilio machaon) appears in imago form with the
statement, ‘The perfect insect is taken from the beginning of May to
the end of August’, and he expresses his concern that the draining of
its habitat may threaten the species’ survival with the comment, ‘It
is to be feared that we may in time lose this most conspicuous orna-
ment of our cabinets.’83 When discussing the extinction of the Large
Copper (Lycaena dispar), he similarly confides, ‘I cannot but with
some regret recall, at all events, the time when almost any number of
this dazzling fly was easily procurable, either “by purchase” or “by
exchange” for our cabinets.’84 Most tellingly, while his natural his-
tories offer no description of the life cycle of Lepidoptera or similar
supplementary material, his History of British Butterflies contains an
extensive appendix detailing methods for the luring, capture, killing,
transport, relaxation, setting, arrangement, and display of butterflies
and moths.85 In offering advice on collection methods, Morris was not
exceptional; most popular nineteenth-century guides to Lepidoptera
did the same. However, Morris represented an extreme within the
natural history tradition in that this was the only supplementary
information that he offered.86
The enduring popularity of Morris’s work demonstrates the resist-
ance to change characteristic of recreational natural history in the
late nineteenth century. Morris’s mid-century, pre-Darwinian works
on British birds and butterflies remained standard popular references
throughout the Victorian period, continuing in print until the first
years of the twentieth century. The popular works that he published
after Darwin’s promulgation of his theory of evolution illustrate
another feature of late nineteenth-century natural history. When The
Origin of Species was published, Morris was among its most vocal
detractors:Â€David Elliston Allen describes Morris as ‘an out-and-out
fundamentalist who campaigned against the theory in innumerable
pamphlets, couched in intemperate language, over many years’, and
Morris’s son confirms this assessment of his father, asserting that ‘of all
the clergy of the Church of England who made public their opinions
there was probably not one who wrote at greater length, more out-
spokenly, vehemently and decidedly than he’.87 In spite of his strong
opposition to evolutionary theory, however, the works of popular nat-
ural history that Morris wrote after the publication of The Origin of
Species perpetuate a pre-Darwinian outlook not by challenging evo-
lutionary theory but by ignoring it. For example, in A Natural History
of British Moths, written between 1859 and 1870, Morris makes no ref-
erence to evolutionary ideas, offering only oblique refutations of the
evolutionist position through convoluted assertions of a special and
fixed creation, as in his celebration of ‘the preservation through all
vicissitudes of so many creatures of the hand of the Immortal, which
the same hand by His providence has preserved through a “thousand
generations” which though to Him “but as yesterday”, are coeval in
our calculation with the beginning of time itself’.88
The Stephen children’s practice of natural history thus followed
mid-century, pre-Darwinian lines; it was the tradition of taxonomy,
with its focus on the assembly of a collection and the identification
and arrangement of the specimens within itÂ€ – simplified to appeal
to popular tastesÂ€ – that provided diversion for the young Virginia
Stephen.89 The fact that the children of Leslie Stephen, the ‘godless
Victorian’ who ‘attributed his loss of faith quite directly to reading
The Origin of Species’, could be brought up on this pre-Darwinian
scientific tradition demonstrates the stagnation of popular natural
history in the late Victorian period.90
Despite the survival of taxonomic natural history as a recreational
activity until the turn of the century, however, the late Victorian con-
text gradually undermined many of the key tenets of the practice and
prepared the way for its demise. Simultaneous with her participa-
tion in the popular tradition of taxonomic natural history, Virginia
was aware of other developments in the nineteenth-century study of
nature. Relating to Thoby the recent discovery of ‘an ape which is
nearer to a man than anything else which has yet been found’, the
14-year-old Virginia indicates her familiarity with Darwin’s theory of
the descent of man (L I:Â€2). Such ideas, encountered outside the classic
texts of popular Victorian natural history, distanced Virginia from
the taxonomic tradition even as she participated in it. Even as a young
girl engaged in the practice of natural history, Virginia possessed a
scientific frame of reference in relation to which Morris’s creationist
taxonomising would have appeared backward and credulous.
Likewise, a single, retrospective reference in ‘Sketch of the Past’
suggests another influence that may have gradually eroded Woolf’s
childhood conviction in the taxonomic approach to the study of
nature. Looking back on her Victorian upbringing from the vantage
point of 1940, Woolf likens Hyde Park Gate in 1900 to a microcosm
of Victorian society ‘like one of those sections with glass covers in
which ants and bees are shown going about their tasks’ (MOB 150).
This allusion conjures up an image of Woolf examining the Victorian
society of her childhood in much the same manner as a behavioural
entomologist such as John Lubbock would have observed the activ-
ities of social insects in a glass nest or hive. As children engaged in the
practice of entomology, Woolf and her siblings made no mention of
the work of behavioural entomologists such as Lubbock; the Stephen
children’s study of insect life centred around the collection and clas-
sification of butterflies and moths in the tradition of Morris rather
than the observation of the habits of ants and bees in the manner of
Lubbock. However, Woolf’s retrospective association of Victorian
society with ants in glass nests calls to mind the fact that alternatives
to taxonomic natural history were emerging during her childhood,
and suggests that, although the behavioural approach did not deter-
mine the manner of Woolf’s childhood practice of natural history, it
may over time have encouraged her re-evaluation of the taxonomic
tradition by suggesting an alternative means of studying nature.
The popular practice of taxonomic natural history survived in its
traditional form until the close of the nineteenth century and it was in
this form that Woolf encountered it as a child. By this time, however,
it was less a living tradition than an artificially preserved practice that
persisted by being kept apart from the main trends of scientific devel-
opment. The next chapter will consider the disciplines that, arising in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, defined themselves
against the taxonomic tradition that had preceded them and in doing
so altered the way that nature was seen and described by both mod-
ern practitioners of science and interested observers such as Woolf.
Chapter 2
The modern life sciences
In the late nineteenth century, the long domination of taxonomic

natural history was brought to an end by the combined impact of
evolutionary theory and the new biology of the laboratory. As the
twentieth century began, ethology and ecology also emerged as rec-
ognised disciplines and added a further dimension to the study of
nature. In contrast to taxonomic natural history, which focused on
the description of organisms for purposes of identification and sys-
tematic arrangement, these emerging disciplines sought a wider and
deeper understanding of nature through consideration of the origins
and evolution of life, the internal make-up and functioning of organ-
isms, the behaviour of living things, and the interrelationships occur-
ring among organisms in a shared environment.
Woolf’s interest in developments in the study of nature is demon-
strated by her allusions to the work of nature writers, scientists, and
science popularisers. In addition to her well-documented familiarity
with and respect for Darwin’s work, she refers in her fiction to T. H.
Huxley and to Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance (MEL 62; VOÂ€55;
MD 85, 33; ND 385). She was acquainted with Jean-Henri Fabre’s
work on insect behaviour; she alludes to Richard Jeffries; and she read
and reviewed W. H. Hudson’s nature writing, expressing admiration
for both his literary style and his approach to the natural world. Over
the winter of 1931–2, she ‘dip[ped] into The Sciences of Life [sic]’, a
survey of approaches to the study of nature by H.Â€G.Â€Wells, Julian
Huxley, and G. P. Wells (L IV:Â€418). She was familiar with the applied
science of economic entomology through writing on and by Eleanor
Ormerod, a pioneer in the field. Additionally, Woolf drew on the fic-
tion of scientifically inclined authors such as Marie Stopes for insights
38
The modern life sciences 39
into the methods and theories of the new biology of the laboratory.
In an effort to reconstruct the scientific context that shaped Woolf’s
mature views of nature and its study, this chapter will examine devel-
opments in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-Â�century life sci-
ences that transformed the way that nature was seen and described,
shifting attention from external form to internal functioning, and
from the dead specimen to the living organism, its behaviour, and its
interactions with its environment.
Da rw i n i a n c on t rov e r s i e s
The publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 was both a product
of the taxonomic tradition and a departure from it. Darwin drew
heavily upon classificatory work in formulating his evolutionary the-
ory:Â€as Harriet Ritvo points out, Darwin recognised the Galapagos
finches as examples of adaptive radiation only after John Gould had
classified them, differentiating finch species where Darwin had seen
only varieties and identifying as finches birds that Darwin had placed
in entirely different families.1 However, to taxonomic work Darwin
added a commitment to theorisation:Â€ he sought to understand the
implications of taxonomic classifications for the relationships among
organisms, rather than contenting himself with having ordered them.
As a result, Darwin’s ‘great generalisation’ gave rise to controversy
over method as well as subject matter, dividing theorists from tax-
onomists as well as evolutionists from creationists.2
James R. Moore was perhaps the first to argue that what has been
taken as religious resistance to the theory of evolution was in many
cases a Baconian suspicion of deductive reasoning. For those com-
mitted to inductive reasoning, Moore argues, The Origin of Species
was controversial because ‘it represented a new departure in scientific
explanation. Facts swarmed its pages in orthodox Baconian propor-
tions … Yet the book set forth natural selection, not as a theory for
which absolute proof had been obtained, or even might be obtained,
but merely as the most probable explanation of the greatest number
of facts relating to the origin of species.’3 Knight seconds this argu-
ment, observing that for most of the nineteenth century in Britain,
‘Baconian suspicions of the speculative and deductive intellect were
strong … scientific opinion was cautious … One should avoid a the-
ory of the origin of species, which would inevitably be unscientific,
and concentrate on describing and classifying the existing species.’4
Knight declares that the challenge facing Darwin and his supporters
was not so much to overthrow existing theories about the origin of life
as ‘to persuade contemporaries that hypothesizing about origins was
worthwhile’.5 As an example of this resistance to speculation, Mearns
and Mearns record that shortly after Alfred Russel Wallace published
his article ‘On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New
Species’ in The Annals and Magazine of Natural History (1855), a friend
wrote to say that he had ‘overheard several naturalists expressing
regret that Wallace was theorizing when he should only have been
gathering more facts’.6 Such resistance to theorisation was charac-
teristic of the taxonomist, concerned with cataloguing nature rather
than explaining it.
This was not the last challenge to Darwin’s arguments to be voiced
from within the scientific community. As Julian Huxley would later
observe in Evolution, the Modern Synthesis (1942), by the turn of the
century, ‘the death of Darwinism’ was being ‘proclaimed not only
from the pulpit, but from the biological laboratory’.7 Beginning in the
1890s, Darwinism was challenged by biologists who questioned not
the fact of evolution but Darwin’s explanation of the means by which
evolution occurred. Turn-of-the-century biologists such as William
Bateson and Hugo de Vries contested Darwin’s gradualist argument
that evolution occurred by way of continuous variations operated
upon by natural selection, arguing instead that ‘large mutations, and
not small “continuous variations”, were the raw material of evolu-
tion, and actually determined most of its course, selection being rel-
egated to a wholly subordinate position’.8 This view was bolstered by
the rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, for
Mendel’s observation that hereditary characteristics were transmitted
as discrete units was employed by mutationists in support of the argu-
ment that evolution occurred by way of discontinuous variations.9
The intradisciplinary dispute over the mechanisms by which evolu-
tion occurred continued throughout the early decades of the twentieth
century and was communicated to the general public:Â€in Ann Veronica
(1909), H. G. Wells alludes to ‘the burning topic of the Mendelian
controversy’ and the ‘vigorous fire of mutual criticismÂ€… going on
now between the Imperial College and the Cambridge Mendelians’;
Wells, Huxley, and Wells summarise the debate in BookÂ€ 4 of The
Science of Life, ‘The Essence of the Controversies about Evolution’;
and Robert Olby confirms that ‘[b]y Julian Huxley’s timeÂ€ … the
Â�climate of opinion among both experts and the public was not sup-
portive of wholesale selectionist evolution’.10 That Woolf was aware
of emerging alternatives to the strictly Darwinian explanation of
evolution is demonstrated by her references to ‘the Mendelian the-
ory’, ‘inherited characteristics’, and ‘the recurrence of blue eyes and
brown’ in her fiction (MD 33; ND 385). Over the course of the inter-
war period, the theories of Mendelian heredity and de Vriesian muta-
tion were ‘profoundly Â�modified’ and ultimately recombined with
an equally modified Darwinism to create what came to be termed
the modern evolutionary synthesis, described by Olby as ‘evolution
by the natural selection of small mutations inherited in a Mendelian
fashion’.11 The formulation of the modern evolutionary synthesis was
not wholly completed until after Woolf’s death, but the debates that
brought it about remain relevant to a discussion of Woolf’s responses
to the life sciences, for they ensured that the interrogation of past evo-
lutionary arguments and the testing of emerging alternatives were
central concerns for evolutionary biologists throughout Woolf’s
adult life.
T h e r i s e o f t h e n e w b iol o g y
While the debates over evolutionary theory are among the best-Â�
known controversies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
science, methodological and institutional disputes also contributed to
the scientific upheaval of the period. T. H. Huxley is now remem-
bered primarily for his defence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory
against both representatives of the Church such as Bishop Samuel
Wilberforce and traditionalist men of science such as Richard Owen.
Recently, however, historians such as Adrian Desmond, Nicolaas
Rupke, and Paul White have argued that the dispute over evolution-
ary theory was not Huxley’s or Owen’s sole or even primary concern.
Desmond argues that while Huxley ‘distilled’ the struggle for scien-
tific authority ‘into an evolution versus creation slogan’, his support
for Darwin’s theory can best be viewed as part of a larger agenda of
seeing secular, speculative biology centred in the laboratory triumph
over the museum-based, theologically justified taxonomic cata-
loguing that had dominated the study of nature for the greater part of
the nineteenth century.12
Underlying Huxley and Owen’s clash in the debate over evoluÂ�
tionary theory was their fundamental difference of opinion regarding
the methods and institutions proper to the study of nature. Owen and
Huxley were alike in their wish for greater recognition of and support
for the life sciences:Â€both sought ‘institutional status for the sciences
on a par with their status on the Continent’.13 However, Owen was
‘a museum man par excellence’, committed to expanding the facil-
ities available for taxonomic work, while ‘[a]lmost from its begin-
ning, Huxley’s career was marked by his pleas for the preeminence of
the laboratory over the museum as a space for scientific research and
teaching’.14
As curator of the Hunterian Museum collections at the Royal
College of Surgeons and later as superintendent of the natural his-
tory departments of the British Museum, Owen was the driving force
behind the campaign for the establishment of a national museum
devoted exclusively to natural history along the lines of the Muséum
national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. Owen was a skilled compara-
tive anatomist and his work brought a new precision to taxonomy,
but it was a change in means without any accompanying divergence
from taxonomic ends. As Charles Coulston Gillispie declares of
Owen’s French predecessor, Cuvier, he used dissection as ‘a keen
analytical tool serving the purposes of taxonomy’.15 Owen was suc-
cessful in promoting his museum agenda to the extent that in 1881
he witnessed the opening of the newly constructed British Museum
(Natural History) in South Kensington. The opening of Owen’s
‘Index Museum’Â€– intended to offer a spatial embodiment of the prin-
ciples of taxonomic natural historyÂ€– might be viewed as the apex
of the British taxonomic tradition, for from this time forward the
taxonomic tradition and its attendant collections were increasingly
displaced by other approaches to the study of nature.16 Taxonomic
work would go on and natural history collections would continue
to expand, but collection and classification would never again be the
primary focus of the life sciences.
In contrast to Owen’s support for museum taxonomy, Huxley’s
ideal was ‘the laboratory model’ that had developed decades earlier
in the German states.17 Building on the advances in anatomical work
that had occurred in France, the German states in the 1840s developed
university laboratories that opened the way to new research possibil-
ities. The new biology of the laboratory focused on morphology and
physiology, the study of the form and functioning of organisms, as
ends in themselves rather than as means to achieve a more accurate
classification. Attempts were made in the 1840s and 1850s to introduce
the new German approach to Britain, but these were frustrated by the
lack of formal science education or institutional support for the sci-
ences in Britain as well as by the prevailing obsession with taxonomy
that characterised the British life sciences at the time. Looking back,
the turn-of-the-century botanist F. O. Bower stated that ‘in Britain,
between 1840 and 1875, investigation in the laboratory … was almost
throttled by the overwhelming success of systematic and descriptive
work’.18 Likewise, F. W. Oliver, reflecting in 1906 on nineteenth-
century developments in botany, observed that the ‘great awakening’
that occurred on the Continent in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury did not reach Britain until ‘the botanical renaissance twenty-five
years ago’, and he lamented that ‘the methods inculcated by Linnaeus
and the other great taxonomists of the eighteenth century had taken
deep root with us and choked out all other influences’, with the result
that ‘all through the middle parts of the last century we were so busy
amassing and classifying plants that the great questions of botan-
ical policy were left to solve themselves’.19 This delay in the intro-
duction of new research methods resulted in a growing antagonism
between those of the rising generation who wished to pursue mor-
phological and physiological research and the established naturalists
who controlled what museum and university facilities did exist and
who remained committed to taxonomic work:Â€Huxley suggested the
gulf that divided the taxonomist from the biologist with his assertion,
‘I never collected anything and species work was always a burden to
me.’20 In the minds of the adherents of the new biology, ‘[s]ystemat-
ics, natural history, even field work as a whole became irretrievably
identified with the mumbling, doddery Old Men’.21
An opportunity to establish the new biology in Britain arose in
the 1870s as an indirect result of the Elementary Education Act of
1870, which, in addition to making the state responsible for ensuring
that primary school education was available to all, declared that sci-
ence was to be taught in all state schools. To meet the sudden demand
for trained science teachers, T. H. Huxley devised a crash summer
course. Desmond argues that this ‘yearly summer course, transmit-
ted via the teachers to the new schools, became the foundation of
the modern discipline of biology’.22 At first, Huxley was forced to
make do with offering ‘as full an exposition as [he] could give’ of
biological principles by means of lectures.23 However, in 1872, with
his move to the new Science Schools building at South Kensington
with its 60-foot laboratory, Huxley was able to replace lectures with a
course of practical instruction based in the laboratory. ‘BypassingÂ€…
most of contemporary systematics’, Huxley’s course taught the struc-
ture, functioning, and development of plants and animals by way
of laboratory demonstrations.24 In order to make this practicable,
Huxley developed a method of teaching by way of a few ‘common
and readily obtainable plants and animals … selected in such a man-
ner as to exemplify the leading modifications of structure which are
to be met with in the vegetable and animal worlds’.25 Taxonomic spe-
cimen collections, which aimed at comprehensiveness and prized
rarities, were of little use to such an approach and quickly fell into
disfavour with the new biologists. F. O. Bower recalled that as an
undergraduate in 1876 he had ‘longed for a train of wagons to convey
the Cambridge herbarium away to Kew, and so to vacate for the new
botany the rooms that would have served its needs’.26 Bower admit-
ted in retrospect that this was ‘a crude idea’, but he maintained that it
‘reflected the inverted narrowness which the time had imposed upon
us’.27 When the new biologists finally gained a place for themselves,
they were impatient to do away with the traditions that had so long
impeded them.
In 1906, F. W. Oliver, reflecting on developments in the life sci-
ences in the preceding quarter-century, declared that as a result of the
antagonism that existed between the practitioners of taxonomy and
the proponents of the new biology, ‘the prevailing school of Botany
has arisen very independently of that which preceded it. The dis-
continuity between them you might almost call abrupt.’28 The long
delay that had attended the introduction of the new biology to Britain
meant that when the new biology did succeed in establishing itself, it
would accept no compromise with the taxonomic tradition that had
preceded it, thus ensuring that the rise of the new biology meant the
eclipse of taxonomy in the modern practice of the life sciences. In a
reversal of Linnaeus’s earlier dismissal of plant anatomists as mere
‘“botanophili,” plant lovers’, who ‘did not deal with botanical science
“in the true sense”’, the new biologists, concerned primarily with
morphology and physiology, now disdained taxonomists as mere
book-keepers with no in-depth understanding of the organisms that
they described and classified.29
Following the long delay that preceded its introduction, labora-
tory biology was embraced by newly professionalised scientists and
by many outside observers in part simply for its modernity as meas-
ured against the taxonomic tradition. Taxonomy and the new biol-
ogy were consequently used by scientifically inclined authors such as
H.Â€G.Â€Wells to represent the clash between the Victorian and the mod-
ern. In Ann Veronica, Wells presents the study of biology as the means
by which his young heroine achieves independence, and he empha-
sises the generational divide between Ann Veronica and her father
by making her father a natural history hobbyist ‘in the unphilosoph-
ical Victorian manner’, a maker of polished rock sections of pleas-
ing appearance and no scientific value.30 Mr Stanley’s conservatism
regarding gender roles is also demonstrated through reference to his
taxonomic leanings:Â€he is presented as ‘a man who in all things classi-
fied without nuance’, who in his view of women constructed ‘a simple
classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all inter-
mediate kinds’ according to which women were either ‘too bad … or
too pure and good for life’.31 Mr Stanley’s perception of his daughter’s
rebellion against convention in terms of her desire to ‘cut up rabbits
and dance about at night in wild costumes’ suggests Wells’s convic-
tion that changes in scientific method played a part in the modern
revolt against Victorian convention.32 Wells also approved of the new
biology for its commitment to an in-depth understanding of organ-
isms rather than a superficial familiarity with them, and he presents
the methods of the laboratory biologist as a model for a frank and
modern mode of discourse aimed at understanding the inner mean-
ing of things. Dismissing rigidly conventional social encounters that
find ‘all the meanings of life on its surfaces’, he sanctions instead con-
versations that in their openness and penetration resemble ‘a care-
lessly displayed interior on a dissecting-room table’.33 As will be seen
in Chapter 4, Marie Carmichael Stopes and Woolf herself likewise
approved of the new biology of the laboratory on the grounds of its
newness and as a model of modern conduct.
P ro t e c t ion a n d c on s e rvat ion

The early protection movement
Upon the average natural history hobbyist, the disputes between
taxonomists and biologists had little immediate effect, for the new
biologists, intent upon professionalising the study of nature, did not
encourage amateur imitators; in fact, they sought to dissociate them-
selves from the amateur study of nature altogether. However, other
factors were also at work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries that would gradually produce a shift in popular attitudes
towards taxonomic natural history and, in particular, natural history
collections. One such factor was the development of the protection
movement. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a broad change
in attitudes towards man’s treatment of animals occurred. Early in
the century, organisations such as the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals (established in 1824, later to become the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) arose to combat
cruelty to domestic animals and to do away with blood sports such as
cock-fighting and bear-baiting. By the late 1860s, protectionists had
begun to extend their aegis to wild animals, most notably in the form
of campaigns to protect wild birds from over-hunting by sportsmen
and commercial plumage dealers. The first legislation passed in the
service of wild bird protection was the Sea Birds Preservation Act of
1869, which imposed a close season for designated bird species; later
campaigns sought legislation banning the shooting of all wild bird
species during the breeding season. By the 1880s protectionists had
also begun campaigning against the commercial plumage trade, for,
as Mearns and Mearns observe, the destruction of wild birds for the
plumage trade marked ‘the peak of western man’s direct impact on
wild birds (as distinct from the destruction of habitat)’.34
There was considerable continuity between the natural history
tradition and the early protection movement, for many naturalists
were enthusiastic supporters of the protectionist cause. Some under-
went a drastic ‘conversion’ from collector to protectionist, but many
more saw no particular contradiction in collecting specimens while
campaigning against the killing of birds.35 Specimen collection was
not initially regarded as a major concern by bird protectionists, for
the total number of birds killed by collectors was comparatively low,
and protectionists were more intent upon halting the mass slaughter of
birds by sportsmen and commercial plumage hunters. The protection
movement also shared many of the tenets of Victorian natural his-
tory, campaigning against the destruction of animals on the grounds,
familiar from natural theology, that animals are God’s ‘brute cre-
ation’ and that human beings’ approach to the natural world therefore
has moral and spiritual ramifications.36 As a result, the rationale of
the early protection movement was more often religious than scien-
tific, and Victorian protectionists relied on anthropomorphism and
‘Christian ornithology’ to advance their cause.37
The transition from collection to protection can be seen in the
life of F. O. Morris, author of the popular works of natural history
that Woolf and her siblings consulted as children. Morris began his
career as a natural history writer in the taxonomic mode, advising
his readers on the proper arrangement of collected bird specimens
and the best methods for capturing butterflies and moths. Later in
life, however, he adopted a more protectionist outlook, ceasing to
collect birds himself or to recommend their capture, although he
continued to promote the collection of insects as a pleasurable and
edifying activity. He played an important role in the campaign lead-
ing to the passage of the Sea Birds Preservation Act of 1869, and
he wrote condemnations of blood sports, quoting in disgust news-
paper accounts that boasted of a ‘distinguished party’ that ‘bagged
1495 pheasants, 727 hares, 1231 rabbits, 23 partridges, and 17 wood-
cock, making a total of 3493 head’.38 Morris was also a representative
Victorian protectionist in that he was guided in his views by a reli-
gious rationale:Â€his arguments on behalf of ‘the poor dumb creatures
of the hand of God’ and his denunciations of ‘those who have so
vilely sinned against them’ were characteristic of much early protec-
tionist writing.39
The Victorian protection movement offered an outlet to amateur
naturalists who, with the displacement of taxonomy by the profes-
sional laboratory work of the new biology, found themselves increas-
ingly excluded from scientific developments. The rift between the
professional biologist and the amateur student of nature was in fact
widened by the early protection movement, for protectionists also
campaigned against vivisection, a practice that played a significant
role in the physiological work of the new biology. Protectionist
pamphlets targeted prominent biologists such as Ray Lankester,
Michael Foster, and William Rutherford, who were T. H. Huxley’s
colleagues at the School of Mines and demonstrators in Huxley’s ori-
ginal biology courses.40 Morris represented an extreme within the
protectionist movement in that he campaigned against vivisection as
an extension of his campaign against evolutionary theory.41 Morris’s
wholesale rejection of late nineteenth-century developments in the
life sciences suggests one of the factors that made it difficult for biol-
ogists and protectionists to find common ground. Also exacerbating
the dispute was the fact that practitioners of the new biology regarded
the anti-vivisection movement as a challenge to their newly attained
authority and combated this threat by dismissing protectionist views
as the irrational sentimentality of unqualified amateurs.42 Although
laboratory biology and the protection movement both contributed to
the decline of the taxonomic tradition and the associated practice of
specimen collection, at this stage in their concurrent development,
modern biology and protection were often at odds.
The later protection movement

Beginning around the turn of the century, the protection movement
sought to shed its sentimental and religious reputation and become
more scientific in its defence of animal life. One of the figures initiat-
ing this transition was the turn-of-the-century nature writer W. H.
Hudson. E. M. Nicholson, one of Hudson’s protectionist successors,
praised Hudson in 1926 for the ‘sanity of his outlook on Nature’, for
moving away from the ‘super-humanitarianism’ of Victorian protec-
tion and setting protection upon a more rational footing. 43 Hudson
dispensed with religious arguments for the protection of God’s crea-
tures and anthropomorphising tributes to ‘our feathered friends’,
seeking instead to instil in the public an appreciation for nature on its
own terms through accounts of the complex patterns of animal life.44
Hudson was also one of the first to raise concerns over natural his-
tory collecting as a threat to wildlife. As a young man in Argentina
he had himself worked as a professional collector for museums in
America and Britain and he did not apologise for this, asserting that
collections that added to the knowledge of a previously unstudied
region made a worthwhile contribution to science. However, he dis-
tinguished between this form of scientific collection and the practices
that went under the name of scientific collection in Britain, the unjus-
tified and ‘increasingly common habit of killing rare British birds for
innumerable private collections’ that added nothing to general orni-
thological knowledge.45
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, protection-
ists began to concern themselves more and more with the damage
done to wildlife by collection. This was due in part to the fact that,
with the decline of taxonomy, specimen collection lost much of its
scientific justification. However, it was also a result of the realisation
that, while collectors did not kill specimens in great numbers, they
killed more strategically than sportsmen and as a result had an impact
on populations disproportionate to the number of specimens killed.
As Nicholson states:
The explanation of the paradox that the collector, by destroying comparatively

few birds and eggs, is yet able to do so much damage, is this. Once any species,
for some reason or other, falls into a perilous state, down come the collectors
together, like vultures on a sick antelope, and finish the work … It is the fatal
logic of the collecting system that … the smaller the numbers of a species the
greater the demand for specimens. 46
Pseudo-scientific collectors’ interest in rarities meant that their dep-

redations put pressure on precisely those populations least able to
support it. While collectors could not, like sportsmen or commercial
hunters, be held responsible for the overall decline of any species,
their attentions to a species once it was in danger of disappearance
(and for the very reason that it was in danger of disappearance) might
contribute to its ultimate (local or total) eradication.
The change in attitude towards specimen collection can be seen in
a resolution passed by the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) in
1908 ‘condemning the taking or destroying of British birds or their
eggs’.47 The BOU, established in 1850, was a society with its roots
in the collection tradition. Although many with protectionist sym-
pathies suspected that the BOU still harboured collectors, this offi-
cial denunciation demonstrates that, by the early twentieth century,
even organisations with a history of collection had come to regard the
practice as posing an unacceptable threat to wildlife. In 1926, E. M.
Nicholson stated that ‘the anti-collectors now outnumber the collec-
tors among the ranks of ornithologists and immeasurably so among
the general public’, and in 1928 J. C. Squire summarised the contem-
porary shift in outlook with the remark:
Today there are a host of observers who watch birds with enthusiastic affec-
tion, never kill a bird, and would never dream of killing a rare bird. The mod-
ern man who kills a rare bird is not regarded as the hero of an exploit, but as
the perpetrator of an unpunishable crime. The collectors, the hoarders of eggs,
the stuffers of skins are now a furtive race.48
T h e p s y c h oa n a ly t i c i n t e r p r e tat ion
o f c ol l e c t ion
In addition to the turn against taxonomy that occurred within scien-
tific circles and the popular turn against specimen collection brought
about by the protection movement, further suspicion of the practice
of collection was engendered in the early decades of the twentieth
century by developing psychoanalytic arguments. Susan Pearce, in a
historiographical account of collection theory, links the modern con-
ception of collection to ‘Freud’s original biological drive model’.49
Freud and his successors interpreted the collection impulse as a mani-
festation of the anal phase of psychosexual development, natural in
children but indicative of arrested development and a repressed sexual
drive when occurring in adults. Freud declared that ‘the collector …
directs his surplus libido onto an inanimate object’, and Karl Abraham
expanded on the parallel between collection and sexual activity with
the argument that ‘the excessive value [the collector] places on the
object he collects corresponds completely to the lover’s overestimate
of his sexual object. A passion for collecting is frequently a direct sur-
rogate for a sexual desire.’50 Taken together, the collector’s ‘refusal to
give and the desire to gather, … collect, and hoard’ led to the conclu-
sion that ‘all collectors are anal-erotics’.51
Pearce regards these early psychoanalytic explanations of collec-
tion as ‘fatally limited’ in their ‘concentration on a sexuality divorced
from social practice and the personality as a whole’, but she acknow-
ledges that such conceptions ‘entered into the bloodstream of certainly
the popular view of collecting’ and determined the view of collection
that prevailed for much of the twentieth century.52 Although far less
overt than the campaigning of the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds, the psychoanalytic conception of collection had an impact,
loading the pastime with associations of obsession and perversion.
The nineteenth-century penchant for collection in particular was
accepted as proof of the ‘mummified libido’ of the Victorians.53
The psychoanalytic interpretation of the collection instinct demon-
strably informed the view of specimen collection held by twentieth-
Â�century naturalists themselves. E. M. Nicholson’s analysis of the
collector’s mentality in Birds in England (1926) reveals a Freudian
influence. Nicholson argues that specimen collection, when taken to
extremes,
shows an extraordinarily perverted type of mind … [T]he collector is always
looking at even the living creature in terms of the glass caseÂ€ – he admires
a fine specimen far above a fine singer, and to him the live bird is always a
chrysalis ready to be transformed into the perfect imago which only a spell at
the taxidermist’s can make it … [H]e misses nothing in the corpse, for he has
never seen anything further in the living bird. I think that this, rather than the
stage-villain type of man who slays for the lust of killing that we so often find
painted, is the true psychology of the collector. When he shoots a bird he is not
conscious of having destroyed anything, but only of having secured it.54
The stress that Nicholson places on the collector’s need for possession
and control recalls Freud’s interpretation of the collecting impulse as
a manifestation of the anal-retentive personality and suggests that
theories of psychology played a role in shaping naturalists’ interpret-
ations of the practice of specimen collection.
T w e n t i e t h - c e n t u ry d e v e l o p m e n t s
By the turn of the century, as a result of the combined effects of the
scientific shift from taxonomy to the new biology and the growing
suspicion of specimen collection, the popular practice of taxonomic
natural history was in decline. On the basis of contributions to popu-
lar entomological journals, Bryan Beirne judges that the recre-
ational practice of entomology, having followed a pattern of general
increase into the 1890s, fell sharply around the turn of the century,
and he attributes these fluctuations of interest to ‘changes in mental
outlook’.55 One interpretation of these trends is that, with the fall from
grace of taxonomy in the late nineteenth century, the popular study of
nature lost its focus. Fieldwork was devalued through its association
with the increasingly suspect practice of specimen collection, but the
laboratory work that absorbed the new class of professional biologists
had no place for the amateur enthusiast.
However, the turn of the century also saw developments that pro-
vided new outlets for both the professional and recreational study of
nature. In place of the collection and classification of specimens that
had occupied naturalists for much of the nineteenth century, there
arose a new interest in the observation of living organisms. In the
professional study of nature, this development was marked by the
emergence of two new disciplines:Â€ethology, the study of the behav-
iour of living organisms, and ecology, the study of the relationships
between living organisms and their environment. These new discip-
lines complemented the morphological and physiological work of
laboratory biology and, unlike laboratory biology, they had a popu-
lar equivalent in activities such as bird-watching and other forms of
‘species-spotting’.56 These new developments both widened the scope
of the professional practice of biology and revitalised the popular
study of nature.
Allen declares that around the turn of the century there occurred
throughout the botanical and zoological sciences ‘a shift to movement
and dynamism …Â€from the dead specimen to the living [organism,]
from a static viewpoint to an emphasis on change’.57 This shift in focus
was facilitated by technological developments. Just as improvements
in firearms and preservation techniques had permitted the spread of
collection and taxonomy in the early nineteenth century, improve-
ments in optical technology enabled the shift from the collection of
specimens to the observation of organisms. Allen stresses that the
development of prism binoculars in the latter half of the nineteenth
century did not immediately bring about a turn to observation in the
study of nature; nevertheless, over the course of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, field-glasses came increasingly into
use among naturalists and, by allowing observers to identify species
at a distance, rendered obsolete the collector’s adage, ‘What’s hit is
Â�history. What’s missed is mystery.’ 58 Wildlife photography was like-
wise pioneered in the 1880s and 1890s and developed into a popular
pastime in the Edwardian period.59 The introduction of mist nets and
other non-violent trapping techniques further enabled naturalists to
study animals without killing them.60 To accompany the new obser-
vational approach to the study of nature, a new style of field guide
developed, with notes enabling observers to identify living species
not only by their shape and colouring but also by their movement,
mannerisms, calls, and overall ‘jizz’ (a term coined in 1922 by T. A.
Coward to describe ‘the character rather than the characteristics’ of
a species).61
E t h ol o g y
The behaviour of animals had long been noted in passing by natural-
ists pursuing an accurate classification, but around the turn of the
century there developed a new commitment to ‘the understanding
of what used simply to be recorded, if not ignored’, and details of
behaviour came to be valued in themselves above the cataloguing of
species.62 As an adult, Woolf indicated her familiarity with the work
of several of the pioneers of ethology, among them Jean-Henri Fabre,
W. H. Hudson, and Julian Huxley.
Some of the earliest signs of the development of ethology as an
independent discipline occurred in the field of entomology, and
although the behavioural approach was not immediately adopted
by amateur entomology enthusiasts, it gradually prepared the way
for the twentieth century to become ‘the age of the study of living
insects’.63 The foremost populariser of insect ethology was Jean-
Henri Fabre, whose Souvenirs entomologiques:Â€études sur l’instinct et les
moeurs des insectes recounts his close observation of the ‘manners and
customs’ of Â�bluebottles, dung beetles, weevils, glowworms, emperor
moths, mason bees, and other insects common around his home at
Sérignan.64 Fabre’s first biographer, G. V. Legros, dubbed him ‘the
Homer of the insects’ for his vivid descriptions of ‘the epic of animal
life’:Â€courtship rituals, warfare tactics, and the skilled labour involved
in the building of shelter and the gathering of food.65 Fabre’s work
illustrates the confluence of original research and popular nature
writing in the early stages of ethology’s development.
The reception history of Fabre’s work suggests the timeline for the
growth of interest in behaviour studies. Souvenirs entomologiques was
originally published as a series between 1879 and 1907 and excerpts
were first translated into English in 1901, but these initially drew only
modest interest. However, in the 1910s, Fabre’s work was suddenly
rediscovered. In both France and Britain, ‘everyone began to read
him, and presently no one was willing to seem ignorant of him, for
more of his Souvenirs entomologiques were sold in a few months than
had been disposed of in more than twenty years’.66 Throughout the
1910s and 1920s translations of Fabre’s accounts of insect life were
excerpted in periodicals and collected in books to satisfy the ‘surge in
the English appetite for books on bugs’.67 Thirty-three books based
on English translations of Fabre’s works appeared in the 1910s and
another thirty in the 1920s; additionally, between 1912 and 1922 The
English Review intermittently printed excerpts from Souvenirs ento-
mologiques and extracts appeared as well in the Fortnightly Review and
the Daily Mail. Fabre’s late rise to fame suggests that the time was at
last ripe for a behavioural approach to the animal world.
In many cases, popular writing on animal behaviour anticipated
the rise of ethology as a professional discipline and helped prepare
the way for the institutionalisation of behavioural studies. Many of
the pioneering figures of ethology were amateurs:Â€as E. M. Nicholson
noted of the early study of bird behaviour, ‘most of its outstanding
figures have not been trained scientists’.68 W. H. Hudson, Edmund
Selous, H. Eliot Howard, and Nicholson himself had no formal train-
ing in biology, and their writing was more often addressed to the
general public than to a specialist audience. The best known of these
early, amateur students of behaviour was W. H. Hudson. Hudson’s
accounts of animals observed in their natural environment gained him
a wide readership in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the
opening decades of the twentieth and introduced the general public to
a new way of seeing nature. Hudson was a self-taught naturalist who
had struggled to win recognition within the scientific establishment
before turning to popular nature writing. The Naturalist in La Plata
(1892) was his first attempt at nature writing for a general audience.
In it, Hudson set out to describe ‘the habits of the animals best known
to [him]’ from his childhood on the South American pampas.69 In a
tribute to Gilbert White, he declared the pampas his own ‘parish of
Selborne’, and he distanced his work from the exploration narratives
of naturalist-collectors such as Henry Walter Bates.70 These allusions
to other naturalist-authors situate Hudson’s work within the genre
of nature writing:Â€ stressing his interest in recounting the habits of
Â�
long-familiar species rather than in cataloguing the exotic, Hudson
locates himself within an ethological rather than a taxonomic trad-
ition. He defended his own approach to nature as equal in value to
both the taxonomic tradition and the laboratory work of the new bioÂ�
logy. In The Book of a Naturalist, Hudson declared:
To weigh, count, measure, and dissect for purposes of identification, classifi-

cation, and what not, and to search in bones and tissues for hidden affinities,
it is necessary to see closely; but this close seeing would be out of place and a
hindrance in other lines of inquiry. To know the creature, undivested of life or
liberty or of anything belonging to it, it must be seen with an atmosphere, in
the midst of the nature in which it harmoniously moves and has its being.71
This interest in observing the living creature in action in its natural

environment was a cornerstone of ethology.
Not only did the study of birds inspire many of the leading nature
writers of the period, but it was also largely through the work of
ornithologists that ethology became institutionalised as a discipline.
Julian Huxley was among the ‘pioneers’ of bird ethology:Â€in 1912
he published a paper describing the courtship of the Redshank, the
first in ‘a long line of brilliant contributions by Huxley on the topic
of bird courtship’.72 Huxley was well placed to promote the spread
of ethology in both the academic and popular spheres. As a lecturer
and demonstrator at Oxford in the 1910s and 1920s, he was one of
the first academic zoologists to pursue ethological research and to
encourage it among his students. As Secretary of the Zoological
Society (1935–42), with responsibility over the London Zoological
Gardens and the country outpost at Whipsnade, he again promoted
behavioural research. He also encouraged popular interest in ani-
mal behaviour through books, articles, lectures, guides to the zoo-
logical gardens, radio talks on topics such as bird-watching, and
documentary films such as the Oscar-winning short The Private
Life of the Gannets (1934). In one of his most successful efforts at
popularising the study of nature, he collaborated with H. G. Wells
and his son G. P. Wells on The Science of Life, a ‘précis of biological
knowledge’ that surveyed a range of approaches to the study of life,
including taxonomy, evolutionary theory, genetics, ethology, and
ecology.73 The work initially appeared in thirty fortnightly parts,
between March 1929 and May 1930, before being collected in book
form, and, as I have noted before, Woolf records reading it in late
1931 and early 1932.
In their introduction to The Science of Life, Wells, Huxley, and
Wells offer a brief history of the life sciences in which they judge one
of the most significant developments of the recent past to be the fact
that ‘[w]ork upon the living subject became more and more frequent
and relatively more important’.74 They observe:
Men of intelligence are taking cameras and building watching-shelters in for-

est and jungle and prairie, where formerly they took gun and trap and killing
bottle. Zoological gardens are being reconstructed and enlarged, so that, while
formerly the animals were exhibited as specimens, they are now watched going
about their normal affairs … Parallel to these modern zoological gardens, the
modern botanical garden expands from the old obsession with specimens.75
In the section of the book devoted to animal behaviour, the authors

relate the findings of Fabre, Forel, Maeterlinck, and others on the
instinctive behaviour of solitary and social insects; the work of
Selous, Howard, and Levick on courtship in animals (particularly
birds, the group in which ‘courtship-display reaches its greatest elab-
oration’); and the writing of Hudson, Levick, Koehler, Yerkes, and
Kohts on educational play in animals as seen in ‘the flying sports of
rooks and the joy-rides of penguins’ and in the activities of monkeys
and apes.76
In addition to the work and authors that Woolf declares her familiar-
ity with, there were many other contemporary sources of ethological
knowledge that she would likely have encountered, for ethology in
the early twentieth century was a highly accessible discipline, both
readily available and easily comprehensible to the general public.
Essays on nature subjects by authors such as J. Arthur Thomson and
E. M. Nicholson appeared regularly in generalist perioÂ�dicals such as
the New Statesman and Time and Tide and demonstrate the ubiquity
of popular nature writing in the early twentieth century. As a contem-
porary reviewer of Thomson’s writing noted, Thomson’s approach in
his ‘chosen task of interpreting modern biological science to the lay
reader’ was to ‘select topics of special interest and discuss them in the
light of recent advances … to give the lay reader a real insight into the
most modern discoveries and developÂ�ments of biological science’.77
Drawing upon a range of authorities from ornitholoÂ�gists such as
Edmund Selous and Julian Huxley to botanists such as F. O. Bower
and J. C. Bose, Thomson summarised contemporary work on sub-
jects such as the habits of penguins and puffins, the homing instincts
of sea-swallows, the courtship rituals of pigeons, the responsiveness
of plants to external stimuli, lunar periodicity in the reproduction
of sea-urchins, and paternal care for the young among sea-horses.78
E.Â€M. Nicholson likewise contributed articles on ethological subjects
to the New Statesman, describing the habits of shearwaters and the
ceremonies of the great crested grebe, discussing recent work on
bird-roosts and flylines, and reporting on the long-term findings of
a large-scale bird-ringing scheme initiated to track bird movements
and study bird migration.79
Popularisers of science were also quick to adopt the new media of
radio and film to communicate emerging perspectives on nature to the
public. In 1930, Julian Huxley gave a series of radio talks (published
in book form later that year) on the subject of bird-watching and bird
behaviour. The series addressed topics such as ‘The Everyday Life of
Birds’, ‘Watching the Courtship of Birds’, ‘The Mind of Birds’, and
‘The Birds’ Place in Nature’.80 In his first broadcast, Huxley explained
the approach to wildlife that he wished to promote, declaring, ‘When
it was arranged that I should give these talks about birds, I put bird-
watching into the title of the series, as this, more than any other single
word I could think of, would tell my potential listeners the lines along
which I mean to approach my subject.’81 Elaborating on what this
approach to nature entailed, he stated that the bird-watcher observes
birds because ‘their characters and doings interest him. He is filled
with a desire to see more of their lives.’82
Film was a medium particularly well-suited to promoting the
observation of living nature. As early as 1910, nature documentary
shorts were shown in cinemas prior to feature films. As evidence
of the reception of these early nature shorts, Mary Field and Percy
Smith recount a case in Lewisham ‘in which the audience not only
applauded the presentation of The Birth of a Flower, but held up the
performance until a manager appeared and promised to re-wind and
re-project the picture’.83 In The Tenth Muse:Â€Writing about Cinema in
the Modernist Period, Laura Marcus observes that ‘[t]he fascination
with films which speeded up natural processes, as in the growth and
unfolding of a flower, and with filmic slow-motion’ arose from a ‘sense
that film could show the very workings of nature, opening up entirely
new dimensions of the visible, and the invisible, world’.84
Beginning in 1922, the ‘Secrets of Nature’ series made nature
Â�documentary shorts common cinema fare; by 1934 the series had pro-
duced over 150 short films on plant and animal life. One of the first
films in the series was inspired by Edgar Chance’s ground-breaking
behavioural study of the cuckoo, which appeared in print in 1922.
The film, which like Chance’s book was entitled The Cuckoo’s Secret,
included footage of the female cuckoo depositing her egg in the nest
of a foster species and of the newly hatched cuckoo forcing its foster-
siblings from the nest; Chance used the film to document the fact
that the cuckoo returns to the same breeding ground every year and
deposits its eggs in nests belonging to the same species as its own fos-
ter-parents.85 This choice of topic demonstrates the series’ potential
for conveying new discoveries in the life sciences to the general pub-
lic. Quite often, techniques developed to film wildlife also suggested
new ways of studying nature:Â€ the filming of microscopic subjects,
underwater cinematography, slow-motion filming, and time-lapse
filming all provided new ways of observing living organisms and
analysing their movement and growth. Work intended to popular-
ise new scientific approaches thus contributed to scientific knowledge
and to the development of new methods of observing nature.
The ‘Secrets of Nature’ series was widely known:Â€Mary Field and
Percy Smith, two of the series’ directors who published an account
of their work in 1934, declared that only ‘someone who never visits a
cinema’ could be unfamiliar with the series; Julian Huxley likewise
commented, ‘All filmgoers know and most of them enjoy the series
of films of animal and plant life produced in this country under the
title of “Secrets of Nature.”’86 It is difficult to trace showings of the
‘Secrets of Nature’ films:Â€as Field and Smith note, ‘“Shorts” are never
advertised outside theatres, except news theatres. They are never
advertised in newspapers.’87 Nevertheless, given Maggie Humm’s
statement that Woolf was susceptible to ‘the attraction of regular
movie going’, there is reason to believe that she would have encoun-
tered the series.88 Laura Marcus also notes that Virginia and Leonard
Woolf attended Film Society screenings, and Marcus’s reference to
the Film Society’s ‘strong emphasis on scientific and nature films’ fur-
ther suggests the likelihood that Woolf was familiar with documen-
tary nature shorts.89 In any case, phenomena such as the ‘Secrets of
Nature’ series demonstrate that in the early decades of the twentieth
century ethology was a highly accessible discipline, communicated
to the public through a wide range of media in a form intended to
Â�convey the latest discoveries in the field in an informative and com-
pelling manner.
Many early twentieth-century writers displayed an interest in
ethological work and drew on the increasingly detailed knowledge
of animal behaviour for imagery and analogy. In 1922 Ezra Pound
translated Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour (1903), a study
of animal (especially insect) courtship behaviour. The Insect Play by
the Čapek brothers is equally informed by Æsop’s fables and Fabre’s
entomological observations and satirises sexual relations, capitalism,
militarism, and authoritarian government through the Â�representation
of insect behaviour. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s depic-
tion of the Hatcheries and the techniques of ‘Social Predestination’
(whereby social function and sex are determined by the treatment of
the embryo) recalls the control over development exerted by social
insects such as ants and bees.90 In Snooty Baronet, Wyndham Lewis
alludes to Fabre’s work on insects as a model for the study of human
behaviour. Stories such as Kipling’s ‘The Mother Hive’ and Joyce’s
tale of the Ondt and the Gracehoper in Finnegans Wake (which
according to Susan Shaw Sailer rewrites Æsop’s fable and ‘violates the
logic of the earlier version’s moral precept by undermining the ondt’s
behavioural superiority’) drew upon the knowledge gained from
behavioural studies and demonstrate an alertness to developments in
the study of nature among writers of the period.91 The diverse ends
to which such imagery has been put have been capably analysed by
critics such as Jessica Burstein, Rachel Sarsfield, and Holly Henry.
More fundamentally, the presence of such imagery reveals a Â�modern
awareness of and appreciation for the emerging science of ethology
and, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the same interest is
apparent in Woolf’s writing.
The rise of ethology at the turn of the century marked the emer-
gence of behavioural studies as a recognised discipline, but it can also
be viewed as a revival of an approach to nature already present in
the works of naturalists such as Gilbert White. The Victorians had
venerated White as the definitive clergyman-naturalist who found
evidence of God’s glory in the natural wonders of his parish. Early
twentieth-century ethologists and protectionists also lionised White,
but for different reasons. E. M. Nicholson praised White’s acuity in
seeing beyond the growing taxonomic preoccupation of his age:Â€he
quotes with approval White’s recommendation, ‘Learn as much as
possible the manners of animals … they are worth a ream of descrip-
tions’, and he notes that this advice was ‘contrary to the ideas of
[White’s] contemporaries’.92 Early twentieth-century ethologists
tended to regard the nineteenth-century focus on taxonomic work as
a lamentable sidetrack from the worthwhile study of animal life, and
in White they found an admirable precursor.
E c ol o g y
Ecology, like ethology, emerged as a recognised discipline in Britain
in the early twentieth century and its central tenets were quickly
communicated to the general public. However, the character of early
twentieth-century ecology differed in significant ways from ecology
as it is currently conceived. Both the discipline’s early twentieth-
Â�century emergence and its distinctive character in the initial stages of
its development need to be considered when evaluating its impact on
interested members of the public such as Woolf.
The term Oecologie was coined in 1866 by the German biologist
Ernst Haeckel. Thereafter, as Donald Worster has noted, ‘biologists
absolutely ignored Haeckel’s innovation for several decades’, but in
the 1890s European plant-geographers such as Eugenius Warming,
Oscar Drude, and Andreas Schimper ‘transformed Oecologie from just
another neologism to a functioning science’.93 These European bota-
nists moved from identifying and charting the distribution of indi-
vidual species to studying plants as members of communities shaped
by determinants such as soil composition, temperature, and rainfall
and by the interrelationships among the community’s component
species. By 1904, British botanists, led by A. G. Tansley, had begun
to study England’s vegetation ‘after the manner of these Continental
masters’.94 This work marked the beginning of the practice of ecoÂ�
logy in Britain, leading not only to the publication of Types of British
Vegetation (1911) but also to the founding of the British Ecological
Society and the Journal of Ecology in 1913.
In Botany; or, The Modern Study of Plants, published in 1912 as
part of the People’s Books series, Marie Carmichael Stopes devotes a
chapter to plant ecology, which she describes as ‘the study of the plant
in its home’, an approach that broadens botany’s outlook to take in ‘a
wider field where the plant is merely an individual in a community’.95
Stopes’s book was one of the first works intended for a general audi-
ence that not only explained concepts such as habitat niches and the
succession of one plant community by another, but also explicitly
identified these ideas as belonging to the science of ecology.
Although the mobility of animals made it more challenging to study
them in relation to their environment, by the 1920s the ecological
approach was spreading to zoology, as is evident even from popular
nature writing. By 1924, J. Arthur Thomson was explicitly grouping
his essays on the interrelationships among organisms and between
organisms and their environment under the title ‘Ecology’ in Science,
Old and New.96 The infiltration of this approach is also illustrated by
the opening words of E. M. Nicholson’s popular work of ornithol-
ogy, How Birds Live (1927):Â€‘There is a flourishing science, Ecology,
which deals with the relationship of plants to their environment and
to one another’; he goes on to suggest to his readers that the ‘study
of bird ecology’ can be equally rewarding.97 Also in 1927, Charles
Elton (one of Julian Huxley’s students) published Animal Ecology,
one of the foundational texts of the discipline, which ‘populari[sed]
notions such as food chains, habitat niches and the natural regulation
of numbers’.98 Seeking to explain the focus of ecology, Elton distin-
guished his approach from both the taxonomic tradition of the past
and the contemporary science of laboratory biology. He declared:
In solving ecological problems we are concerned with what animals do in their
capacity as whole, living animals, not as dead animals or as a series of parts of
animals. We have next to study the circumstances under which they do these
things, and, most important of all, the limiting factors which prevent them
from doing certain other things … The study of dead animals or their macer-
ated skeletons, which has to form such an important and necessary part of zoo-
logical work, and which has bulked so largely in the interest of zoologists for
the last hundred years, has tended to obscure the important fact that animals
are a part of their environment.99
Taxonomy and laboratory biology, which had long been defined in

opposition to each other, are from the ecologist’s perspective more
similar than different in their concentration on the dead specimen,
and both, Elton suggested, needed to make room for the study of liv-
ing organisms as members of a larger biotic community.
Another way in which ecologists demonstrated their sense that their
work was discontinuous with the approaches to nature that had domi-
nated the nineteenth century was through their adoption of Gilbert
White as a precursor. Elton opens Animal Ecology with an epigraph
from The Natural History of Selborne, in which White declares,
Faunists, as you observe, are too apt to acquiesce in bare descriptions and a few
synonyms; the reason for this is plain, because all that may be done at home in
a man’s study, but the investigation of the life and conversation of animals is a
concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by
the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country.100
Ecologists, like ethologists, saw in the approach of the eighteenth-

century naturalist a precedent for their own work and aligned them-
selves with White over their more immediate scientific predecessors.
Animal ecology expanded rapidly. In 1932, the Journal of Animal
Ecology was established to accommodate the increasing amount of
ecological work devoted to animal subjects. However, the overall
movement of ecology in this period was towards the integration rather
than the separation of plant and animal work. In his 1928 review of
Elton’s Animal Ecology, Tansley expressed his belief that ‘[w]e may
now look forward with some confidence to a period of intimate co-
operation between botanists and zoologists in ecological work, a
period which we expect will be fruitful to a degree hardly yet sus-
pected’, and in 1935 Tansley coined the term ‘ecosystem’ to describe
a community of organisms and its physical environment considered
together as a complex of interacting relationships.101 Thus, by the end
of the interwar period, the fundamental concepts of modern ecology
were in place.
Like early ethologists, early ecologists sought to communicate
the foundational ideas of their discipline to the general public. Wells,
Huxley, and Wells outlined the principles of ecology in The Science
of Life. Drawing upon the work of authorities such as A. G. Tansley,
F.Â€W. Oliver, and Charles Elton, they devoted a chapter to ‘The Science
of Ecology’, and returned in subsequent chapters to possible applica-
tions of ecological knowledge.102 Their chapter on ecology explains
concepts such as food chains; ecological niches, ‘well-markedÂ€ …
rôles, which will be found, played by one actor here and another actor
there, in all well-developed life communities’; ecological succession,
whereby a group of organisms alters its environment to the point at
which a new group of organisms is able to move in and replace it; and
the natural regulation of numbers, through which population increase
is held in check by predators, disease, migration, or starvation.103
In 1933, Elton gave a series of radio talks on the subject of animal
ecology (published in book form later the same year under the title
Exploring the Animal World). In his broadcasts, Elton explained the
focus of ecological work, stating, ‘My interest is in all animals at once,
in animal society, in the animal world as a whole. This subject is sort
of animal politics and economics and social science and fashionable
gossip and geography all rolled into one.’104 He encouraged his listen-
ers to adopt a similarly broad view in their observation of the natural
world, assuring his audience that anywhere one chooses to look, one
will find ‘a very busy, complicated, living society of Â�animals, depend-
ing on each other in many ways’.105
Early ecological work remained accessible to a general audi-
ence. Worster notes that Elton’s writing ‘relied on many homely,
commonplace terms, much as Darwin’s had’:Â€Elton’s use of ‘“food”
as the currency or basis of exchange in the natural Â�economy’,
for example, ensured that ‘[n]o one could mistake his general
meaning’.106 The dissemination of ecological ideas to a general
audience aided the early development of the discipline in a number
of ways. Elton used his radio talks to recruit volunteers for an eco-
logical survey of British woods (the results of the survey were later
published in the Journal of Animal Ecology) and to invite listeners
to report on the spread of accidentally introduced species such as
the grey squirrel and the muskrat through Britain. Elton’s attempts
to summarise contemporary developments in his field for a general
audience also advanced his discipline. Joel B. Hagen states that,
although Animal Ecology ‘had originally been aimed at a general
audience’, it nevertheless went on to have ‘a profound impact upon
professional ecology’.107 At this early stage in the development of
the discipline, a clear statement of fundamental ecological princi-
ples intended to explain the emerging science to the public could at
the same time serve as an important drawing-together of concepts
that consolidated what had previously been piecemeal work and
brought into focus directions for future research. As in ethology,
original work and popular writing overlapped in the early period of
ecology’s development as a discipline.
Ecology as a science of control

Many arguments made by early twentieth-century ecologists sound
familiar by present-day standards, as when Elton declares, ‘In
England we do not realise sufficiently vividly that man is surrounded
by vast and intricate animal communities, and that his actions often
produce on the animals effects which are usually quite unexpected in
their natureÂ€– that in fact man is only one animal in a large commu-
nity of other ones.’108 However, other aspects of ecology in its early
twentieth-century form clash with current conceptions of ecology, a
fact which should be borne in mind when applying critical theories
derived from current ecological attitudes to the work of modernist
writers such as Woolf.
Early ecology had as one of its main objectives the control of the
natural environment for human benefit. In his introduction to Elton’s
Animal Ecology, Julian Huxley presents ecology as ‘destined to a great
future’ on the grounds that it offered a means of achieving ‘control of
wild life in the interest of man’s food supply and prosperity’.109 Elton’s
description of ecology in his 1933 radio talks also demonstrates the
extent to which early ecology was invested in controlling the natural
world. Elton presents the rapid expansion of ecology, its status as ‘one
of the largest growing points of biology at the present day’, as a result
of the fact that ‘by its aid we hope to attain fuller knowledge and con-
trol of dangerous diseases and pests, and some foreknowledge of the
changes in natural resources such as fisheries’.110 He acknowledges
that the motivations behind ecological work could be either disinter-
ested or pragmatic, declaring, ‘Scientists are engaged on the absorb-
ing adventure of finding out how these [natural] systems workÂ€– both
for the interest of the search and in order to obtain the best deal that
is possible for humanity.’111
In Wells, Huxley, and Wells’s The Science of Life, the introduc-
tion to ecology is followed by suggestions of the ways in which the
previously described principles might be employed to human advan-
tage. The authors’ optimism regarding the human ability to control
the natural environment is almost without bounds. Observing that
humankind has begun to alter the natural environment at an unprece-
dented rate, they warn that this will result in the destabilisation of the
ever-swaying balance of nature if human beings do not become fully
conscious of their impact on the natural world. However, instead of
concluding that this heightened awareness must lead to less inter-
ference with nature, they aspire to greater regulation of the natural
world, viewing deliberately exercised control of the environment as
‘the only possible substitute for Nature’s clumsy sequences’; through
human intervention they hope to make ‘the vital circulation of mat-
ter and energy as swift, efficient, and wasteless as it can be made’.112
In the final segment of The Science of Life, Wells, Huxley, and Wells
return to the idea of controlling nature by means of science and look
forward to a time when ‘[t]he wilderness will become a world-garden’,
when ecological knowledge will make it possible to create ‘a forest of
great trees without disease, free of stinging insect or vindictive rep-
tile, open, varied and delightful’.113 The authors’ declared desire for
variety is at odds with the planned elimination of any species deemed
undesirable by man, and this internal contradiction is characteris-
tic of ecology in the early twentieth century. As Peder Anker has
previously noted, the exterminatory aspect of early ecology is also
suggested in H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923), which depicts a
Utopian world from which all species deemed harmful, unpleasant,
or unnecessary to man have been eliminated.114 The eradication of
almost all insects has led to the almost total disappearance of insect-
ivorous birds, a loss deemed acceptable by the Utopians.115 The con-
trast between this approving view of rationalised extermination and
Rachel Carson’s warning vision of a silent spring four decades later
illustrates a crucial difference in perspective between early twentieth-
century ecology and ecology as it is currently conceived.
A number of factors contributed to early ecology’s commitment to
environmental control. Many early ecologists such as A. G. Tansley
were, in the words of Peder Anker, ‘socially concerned scientists’, who
wanted their work to contribute to the amelioration of human life.116
Tansley and others who shared his outlook rejected laboratory biol-
ogy with its focus on morphology in part because the work was often
of no immediate practical use. In his inaugural lecture as Sherardian
Professor at Oxford in 1927, Tansley declared his intention to move
away from the ‘“sterile academicism” of laboratory biology’.117 For
Tansley and others, ecology was to be recommended as a discip-
line because it focused on ‘something broader, more vital and more
practical’.118 The applicability of ecological knowledge to problems
such as the expansion of commercial agriculture in the coloÂ�nies or the
control of rodent and insect pests made it particularly appealing to
those who wished to practise useful science.
The focus on applied work was pragmatic in another sense as
well:Â€prior to the Second World War, ecologists were still struggling
to gain institutional status for their discipline, and they often relied on
funding from interested industries. Elton’s work in the 1920s ranged
from surveys intended to identify the basic structure of ecological
communities to more practical work, funded by the Hudson’s Bay
Company and the Empire Marketing Board, into fluctuations in rodent
numbers. Elton sought means of predicting surges in rodent popula-
tions and the disease epidemics that often followed these surges, both
of which impacted on human welfare and wealth.119 In the 1930s, eco-
nomic depression and the socially and politically engaged character
of the decade served as further incentives to practical work. In 1932,
Elton created the Bureau of Animal Population with funding from
a number of scientific societies and interested industries; in 1934 the
University of Oxford recognised the Bureau as a unit of the university,
but left it to secure its own funding.120 During the 1930s and through-
out the Second World War, the Bureau continued Elton’s work on
the population dynamics of rodents for purposes of prediction and
control.121 After the Second World War, however, when ecology was
more firmly established as a discipline, Elton turned his attention
to a decades-long survey of the ecology of Wytham Woods, a task
important to understanding broad ecological relationships but of no
immediate practical usefulness. The achievement of institutional sta-
tus was gradual and ecology’s ties to industry remained important
throughout the discipline’s formative period.
The preoccupation with the control of nature evident in early
twentieth-century ecology does not negate the conservationist views
emerging at the same time, but it is important to acknowledge that
these seemingly conflicting outlooks developed simultaneously as
two aspects of the same discipline. In Imperial Ecology:Â€Environmental
Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945, Peder Anker contends that
‘designations such as “good” Arcadian views of nature and “bad”
imperial or industrial management views represent false and ana-
chronistic dichotomies … The history of early British … ecology rep-
resents instead a tangled web of both imperial and romantic views.’122
Practitioners of ecology such as Tansley and Elton and popularisers
of the discipline such as Huxley and Wells ‘endorsed both romantic
environmental preservation and hard-core ecological management’,
and both aspects of early ecology must be taken into account when
considering the impact of ecological thinking on modernist Â�writers.123
The co-existence of seemingly contradictory attitudes towards
natureÂ€ – conservationist and exterminatoryÂ€ – can also be found in
Woolf’s work, suggesting the extent to which her view of nature was
a product of the science of her time.
A co-operative ethic
Despite early ecology’s preoccupation with environmental control,
the overall impact of ecological knowledge on early twentieth-Â�century
views of nature was positive. Like natural theology or evolutionary
theory before it, ecology provided an overarching perspective that
gave coherence to the study of nature, and Allen argues that, as an
integrating principle, ecology was preferable even to evolutionary
theory. Evolution, he claims, ‘involved too much still that seemed
incapable of proof; it operated too elusively; it was too slow-mov-
ing to be readily demonstrable. Ecology, by contrast, was instantly
accessible, and it more patently linked in an overall logical framework
what had previously been atomised and disjointed.’124 Additionally,
where evolution stressed competition, ecology stressed ‘mutual inter-
relationship’ and thus served ‘as the intellectual sanction for a more
constructive ethic’.125 Two linked articles by Lens that appeared in the
New Statesman in 1915 offer a similar argument:Â€Lens contrasts ‘The
Fratricide Biology’, premised on the idea of the struggle for exist-
ence, with ‘The Fraternal Biology’, stressing the idea of a division
of labour in nature and emphasising co-operation among organisms
over competition between them. Lens presents the former perspective
as a misinterpretation of Darwin and an outlook ‘perniciousÂ€… in its
effect’, and he recommends the ‘principle of co-operation and mutual
dependence’ as a more promising basis for understanding nature.126
Ecology had a unifying influence on the life sciences in another sense
as well:Â€ not only did it foster a vision of nature as a co-operative
system but it also encouraged collaboration among previously iso-
lated disciplines, for to understand the many and complex interac-
tions occurring within any one ecosystem it was necessary to pool
the knowledge of many specialist fields. Evaluating ecology’s impact
on both the scientific view of nature and relations among diverse sci-
entific disciplines, Allen sounds almost devout when he speaks of the
life sciences’ ‘deliverance through ecology’.127
Wo ol f ’s o b s e rvat ion o f n at u r e
Woolf was clearly conscious of the appeal of observing living nature.
In ‘The Introduction’, Lily Everit describes the ‘rapture and wonder’
to be found in
long solitary walks, climbing gates, stepping through the mud, and through
the blur, the dream, the ecstasy of loneliness, to see the plover’s wheel and sur-
prise the rabbits, and come in the hearts of woods or wide lonely moors upon
little ceremonies which had no audience, private rites, pure beauty offered by
beetles and lilies of the valley and dead leaves and still pools, without any care
whatever what human beings thought of them. (CSF 180)
Woolf herself adopted an observational approach to nature. In ‘Woolf,
Rooks, and Rural England’, Ian Blyth draws attention to the accuracy
of Woolf’s descriptions of the manners and habits of rooks and argues
that ‘[l]ike all good nature writing, Woolf’s emerges from a day by
day, week by week, year by year familiarity with her subject’.128 In
Orlando, she alludes to the homing flight of rooks in the evening, and
in ‘The Death of the Moth’, she describes rooks’ habit of settling and
rising and settling again en masse in the tree-tops,
as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it has been cast up into the
air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every
twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be
thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour
and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down
upon the tree-tops were a tremendously exciting experience. (O 15; CE I:Â€359)
Woolf observes the nest-building activities of rooks in their rooker-
ies; she describes the group flights of rooks and remarks on the fact
that rooks are sometimes accompanied in these flights by flocks of
starlings; she records rooks’ fondness for walnuts (L v:Â€58; D i:Â€48,
54). Describing the flight of rooks on a windy day, she notes ‘the
roughness of the air current & the tremor of the rooks wing <deep
breasting it> slicingÂ€– as if the air were full of ridges & ripples &
roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the exercise <pleased
them> rubbed & braced them like swimmers in rough water’
(DÂ€iii:Â€191). Evaluating this passage, Blyth declares that, ‘by anyone’s
standard’, Woolf’s account
is a meticulously observed, beautifully described short passage of nature writ-
ingÂ€– one of many such passages scattered throughout Woolf’s work. As those
who have been lucky enough to see such a performance for themselves can
testify, ‘swimmers in rough water’ is an excellent attempt at what is in truth
impossible:Â€conveying in words the shapes in the sky made by rooks when fly-
ingÂ€– or rather ‘playing’Â€– in high winds.129
Blyth concludes that ‘Woolf’s description stands up to comparison
with any other in the field’.130 Woolf’s skill as an observer of nature
thus places her on a continuum with nature writers such as Hudson
and Fabre.
The successive theoretical, methodological, and institutional
changes that occurred in the life sciences in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries resulted in a significant shift in the way
that nature was seen and described. Attention turned from the cata-
loguing of natural forms to an interest in understanding life processes,
whether this took the form of the study of physiology, behaviour,
or the interrelationships between organisms and their environment.
These changes were accompanied by a shift in popular attitudes
towards the taxonomic natural history tradition brought about by the
dissemination of new approaches to the study of nature, by the con-
temporary emergence of the animal protection movement, and by the
influence of psychoanalytic interpretations of the collecting impulse.
These shifts in outlook were reflected in contemporary fictional rep-
resentations of nature and its study, and the next chapters will explore
Woolf’s responses to the study of nature in both its Victorian and
modern manifestations.
Chapter 3
‘To pin through the body with a name’

Virginia Woolf and the taxonomic tradition
In the midst of the many changes occurring in the late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century life sciences, the one constant was the
tendency among modern practitioners of the life sciences to define
their emerging disciplines against the taxonomic tradition of natural
history. In her use of natural history as a subject and a symbol, Woolf
was equally consistent. Woolf’s childhood encounter with natural
history led her early in life to form a critical view of the taxonomic
tradition and its component practices of collection and classification.
Thereafter, she repeatedly employed the collecting habit and the clas-
sificatory mentality as analogies through which to comment on social
and literary conventions that she regarded as similarly restrictive and
reductive. Through a review of Woolf’s childhood responses to the
natural history tradition, this chapter outlines the way in which she
arrived at her conception of the pastime; it then surveys her use of
natural history and its component practices as stable points of refer-
ence in her fiction. Because Woolf’s views of taxonomic natural his-
tory were established early and varied little over the course of her life,
her use of this imagery forms a coherent argument running through
her work and linking together a range of practices and attitudes that
she wished to interrogate.
T h e o r igi n s o f Wo ol f ’s r e s p on s e t o
ta xon o m i c n at u r a l h i s t o ry
Looking back on the earliest days of her participation in natural
history, Woolf recalls the pastime as an obsession shared with her
siblings, ‘our mania’, and in the Hyde Park Gate News, the Stephen
72
children show themselves to be ‘enthusiastic butterfly collectors’
(MOB 113; HPGN 121). Gradually, however, natural history devolved
from a group obsession to a pastime associated primarily with Thoby,
‘whose great passion it was’.1 Already in the Hyde Park Gate News,
Thoby is often singled out in discussions of the children’s practice of
natural history, and his enthusiasm for the activity seems to fuel his
siblings’ efforts:Â€it is recorded that Thoby had received ‘a very hand-
some box to contain his butterflies and moths’ as a birthday present;
that on a visit to Thoby at school, ‘bugs, chrysalises and butterflies’
were taken to the boarder; and that, on other such trips, a portion of
the visit was spent in ‘arranging butterflies and moths’ in Thoby’s
dormitory (HPGN 107, 133, 131). In her memories of her elder brother
Woolf declares, ‘always round him, like the dew that collects in beads
on a rough coat, there hangs the country; butterflies; birds; muddy
roads; muddy boots; horses’ (MOB 140).
Virginia’s childhood letters to Thoby are liberally scattered with
‘entomological news’:Â€she discusses the family museum, reports the
discovery of a beetle pupa, and offers updates on the development
of local insects, noting at intervals, ‘the chrysalises are still in their
maiden (?) state’ and ‘No. Bugs are out … I am afraid they must
have overslept’ (L i:Â€7, 52). Yet the letters that she wrote to others
during the same period contain no such references and her contem-
porary diary entries similarly fail to record her entomological discovÂ�
eries, Â�suggesting that Virginia engaged in the pastime as a means of
interacting with Thoby even after her personal enthusiasm for bug-
Â�hunting had begun to wane. She requests instructions and direct-
ives from Thoby, seeming to carry out entomological investigations
more for his sake than her own. ‘Shall I do any bug looking out?’
she inquires. ‘I have plenty of time for it, and I am very often in the
[illegible] regionÂ€– if it would be of any use I can easily do it’ (9).
As any reference to naturalists’ anecdotes will demonstrate, this is
not the characteristic tone of an entomology enthusiast, but rather
that of one solicitously offering assistance to an enthusiast. It was in
this period of more detached engagement in the practices of specimen
collection and species classification that Virginia’s own view of taxo-
nomic natural history began to form.
In her personal responses to the pursuit of natural history, Virginia
often displayed a degree of indifference. She writes to Thoby that
Sophia Farrell, the Stephens’ cook, has given them a box of South
African butterflies and asks, ‘Would you like us to send them on to
you? They are not much good, I am afraid. They are unset and most
of the wings are offÂ€– however some of them are whole and in a good
state. Only I don’t see quite what we are to do with them’ (16). Her
congratulations to Thoby for having ‘done our work for the year’ by
obtaining a series of White Ws (or White-Letter Hairsteaks) suggests
that she associates the pursuit of natural history with the Victorian
demand for industriousness even in leisure (an attitude summarised
by H. T. Stainton in his advice to novice entomologists:Â€‘Take a pleas-
ure in your business and make a business of your pleasure’) (42).2
Woolf’s recollection of being ‘scolded severely by Thoby … for
slackness’ in the fulfilment of her duties as ‘name finder’ suggests that
she did not herself approach the pastime in a sufficiently businesslike
manner (MOB 113).
One of the ways in which Virginia expressed her dwindling con-
viction in taxonomic entomology was by suggesting the imaginary
nature of its quarries. In her journal she recounts:Â€‘In the morning
Thoby Nessa Jack Georgie & I went to Painswick Castle, a roman
camp on the down about 2 miles away to look for mythical Large
Blues. Needless to say, they were not forthcoming’ (PA 119). A week
and a half later she repeats this dismissal, noting:Â€ ‘We went out to
catch a mythical Comma in the valley but no traces of the creature
were to be seen & Nessa & I came back and shopped in the village’
(121). Her descriptions of the pursuit of natural history suggest her
wavering belief in the pastime.
In August of 1899, while on holiday at Warboys in Huntingdonshire,
Virginia composed her most complete account of a family moth
hunt, opening with the disclaimer, ‘Tonight & last night we began
our Sugar campaignÂ€ – Thoby rather, the rest of us have rather
departed from that profession’ (144). The tone of the essay is one of
amused detachment despite the fact that Virginia was herself a par-
ticipant in the event. She imagines her own actions as they would
be seen from the perspective of ‘an innocent reader’ and finds them
strange (ibid.). Her description of the ceremony of the ‘procession’,
led by ‘the renowned J. T. S.’ and brought up in the rear by ‘A. L. S.
a supernumerary amateur of no calling’ and ‘Gurth the dog mem-
ber’, stresses the hierarchical organisation of even this recreational
pursuit (144–5). Mimicking the clichés common to tales of adven-
ture (their ‘renowned’ leaders and ‘expedition[s] confounded’) and
the language of a military ‘campaign’ (‘Advance slowly’; ‘halt’), she
at once deflates the seriousness of the sugar campaign through the
inappropriate use of high rhetoric and implies that supposedly heroic
voyages of exploration are not so different in spirit from this back-
yard moth hunt (144, 145). She anthropomorphises the moth, envi-
sioning it ‘roaming Â�melancholy thro’ damp woods’ and ‘uttering a
slightly tipsy protest at the indignity’ of being disturbed at the sugar
(144, 145). This results in a sense of uneasiness when she contrasts
‘the moths [sic] point of view’ with that of ‘man, the hunter’ (144).
Interestingly, Virginia pays little attention to the moths captured on
the hunt:Â€she makes no attempt to identify them and they are quickly
passed over. Instead, she focuses on the memory of a Red Underwing
upon whom they ‘gazed one moment’ before ‘the grand old moth
vanished’ (145). Her account suggests that the momentary glimpse of
the Red Underwing left a more lasting impression than the specimens
captured during the hunt, an idea that Woolf would develop further
in her later writing. This early account of a moth hunt, written while
Virginia and her siblings still engaged in the practice, suggests that
already she was critical of the activity and distanced herself from it
through ironic presentation.
Virginia’s disinclination to join fully in her brother’s entomological
enthusiasms derived in part from her sense that the scientific approach
of the naturalist was not truly her own, a sense apparently instilled
in her by Thoby himself. Writing to her elder brother, Virginia is
conscious of his knowledge of taxonomic nomenclature and her own
relative ignorance in this area:Â€forwarding to him some photographs
taken at Corby, she confesses that she ‘do[es]n’t know to what species
[the Hills’ dog] belongs’ (L i:Â€11). Reporting to Thoby that she has
seen ‘a blue bird with a yellow chest and cheeks on [her] window-
sill, the other morning’, she asks him to identify it for her, already
anticipating his dismissal of her own conjectures:Â€‘“My dear GoatÂ€–
no woman knows how to describe a thing accurately!”’ (59).
Virginia also displays ambivalence towards natural history in its
institutional form. On a visit to the British Museum (Natural History),
she and Adrian go ‘in search of a mythical underground collection of
bugs, which Miss Kay declares she saw’; on her return, she reports,
‘instead we discovered a notice directing us to an insect room open to
students from 10 to 4, which we suppose she meant, but as we did not
feel sufficiently student like to enter, we came home’ (PA 53). Despite
her private mimicry of their idiom and conventions, she feels a sense
of exclusion from the institutions of Victorian science. Subsequent
to this failed attempt to view the insect collections, Virginia and
Vanessa arrange to go with Miss Kay ‘to see the bugs’ (94). This they
manage to do, but Virginia leaves no more engaged than before. She
records only, ‘The bugs were downstairs at the Mu[seum]. Nothing
very wonderful’ (ibid.). At first intimidated by the museum’s aura of
authority, she subsequently finds herself indifferent.
Having been discouraged from and having rejected in her turn the
taxonomic mode of description, Virginia continues to distance herself
from it through mockery. She satirises the enthusiasm and pedantry
of the naturalist, noting in her journal:
The Almond trees are just coming out, and there are crocusses (crociÂ€– Stella’s
young man calls them) all over the grass. A reverend gentleman has written to
the Times to record the first hawthorn flowerÂ€– the earliest that has appeared in
the Parish since 1884 when, as will be remembered, there was an uncommonly
mild winter, and favourable springÂ€– still I think your readers will agree with
me, when I say that it is not an unprecedented phenomenon, this early visitor,
etc etc. Hear hear! (52)
Virginia mocks the ponderous pomposity of this outlook, through
which nature itself is accorded less importance than the human tabu-
lation of it. She is wary of lapsing into such a reductive view of nature
herself and conscious of the self-importance and competitiveness
underlying the pretence of objective scientific reportage. Catching
herself rhapsodising over ‘the flowersÂ€– the almond trees out, the cro-
cusses going over, squills at their best, the other trees just beginning
to seed’, she comments dryly, ‘I shall turn into a country clergyman,
and make notes of phenomena in Kensington Gardens, which shall be
sent as a challenge to other country clergymen’ (55–6).
Later in life, Woolf herself attracted the censure of a naturalist
through her descriptions of the wildlife and scenery of the Isle of Skye
in To the Lighthouse. Shortly after the publication of the novel, Woolf
received a letter from Lord Olivier informing her that ‘her descrip-
tions of the fauna and flora of the Hebrides were totally inaccur-
ate’:Â€as she recounted in a letter to Vanessa, ‘Lord Olivier writes that
my horticulture and natural history is in every instance wrong:Â€there
are no rooks, elms, or dahlias in the Hebrides; my sparrows are
wrong; so are my carnations’ (L iii:Â€379).3 Woolf rebutted Olivier’s
criticism in Orlando by satirising the pedantry of those whose focus
on minutiae impedes their ability to take a wider view. She refers to
his cataloguing of her errors, in the preface to the novel, where she
offers ironic thanks to the gentleman ‘who has generously and gra-
tuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the
geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I
hope, not spare his services on the present occasion’ (O 7).
Early in life, Virginia concluded that nature must be approached
and described in a manner other than that adopted by the natural his-
torian. She reflects:
I often wonder whether, if I lived in the country all the year round, I could
think as pleasantly as these country writers write … I think that a year or two
of such gardens & green fields would infallibly sweeten one & soothe one &
simplify one into the kind of Gilbert White old gentleman or Miss Matty old
lady that only grew till now for me inside the covers of books. I shd. be writing
notes upon the weather, & I shd. turn to my diaries of past years to compare
their recordsÂ€– I shd. tell how I ‘bedded out’ certain plants, & record the con-
dition of my rose trees. I shd. perhaps, have seen a swallow on the wing for
other climates, or have discovered a sleepy martin presumably preparing for
his winter sleep. I shd. propound my theories as to migration & hybernation.
Alas, tho’, as a Cockney I have no sound country education to go upon. I must
blurt out crude ecstasies upon sky & field; which may perchance retain for my
eyes a little of their majesty in my awkward words. (PA 137–8)
Virginia had more of a ‘country education’ than she here acknow-
ledges. Her preference for ‘crude ecstasies’ was a choice arising from
a sense that cataloguing was an inadequate response to nature.4 At
this stage, Virginia rejects the scientific perspective altogether and
champions instead a visionary approach to the natural world. Later,
however, she would return to science, adopting other, newly emer-
gent methods of studying nature as analogies for her own chosen
means of viewing the world.
C h i l d h o o d a n d n at u r a l h i s t o ry
i n wo ol f ’s f i c t ion
As a result of her own childhood encounter with natural history,
Woolf repeatedly portrays her fictional children engaged in the same
pastime. Jacob Flanders searches tidal pools for marine life, and he
and his brother John collect and classify butterflies, moths, and bee-
tles; the Ramsay children interest themselves in everything from
‘sea-birds and butterflies’ to seaweed and crabs and live surrounded
by ‘beetles, and the skulls of small birds … [and] long frilled strips of
seaweed pinned to the wall’; Bernard, Neville, Jinny, and Susan (but
not Rhoda or Louis) net and examine butterflies, and Susan’s children
later take up the activity; Martin Pargiter proposes beetling expedi-
tions; and in the dip of ground beyond the lily pond, George Oliver
is initiated into the tradition of ‘butterfly catching’ that captivated
Bartholomew, Lucy, and Giles before him (TTL 14; BTA 36). Of all
the children depicted at any length in Woolf’s fiction, only the young
Orlando fails to engage in some form of taxonomic natural history,
a fact suggesting that Woolf viewed the popular practice of natural
history as a legacy of the nineteenth century that it would have been
anachronistic to associate with a child of the Renaissance.
Woolf’s fictional representations of the childhood practice of nat-
ural history illustrate the way in which a natural inclination can be
co-opted and used to inculcate a socially sanctioned system of order
and value. Woolf suggests that the natural world holds an innate fas-
cination for children, but that the form this fascination takes var-
ies with the temperament of the child. Mrs Ramsay recognises the
individual approaches to nature adopted by her children, reflecting,
‘Crabs, she had to allow, if Andrew really wished to dissect them,
or if Jasper believed that one could make soup from seaweed, one
could not prevent it; or Rose’s objectsÂ€– shells, reeds, stones; for they
were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways’ (TTL 34).
However, Woolf suggests that the typical adult response to the unique
outlooks of children is to channel their individual Â�enthusiasms into
conventional pastimes. Mr Ramsay reacts to his children’s dispar-
ate approaches to nature by suggesting a more formalised approach,
commenting, ‘“Why don’t some of you take up botany?”’ (216).
Similarly, while John Flanders amuses himself by depositing in his
mother’s lap ‘grass or dead leaves which he called “tea”’, Mrs Flanders
attempts to teach him to recognise distinct species:Â€‘“That’s an orchid
leaf, Johnny”’ ( JR 20). Bernard, Neville, Jinny, and Susan, whose
first articulated thoughts offer unstudied observations of their nat-
ural surroundings, are soon engaged in the more regulated pursuit
of collecting and examining specimens. Children’s engagement with
nature is also shaped by institutional models:Â€Jacob’s examination of
a tidal pool for interesting specimens and his subsequent capture of a
crab in a bucket have a public parallel in Captain Boase’s capture and
display of a shark at the Scarborough aquarium (18).
This redirection of a general love of nature into the conven-
tional practice of natural history enables further conditioning, for,
once learned, the practice of natural history itself serves as a means
of entrenching wider social values and perspectives. In a discussion
of The Waves, Kathy J. Phillips suggests the extent to which adult
behaviour is learned on the school sports ground, arguing that, as
a colonial administrator, Percival ‘has hardly matured beyond the
level of games at school’ and ‘adopts the tactics of the schoolyard’.5
Woolf suggests that the natural history tradition also contributes
to this education, for in The Waves she mentions the pursuits of the
Natural History Society alongside cricket and military drill as con-
ventional schoolboy pastimes:Â€ Louis watches with a mix of envy
and disdain ‘“the boasting boys … Archie and Hugh; Parker and
Dalton; Larpent and Smith”’, observing, ‘“They are the volunteers;
they are the cricketers; they are the officers of the Natural History
Society. They are always forming into fours and marching in troops
with badges on their caps; they salute simultaneously passing the
figure of their general”’ (TW 34).6 If cricket and the drill inculcate
competitiveness, obedience, and loyalty in children, the practices of
specimen collection and classification encourage the urge to capture
and possess and entrench the habit of differentiation. While Louis
confesses his admiration for the majestic order and beautiful obedi-
ence of the boy heroes of the public school, he expresses reservations
as well, noting that the same boys ‘“leave butterflies trembling with
their wings pinched off; they throw dirty pocket-handkerchiefs clot-
ted with blood screwed up into corners. They make little boys sob in
dark passage ways”’ (ibid.). Phillips links these habits of violence to
the boys’ military training; however, the boys also receive training
in this behaviour in their capacity as officers of the Natural History
Society.7 Violence against nature has an institutional tradition of its
own and constitutes another form of learned brutality.8
The practice of natural history also reinforced gender bounda-
ries, for natural history was an activity in which the propriety of
female participation was disputed.9 While an interest in botanising
was deemed acceptable for a young lady, many similar activities were
regarded as unseemly. In Night and Day, Cassandra Otway’s mother
is horrified by her daughter’s hobby of raising silkworms, an interest
that she attributes to the unhealthy influence of Cassandra’s brothers.
A childhood quarrel between Rose and Martin Pargiter, recounted
several times in the course of The Years, illustrates the power dynamic
between brother and sister through reference to the activities and
instruments of natural history. The first description of the quarrel
occurs shortly after the event itself, as Rose steels herself to ask her
brother to take her to the shop:
She … stopped outside the schoolroom door. She did not want to go in, for she
had quarrelled with Martin. They had quarrelled first about Erridge and the
microscope and then about shooting Miss Pym’s cats next door. But Eleanor
had told her to ask him. She opened the door.
‘Hullo, MartinÂ€–’ she began.
He was sitting at a table with a book propped in front of him, muttering to
himselfÂ€– perhaps it was Greek, perhaps it was Latin.
‘Eleanor told meÂ€–’ she began, noting how flushed he looked, and how his
hand closed on a bit of paper as if he were going to screw it into a ball. ‘To
ask you …’ she began, and braced herself and stood with her back against the
door. (TY 16–17)
This first telling reveals little about the subject or consequences of the
quarrel itself, but it positions Rose outside the schoolroom and presents
her as unable to decipher the texts representative of a classical education,
suggesting her exclusion from the intellectual sphere, gendered male.
In the second telling of these events, this time by Rose, the cause
and consequences of the quarrel are elaborated. Rose asks,
‘Do you remember that row when the microscope was broken? Well, I met
that boyÂ€– that horrid, ferret-faced boyÂ€– ErridgeÂ€– up in the North.’
‘He wasn’t horrid,’ said Martin.
‘He was,’ Rose persisted, ‘A horrid little sneak. He pretended that it was I
who broke the microscope and it was he who broke it.’ (151)
The revelation of the subject of the quarrel reinforces the impression
created by the image of Rose standing hesitant outside the school-
room. If Latin and Greek constitute the formal education of the
upper-middle-class Victorian schoolboy, natural history is his typ-
ical recreational pursuit. The dispute over the broken microscope, in
which Erridge’s word is automatically accepted over Rose’s, implies
that, as a girl, Rose can be assumed to be unfit to handle this instru-
ment of science as well as incapable of competently engaging with the
field of knowledge that it represents.
However, the matter does not end there. Rose continues her
reminiscence:
‘And after it was over,’ she said, ‘you came into the nursery and asked me to go
beetling with you in the Round Pond. D’you remember?’
She paused. There was something queer about the memory, Eleanor could
see. She spoke with a curious intensity.
‘And you said, “I’ll ask you three times; and if you don’t answer the third
time, I’ll go alone.” And I swore, “I’ll let him go alone.”’ Her blue eyes
blazed.
‘I can see you,’ said Martin. ‘Wearing a pink frock, with a knife in your
hand.’
‘And you went,’ Rose said; she spoke with suppressed vehemence. ‘And I
dashed into the bathroom and cut this gash’Â€– she held out her wrist. Eleanor
looked at it. There was a thin white scar just above the wrist joint.
When did she do that? Eleanor thought. She could not remember. Rose had
locked herself into the bathroom with a knife and cut her wrist. She had known
nothing about it. She looked at the white mark. It must have bled. (ibid.)
Martin’s attempt at reconciliation through the offer of a beetling
expedition appears on the surface to invite Rose’s participation in
the field of scientific investigation that had just been denied her and
thus to rectify the wrong done by the false accusation against her.
However, the opportunity that Martin offers her remains a male-
mediated experience, impossible without his supervision, and thus
reiterates male control over the pursuit of knowledge. Rose’s deter-
mination to refuse his offer demonstrates her rejection of such par-
tial access to knowledge. Unfair exclusion from the former activity
prompts her dismissal of the latter. Her act of self-harm is an act
of defiance, though due to her position of powerlessness her vio-
lence can be directed only against herself:Â€ she mutilates the girl
in the pink frock, the compliant Victorian sister, in an act that is
also an attempt to illustrate physically the crippling effect of patri-
archal oppression. The fact that her self-harm goes unnoticed by
her family suggests the failure of this effort to communicate her
oppression.
The final retelling of these events confirms the failure of Rose’s
attempts to communicate her situation. The account of the quarrel
has become a story familiar to all. Martin, with the air of one starting
an argument that has been gone through many times before, declares,
‘She always was a spitfire’, and Rose responds, in the same formulaic
manner,
‘And they always put the blame on me … He had the schoolroom. Where was
I to sit? “Oh, run away and play in the nursery!”’ She waved her hand.
‘And so she went into the bathroom and cut her wrist with a knife,’ Martin
jeered.
‘No, that was Erridge:Â€that was about the microscope,’ she corrected him.
It’s like a kitten catching its tail, Peggy thought; round and round they go
in a circle. But it’s what they enjoy. (340–41)
Rose’s observation that the schoolroom was Martin’s territory returns
to the argument that women are accorded no place in the intellectual
sphere. More significantly, however, in this repetition of the story, the
content of the argument is ignored. While the previous telling at least
provoked in Eleanor a sense of shock, now Rose’s remembered action
evinces only bored familiarity.
Yet Woolf’s outlook is not wholly bleak. Gillian Beer has sug-
gested that Woolf was both acutely aware of historical ‘shifts in mate-
rial and intellectual circumstances’ and convinced of the ‘inertness of
the human condition’ and the capacity of individuals to ‘stand in for
each other across the centuries’.10 Rose’s story can therefore be read
as continuing in Peggy’s, and although Peggy displays no recogni-
tion of the significance of Rose’s narrative, her life and work illustrate
the changes wrought between Rose’s Victorian childhood and her
own modern adulthood. As a medical doctor, Peggy stands as proof
of women’s independent entry into the field of science, and her work,
which involves laboratory experiment as well as medical practice,
suggests the eclipse of the representative Victorian science of taxo-
nomic natural history, along with many of the social conventions and
restrictions contemporary with its practice. Natural history remains
associated for Woolf with the social constraints of a Victorian child-
hood, and, as will be demonstrated in the next chapter, the displace-
ment of natural history by the modern biological sciences appeared to
Woolf to parallel the supplanting of Victorian restrictions by modern
freedoms.
N at u r a l h i s t o ry a n d t h e V i c t o r i a n ag e
In addition to using the practice of taxonomic natural history to sug-
gest the ways in which conventional systems of meaning and value
are entrenched, Woolf employs natural history as a pastime repre-
sentative of the preoccupations of the Victorian age. In Between the
Acts, the Victorian segment of Miss La Trobe’s pageant offers a sentiÂ�
mental tale of courtship, Christian piety, and imperial endeavour
played out against the backdrop of a picnic for which the participants
have outfitted themselves with natural history paraphernalia, ‘some
carryingÂ€… butterfly nets, others spy glasses, others tin botanical
cases’ (BTA 99). As Edgar and Eleanor pledge their love and vow
to devote themselves to ‘a lifetime in the African desert among the
heathens’, Mrs Hardcastle admonishes the young Alfred not to make
himself sick chasing butterflies (ibid.). The pursuit of natural his-
tory appears to stand in for the imperial project, the capture and
classification of specimens evoking both territorial conquest and the
cultural imperialism of the missionary effort that sought to impose a
European system of meaning upon the rest of the world.
In Mrs Dalloway, too, the Victorian era is represented by means
of an association with natural history. When Miss Helena Parry first
appears in the novel as the subject of one of Clarissa’s memories of her
nineteenth-century childhood, she seems a caricature of the Victorian
maiden aunt:Â€prudish, convention-bound, and fussing over flowers.
Peter Walsh conveys a similar impression of Miss Parry through his
recollections of a moment of crisis in his life when, in the midst of his
realisation that Clarissa was falling in love with Richard Dalloway,
he was forced to make meaningless conversation with Clarissa’s
aunt. As a result of this remembered encounter, Miss Parry and her
Â�botanising become for Peter an emblem of Victorian convention.
Thereafter, in trying to express the difference between the society of
his youth and that of the present, Peter attributes the change to the
shifting of a ‘pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed
immovable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the
women Â�especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to
press between the sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré’s diction-
ary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner’ (MD 173). Social con-
ditioning is equated with the preservation of specimens, the weight
of convention setting individuals in acceptable attitudes. Continuing
to reflect upon Miss Parry, Peter notes, ‘She was dead now. He had
heard of her, from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so
fittingÂ€– one of nature’s masterpiecesÂ€ – that old Miss Parry should
turn to glass’ (173–4). Peter envisions Miss Parry as having been
herself transformed into a preserved specimen, and he regards her
as a symbol of ‘a different age’, now gone (174). However, Peter is
mistaken. Helena Parry is not dead, and her attendance at Clarissa’s
party suggests the survival of Victorian influences into the present.
With Helena Parry’s appearance at Clarissa’s party, her role as an
emblem of the Victorian era is both complicated and confirmed. The
revelation of the seriousness and extent of her botanical pursuitsÂ€ –
her expeditions in Burma, India, and Ceylon and her publication of
a book on Burmese orchids that had gone into ‘three editions before
1870’ and been praised by DarwinÂ€ – suggests a new view of Miss
Parry as an adventurer who circumvented the limitations imposed
upon Victorian women and assumed a public role through her efforts
in the field of natural history (191). Even so, Woolf leaves Aunt
Helena’s actions open to criticism, for while Aunt Helena seeks to
assert her distance from empire-building, claiming that ‘she had
no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals,
MutiniesÂ€– it was orchids she saw, and mountain passes’, the narrative
reminds us that her accomplishments were achieved ‘on the backs of
coolies’ (190). Science conducted under imperialism cannot, Woolf
maintains, be apolitical. Through her representation of Aunt Helena
as a naturalist, Woolf suggests both the oppressive conventions of
Victorian society and the imperialist underpinnings of the taxonomic
project.
C ol l e c t ion
Woolf’s dispute with the taxonomic tradition of natural history
also resulted in part from the discipline’s reliance on specimen col-
lection, for, by the early twentieth century, collection of any kind
was regarded as a Victorian preoccupation and viewed with dis-
dain. In Orlando, Woolf depicts the nineteenth century as an age of
‘glass cases’ (David Elliston Allen confirms this characterisation of
the period, identifying the ‘widespread taste for bottling up natural
objects under glass’ as ‘quintessentially Victorian’), and she offers a
physical embodiment of the nineteenth century in the form of ‘a pyra-
mid, a hecatomb, or Â�trophy …Â€– a conglomeration at any rate of the
most heterogeneous and ill-assorted objects, piled higgledy-piggledy
in a vast mound where the statue of Queen Victoria now stands’ and
looking ‘as if it were destined to endure for ever’ (O 218, 221–2).11
The Victorian impulse to collect and preserve is, Woolf suggests, all
the more striking when contrasted with the attitudes of other ages,
most notably that of the Renaissance, a time more accepting of transi-
ence, when ‘the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall.
The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night
is then slept by all. As for using the artifices of the greenhouse or
conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that
was not their way’ (26). Similarly, with the accession of King Edward
in 1901 and the passing of the Victorian age, Orlando can find ‘not a
trace of that vast erection which she had thought everlasting; top hats,
widows’ weeds, trumpets, telescopes, wreaths, all had vanished and
left not a stain, not a puddle even, on the pavement’ (283). An obses-
sion with the accumulation and preservation of objects is presented as
a hallmark of the nineteenth century, not previously evident and not,
it was to be hoped, surviving the century’s end.
The Years charts a similar turn-of-the-century shift in attitudes
towards material objects. Early in the novel, in the description of
the Pargiter family’s life in 1880, the reader’s attention is drawn to
a ‘spotted walrus with a brush in its back’ sitting on Mrs Pargiter’s
writing-table (TY 33). Eleven years later, long after the death of Mrs
Pargiter, the writing-table has passed to Eleanor and still the wal-
rus with its now ‘ink-corroded patch of bristle’ occupies unchanged
its position on the table (88). Contemplating the figurine, Eleanor
reflects that ‘it’s awfully queer … that that should have gone on all
these years. That solid object might survive them all. If she threw
it away it would still exist somewhere or other. But she never had
thrown it away because it was part of other thingsÂ€– her mother for
example’ (ibid.). However, this belief in the permanence of objects
and the tendency to preserve things for their sentimental value (the
ink-corroded bristles of the walrus suggesting that it has outlived
its use-function) is challenged with the coming of the new century.
The housekeeper, Crosby, finds ‘the walrus … in the waste-paper
basket one morning, when the guns were firing for the old Queen’s
funeral’ (208). As in Orlando, the urge to collect and preserve is dir-
ectly associated with the age of Victoria and it is suggested that this
impulse ends abruptly with the Queen’s death. In fact, Crosby keeps
the walrus brush herself, as a keepsake of the Pargiter Â�family. This
might be interpreted as a suggestion that Crosby is a relic of a bygone
age who, ‘remember[ing] everything’, lives in the past, while Eleanor
speaks for the Pargiter children when she declares herself ‘glad to be
quit of it all’ (206). Alternatively, it might be read as a hint that it is
not as easy to dispense with memory-imbued objects as modernists
liked to imagine.12 Nevertheless, the treatment of other family heir-
looms in The Years confirms that a shift in attitudes towards mater-
ial objects has taken place. In the midst of the First World War,
Maggie and Renny use the plates that were once reserved for show
in the drawing-room cabinet. Maggie remarks, ‘“It seemed sillyÂ€–
keeping them in a cabinet”’ (270). When Renny admits, ‘“We
break one every week”’, Maggie concludes, ‘“They’ll last the war”’
(270–71). This turn from collection to use suggests an awareness of
the ephemerality of things and expresses a wider modernist sense of
the transitory nature of muchÂ€– values and social structures as well
as objectsÂ€– once held to be permanent.
It was not only the association with Victorian sentimentality and
traditionalism that made collection appear suspect to modern eyes.
The developing psychoanalytic interpretation of the collecting
impulse as symptomatic of anality suggested that, when occurring in
adults, the urge to collect might be taken as a sign of arrested develop-
ment and a surrogate for sexual desire. Jean Baudrillard in The System
of Objects (a work that Douglas Mao describes as ‘represent[ing] the
final movement of decisively modernist thinking’ on the subject)
argues that ‘[t]here is in all cases a manifest connection between col-
lecting and sexuality’, with collection acting as ‘a powerful compen-
sation … run[ning] counter to active genital sexuality’.13 That such
assumptions inform Woolf’s view of collecting is suggested in The
Waves where Jinny, contemplating a man who ‘“lives … surrounded
by china pots”’, composes a story to account for his situation:Â€‘“he
loved a girl in Rome and she left him. Hence the pots, old junk found
in lodging-houses or dug from the desert sands. And since beauty
must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stag-
nates in a china sea”’ (TW 132). In the earliest draft of The Waves,
Woolf elaborates upon this idea with the assertion that, through his
collecting, the man feeds ‘a hopeless passion’ since ‘only used things
are beautifulÂ€– things one breaks’ (TWHD 266). This narrative con-
tains all the essentials of the psychoanalytic interpretation of collec-
tion and suggests that the modernist conviction in the beauty of the
fragmentary and the transitory is fundamentally at odds with the col-
lector’s instinct to preserve.
Woolf’s short story ‘Solid Objects’ (1920) similarly encapsu-
lates the prevailing modernist conception of the impulse to collect.
Walking along the beach in argument with a friend, JohnÂ€– a prom-
ising young politicianÂ€ – comes upon a pleasing lump of glass. He
considers the object with the same ‘wonder, which the eyes of young
children display’ (CSF 97), a fact that recalls the assumption that col-
lection is a natural occupation for children but suggestive of ‘regres-
sion to the anal stage’14 when practised by adults. Raising the lump
of glass to the light, John holds it ‘so that its irregular mass blotted
out the body and extended right arm of his friend’, prefiguring the
way in which his growing obsession with collection will eclipse his
interest in friends, work, and everyday concerns (ibid.). Initially, the
lump of glass combines aesthetic appeal with usefulness, having ‘its
place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile
of bills and letters, and served … as an excellent paperweight’ (98).
However, as John’s preoccupation with his growing collection dis-
tracts him from his professional responsibilities, his collected objects
are increasingly ‘abstracted from [their] use’ (to borrow Baudrillard’s
phrase):15 ‘their duty was more and more of an ornamental nature,
since papers needing a weight to keep them down became scarcer
and scarcer’ (99). Woolf suggests that the impulse that drives John’s
collection is in part a desire for control:Â€selection, the choice of ‘one
pebble on a path strewn with them’, allows him to revel in ‘the sense
of power and benignity which such an action confers’ (97–8). He is
also motivated by a desire for self-affirmation through identification
with the collected object:Â€‘believing that the heart of the stone leaps
with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it … “It might
so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I,
I”’, John achieves an elevating sense of having been himself chosen
(98). As Baudrillard explains this ‘grandiose tautology’, the collected
object’s ‘absolute singularity … arises from the fact of being pos-
sessed by [the collector]Â€– and this allows [the collector], in turn, to
recognise [him]self in the object as an absolutely singular being’.16
Initially, John’s urge to collect may be viewed sympathetically, as
an intense but comprehensible preoccupation with beautiful forms.
However, as the impulse to collect grows increasingly urgent, his
actions appear to be motivated less by a love of beauty than by an
obsessive acquisitiveness, a ‘determination to possess’, and the
objects collected appear to be of less importance than the compulsion
to obtain them (100). On his last visit to his friend, Charles perceives
‘something fixed and distant in [John’s] expression [that] alarmed
him’, and ‘saying that he had an appointment to keep, he left JohnÂ€–
for ever’ (101). John’s obsession with objects isolates him, illustrating
Baudrillard’s argument that collectors ‘invariably have something
impoverished and inhuman about them’.17 The deterioration of John’s
life following from his first act of collection encapsulates the modern
view of the psychopathy of collection.
In Solid Objects:Â€ Modernism and the Test of Production, Douglas
Mao charts an increasing disillusionment with objects, an intensify-
ing sense of ‘oppression by the sheer weight of accumulated things’,
in Woolf’s writing over time.18 He regards the early short story ‘Solid
Objects’ as comparatively positive in its view of material things, sug-
gesting that at this stage Woolf still acknowledges the ‘enchantment’
of objects and presents the collection of beautiful things as a ‘voca-
tion’ preferable to a political career.19 Nevertheless, he maintains that
even in this early work Woolf’s suspicion of collection is apparent in
her description of ‘the metamorphosis of vague desire into singular
pathology’, and he argues that the impression left by the narrative
is that John’s collected objects ‘speak not of an ability to purchase
expressive objects but of a profound possession by things, where this
possession might figure as a demystification of Victorian fantasies of
self-fashioning through acquisition’.20
Woolf also offers her opinion of the collection in its institutional
form:Â€the museum. In Night and Day, she examines the way in which
the institutionalisation of an object alters its perceived value. Mary
Datchet, contemplating the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum,
feels herself ‘borne up on some wave of exaltation and emotion, by
which her life at once became solemn and beautiful’ (ND 81). Yet she
suspects that her response is ‘due as much, perhaps, to the solitude and
chill and silence of the gallery as to the actual beauty of the Â�statues’
(ibid.). Mary recognises that the space of the museum determines
much of the significance attributed to the objects contained within it.
The Elgin Marbles are a particularly apt choice of subject for a debate
on the meaning accorded to collected objects by their context, for in
the display of the frieze and sculptures of the Parthenon by the British
Museum under the name of the British Ambassador to Constantinople
who controversially removed them from the Greek temple, the mar-
bles’ original historical and artistic significance is overwritten by the
history of their acquisition by Britain and by British claims to be the
rightful heirs to the achievements of antiquity.21 The cultural appro-
priation sanctioned by the museum and the political import of such
appropriations were noted and criticised by others in Woolf’s circle.
In ‘For the Museum’s Sake’ (1920), E. M. Forster presents collection
in its modern, institutional form as a manifestation of the jostling for
power among nation-states. He declares:
in the nineteenth century the soil was scratched all over the globe, rivers were
dammed, rocks chipped, natives tortured, hooks were let down into the sea.
What had happened? Partly an increase in science and taste, but also the arrival
of a purchaser …Â€– the modern European nation. After the Treaty of Vienna
every progressive government felt it a duty to amass old objects, and to exhibit
a fraction of them in a building called a Museum, which was occasionally open
free. ‘National possessions’ they were now called, and it was important that
they should outnumber the objects possessed by other nations.22
In questioning the motives and significance of the museum, Woolf
participated in a wider modernist critique of institutional collection.
Woolf discusses the effect of the museum upon the viewing subject
as well as upon the object being viewed, suggesting that the sense of
order and permanence offered by the museum accounts for much of
its appeal. In The Waves, Rhoda, distraught on learning of Percival’s
death, feels a sudden impulse to visit ‘“some museum, where they keep
rings under glass cases, where there are cabinets, and the dresses that
queens have worn”’ (TW 122). Confronted by the transience of indi-
vidual life, she looks to the museum for reassurance of the durability
of things and the continuity of human history. Similarly, she instinc-
tively wishes to counteract her sense of the random menace of nature
with a view of nature contained and controlled by man in the formal
gardens of Hampton Court, where, she hopes, ‘“the seemliness of
herded yew trees making black pyramids symmetrically on the grass
among flowers”’ will ‘“impose order upon my raked, my dishevelled
soul”’ (ibid.).23 Woolf, however, remains unconvinced of the musÂ�
eum’s capacity to impose order and convey truth. In ‘The Mark on
the Wall’, the narrator itemises the random collection of artifacts that
fill the cases of a local museum:Â€an ‘arrowhead … together with the
foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great
many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass
that Nelson drank out ofÂ€– proving I really don’t know what’ (CSF
81). Woolf questions the coherence and validity of the narrative that
the museum constructs.
Woolf offers a similar critique of institutional natural history col-
lections and their impact upon viewers. In Jacob’s Room, she accu-
rately encapsulates the air of degraded spectacle that pervaded the
public aquaria of seaside towns at the turn of the century through her
representation of the Scarborough Aquarium and the shabby sensa-
tionalism surrounding the display of Captain Boase’s ‘monster shark’
( JR 18).24 Dislocated from its natural context, the shark is stripped of
the significance that it held in the wild and reduced to ‘a flabby yel-
low receptacle like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank’ by its display
among the ashtray-strewn tables of the public aquarium (18–19). The
narrator’s observation that ‘[n]o one had ever been cheered by the
Aquarium’ suggests the futility of the effort to contain nature in this
way (19).
O b s e s s ion , P o s s e s s ion , a n d C on t rol i n

t h e v oya g e o u t
Baudrillard argues that the collector’s sense of the ‘sublimity’ of his

pursuit ‘derives not from the nature of the objects he collects (which
will vary according to his age, profession and social milieu) but
from his fanaticism. And this fanaticism is identical whether it char-
acterizes a rich connoisseur of Persian miniatures or a collector of
matchboxes.’25 In Woolf’s view, the fanaticism associated with collec-
tion also drives other pursuits, and in The Voyage Out she discusses
what Baudrillard terms the ‘passionate involvement’ of the collector
as a way of addressing fanaticism in other forms.26 Clarissa Dalloway
introduces this theme with the comment, ‘“I always think religion’s
like collecting beetles … One person has a passion for black beetles;
another hasn’t; it’s no good arguing about it. What’s your black bee-
tle now?”’ (VO 58). In the earlier draft of the novel now published
as Melymbrosia, Woolf elaborated upon this notion so as to suggest
the universality of this passion irrespective of its object:Â€ Rachel,
seating herself at the piano, remarks to the Bach score spread before
her, ‘“You’re my black beetle”’, and the narrator elaborates, ‘Mrs
Dalloway when she talked of black beetles, was hinting at something
common to arts, religion and maternity’ (MEL 66). The excision of
these lines from The Voyage Out suggests a growing unwillingness to
assume the universality of this impulse. Even in Melymbrosia, there
are suggestions that collection represents not a universal impulse but
a narrow and extreme obsession. Hughling Elliot offers an explana-
tion of ‘the collecting mania’ through the example of a man who col-
lects buckles;Â€Elliot comments:
‘Now that would be reasonable enough, but the sign of your true collector is
that he hedges himself with all kinds of limitations. They must be shoe buck-
les, worn by gentlemen, after the year 1580, and before the year 1660. (I may
not be right in my dates but the fact’s as I say.)’ (MEL 200)
The collection thus functions as a material expression of an idée fixe.

In The Voyage Out, Woolf represents the collector’s passion through
characters such as the obsessive Mr Grice, steward of the Euphrosyne
and a collector of marine curiosities, ever in search of people to listen
to ‘the tirade of a fanatical man’ and to be made ‘appreciative of all his
seaweeds’ (VO 54, 72).
In the final version of The Voyage Out, Woolf likens only religion to
beetle-collecting, and in doing so she distances collection and religion
from other pursuits and implies a criticism of both. Rachel, observing
a church service, reflects that ‘all round her people were pretending
to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above her floated the
idea which they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to
grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea, an idea like a
butterfly’ (264). Not only is ‘this blundering effort’ at grasping the
unknown unsuccessful, but there also appears something misguided
in the pursuit itself, for Woolf questions the idea that truth can be pos-
sessed and preserved like a captured specimen (ibid.). This argument
recurs in Woolf’s discussion of the pursuit of truth in other forms. In
A Room of One’s Own, the narrator begins her lecture with the dis-
claimer that she will ‘never be able to fulfil what isÂ€… the first duty
of a lecturerÂ€– to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure
truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on
the mantelpiece for ever’ (AROO 4). Although ostensibly presented as
a failing on the part of the narrator, this resistance to conclusiveness
also implies a dismissal of categorical assertions of truth. Likewise, in
Orlando, the narrator admits that despite having ‘pray[ed] once in a
way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear
it was life’s meaning … back we must go and say straight out to the
reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life isÂ€– alas, we don’t know’
(OÂ€258–9). Through the analogies of capture and collection, Woolf
suggests the futility and error of seeking to lay claim to truth, stressing
instead its fundamental elusiveness and changeability.
The desire to possess and control that drives collection also informs
the associated activity of classification. The Voyage Out hints at the
origins of the urge to classify the natural world. St John Hirst, the
novel’s exponent of eighteenth-century rationalism (as indicated by
his devotion to Gibbon), displays an undisguised antagonism towards
nature. He asserts that ‘“nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly,
appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying”’ (VO 134). (His
pointed gendering of nature suggests his added displeasure at feel-
ing himself threatened by a force he wishes to find subordinate.)
Contemplating the South American landscape, he complains, ‘“It
makes one awfully queer, don’t you find? … These trees get on one’s
nervesÂ€– it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad. What sane per-
son could have conceived a wilderness like this, and peopled it with
apes and alligators? I should go mad if I lived hereÂ€– raving mad”’
(321). Viewing nature as opposed to reason and a threat to rationality,
Hirst embodies an outlook that fuelled the development of a universal
system of classification in the eighteenth century:Â€a desire to subor-
dinate nature to human reason and thus impose order upon what was
Â�perceived as a dangerously chaotic natural world.
Hirst is not alone in his apprehension of nature. Confronted with
‘the infinite distances of South America’, the walking party arranged
by Hirst and Hewet finds ‘the effect of so much space … at first rather
chilling. They felt themselves very small’ (146). (In Melymbrosia, the
narrator notes that this sense of insignificance in the face of nature
is intensified ‘in a foreign land where the far off hills and scattered
villages have no names’ (MEL 151).) However, the travellers combat
this sense of their own insignificance by offering judgements of the
viewÂ€– ‘“Splendid!”’Â€– and inscribing the vastness with human mean-
ing by iterating the points of the compass, ‘“NorthÂ€– SouthÂ€– EastÂ€–
West”’ (VO 146). This mental colonisation of the landscape produces
a sense of mastery that restores their ease.
When nature intrudes upon the travellers in the form of ants that
attack their picnic, they retaliate by ‘adopt[ing] the methods of mod-
ern warfare against an invading army’, a response that confirms their
desire to assert mastery over nature (149). Even Rachel, more often
presented as a victim than an agent of force, is susceptible to the desire
for control:Â€choosing ‘an inch of soil of South America’, she makes it
into ‘a world where she was endowed with the supreme power. She
bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and
wondered if the insect realized his strange adventure’ (157).
Woolf, however, suggests the presumptuousness of the human
attempt to dominate nature, whether through physical or classifica-
tory conquest. In the course of their expedition up-river, the English
travellers pass the hut of ‘Mackenzie, the famous explorer … who
went farther inland than anyone’s yet been’ (323). (In Melymbrosia
he is further identified as ‘an Englishman who came here to collect
birds’, an occupation that locates him squarely within the natural his-
tory tradition (MEL 297).) On his return journey, he ‘died of feverÂ€…
almost within reach of civilisation’, and ‘his skins and a note-book’
were found with his body (VO 323, 325). His collected specimens and
records survive him but did not grant him power over nature.
The desire for mastery by means of classification also informs
perceptions of human society. Hirst regards his fellow travellers as
beasts, remarking upon the arrival of letters from home that ‘the ani-
mals had been fed’ and proceeding, ‘stimulated by this comparison,
to liken some to hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to
swine, some to parrots, and some to loathsome reptiles curled round
the half-decayed bodies of sheep’ (198). In Melymbrosia, Hirst is even
more scientific in his comparisons, telling Hewet that ‘“the human
race, as exemplified before us, is divisible into species; hogs, horses,
cows and parrots”’ (MEL 201). In accordance with this taxonomic
philosophy, he asserts that people are ‘“all types … [T]ake this hotel.
You could draw circles round the whole lot of them, and they’d never
stray outside”’ (VO 118). Hewet’s parenthetical aside, ‘(“You can kill
a hen by doing that”)’, points to the destructiveness of imposing such
boundaries upon identity (ibid.).
In response to Hirst’s taxonomising, Hewet offers a defence of the
freedom of the self, protesting, ‘“I’m not a hen in a circle … I’m a
dove on a tree-top … I flit from branch to branch”’ (ibid.). He rejects
the rigid social divisions that Hirst lays down with the assertion, ‘“I
don’t see your circlesÂ€– I don’t see them … I see a thing like a tee-
totum spinning in and outÂ€– knocking into thingsÂ€– dashing from side
to side … Round and round they goÂ€– out there, over the rim, out of
sight”’ (119). Hewet asserts the expansiveness of identity and main-
tains the possibility of movement and contact.
Yet while Hewet resolves that ‘to Hirst’s theory of the invisible
chalk-marks he would pay no attention whatever’, the novel’s nar-
rative voice confirms that society does function along the lines that
Hirst has suggested, noting, ‘by this time the society at the hotel was
divided so as to point to invisible chalk-marks such as Mr Hirst had
described’ (167). Although demonstrably unnatural, these lines are
largely effective in inscribing divisions upon the world. Woolf reiter-
ates this argument in Three Guineas, presenting the patriarchal male
as ‘childishly intent upon scoring the floor with chalk marks, within
whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, sepa-
rately, artificially’ (TG 308). This chalk-line imagery suggests the
real constriction resulting from the inscription of artificial bounda-
ries. Even Hewet acknowledges the practical benefits of Hirst’s view
of the world. While he maintains, ‘“I’m not like Hirst … I don’t see
circles of chalk between people’s feet”’, he admits: ‘“I sometimes wish
I did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One
can’t come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making
judgements”’ (VO 251). Hewet recognises Hirst’s system of classifica-
tion to be an artificial and reductive construct but sees the usefulness
of such definitions and divisions to the attempt to arrive at a coherent
vision of the world. In Melymbrosia, the same speech suggests both
the wisdom and the danger of seeking to contemplate the world with-
out imposing artificial certainties upon it:Â€having asserted, ‘“I’m not
like Hirst, who sees neat little circles between people’s feet. I tend,
as far as I can see, to make fewer and fewer judgements”’, Hewet
reflects, ‘“Perhaps that was how Socrates died, staring into the air, his
mind a blank”’ (MEL 226). Still, Hewet maintains that living with
doubt is preferable to overwriting doubt with false certainty, and cau-
tions against ‘“the mistake of being too definite”’, of ‘“pin[ning] on
labels here and there”’ (320). Although Woolf admits the appeal of
the order that a systematic outlook permits, she maintains that its haz-
ards outweigh its benefits.
In Three Guineas, Woolf elaborates upon her distrust of labels,
maintaining that regardless of how ‘fine’ a label one chooses, ‘it is
only a label, and in our age of innumerable labels, of multicoloured
labels, we have become suspicious of labels; they kill and constrict’
(TG 357). Naming and killing, classification and capture, here appear
synonymous. In Orlando, she further suggests the futility of seeking
to ‘pin’ one’s subject ‘through the body with a name’, presenting the
imposition of a name as a vain and fumbling attempt to limit an irre-
ducible subject to a fixed identity (O 307).
C ol l e c t ion a n d C l a s s i f i c at ion
i n j a c o b’s r o o m
In addition to her broad treatment of the collection habit, Woolf con-
structs analogies based on specific collection techniques. Several crit-
ics have noted the analogy, recurring in a number of her works, that
Woolf sets up between the light of civilisation and light employed as
a lure. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf equates the light of religion and the
‘lamp of learning’ that illuminates Cambridge with the lantern that
lures insects to their capture or immolation, suggesting that society’s
promise of inclusion and enlightenment conceals a threat ( JR 50).
Christine Froula argues that Woolf warns against ‘attraction to the
lamps of a “civilization” that proves dangerous’, and Harvena Richter
likewise reads the moth as a symbolic ‘victim in its search for sweet-
ness and for light’.27
If the light of civilisation acts as a lure, society can by extension
be viewed as a body intent upon the capture and sedation of likely
specimens. In Jacob’s Room Woolf alludes to the capture and despatch
of specimens:Â€Jacob Flanders vanquishes pale clouded yellows with
sulphur fumes, while John’s stag beetle takes two days to die (25). In
the essay ‘Reading’, Woolf offers an extended description of the cap-
ture of a Red Underwing:Â€‘the poison pot was uncovered and adroitly
manoeuvred so that as he sat there the moth was covered and escape
cut off. There was a flash of scarlet within the glass. Then he com-
posed himself with folded wings. He did not move again’ (E iii:Â€152).
This sequenceÂ€– struggle, followed by submission and composureÂ€– is
also enacted by human beings. In his early days at Cambridge, Jacob
reacts with agitation to the restrictions of genteel society; however,
the narrator correctly predicts that, with time, Jacob’s resistance to
convention will subside:Â€‘Every time he lunches out on SundayÂ€– at
dinner parties and tea partiesÂ€– there will be this same shockÂ€– hor-
rorÂ€ – discomfortÂ€ – then pleasure, for he draws into him at every
stepÂ€… such steady certainty, such reassurance from all sides’, until
he emerges at last a simultaneous victim and representative of civ-
ilisation, ‘composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melan-
choly, and bored with an august kind of boredom’ ( JR 44–5, 200).
Likewise, in Mrs Dalloway, the ‘boys in uniform’ that Peter Walsh
observes marching up Whitehall impress him with a sense that ‘life,
with its varieties, its irreticences, has been … drugged into a stiff yet
staring corpse by discipline’ (MD 57).
In addition to her use of specimen collection as an analogy for soci-
ety’s constraining and deadening influence, Woolf suggests that the
possessiveness and destructiveness of collection are linked to the mili-
tarism and imperialism of turn-of-the-century Europe. Phillips notes
that ‘the vocabulary of the butterfly hunt’ in Jacob’s Room ‘announces
World War I’.28 Woolf’s allusions to white admirals, purple emperors,
death’s-head moths, pale clouded yellows ‘vanquished’ by sulphur
fumes, ‘blues settl[ing] on little bones lying on the turf’, ‘painted
ladies and peacocks feast[ing] upon bloody entrails’, and the sound
of a tree falling, like ‘a volley of pistol-shots’, during Jacob’s moth
hunt foreshadow Jacob’s death in the war in a metaphorical sense
( JR 25–7, 170).29 Phillips further contends that Jacob’s participa-
tion in the hobby of collection implicates him practically in the cul-
ture of violence that precipitated the war.30 The pastime inculcates
aggression and acquisitiveness:Â€Jacob ‘does not just observe the crab
but aggressively captures it, appropriating a treasure for his private
store. Conquest and hoarding might come naturally, but his society
reinforces such instincts by marking them as “heroic.”’31
It is not only violence and acquisitiveness that the practice of nat-
ural history encourages. The urge to name, catalogue, and arrange
within a system are likewise promoted by the pastime and are equally
influential in shaping wider patterns of behaviour. Woolf is preoccu-
pied in Jacob’s Room with naming and the inefficacy of names, and she
expresses this concern through reference to the scientific classifica-
tion of specimens. She depicts Jacob in the act of classification:Â€with
F. O. Morris’s primer before him, he scrutinises a captured moth spe-
cimen, observing,
The upper wings of the moth … were undoubtedly marked with kidney-
shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescent upon the underÂ�
wingÂ€…
Morris called it ‘an extremely local insect found in damp or marshy places’.
But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a very fine pen,
made a correction in the margin …
No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing. (26–7)
In one sense, Woolf is doing no more than stating a fact when she
notes Morris’s tendency to error (see Mullens and Swann’s judge-
ment of Morris’s work);32 it is in fact proof of her own credentials as
a naturalist that she was alert to Morris’s mistakes. In another sense,
however, Woolf’s representation of a failed attempt at classification
indicates her low opinion of taxonomic methods as a means of arriv-
ing at meaningful understanding.
Woolf’s allusions to the description of species in conventional
works of natural history also imply a critique of the way in which
taxonomic science was employed to buttress the existing social order.
The narrator of Jacob’s Room remarks, ‘Perhaps the Purple Emperor
is feasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base
of an oak tree’ (170). As Robinson has noted, this depiction of the
Purple Emperor is significant for its subversion of its source material,
for Morris offers no such description of the species.33 Morris portrays
the Purple Emperor ‘perched on the outermost spray of some com-
manding oak … the highest that the neighbouring locality affords
him. There he sits, an Island King … conscious that at home he is
secure.’34 Morris’s description assumes a hierarchy among species that
conforms to human social hierarchies and thus justifies these hier-
archies by implying their naturalness. Woolf’s repositioning of the
Purple Emperor, while still offering an accurate description of butter-
fly behaviour, undermines such hierarchical assumptions and at the
same time inverts the patriotism of Morris’s description into a critique
of the rapacity of empire.
Building upon these reflections on taxonomic natural history,
Woolf employs classification as a metaphor for the construction of
identity in society. A fundamental assumption of the taxonomic
method is that a name can define its subject, that the taxonomist, to
quote Linnaeus,
designates at first sight any body in nature in such a way that the body expresses
the name that is proper to it, and this name … recalls all the knowledge that
may, in the course of time, have been acquired about the body thus named:Â€so
that in the midst of extreme confusion there is revealed the sovereign order of
nature.35
Woolf, however, presents the naming process not as a revelation of

authentic identity but rather as the construction of an artificial per-
sona. In Jacob’s Room, the narrator notes that Florinda’s name ‘had
been bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that
the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked’; this imposition of
a name functions as an attempt to circumscribe Florinda’s identity
and restrict her to a role of virginity (103). Similarly, at Cambridge,
Sopwith reduces ‘old Chucky’ to the role of ‘the unsuccessful provin-
cial’ through his condescending use of a nickname, leaving the boy to
lament that no one uses ‘Stenhouse his real name’ and that ‘Sopwith
brought back by using the other everything, everything, “all I could
never be”’ (51).
The taxonomic naming of species also has possessive connota-
tions, for the Linnaean system of nomenclature records not only the
Latin binomial of each species but also the name of the naturalist who
published the first description of the species (e.g., Papilio machaon
Linnaeus). By designating a species, an entomologist thus lays claim
to it as his or her own. Naming takes on similarly possessive implica-
tions in Jacob’s Room. By writing her son’s name out in full, ‘Jacob
Alan Flanders, Esq., as mothers do’, Betty Flanders seeks to assert
her claim over her son and to demonstrate her right to dictate his
actions:Â€through the writing of Jacob’s name, Mrs Flanders seeks to
tell him, ‘Don’t go with bad women, do be a good boy; wear your
thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back to me’ (122). If
the power to name implies possession and control, the ‘staking and
extending [of] a verbal claim’, renaming is, by extension, a means of
appropriation.36 Thus, Edwin Mallett’s poem to ‘Chloe’, written in
aid of his courtship of Clara, serves as an attempt to demonstrate sole
possession of her (114).
In Orlando, Woolf also suggests the constricting influence of names
by dwelling on the liberating effect of anonymity. Orlando, having
been hurt by negative publicity, reflects upon ‘the value of obscur-
ity, and the delight of having no name’, concluding that ‘obscurity
is dark, ample and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unim-
peded’ (O 101, 100). If one doubts the wisdom of Orlando’s ‘profound
thoughts’ on the advantages of remaining nameless, the argument
recurs in Three Guineas in Woolf’s suggestion that ‘ease and freedom,
the power to change and the power to grow, can only be preserved by
obscurity’ (O 101; TG 322).
While depicting individuals’ efforts to use the naming process
to control and restrict identity, Woolf maintains that names cannot
define their subjects. Betty Flanders assigns to her deceased hus-
band the title of ‘Merchant of this city’; however, she acknowledges
that this is merely a gesture towards convention, for ‘she had to call
him something. An example for the boys.’ The issue of his iden-
tity remains ‘an unanswerable question’ ( JR 15). Similarly, while
characters throughout the novel call Jacob’s name in the hope of
receiving a reply that will allow them to know him, their calls go
unanswered. The question of Jacob’s nature remains unresolved at
his death, and Bonamy calls for ‘“Jacob! Jacob!”’ without any hope
of a responseÂ€(247).
The naming of specimens is part of a larger process of scientific
classification meant to place each species within the hierarchy pre-
sumed to exist in nature. Society employs a similar method of catego-
risation that ignores individual traits in order to classify its members
by type:Â€the narrator of Jacob’s Room comments, ‘to prevent us from
being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have
arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls,
boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There
is no need to distinguish details’ (91). Just as Jacob examines the
markings of his moth specimen in an effort to determine its species,
observers scrutinise Jacob’s appearance and attitudes in an attempt
to ascertain ‘which seat in the opera house was his, stalls, gallery, or
dress circle’ (94). However, like Jacob’s moth specimen, which pos-
sesses the expected ‘kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue’ but lacks
the anticipated ‘crescent upon the underwing’, the question of Jacob’s
social standing leaves society gossips ‘vacillat[ing] eternally’ (26, 215).
The reiterated observation that Jacob is ‘extraordinarily awkward …
[y]et so distinguished-looking’ suggests the difficulties of categorisa-
tion (94, 160, 201, 215). While even the practical matter of his place in
the class hierarchy remains in doubt, the question of his character is
an even greater mystery. Relying upon ‘the infallible test of appear-
ance’, Mrs Norman examines Jacob as a specimen, ‘taking note of
socks (loose), of tie (shabby)’ and scrutinising his facial features and
behaviour in order to ascertain whether he should be classified as a
dangerous man or a boy much like her own son (36). However, as
the narrator points out, ‘of all futile occupations this of cataloguing
features is the worst’ (94). Either classification would reduce Jacob to
a type, for, as Rachel Bowlby concludes, Mrs Norman’s speculations
come ‘no nearer to any “Jacob” when she is likening him to her son
than when she is taking him as belonging to the class of men’.37
While Jacob is subjected to society’s urge to capture and clas-
sify, he is also implicated in this process. It is Jacob who engages in
entomological collection, capturing pale clouded yellows in a clover
field, luring moths with his lantern, and trapping glow-worms in pill
boxes; and it is Jacob who works to identify and classify his specimens
through reference to Morris’s butterfly book, which he annotates with
his own findings (26, 170). Robinson has interpreted this act of annoÂ�
tation as evidence of Jacob’s rebellion against received authority; how-
ever, it may also be read as an indication of Jacob’s participation and
Â�complicity in the classification process.38 Jacob attempts to categorise
Clara by means similar to those that Mrs Norman employed in her
efforts to classify him. Meeting her for the first time, ‘Jacob named
the shape in yellow gauze Timothy’s sister, Clara’; he identifies her by
locating her within the pre-existing system of relations that he holds
in his mind (75). Furthermore, he accepts and employs the categor-
ies into which women are systematically divided:Â€convention assumes
that a woman must be either a ‘Sylvia’, a model of female virtue who
‘excels each mortal thing’, or a ‘Magdalen’, a whore, and Jacob places
Clara firmly within the former category through his description of
her as ‘a flawless mind; a candid nature; a virgin chained to a rock’
(119, 151, 169). As the example of Jacob demonstrates, the victims of
the classification process are also its perpetrators.
I d e n t i t y f o r m at ion i n t h e wa v e s
In The Waves, too, Woolf illustrates the way in which the restric-
tion of identity through classification co-opts individuals into par-
ticipation in the system in which they find themselves contained. The
first extended monologue of the novel is spoken by Louis. In it he
voices a sense of unity with the natural world:Â€‘“I am alone … stand-
ing by the wall among the flowers … I hold a stalk in my hand. I
am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through
earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and sil-
ver”’ (TW 7). However, this sense of rootedness and oneness with
his natural surroundings is threatened by the approach of Bernard,
Neville, Jinny, and Susan, butterfly nets in hand. Louis watches as
they ‘“skim the flower-beds with their nets. They skim the butterflies
from the nodding tops of flowers … Their nets are full of fluttering
wings. ‘Louis! Louis!’ they shout”â•›’ (ibid.). In the capture of butter-
flies and the calling of his name, the other children seem to Louis
similarly bent on entrapment. He rejoices that ‘“they cannot see
[him]”’ and prays, ‘“Oh Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their
butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel. Let them count
out their Â�tortoise-shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites. But
let me be unseen”’ (7–8). He fears to share the fate of the butterflies,
caught, scrutinised, and definitively classified. Yet he cannot escape.
He relates that, as he hides behind the hedge, ‘“an eye-beam is slid
through the chink. Its beams strike me. I am a boy in a grey flan-
nel suit”’ (8). Louis experiences Jinny’s intrusionÂ€– ‘“She has found
me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is
shattered”’Â€– as an attack, a blow that reduces him from his former
state of connectedness with the surrounding natural world to ‘“a boy
in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake”’ (8, 7). Jinny
confirms Louis’s sense of having been captured and constrained with
the remark, ‘“I am thrown over you like a net of light”’ (8). Louis is
thus drawn into relation with others, but in the process finds himself
more isolated than before, for the imposition of an individual identity
paradoxically destroys his sense of identification with the surround-
ing world.
Following his interpellation into society, Louis relates the prob-
lem of identity-formation even more explicitly to taxonomy, likening
his life to an intricate organism rendered coherent through classifi-
cation:Â€ ‘“all the furled and close-packed leaves of my many-folded
life are now summed in my name; incised cleanly and barely on the
sheet … I have fused my many lives into one”’ (127). However, this
coherent identity is achieved at a price:Â€a complex and multifaceted
existence is reduced to a single quality. Neville senses the danger of
such classification and questions the very basis of the taxonomic out-
look when he asks, ‘“[W]hy discriminate? Nothing should be named
lest by doing so we change it. Let it exist”’ (60). Far from revealing
the true nature of things, Woolf suggests, the act of naming alters and
restricts identity in trying to express it.
Woolf concedes that there is a superficial sense of comfort to be
had from being accorded a definite place in the social order, but she
places greater emphasis on the ways in which such classification
restricts and isolates. No longer able to feel himself at one with his
surroundings, Louis is painfully conscious of being classed as foreign,
and he attempts, in Phillips’s words, to ‘lose his awkward difference
in artificial sameness’.39 He seeks to overcome his sense of isolation
and regain his lost sense of unity by means of mimicry, resolving,
‘“I will not conjugate the verb … until Bernard has said it. My father
is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will
wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English”’ (13).
He wishes to rediscover a sense of ‘“complete integration”’, but now
seeks it through conformity to the system in which he has been placed
(28). Religion presents a means by which a sense of inclusion and
expanded identity may be regained or at least simulated. Upon enter-
ing the school chapel, Louis feels that he has recovered his sense of
connection, believing ‘“we put off our distinctions as we enter”’ (24).
In contrast to the constriction he felt on being reduced to a colonial
in grey flannels, on hearing the minister read the sermon, his ‘“heart
expands in [the minister’s] bulk, in his authority”’, and he recovers
‘“the sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down till they
wrap themselves round some hardness at the centre. I recover my
continuity … I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge
wheel”’ (24–5). Louis escapes the sense of difference imposed upon
him by adopting the shared identity of a religious community, but it
is suggested that this is accomplished by submitting his private self
to a dominant authority rather than by achieving a sense of oneness
with the surrounding world. He does not escape his imposed identity,
but rather finds consolation from being accorded a place within the
system that first classified him as different.
Those who feel their exclusion less severely are more conscious
of the threat posed by the submission of one’s self to social institu-
tions:Â€ Neville, listening to the same minister who inspires Louis,
declares, ‘“The brute menaces my liberty when he prays”’, and
Bernard, expanding on the use of the butterfly hunt as a metaphor
for entrapment, agrees: ‘“He has minced the dance of the white but-
terflies at the door to powder”’ (25, 26). Through the analogies of
collection and classification, Woolf depicts the obliteration of Louis’s
former, unrestricted sense of self and his confinement within a social
hierarchy that marks him as inferior.
The taxonomic tradition of natural history functions in Woolf’s
work as a stable point of reference with consistent associations.
Woolf repeatedly presents collection and classification as constrain-
ing, reductive, and deadening in their effects, and her reservations
regarding these practices were symptomatic of changing attitudes
towards taxonomic work in both the life sciences and society more
broadly around the turn of the century. However, as will be shown in
the next chapter, Woolf’s disdain for taxonomic science did not signal
her disapproval of the life sciences in all forms.
Chapter 4
Laboratory coats and field-glasses

Virginia Woolf and the modern study of nature
Woolf’s most frequently cited comment on science is her assertion

in Three Guineas that ‘science, it would seem, is not sexless; she is
a man, a father, and infected too. Science, thus infected, produced
measurements to order’ (TG 360). This declaration has been inter-
preted by many as a wholesale rejection of science. Sue Curry Jansen,
for example, reads this statement as proof of Woolf’s conviction that
‘androcentric bias is a constituent principle of the modern, Western,
scientific outlook’.1 Woolf’s disdain for the taxonomic tradition, out-
lined in the last chapter, might be taken as further evidence of such
a conviction. However, as is suggested by the fact that even in the
above statement she employs a feminine pronoun in her reference to
science, Woolf’s views on science are more complex than this. It is,
after all, to a scientific perspective that Woolf attributes the discov-
ery of the infection in science itself:Â€she praises Professor Grensted as
‘an impartial and scientific operator’ for having ‘dissected the human
mind’ and discovered as a result the ‘germ’ of the ‘“infantile fixation”’
(to give the infection ‘[i]ts scientific name’) (341). Not all scientific
perspectives appear to Woolf infected by patriarchal bias.
Woolf’s dismissal of infected science in Three Guineas is offered
specifically as a judgement upon craniology, already by the early
twentieth century a discredited science, as demonstrated by Bertrand
Russell’s comment, cited by Woolf, that ‘[a]nyone … who desires
amusement may be advised to look up the tergiversations of eminent
craniologists in their attempts to prove from brain measurements that
women are stupider than men’ (360). Woolf rejects as infected any sci-
ence that seeks evidence in nature to confirm the unalterability of the
existing social order and that has as its end the location of its subjects
106
Virginia Woolf and the modern study of nature 107
within a fixed hierarchy of value. It is just such a discipline that elicits
Woolf’s declaration of the infected quality of science, and it is to an
analogy with the more ‘impartial’ science of germ theory that Woolf
turns to refute the arguments of this infected science (341). While
disdaining sciences complicit in the maintenance of a pre-established
hierarchy, Woolf regards science as capable of disinterestedness.
Woolf’s criticisms of science thus constitute not a wholesale rejec-
tion of science but rather a demonstration of her engagement with
scientific arguments, and she was often in agreement with contempor-
ary scientific outlooks. Her view of Darwin, for example, accorded
with early twentieth-century scientific responses to Darwinian evo-
lution. Critics such as Gillian Beer and Elizabeth Lambert have noted
both Woolf’s respect for Darwin and her willingness to challenge his
arguments. Woolf’s appreciation for the immense shift in thought
that Darwin’s work brought about is evident in both her life and her
writing. As Beer points out, when Woolf’s house in Tavistock Square
was bombed in October 1940, Darwin’s works, along with her own
diaries, the silver, and some glass and china, were among the things
she took from the wreckage (D v:Â€331).2 In her fiction, Woolf repeat-
edly employs Darwin as a model of human potential, ‘an example
of the apex of human achievement’, and she frequently draws upon
evolutionary concepts for their imaginative power.3 Nevertheless,
Woolf does not accept Darwin’s arguments unquestioningly. Beer
observes that, while interested in those aspects of Darwin’s writing
that suggested ‘kinship between past and present forms, … the lateral
ties between human kind and other animals, [and] the constancy of
the primeval’, Woolf rejected the Victorian interpretation of evolu-
tion as an assurance of ‘development as improvement’.4 Beer presents
Woolf’s reservations regarding Darwin’s evolutionary arguments,
her ‘scepticism about developmental narratives and irreversible trans-
formations’, as ‘part of her debate with her Victorian progenitors,
her Victorian self’.5 Lambert likewise notes Woolf’s ambivalence to
Darwinism. She suggests that Woolf ‘appropriated Darwin’s name
and writing as an ambiguous authority’, treating the particulars of
the evolutionary argument ‘as concepts, not as truth’.6 Lambert con-
tends that in her irreverent treatment of Darwinian arguments Woolf
was iconoclastic and anticipated the ‘current feminist critique of
science’.7 However, Darwin was not an irrefutable scientific author-
ity, sacred and untouchable, in the period spanning Woolf’s adult life.
Scientific scepticism regarding the Darwinian explanation of evolu-
tion peaked in the early twentieth century, during the period of con-
troversy over the means by which evolution occurred that preceded
the achievement of the modern evolutionary synthesis. As I noted
earlier, Woolf’s allusions to Mendel and his work, in Night and Day
and Mrs DallowayÂ€– her discussion of Cassandra’s interest in the laws
governing ‘the recurrence of blue eyes and brown’, for exampleÂ€ –
indicate her familiarity with the fundamentals of Mendelian genetics
and her awareness of alternatives to the Darwinian explanation of
evolution (ND 385). Woolf’s debate with her Victorian progenitors
on the subject of evolutionary arguments thus coincided with mod-
ern biologists’ challenging of Victorian evolutionary assumptions. In
interrogating Darwin’s authority and casting doubt upon his argu-
ments, Woolf was in accord with the prevailing tendency among
early twentieth-century biologists to challenge the particulars of
Darwinian evolution.
Woolf’s allusions to Darwin in Mrs Dalloway suggest his position
in the eyes of her generation. She presents Darwin alongside the
‘Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare’ as representing a pinnacle of human
thought and as essential reading for self-educated clerks (MD 74,Â€93).
Woolf also mentions Darwin several times in conjunction with Aunt
Helena and her book on Burmese orchids, a connection that suggests
that, like Miss Parry, Darwin may be viewed as a monumental fig-
ure representative of a ‘different age’, ‘stand[ing] up on the horizon,
stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse, marking some past stage on
this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable … this inter-
minable life’ (174). By contrast, Woolf alludes to ‘the Mendelian
theory’ alongside Einstein and the aeroplane as symbols of man’s
continuing aspirations (33). While Woolf’s allusions to Darwin
suggest the heights of thought achieved by past thinkers, Woolf
presents Mendelian genetics together with the new physics and aero-
nautics as representative of contemporary intellectual striving. Like
Aunt Helena, whom Peter mistakenly assumes to be dead, Darwin’s
contemporary relevance was underestimated by his early twentieth-
century successors, a fact that would be acknowledged following the
attainment of the modern evolutionary synthesis; nevertheless, in pre-
senting Darwin as a monumental figure of the past in Mrs Dalloway,
Woolf was reflecting contemporary scientific opinion. Interestingly,
in Between the Acts, Darwin is mentioned in association with the con-
temporary scientists and popularisers of science Arthur Eddington
and James Jeans (BTA 14). Woolf’s final novel was written at a time
when Darwinian natural selection was once again gaining acceptance
as partÂ€ – though not the wholeÂ€ – of the explanation for evolution.
Woolf’s presentation of Darwin as a figure of contemporary as well
as historical significance here coincides with Darwin’s reintegration
into the modern evolutionary synthesis, though this did not prevent
either Woolf or her scientific contemporaries from continuing to test
the particulars of Darwin’s arguments.
T h e n e w b iol o g y
Among the disciplines of the life sciences that Woolf embraced as dis-
interested was the new biology of the laboratory. Woolf’s approval of
the new biology can be seen in her characterisation of William Bankes
in To the Lighthouse. Bankes is carefully constructed as a model of the
new biologist. A botanist whose particular subject is physiological,
‘the digestive system of plants’, his admiration for Darwin situates
him within the evolutionist school of thought, while ‘the white sci-
entific coat which seemed to clothe him’ at all times links him to
the laboratory (TTL 55, 80, 54). His manner of relating to people
appears an outgrowth of his science:Â€Woolf describes him as capable
of ‘love … distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch
its object’ (54). This is the antithesis of the collector’s love, fulfilled
only through possession. Bankes also displays a spirit of objective
inquiry that Woolf associates with science in its purest form, and, for
this reason, Lily Briscoe accepts his examination of her painting. She
appreciates his ‘disinterested intelligence … the vague aloof way that
was natural to a man who spent so much time in laboratories’ and
values his opinion, convinced that ‘thanks to his scientific mind he
understood’ (191). Looking at Lily’s painting, ‘he took it scientifically
in complete good faith … [H]e turned, with his glasses raised to the
scientific examination of her canvas. The question being one of the
relations of masses, of lights and shadows, which to be honest, he had
never considered before, he would like to have it explainedÂ€ – what
then did she wish to make of it?’ (60).
Lily’s willingness to allow Bankes to examine her painting, which
stems from her sense of his scientific disinterestedness, is all the more
striking when contrasted with her fear of Mr Ramsay’s scrutiny of
her work. Lily fears Mr Ramsay’s ‘exactingness’, a reference to what
might also be described as the categorical quality of Mr Ramsay’s out-
look. Mr Ramsay conceives of his own intellectual efforts in the form
of a rigidly linear alphabetical progression in which he has stalled at
Q (40–41). His conception of thought as consisting of discrete units
arranged in an orderly fashion to be run through in a methodical
manner emphasises the systematic quality of Mr Ramsay’s mental
process. Cam, watching her father read, imagines that he is attempt-
ing ‘to pin down some thought more exactly’, an image that sug-
gests a taxonomist’s capture and classification of specimens (205). Mr
Ramsay’s outlook is categorical in another sense as well:Â€he harbours
a ‘secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was
true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered
with a fact’ (10).
It is through contrast with Mr Ramsay’s systematic and categorical
mind, suggestive of a taxonomic attitude, that Bankes’s modern sci-
entific outlook appears to best advantage. It is against Mr Ramsay’s
grasping love of his wife that Bankes’s love for Mrs Ramsay appears
distilled and disinterested. Likewise, while Lily fears Mr Ramsay’s
judgement of her work, she welcomes Bankes’s inquiries into her art-
istic aims and strategies. Thus, Woolf suggests that while a taxono-
mising mind, intent only on the categorisation of what it sees, might
be expected to stifle creativity, a mind trained in the study of function
is more inclined to seek to understand the purpose of a work of art
than to judge it on the basis of pre-existing categories.
In Night and Day, Ralph Denham’s amateur interest in botany pro-
vides Woolf with another opportunity to contrast opposing scientific
outlooks. In the course of a single conversation, Denham passes
through a range of approaches to nature. When he veers towards the
taxonomic, Katharine mockingly deflates his authority:
In naming the little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus disguising
some flower familiar even in Chelsea, and making her exclaim, half in amuse-
ment, at his knowledge. Her own ignorance was vast, she confessed. What did
one call that tree opposite, for instance, supposing one condescended to call it
by its English name? (ND 347)
Yet, his pedantic taxonomising aside, Denham’s view of nature is comÂ�
pelling to Katharine. ‘A little attention to a diagram which Denham
proceeded to draw upon an envelope soon put Katharine in posses-
sion of some of the fundamental distinctions between our British
trees’:Â€this method parallels T. H. Huxley’s practice of Â�teaching not
endless lists of species names but rather the general lines along which
species differ (ibid.). Denham’s exposition on the make-up of plants
likewise recalls the new biology in its focus on life processes:
to him [flowers] were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living
things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities, which adapted
themselves by all manner of ingenious devices to live and beget life, and
could be fashioned squat or tapering, flame-coloured or pale, pure or
spotted, by processes which might reveal the secrets of human existence.
(347–8)
Considering plants as living organisms whose fascination lies in their
development, functioning, and evolution, Denham signals the move-
ment beyond taxonomic description.
Woolf also presents the modern study of biology as a possible
means of emancipation for women. In The Years, Rose Pargiter’s
exclusion from the masculine sphere of education was figured in part
through her exclusion from the pastime of natural history. The fact
that, a generation later, Peggy can pursue a career as a medical doctor
suggests the magnitude of the shift in gender roles that has occurred
in the interim. Significantly, Peggy is not only a practising doctor but
also a laboratory scientist, as Eleanor reveals when she inquires after
the results of Peggy’s ‘experiment with the guinea-pig’ (TY 316).
Peggy thus participates not only in an established profession but also
in a scientific field designated as modern. The fact that it is the natural
history tradition from which Rose is excluded and the experimental
science of the laboratory in which Peggy takes part further confirms
Woolf’s perception of the former as quintessentially Victorian and
the latter as representative of the modern.
Woolf does not suggest by this that one can place one’s faith in
modern science unreservedly. Although in The Years Renny appears
earnest in his declaration that ‘science is the religion of the future’,
Woolf’s often critical views of religion imply that this comparison is
intended to provoke reflection rather than agreement (227). Woolf
suggests a distinction between religion and science through her
depiction of Peggy. Peggy, like Renny, views science as the Â�successor
of religion:Â€she reflects that ‘all her patients said … RestÂ€– restÂ€– let
me rest. How to deaden; how to cease to feel; that was the cry of
the woman bearing children; to rest, to cease to be. In the Middle
Ages, she thought, it was the cell; the monastery; now it’s the labora-
tory’ (337). However, unlike Renny, Peggy appears conscious of the
limitations of both forms of consolation. She is not uncritical of her
field or her colleagues. She feels it her duty to ‘disabuse her elders
of their belief in science, partly because their credulity amused her,
partly because she was daily impressed by the ignorance of doctors’
(312). Peggy’s capacity to regard her own discipline with scepticism
suggests that science has the potential to avoid dogmatic faith in its
own ordering system.
The theme of science as an emancipatory outlet for women is also
present in Night and Day in the story of Cassandra, although in this
case the modern woman’s self-determination through the Â�pursuit
of science is interrupted. When she first appears in the narrative,
Cassandra is an unconventional girl with wide and eccentric Â�interests,
including the breeding of silkworms, the psychology of Â�animals,
and Mendel’s theory of inherited characteristics (ND 296, 385). Her
scientific interests, inasmuch as they form a part of her unique and
self-constructed programme of education, have secured for her ‘the
not despicable virtues of vivacity and freshness’, and Cassandra
Â�initially appears comparable to Katharine in her bid for intellectual
Â�independence (359).
However, Cassandra’s attempts at self-determination through sci-
ence come under attack. Her mother, Lady Otway, objects to her hob-
bies and turns to Katharine for assistance when ‘one day, she opened
Cassandra’s bedroom door on a mission of discovery, and found the
ceiling hung with mulberry-leaves, the windows blocked with cages,
and the tables stacked with home-made machines for the manufac-
ture of silk dresses’ (217). Lady Otway’s objections to Cassandra’s
activities centre around the impropriety of such pastimes for a girl.
She complains, ‘It’s all Henry’s doing, you know, giving up her par-
ties and taking to these nasty insects. It doesn’t follow that if a man
can do a thing a woman may too’, and she enlists Katharine’s help
to Â�convince Cassandra to ‘take an interest in something that other
people are interested in’ (ibid.). At this stage, before her own desire
for Â�self-determination becomes evident, Katharine strikes Lady
Otway as the ‘perfect daughter, or daughter-in-law’, whom she ‘could
not help contrasting … with Cassandra, surrounded by innumerable
silkworms in her bedroom’ (218).
Despite her own growing desire for independence, Katharine
seems willing to sacrifice Cassandra to convention. At Lady Otway’s
request, she encourages her young cousin to ‘put her creatures in the
charge of a groom and come to them for a week or so’, and she warns
Cassandra that her ‘dislike of rational society … was an affectation fast
hardening into a prejudice, which would, in the long run, isolate her
from all interesting people and pursuits’ (324). She betrays Cassandra
still further in advising William Rodney, when he confesses his affec-
tion for Cassandra but his dislike for her ‘dreadful insects’, that he
might ‘insist that she confined herself toÂ€ – toÂ€ – Â�something else …
[S]he cares for music; I believe she writes poetry’ (302). Katharine
seeks to quash Cassandra’s eccentricity while protecting her own; in
fact, her sacrificing of Cassandra to convention serves as a means of
safeguarding her own independence, for it secures her release from
William Rodney.
Partly as a result of Katharine’s interference, Cassandra undergoes
the conversion that Katharine escapes. Appealed to for comfort by a
man, ‘she forgot all about the psychology of animals, and the recur-
rence of blue eyes and brown, and became, instantly, engrossed in
her feelings as a woman, who could administer consolation’ (385–6).
Although ‘there were moments when she felt so young and inexperi-
enced that she almost wished herself back with the silk-worms at
Stogdon House, and not embarked on this bewildering intrigue’, under
pressure from the combined forces of her mother, William Rodney,
and Katharine, she succumbs, devoting herself to the conventional
pastimes foisted upon her and accepting the fate that Katharine strug-
gled to evade as William Rodney’s fiancée (484). Despite Cassandra’s
ultimate failure to escape established gender roles, it is significant that
her bid for independence took the form of an interest in science. In
this, Cassandra recalls H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica and anticipates
Marie Stopes’s Lilian Rullford, as well as Woolf’s own Chloe and
Olivia.
a r o o m o f o n e ’s o w nand the influence

of M a r ie Stope s
Woolf’s reference to ‘Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary
Carmichael’ in A Room of One’s Own is frequently taken as an allu-
sion to Love’s Creation, a novel published by Marie Stopes under the
pseudonym Marie Carmichael in 1928 (AROO 104).8 In her essay,
Woolf analyses Life’s Adventure as an exemplary novel by a Â�modern
woman writer. Discussions of Chloe and Olivia, the protagonists of
Life’s Adventure as summarised by Woolf, often build upon the assump-
tion that these figures have parallels in Stopes’s novel and thus that
the described circumstances of these characters accurately reflect the
fictional representation of women in this period. However, Woolf’s
description of Life’s Adventure and her representation of Chloe and
Olivia as collaborating female scientists constitute not a straight-
forward citation of Stopes’s novel but a pointed rewriting of it, and
Woolf’s chosen revisions illustrate her own views of women’s occu-
pations and relationships and what fiction should tell us of these.
The explanatory notes that accompany Woolf’s references to
Mary Carmichael and Life’s Adventure in recent editions of A Room
of One’s Own typically suggest a connection between Life’s Adventure
and Love’s Creation without indicating the extent of the resemblance
between the two texts:Â€the 1998 Oxford edition, for example, explains,
‘Marie Carmichael was the novelistic pseudonym of the birth-
control activist Marie Stopes. In 1928 she published a novel called
Love’s Creation’ (AROO 420 n. 104). Similarly, literary critics some-
times imply the identity of the two authors or overstate the resem-
blance of their works. In an entry on A Room of One’s Own in The
Literary Encyclopedia, Anna Snaith declares that ‘Mary Carmichael,
the woman writer, author of Life’s Adventure, was the pseudonym
for Marie Stopes’, a statement that disregards the spelling of Stopes’s
pseudonym, blurring the distinction between Woolf’s Mary and
Stopes’s Marie, and Snaith goes on to describe Love’s Creation as ‘a
novel which contains women scientists, like Chloe and Olivia’.9 Jane
Marcus likewise states that Stopes’s novel ‘opens with two women
in a laboratory, setting the scene for Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia’, and
this statement has been taken as authoritative by others:Â€Lauren Rusk
cites Marcus in support of her argument that Woolf’s half-coded allu-
sions to Love’s Creation, ‘a novel that “opens with two women in a
laboratory, setting the scene for Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia”, … estab-
lish with her listeners a conspiratorial relation “of women in league
together against authority”’.10
However, the suggestion that Stopes portrays women in scientific
collaboration is misleading. Her novel in fact opens:
In one of those innumerable interpenetrating worlds composing London, the
clatter of departing students still echoed in the zoological laboratory. The
attendant and his boy satellite cleared away the half-dissected rabbits pinned
out on small wooden trays, which had nominally been occupying the minds of
thirty young men during the afternoon.
‘How that formalin stinks!’
‘We need some lady students with scentÂ€– like they ’ave downstairs, Sir!’
‘God forbid!’ (LC 1)
Although ‘lady students’ are acknowledged to exist, the novel’s open-
ing depicts the laboratory as a masculine space from which women
are conspicuously absent. Nor does Lilian Rullford, who appears in
the second chapter and who remains the only female scientist met
with for the remainder of the novel, live up to the representation of
Chloe and Olivia offered by Woolf. Lilian is a skilled scientist who
wins a place in the above-mentioned laboratory. However, she shares
her work space not with another female scientist but with Dr Kenneth
Harvey, the demonstrator so perturbed at the novel’s outset by ‘the
new plagueÂ€– learned women’ (56). Lilian and Kenneth fall in love
and marry, continuing to work together in the laboratory following
their wedding. This sequence of events may be read as a triumph over
the misogyny of the scientific establishment and the conventions gov-
erning women and work. Yet despite this representation of a married
woman pursuing a scientific career, Stopes’s narrative falls short of
Woolf’s conception of Chloe and Olivia together in a laboratory. The
unprecedented aspect of Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure, Woolf
suggests in A Room of One’s Own, lies in its Â�portrayal of women not
‘only in relation to the other sex’ but in relation to one another and to
concerns beyond the romantic (AROO 107). Life’s Adventure strikes
Woolf as a work of revolutionary potential because in it ‘two women
are represented as friends’ and not simply feminine confidantes but
professional colleagues, an association that adds new Â�complexity to the
literary representation of female relationships (ibid.). Love’s Creation,
by contrast, subsumes the narrative of the female Â�scientist within a
traditional romantic plot, such that the resolution to the Â�problem of
misogyny in science is achieved through marriage. Stopes’s novel thus
does little to counteract the impression that love is ‘the only Â�possible
interpreter’ of women in fiction (AROO 109).
Furthermore, in Stopes’s novel, the female scientist is subject to
ambivalent treatment. Despite her professional success, Lilian is por-
trayed as lacking the fundamental human (or perhaps merely femin-
ine) quality of sympathy:Â€she says herself that ‘there was something,
to her intangible, that was real … and affected other people, that they
understood and could seize upon but that just touched her elusively in
the dark’ (LC 31). Her shortcomings are highlighted by contrast with
the sensitivity of her sister, Rose Amber, who keeps house for the two
women while training to be a secretary and who appears the embodi-
ment of ‘mother comfort’, eliciting from an admirer the comment,
‘Ah! Rose Amber we all come to you, we human beings, don’t we? To
be mothered and patched up and put on our feet again’ (55, 28). In con-
trast to Rose Amber, Lilian is made to appear incomplete. Even more
significantly, Lilian is prevented from developing as either a scientist
or a fictional protagonist. Shortly after her marriage to Kenneth, she
is killed in a cycling accident. The female scientist is shunted from
the novel and her place (both as narrative focus and, ultimately, as
Kenneth’s love interest) is assumed by Rose Amber.
Unlike her sister, Rose Amber does not challenge the conventions
of femininity through participation in the masculine sphere of sci-
ence. Nevertheless, she initially appears something of a New Woman
herself. She expresses liberal views on the subject of love and mar-
riage, arguing that ‘our whole social life is built up on the idea of
an old-fashioned novel, in which people fall in love, marry and live
happily ever after’, and she suggests that a new and truer model is
necessary (76). She contends that ‘what the world needs … is some-
one to sympathise and understand the real insides of people’s private
troubles’, and she maintains that improvements can be brought about
through social reform (77–8).
However, Rose Amber too fails to realise her potential as a New
Woman. Marriage to the possessive Harry Granville traps her in the
role of an oppressed wife, and following the death of her husband and
her subsequent attachment to Kenneth Harvey, she relinquishes her
former aspirations in favour of the role of supportive spouse and pro-
spective mother. Her closing exchange with Kenneth, now confirmed
as a great scientist, signals the thoroughness of her transformation
from a New Woman to a female helpmeet. Kenneth warns:
‘It may be that the time is not yet ripe for my theories. I may be only the next
Focus-Changer’s grandfather. How would you tolerate me as a mere ancestor
and not the great man himself?’
‘Ah, but you are the great one for me. Your work widens science and
enriches life.’
‘And your work?’
‘… Your work is the key of all I was striving after for humanity …’
‘How long can you love a man whose only claim to greatness is that he will
be a grandfather?’
… ‘So long as he is also the father of my childÂ€– always.’ (416)
This final exchange confirms the elevation of the supportive wife and
mother over both the female scientist and the social activist and sets
procreation over intellectual creativity as the primary focus of wom-
en’s energies.
Maroula Joannou argues that early twentieth-century works
depicting the female scientist, whether ultimately suggesting as does
H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909) that the proper occupation for the
gifted female scientist is to be the mother of gifted sons, or contend-
ing like Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s The Call (1924) that both science
and romantic relationships must be sacrificed to the cause of suffra-
gette activism, agree that in ‘the retelling of the New Woman scien-
tist’s story’ it is necessary ‘to arbitrate between three claimsÂ€– love,
science, and politics … One can, it seems, be a New Woman activ-
ist or a lover or a scientist but not all three and not even two of the
three.’11 Stopes’s narrative enacts the same struggle between science,
social activism, and romance or motherhood, though the roles of sci-
entist and social reformer are divided between two characters. Lilian
embodies the scientist, Rose Amber the activist, and both are killed
off, whether literally or metaphorically, to make way for the wife and
mother. Joannou’s comment that in Ann Veronica ‘the epicene, inde-
pendent New Woman of the novel’s opening is reformulated into the
anodyne New Mother thus counteracting any threat that the scan-
dalous New Woman scientist may have posed to the stability of the
social formation’ is equally applicable to Love’s Creation.12 Although
in Stopes’s novel the ‘reformulation’ that Joannou describes requires
the death of one heroine and the submission of another, Love’s Creation
too charts a reversion from the professional world of the scientist to
the domestic space of the wife and mother.
A Room of One’s Own to some extent confirms the oppositional
nature of intellectual endeavour, political activism, and romance or
motherhood. Woolf’s assertion that a woman who writes fuelled by
anger at the position of women in society will produce only stunted
and deformed works suggests the incompatibility of creative work
and feminist agitation (though under the cover of this argument
Woolf’s own essay attempts to combine the two). Elena Gualtieri
also points out an ‘ambivalence to mothering’ in Woolf’s essay.13
Speaking of Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and George
Eliot, Woolf notes ‘the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had
a child’ and implies that this may have been a necessary precondition
for their success as writers (AROO 85–6). Gualtieri also highlights
the criticism inherent in Woolf’s presentation in A Room of One’s Own
of Mrs Seton, mother of Mary Seton, as ‘the biological mother who
has exhausted herself by giving birth to thirteen children and has as
consequence been unable to provide her daughters with the “wine
and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads” that
the text insists are necessary for nourishing the mind as well as the
body’.14 However, while Woolf unquestionably rejects the absolute
elevation of motherhood over intellectual endeavour, she leaves open
the possibility of choosing among rather than between these alter-
natives. What Mary Carmichael’s narrative of Chloe and Olivia (as
summarised by Woolf) introduces is the possibility of combining
the supposedly incompatible roles of scientist, feminist, and mother.
Life’s Adventure depicts women ‘engaged in mincing liver, which is,
it seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia; although one of them was
married and hadÂ€ – I think I am right in statingÂ€ – two small chil-
dren’ (AROO 108). This scenario suggests the possibility of women
being at once scientists, mothers, and friends to one another (in itself,
Woolf suggests, a revolutionary act).15
While it may seem pedantic to dispute the conflation of Mary and
Marie and the discussion of female scientists in the plural rather than
the singular, these discrepancies are significant. Woolf’s reference
to Mary Carmichael and Life’s Adventure does call Marie Stopes and
Love’s Creation to mind, but it is not a straightforward citation, and
given the importance that Woolf accords to the representation of a
relationship between professional women supposedly offered in Life’s
Adventure, it is surely relevant that Lilian Rullford is the only female
scientist portrayed in Stopes’s novel, that her most meaningful rela-
tionship is heterosexual and romantic, and that her presence in the
novel is short-lived.
Of the laboratory scene in Life’s Adventure in which ‘Chloe watched
Olivia put a jar on a shelf and say how it was time to go home to her
children’, Woolf comments, ‘that is a sight that has never been seen
since the world began’ (AROO 110). Such a scene truly had no prece-
dent in fiction, for Stopes’s novel does not permit the female scientist to
live long enough to become a working mother with close relationships
to other professional women. Life’s Adventure constitutes not an echo
of Love’s Creation but a rewriting of it. Woolf’s variation on Stopes’s
title is no accident:Â€she transforms a narrative driven by romance into
one offering a wider view of women in which the adventure of living
extends beyond the social and biological imperative of motherhood.
Yet while there can be no easy equation of Life’s Adventure with
Love’s Creation nor of Chloe and Olivia with the female scientist as
portrayed by Stopes, A Room of One’s Own does bear traces of the
influence of Stopes’s novel in its use of scientific analogy. While Stopes
finds no permanent place for the female scientist in Love’s Creation,
her novel celebrates science itself as a creative endeavour, and Woolf
echoes this in her use of metaphors drawn from the life sciences.
Although it was Stopes’s work as a birth-control activist that made
her a household name, her only published novel, Love’s Creation, marks
a return to earlier interests, for Stopes ‘had an outstanding career as a
scientist before she became known to the world as a “sexpert”’.16 She
studied under F. W. Oliver, a pioneer in the study of palaeobotany and
ecology in England, then went to Germany, ‘the cradle of the new bioÂ�
logy’, to pursue doctoral research.17 Returning to Britain, she accepted
a place as assistant lecturer in Botany at Manchester University and
was later elected a fellow of University College, London. She wrote
textbooks on botany for the general public and maintained a steady
output of scholarly papers. In the 1920s, she turned her attention to
social reform, but she continued her scientific research alongside her
work as a sexologist and birth-control activist. Over the course of
her career, she ‘made an important contribution to Palaeobotany and
her work in the field is still referred to today’.18
Stopes’s scientific writings offer insight into the views informing
Love’s Creation. Her work Botany; or, the Modern Study of Plants (1912)
provides a general introduction to the plant sciences and, as the title
suggests, focuses on ‘the botany of this century’, with chapters on
morphology, anatomy, cytology, physiology, ecology, palaeobotany,
plant breeding, and pathology as well as taxonomy.19 Like most early
twentieth-century scientific writers, Stopes perceived a stark oppos-
ition between traditional and modern botany. She notes that ‘in the
early days of the science nearly every botanist’s energies were devoted
to that branch of it which we now call systematic botany. This is very
natural, for the first stage in the attack on a mass of unknown things is
to arrange and name them for ready reference.’20 However, while she
accepts taxonomy as necessary preliminary work, Stopes suggests
that excessive emphasis upon what she regards as only a small part of
a much larger discipline resulted in botany being ‘classed with stamp
collecting in the older days when the only object of many who went
under the name of botanist was to collect and name all the plants of
their district, and when the naming of a new species was the ultimate
crown of success’.21 Stopes seeks to differentiate the contemporary
practice of botany from this older tradition, asserting that ‘modern
botany … is no narrow and restricted subject, dry as the herbarium
plants which used long to symbolise it. It is full of living interest,
ramifying in many directions … The really essential study in modern
botany may be summed up in the phrase that it attempts to discover
how plants live.’22 Equating the various subdisciplines of botany with
their material subjects, she rejects taxonomy as productive of only
dead, desiccated, ‘cut and dried ideas’.23
There is no reason to suppose that Woolf read Stopes’s scientific
works. When she mentions Stopes in her private writings, Woolf
refers to her primarily in her capacity as a sexologist and advocate of
contraception (L iii:Â€6; D v:Â€202 and n. 16). However, Love’s Creation
espouses many of the same views of science present in Stopes’s
textbook.
Stopes’s novel overtly favours the modern biological sciences. The
opening scene of Love’s Creation, set in a laboratory immediately fol-
lowing a demonstration, locates the novel firmly within the domain of
the new biology introduced to Britain in the late nineteenth century
by men such as T. H. Huxley. Kenneth Harvey, demonstrating in the
laboratory and ‘musing on microscopic revelations’, 24 is a scientist in
the style of Huxley, ‘The Biologist par excellence’ (LC 2). In addition
to demonstrating his alignment with the methods of the new biology,
Kenneth shows his dedication to its objectives. Reflecting upon the
task left to the modern scientist by preceding generations, Kenneth
notes: ‘so many devotees have piled up mountains of loose data which
one has to fuse before building one’s own citadel’ (4). The work of the
modern biologist lies in synthesising the information accumulated by
previous generations into a general understanding of biological proÂ�
cesses, in constructing comprehensive theories out of disparate facts,
making the scientist ‘part-artist, part-creator’ (4).
While celebrating the new biology as a creative endeavour, Stopes
stresses the obsolescence of the taxonomic approach to nature through
her depiction of a directionless period in Kenneth’s life immediately
following Lilian’s death. In a grief-stricken daze, Kenneth joins a sci-
entific expedition drifting ‘from island to island in the southern seas
of the Indian Ocean, amassing insects, bottled and dried plankton,
examples of new species and the rarer specimens of the marine fauna
and flora’ (196). In his role as the expedition’s zoologist, Kenneth
reverts to the activities of collection and classification typical of the
naturalists of an earlier period. He disparages his work, but resigns
himself to ‘collect[ing] the beetles and corals and anything else they
want’ (194). Rose Amber seeks to present his work in grander terms,
declaring, ‘I will tell your mother that you are going on an important
scientific expedition, and remind her that that was what Darwin did
when he was a young man’ (190). Still, Rose Amber’s comment sug-
gests that in order to accord value to this work it is necessary to view
it in the context of theoretical science rather than as an element of the
taxonomic tradition.
Stopes takes the opportunity provided by Kenneth’s temporary
assumption of the role of taxonomist to critique what she regards
as the hidden motives of the taxonomic project. As ship’s zoologist,
Kenneth becomes aware of the authority attributed to the taxonomist.
During a period ashore, he requests permission from the local consul
to take a trip into an untouched forest. Encountering resistance to his
request, he presents specimen collection as an excuse for his excur-
sion (231–2). Kenneth finds the official’s receptivity to this approach
both gratifying and bizarre, and he marvels, ‘if I want to go up a trop-
ical river into a virgin forest just because I want to, I should probably
be stopped as an imbecile or an intruder; but if I go to collect a few
butterflies for a national museum thousands of miles away, and give
them jaw-cracking names, then I am a perfectly sane member of the
community’ (233). Although bemused by this state of affairs, he is
quick to take advantage of the power that his science imparts. On his
journey upriver, he cements his authority over the men accompany-
ing him by playing the part of the taxonomising collector:
Now and then, in order to keep the coolies up to the mark, he made a great dis-
play of catching a particular insect and killing it in the asphyxiating tubes they
carried for him. The capture, whether a treasure in reality, or a mere member
of a prolific species, he made a great show of solemnly entrusting to the coolÂ�
ies. They appeared to be enormously impressed. They feared at any rate to
take any liberties with him. That was all the insect was used for. (242)
Collection and classification are consciously employed, even by one

who has little respect for their worth, as a means of establishing one’s
authority over both the organism caught and those witness to the
taxonomic process.
Following this period of taxonomic drudgery, Kenneth, reani-
mated by his correspondence with Rose Amber, returns to the pursuit
of his ‘great and wonderful theories’, actively positioning himself in
opposition to the conservative element of the scientific establishment
that still regards classification as the proper end of the study of nature
(312). He complains to Rose Amber of a former mentor who now dis-
courages his theorising, urging him to ‘get on with [his] solid workÂ€…
[and] describe [his] new fossils’ (363). In the face of this pressure to
continue his taxonomic work, Kenneth reasserts his commitment to
the pursuit of his ‘great idea, one of those glorious, master-key ideas’
that, like the theories of Copernicus and Darwin, could transform the
way that humanity sees itself and the world (364).
In Love’s Creation, Stopes sets up a clear opposition between the
taxonomic traditionÂ€– serving little purpose beyond the assertion of
authority over one’s subject and over witnesses to the act of classifi-
cationÂ€– and theoretical biology based on laboratory workÂ€– having
the potential to explain the secrets of life’s processes. This opposition
is echoed in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf condemns measurement in
the service of classification as reductive and restrictive but presents
the laboratory and the microscope as symbols of intellectual emanci-
pation. Thus, while Woolf’s depiction of Chloe and Olivia as female
scientists together in a laboratory reconceives rather than reproduces
Stopes’s representation of the female scientist, Love’s Creation remains
an important influence on A Room of One’s Own in its juxtaposition of
scientific approaches.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf analyses the motivations underlying
the taxonomic impulse. She contends that the urge to measure and
classify is born of a desire for domination through knowledge, such
that any encounter with the unknown sends ‘Professor X rush[ing]
for his measuring-rods to prove himself “superior”’ (AROO 115).
Measurement and classification function as a means of subduing one’s
subject, transforming it from a wayward living entity into an orderly
recorded fact confined to its place within a hierarchical system. Woolf
suggests that a similar impulse accounts for the formulation of gender
stereotypes (it is, after all, a specimen of a newly discovered third sex
that the professor rushes to classify), and she implies the identity of
the taxonomist and the misogynist in their efforts to subdue an unruly
subject through reductive classification. Woolf’s vision of Professor
X labouring over his ‘monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral,
and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex … jab[bing] his pen on the
paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote’ conflates
collection and classification and suggests that, through description,
the professor endeavours to pin women within the category of the
weaker sex (39–40).
Woolf was not alone in satirising the taxonomic impulse or in
regarding the practice of taxonomy as infected by patriarchal bias.
Mary Kingsley, a Victorian traveller who herself collected entomo-
logical and ichthyological specimens for the British Museum (and
whose criticisms of the inequality of education for men and women
Woolf cites in Three Guineas), noted this bias with the comment:
The last words a most distinguished and valued scientific friend had said to
me before I left home were, ‘Always take measurements, Miss Kingsley, and
always take them from the adult male.’ I know I have neglected opportunities of
carrying out this commission on both banks, but I do not feel like going back.
Besides the men would not like it, and I have mislaid my yard measure.25
Woolf expresses similar reservations regarding the urge to measure
and the hierarchies produced through measurement, cautioning that,
‘delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of
all occupations and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most
servile of attitudes’ (139).
Woolf links the masculine preoccupation with measurement and
classification to the education received by young men within patri-
archal society. The narrator describes the university of Oxbridge
as ‘a miraculous glass cabinet’ ‘in which are preserved rare types’
(7,Â€10). The university functions as a collection of specimens brought
together for the purpose of classification, and the effectiveness of this
institutional categorisation is suggested by the narrator’s subsequent
observation:
if I want to know all that a human being can tell me about Sir Hawley Butts,
for instance, I have only to open Burke or Debrett and I shall find that he took
such and such a degree; owns a hall; has an heir; was Secretary to a Board;
represented Great Britain in Canada; and has received a certain number of
degrees, offices, medals and other distinctions by which his merits are stamped
upon him indelibly. (111–12)
The choice of the word ‘distinctions’ underscores the fact that Sir
Hawley’s qualifications and accolades function to differentiate and
thus to classify him. Woolf’s narrator remains sceptical of the value
of such categorisations, arguing, ‘I do not believe that gifts, whether
of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even
in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes’
(138). However, while Woolf asserts the inapplicability of fixed hier-
archies and systems of classification to human beings, the education
administered by patriarchal society ensures the perpetuation of this
system of social distinction.
By instilling in its recipients a classificatory mindset, this training
also has implications for literary expression, for it produces men like
‘Mr B the critic’ whose ‘mind seemed separated into different cham-
bers’ (132). The consequence of this divided and dividing mind is that
‘when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump on the
groundÂ€– dead’ (ibid.). The taxonomising mentality kills the living
subject through restrictive categorisation.
On the basis of this evidence, Woolf might be read as regarding
the scientific outlook as wholly negative. Yet she also presents science
as a possible means of emancipation or empowerment for women. She
laments the waste of the ‘wild, generous, untutored intelligence’ of
Margaret of Newcastle, which ‘poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy,
in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy’ when ‘[s]he
should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been
taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically’ (79). Mary Seton,
teaching science at a women’s college, and Chloe and Olivia, together
in a laboratory preparing a cure for pernicious anaemia, stand as
models of the professional and independent modern woman and the
Â�modern fictional heroine. Nor is Woolf averse to recommending
scienÂ�tific techniques for the investigation of the effects of sexism. She
reasons:
surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the art-
ist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of
ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats
in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the
other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists
upon? (68)
Woolf suggests that while measurement for the purpose of classifi-

cation serves only to locate one’s subject within a fixed hierarchy,
measurement in the experimental context of the laboratory offers a
means of understanding influences and explaining behaviour. While
disdaining measurement when it serves as an emblem of the taxo-
nomic tradition, Woolf sanctions it as a tool of the new biology.
Woolf even takes the scientific as her own standard of judgement.
She rejects men’s writing on the subject of women as ‘worthless sci-
entifically’ for having been written in ‘the red light of emotion and
not in the white light of truth’ (42). As her allusion to white light
(containing all wavelengths of light within its spectrum) suggests,
she retains the ideal of an inclusive rather than a partial vision. In this
sense, the impartiality recommended by science resembles the ‘incan-
descent and undivided’ androgynous vision that Woolf advocates for
the writer (128). The ideal androgynous mind, Woolf suggests, is
less inclined to stress ‘distinctions’ than the single-sexed mind, and
in contrast to the classificatory mentality that kills its living subject,
the undivided androgynous mind produces writing that remains vital
and generative, that when taken ‘into the mind … explodes and gives
birth to all kinds of other ideas’, making it ‘the only sort of writing
of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life’ (128, 132).
Woolf holds science and art to the same standard of impartiality, and
she suggests that it is only through such impartiality that ‘genius …
whole and entire’ can be expressed (90).
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf echoes Marie Stopes in presenting
the classificatory outlook as reductive and compromised while com-
mending modern biology’s concern with tracing influences, explain-
ing behaviour, and understanding life processes. And in suggesting
that science and literature likewise benefit from an impartial and
undivided outlook, Woolf collapses the distance between science and
art viewed as creative endeavours.
Wo ol f a n d t h e p ro t e c t ion m ov e m e n t
Woolf encountered protectionist arguments early in life and her
absorption of protectionist ideas contributed to her gradual disen-
chantment with the practice of specimen collection. ‘At the age of ten
or thereabouts’ she established her protectionist credentials by sign-
ing a pledge never to wear the plumes of wild birds (E iii:Â€244 n. 4).
During the same period, the Stephen children wrote a condemnation
of egg-collecting in the Hyde Park Gate News, calling upon Â�children
to refrain from taking birds’ eggs, and recommending instead the
‘day by day’ monitoring of birds’ nests (HPGN 59). Adopting the
Â�language of Victorian protectionists, they lamented, ‘Alas! oh how
often cruel boys or girls go and rob the fond mother bird of her young.
Think oh children before you yield to the Â�temptation which is before
you’ (ibid.). The Stephen children’s disapproval of egg-Â�collecting was
genuine; still, their support for the protection of birds did not Â�prevent
them from amusing themselves by mimicking the extravagant Â�rhetoric
of Victorian protectionists. This combination of agreement with the
general principles of protection and alertness to protectionist strat-
egies and rhetoric would characterise Woolf’s attitudes towards pro-
tection throughout her life.
Woolf agreed with many of the tenets of the protectionist move-
ment. She was critical of blood sports as symptomatic of a wider
culture of violence. In Three Guineas, she denounces the wasteful
destructiveness of the hunt, declaring, ‘The number of animals killed
in England for sport during the past century must be beyond compu-
tation. 1,212 head of game is given as the average for a day’s shoot-
ing at Chatsworth in 1909’ (TG 369 n. 3). Using these statistics in
support of an argument regarding the masculine tendency towards
war, Woolf suggests that violence against nature and violence against
human beings are of a piece. Woolf treats the hunt as an emblem
of civilisation, but a civilisation lacking in humanity. In The Years,
Edward Pargiter’s college friend Gibbs embodies this civilisation as
he reminisces about cubbing and impatiently awaits the start of the
hunting season (TY 51). University-educated and a member of the
landed class, Gibbs suggests through his appearance and talk the bru-
tish aspects of the culture of which he forms a part:Â€ his hands are
‘great red paw[s]’ that he ‘dangl[es] … in front of him like a bear’, and
the conversations of Gibbs and his wife Milly remind North of ‘the
half-articulate munchings of animals in a stall … prolific, profuse,
half-conscious’ (50, 346, 356).
A liking for the hunt also suggests a dubious form of gentility else-
where in Woolf’s novels. Woolf often employs a predilection for the
hunt as a hint of the unsuitability of a suitor. The Archduke Harry
seeks to woo Orlando with boasts of having shot elk, reindeer, and
albatross and promises of ‘a mixed bag of ptarmigan and grouse’
(OÂ€172). In The Years, Delia Pargiter dreams of marrying a revolution-
ary figure like Parnell, but finds herself instead the wife of the con-
servative Patrick, who always wore ‘the look of a sportsman who saw
the birds rising’ (TY 382). In Night and Day, William Rodney illus-
trates another unsavoury aspect of the culture of the hunt through his
inquiries after the local pack:Â€confessing that he has no great fondness
for shooting, he nevertheless maintains, ‘“one has to do it, unless one
wants to be altogether out of things”’ (ND 211). The social manoeuvÂ�
ring that forms a subtext to the hunt renders its destructiveness all the
more objectionable. Henry Otway’s allusion to ‘“Sir William Budge,
the sugar king”’, who took over the pack along with the estate of
‘“poor Stanham, who went bankrupt”’, suggests the extent to which
primacy in the hunt reflects social primacy (210). It was in part the
social significance of blood sports that troubled Woolf, for she saw
the hunt as a means of manifesting powerÂ€– over the land and its wild-
life, over the surrounding population from whom the game was pre-
served, and over the participants in the hunt itself, the hierarchy of
which reflected wider social gradations. Jacob Flanders, for example,
‘rode to houndsÂ€– after a fashion, for he hadn’t a penny’, and the fact
that he loses the hunt suggests that he does not quite fit into the social
circle for which he has been groomed ( JR 215, 137).
In ‘The Shooting Party’, Woolf offers her most extended criti-
cism of the culture of blood sports, employing the hunt as an emblem
of a civilisation in collapse as its violence is turned inward against
itself. The story is set in the drawing room of the Rashleigh family,
where the women sit beneath the family coat-of-arms, the symbol of
their gentility, while the men hunt in the patriotically named King’s
Ride and Home Wood. The coat-of-arms, consisting of grapes, a
mermaid, and spears, recalls the history of the family with its ‘vast
lands’ in the Amazon basin where the Rashleighs gathered ‘sacks of
emeralds’ and took ‘captives. Maidens’ (CSF 249); it offers a visual
reminder that the family’s rise was accomplished by means of vio-
lence and appropriation. This violence is perpetuated in the present
through the pastime of the hunt:Â€ Woolf describes the destruction
wrought as the pheasants are driven ‘across the noses of the guns’
and a cart is heaped full of dead birds (ibid.). The birds are both lit-
eral and symbolic prey, representative of others victimised by the
Rashleigh men. Immediately after having been shot, the birds are
described as ‘soft warm bodies, with limp claws and still lustrous
eyes. The birds seemed alive still, but swooning under their rich
damp feathers’; later, the narrator observes, ‘The birds were dead
now, their claws gripped tight, though they gripped nothing. The
leathery eyelids were creased greyly over their eyes’ (249, 250).
These descriptions are echoed in the portrayal of the Rashleigh
women, whose ‘laces and … flounces seemed to quiver, as if their
bodies were warm and languid underneath their feathers’, though
later, ‘light faded in their eyes too, as they sat by the white ashes
listening. Their eyes became like pebbles, taken from water; grey
stones dulled and dried. And their hands gripped their hands like
the claws of dead birds gripped nothing’ (252, 253). The Rashleigh
women are presented as victims of this culture of violence, but
they are not wholly exempt from criticism. They lunch on pheas-
ant, Miss Antonia drawing ‘the carving knife across the pheasant’s
breast firmly’ (251). Sustained by this game, they are also compli-
cit in their culture’s violence. Other women are more unequivocally
victimised, for the Rashleigh men prey upon the local girls:Â€together
Miss Rashleigh and Miss Antonia tally, ‘“Pink and white Lucy at the
Mill”’, ‘“Ellen’s daughter at the Goat and Sickle”’, ‘“the girl at the
tailor’s”’, and ‘“Milly Masters in the still-room”’, all of whom serve
as trophies for the Rashleigh men (252).
However, it is not only women who are represented as victims of
this culture. At times the hunt returns carrying dead men as well as
birds:Â€one man is brought back with ‘“a bullet through his heart”’,
another, his horse having gone down and both having been ridden
over by the hunt, ‘“came home … on a shutter”’ (ibid.). The vio-
lence of the hunt is also on a continuum with the violence of war, for
the women’s reminiscences shift imperceptibly from casualties of the
hunt to the war dead with the recollection of ‘“the Colonel’s letter”’
informing them that ‘“[y]our son rode as if he had twenty devils in
himÂ€– charged at the head of his men”’ (ibid.).
The hunt approaches closer and closer to the house, until the
hounds burst into the Rashleigh drawing room. In attempting to
bring the dogs to order, the squire strikes old Miss Rashleigh, who
staggers:Â€‘Her stick, striking wildly, struck the shield above the fire-
place. She fell with a thud upon the ashes. The shield of the Rashleighs
crashed from the wall. Under the mermaid, under the spears, she lay
buried’ (254). Women become not only metaphorical but literal vic-
tims of the hunt as the chase enters the drawing room. It is the men
who bring this violence into the house and are thus the larger cause of
this collapse, but it is Miss Rashleigh’s defensive gesture that brings
down the coat-of-arms, though she is herself buried beneath it. The
fall of King Edward’s picture moments later suggests that the fall of
the Rashleighs is only a symptom of wider social collapse.
Woolf shared the protectionist disapproval of blood sports, but
she cannot be simply categorised as a protectionist. The wider social
implications of recreational violence concerned her as much as the
violence against wildlife in and of itself, and she viewed the campaign
for the protection of animals through a social lens. Thus, while she
objects to the fox hunt and the battue in part because of their social
significance, she defends other, even unlawful, hunting for equally
social reasons. In Night and Day, through the character of Mary
Datchet, she offers a defence of poaching. When Ralph Denham, a
nature enthusiast with protectionist leanings, finds and destroys ‘a
poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap a rabbit’, Mary protests, ‘“It’s
quite right that they should poach … I wonder whether it was Alfred
Duggins or Sid Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they
only make fifteen shillings a week?”’ (ND 192). And in Flush, Woolf
critiques the phenomenon of game preserves through a description of
the estate of the Reverend Charles Kingsley:
at Farnham there were fields of green grass; there were pools of blue water;
there were woods that murmured and turf so fine that the paws bounced as
they touched it … [T]he old ecstasy returnedÂ€– was it hare or was it fox? Flush
tore across the heaths of Surrey as he had not run since the old days at Three
Mile Cross. A pheasant went rocketing up in a spurt of purple and gold. He
had almost shut his teeth on the tail-feathers when a voice rang out. A whip
cracked. Was it the Reverend Charles Kingsley who called him sharply to
heel? At any rate, he ran no more. The woods of Farnham were strictly pre-
served. (F 93)
Woolf highlights the unnaturalness of game preserves, on which a
dog may not follow its instinct to chase a pheasant in order that the
birds may later be killed en masse by a shooting party. Woolf was
often in agreement with protectionist arguments, but her sympathies
were inflected by social concerns.
It was for similarly social reasons that Woolf, while supporting
many of the principles of animal protection, expressed reservations
regarding protection as a movement. In Mrs Dalloway, she associates
the protectionist position with Hugh Whitbread, who displays argu-
ably admirable qualities:Â€he ‘gave up shooting to please his old mother’,
and ‘one or two humble reforms stood to his credit; an improvement
in public shelters was one; the protection of owls in Norfolk another;
servant girls had reason to be grateful to him’ (MD 80, 111–12).
HowÂ�ever, there is something domineering in the manner in which he
decrees these changes, something oppressive in the appearance of ‘his
name at the end of letters to The Times, asking for funds, appealing to
the public to protect, to preserve, to clear up litter, to abate smoke, and
stamp out immorality in parks’ (111–12). Although he Â�accomplishes
tangible good and is ‘really remarkably kind’, there is a prescriptive
quality to his chosen role as guardian of public morality that Woolf
regards as suspect, and her uneasiness on this subject extends to her
treatment of the protection movement more generally (112).
Woolf’s most overt confrontation with the protection movement
occurred in her essay on ‘The Plumage Bill’, which appeared in the
Woman’s Leader on 23 July 1920. Andrew McNeillie describes this
essay as ‘perhaps [Woolf’s] earliest feminist polemic’, a statement that
suggests that the protection movement and the manner in which its
campaigns were conducted were important enough to Woolf to incite
her for the first time to public argument.26 Woolf’s essay appeared
in the wake of the failure of a parliamentary bill intended to prohibit
the importation of plumage, and it served as a reply to ‘Wayfarer’Â€–
H.Â€ W. Massingham, editor of the Nation and a member of the
Plumage Bill GroupÂ€– who commented upon the bill’s defeat, ‘What
does one expect? [Birds] have to be shot in parenthood for child-
bearing women to flaunt the symbols of it, and, as Mr Hudson says,
one bird shot for its plumage means ten other deadly wounds and the
starvation of the young. But what do women care? Look at Regent
Street this morning!’27 In response, Woolf states that ‘in spite of a vow
[never to wear the plumes of wild birds] taken in childhood and hith-
erto religiously observed’, she felt an urge, on reading Massingham’s
comment, to ‘go to Regent Street, buy an egret plume, and stick itÂ€– is
it in the back or the front of the hat?’ (E iii: 241). Woolf makes clear
her repugnance for a trade that dooms birds ‘not only to extinction
but to torture’, describing in graphic detail ‘the bird tightly held in
one hand while another hand pierces the eyeballs with a feather’ so
that the bird may be used as a decoy and the ‘innumerable mouths
opening and shutting, opening and shutting, untilÂ€– as no parent bird
comes to feed themÂ€– the young birds rot where they sit’ (241, 242).
However, the rhetoric of the anti-plumage campaign relied heavily
on the vilification of female vanity on the one hand and on appeals
to feminine tender-heartedness on the other, and Woolf objects to
both stereotypes. She criticises the affluent woman of fashion who,
allowing herself to be controlled by trends, becomes herself no more
than ‘an object of beauty’, comparable to ‘any other object in street
or window’ (242). However, she goes on to stress that women alone
should not be made to bear the blame for the destruction of birds, for
it is men who hunt the birds commercially, men who constitute the
‘East End profiteers’ who benefit from the plumage trade, and, with
a single exception, men who make up the parliamentary committee
that showed such indifference to the Plumage Bill that, despite five
attempts, it was impossible to get the necessary quorum of twenty
members to attend its reading (243).
The debate did not end here. Massingham responded to Woolf in
the Woman’s Leader on 30 July. He declares Woolf ‘a victim of mental
confusion’; complains, ‘Personally, I cannot judge from Mrs Woolf’s
ambiguous article, whether she is for or against the plumage trade’;
and opines that ‘articles of the kind she has written … do a great
deal more harm than the trade can do by its propaganda in its own
defence’ (E iii:Â€244 n. 4). He concludes by reminding her of the ‘real
and profoundly important common duty of … raising the moral cur-
rency of civilised nations’ (ibid.). Woolf replied to Massingham in
turn, arguing that she had already declared, ‘with sufficient plain-
ness as I thought’, that she found the plumage trade ‘abominable and
the cruelty repulsive’ (245 n. 4). For Massingham’s benefit, she states
again, ‘I am wholly against the plumage trade. At the age of ten or
thereabouts I signed a pledge never to wear one of the condemned
feathers, and have kept the vow so implicitly that I cannot distinguish
osprey from egret’ (244 n. 4). She stresses that her complaint is not
with the cause itself but rather with the ‘half sentimental and wholly
contemptuous’ representation of women by means of which Wayfarer
seeks to advance his cause (ibid.). It is the gender politics that forms
a subtext of the protection movement and the rhetoric employed to
advance the protectionist cause that concern Woolf, and as a result,
while strongly denouncing the torture and killing of birds for profit
and fashion, she does not lend her unqualified support to the cam-
paign that opposes it.
In her final comment to Massingham, Woolf states her priorities
outright:
I am not writing as a bird, or even a champion of birds; but as a woman. At the
risk of losing such little reputation for humanity as I may still possess I hereby
confess that it seems to me more necessary to resent such an insult to women
as Wayfarer casually lets fall than to protect egrets from extinction. That is my
way of ‘raising the moral currency of civilised nations’. (245 n. 4)
Nevertheless, she maintains, ‘that does not mean that I have not the
highest respect for Mr Massingham’s way also’, and to illustrate this
fact she commits herself to ‘the pleasure of spending whatever sum
I receive for my article, not upon an egret plume, but upon a sub-
scription to the Plumage Bill Group’, a resolution that foreshadows
her later engagement with the issue of gender relations by means of a
reflection upon the proper allocation of three guineas (ibid.). Woolf
judges the protectionist cause to be worthy of support but not exempt
from criticism.
Reginald Abbott has discussed Woolf’s confrontation with
Massingham in ‘Birds Don’t Sing in Greek:Â€Virginia Woolf and “The
Plumage Bill”’. Abbott treats Woolf’s attack on the anti-plumage
campaign as an early critical misfire on Woolf’s part, noting that her
writing on the subject provoked criticism from female readers of the
Woman’s Leader such as Mrs Meta Bradley, who demanded, ‘Does it
matter in the least to the birds so foully slain whether the blame rests
most with men or women?’28 Abbott takes Woolf’s writing on the
Plumage Bill as evidence that ‘[a]s a maturing producer of essays who
strove for a polemical tone without stridency, Woolf could miss her
mark’.29 However, the views that Woolf expressed in ‘The Plumage
Bill’ should not be so simply dismissed as an isolated instance of mis-
judgement, for the essay was not Woolf’s only statement of such a
position. Consideration of the contemporary scientific context and of
debates within the protection movement itself helps to clarify Woolf’s
attitudes towards protectionist arguments. Her biographical sketch of
the economic entomologist Eleanor Ormerod provides an opportun-
ity for such a consideration.
‘ M i s s O r m e ro d’, a p p l i e d e n t o m ol o g y,
a n d t h e p ro t e c t ion m ov e m e n t
Woolf’s reservations regarding protectionist rhetoric and her cham-
pioning of new scientific approaches come together in her treatment
of the life and career of Eleanor Ormerod, a pioneer in the field of
applied entomology and one of the foremost Victorian authorities
on agricultural insect pests. Woolf’s biographical sketch, ‘Miss
Ormerod’, appeared in The Dial in December 1924 and was later
included in the American edition of The Common Reader as part of the
essay ‘Lives of the Obscure’. The sketch provides an opportunity to
examine Woolf’s view of the science of pest control and to relate this
view to her attitudes towards the natural history tradition, to shifting
outlooks within the protection movement, and to the preoccupations
of the emerging science of ecology.
Eleanor Ormerod was born in 1828 into an English gentry fam-
ily. She grew up with a recreational interest in taxonomic natural
history, collecting insects and classifying them through reference to
J.Â€ F. Stephens’s systematic catalogues. However, finding this taxo-
nomic approach insufficient, she augmented her reading with her
own course of instruction. Ignoring her brother Edward’s strictures
against girls learning anatomy, Eleanor spent ‘hours in her bedroom
cutting … up’ specimens (E iv:Â€134). As Ormerod explained it in an
autobiographical work published after her death, ‘From time to time
I got one of the very largest beetles that I could find, something that I
was quite sure of, and turned it into my teacher. I carefully dissected
it and matched the parts to the details given by Stephens.’30 Ormerod’s
organisation of her own course of study anticipated the transform-
ation of instruction in the life sciences in the 1870s when attention
shifted from the identification of endless specimens in museum col-
lections to the close study of the structure and functioning of repre-
sentative species in the laboratory.
While her parents lived, Ormerod pursued entomology only as a
hobby, but in 1868 she determined the future direction of her studies
when she encountered in The Gardeners’ Chronicle a request from the
Royal Horticultural Society for contributions to a Â�collection of ‘insects
beneficial or injurious to man’.31 This was the start of Ormerod’s
involvement in applied or economic entomology, the study of insects
for the purpose of their use and control. Taking up the subject in its
earliest stages of development, Ormerod soon found her expertise in
great demand. In 1877, she began issuing annual reports on insect
pests and methods of combating them compiled from responses to
circulated questionnaires and from correspondence with farmers and
market gardeners throughout the country. In 1882, she was appointed
the honorary entomological adviser to the Royal Agricultural Society
of England (RASE). Ormerod also promoted the institutionalisation
of economic entomology:Â€she campaigned to have the subject taught
in agricultural colleges and universities, and to this end she gave lec-
tures, wrote textbooks, and acted as an examiner for the University
of Edinburgh. She was the recipient of awards from institutions both
in Britain and abroad, culminating in an honorary LLD from the
University of Edinburgh, the first ever bestowed upon a woman.
However, in contrast to the success that she achieved in her own
time, recent assessments of Ormerod have criticised her science,
condemning her promotion of pesticides and the extermination of
pest populations. In ‘Eleanor Ormerod (1828–1901) as an Economic
Entomologist:Â€“Pioneer of Purity Even More than of Paris Green”’,
the environmental historian J. F. McDiarmid Clark accuses Ormerod
of encouraging farmers to ‘drench Nature in a slurry of poison’
and of seeking to ‘attain professional status upon the heads of life-
less sparrows’.32 Clark’s criticism of Ormerod takes an ecofeminist
form:Â€he regards her environmentally suspect science as evidence of
her betrayal of her feminine and feminist self, arguing that Ormerod
‘allied herself with the “male” science bent upon the dissection of
the passive, feminine bosom of nature’ and won a place for herself
in the field of economic entomology only through ‘a denial of her
sexuality’.33
Clark focuses his criticism of Ormerod on two of her cam-
paigns:Â€her promotion of the use of pesticides and her support for the
extermination of house sparrows. In relation to the former campaign,
Clark states that Ormerod ‘played a pivotal role in the promotion of
the large-scale use of Paris green’, a copper acetoarsenite compound
used as an insecticide.34 The nineteenth-century understanding of
the health hazards of arsenite compounds was limited. Medical doc-
tors and agricultural scientists were aware of the compound’s acute
toxicity when encountered in large quantities but were less alert to
its chronic toxicity when encountered in small amounts over a long
period of time.35 The compound was widely used as a pigment in
green paints (hence its name) and was to be found in many consumer
products, including wallpaper and food wrappers. It was also used
medicinally in tonics such as Fowler’s solution, as it was reputed to
clear the skin and act as a stimulant.36 If its impact on human health
was not fully understood, its effect on the environment was given
even less consideration. As a result of this lack of awareness regard-
ing the long-term effects of arsenical substances upon health and the
environment, there was little resistance to the adoption of Paris Green
as a pesticide:Â€‘agricultural scientists failed to appreciate the hazard
of chronic arsenicism’ and ‘the medical profession maintained a vir-
tually unbroken silence on the question of arsenical insecticides’.37
Ormerod herself was proud of her role in promoting the use of pes-
ticides and declared that she wished it to be recorded of her that ‘she
introduced paris-green into england.’38
Clark cites Woolf’s biographical sketch, ‘Miss Ormerod’, in sup-
port of his condemnation of Ormerod and her science. He takes
Woolf’s description of Ormerod as a ‘pioneer of purity even more
than of Paris Green’ as the title of his article and as confirmation
of his contention that Ormerod’s success in the masculine field of
applied entomology was made possible only through the suppression
of her sexuality (E iv: 136).39 However, Clark’s deployment of Woolf
as a guarantor of his ecofeminist argument demands examination.
Although much of Woolf’s writing does, without question, sup-
port the view of Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist, her representation ofÂ�
economic entomology in ‘Miss Ormerod’ complicates the perception
of Woolf as a presciently green author.
In fact, unlike Clark’s portrayal of Ormerod and her science,
that of Woolf is essentially approving. Woolf presents Ormerod as
overturning both scientific and social convention by means of her
approach to the study of nature. In applauding this, Woolf displays
a modern impatience with the long-standing tradition of taxonomic
natural history and a concomitant enthusiasm for new scientific
approaches. Additionally, while not conforming to Clark’s ecocritical
conception of an ecological outlook, Woolf’s approval of Ormerod
was in keeping with the ecology of her time, for in their interest in
environmental control, early ecologists had more in common with the
economic entomologists who preceded them than with later ecocriti-
cal commentators.
In his critique of Ormerod, Clark describes economic entomol-
ogy as part of ‘the new empirical science, bent upon the dissection
of nature’s anatomy’.40 In the early twentieth century, however,
such new sciences were seen as possessing a revolutionary poten-
tial. Writers such as H. G. Wells and Marie Stopes presented the new
biology alongside Fabian socialism and feminist activism as possible
means of social amelioration. Woolf was also susceptible to such opti-
mism. Her representation of the laboratory as a site of emancipation
and possibility for women and her use of scientific experiment as a
metaphor for feminist action illustrate her willingness to align herself
with emerging scientific disciplines. She viewed the modern sciences,
economic entomology included, as potentially transformative, having
the capacity to overthrow the dogmatism of not only the old scientific
order but also established social conventions and hierarchies.
Ormerod was not an overtly revolutionary figure. As Clark has
noted, she was publicly dismissive of the women’s movement, respond-
ing to Lydia Becker’s praise that she was ‘proof of how much a woman
could do without the help of a man’ with a declaration of her gratitude
to the men who had furthered her career.41 Woolf likewise observes
that Ormerod was conservative in many of her social and political
views:Â€she depicts Ormerod toasting the Queen’s health, assembling
her servants for prayer, lamenting the prospect of Irish Home Rule,
and preserving her father’s ‘pigtail … in a box’ (E iv: 139). Woolf
suggests, however, that where her scientific training came into play,
Ormerod was iconoclastic, that she was encouraged by her science to
overturn established conventions, whether these took the form of the
taxonomic tradition of natural history or restrictive social and gender
norms. Woolf presents Ormerod as, almost against her will and cer-
tainly against the conditions of her upbringing, challenging received
values by means of her science.
In the most general sense, Woolf suggests that over the course
of Ormerod’s life her science gradually emboldened her to chal-
lenge masculine authority. As Woolf tells it, Ormerod’s first scien-
tific observation, made as a small child while watching a tumbler
full of water grubs, sent her running to her father, filled with
‘eagerness to impart her observations’ (133). However, her father
Â�dismissed her report that the grubs had eaten one of their com-
panions as ‘[n]onsense’, and on this occasion, she did not protest,
accepting that ‘little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers’
(ibid.). During her apprenticeship as a taxonomic entomologist, she
Â�continued to appeal to male authority figures, sending captured
specimens to an Oxford professor for classification (134). Even once
she felt herself a competent judge, she initially concealed her own
authority behind that of a man:Â€ Woolf causes her to remark that
‘Dr Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t take a woman’s
word’ (136). Gradually, however, Ormerod gained the confidence
to challenge even her former mentor, offering the pronouncement,
‘these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the gen-
erative organs of the male. I’ve proved it’ (ibid.). By the end of her
career, Woolf suggests, Ormerod had achieved public recogni-
tion as an expert, as demonstrated by her dictated letter to Messrs
Langridge:Â€‘Gentlemen, I have examined your sample and find …’
(138). From being a seeker after the opinions of others, Ormerod
had herself become an authority.
The moralising of nature was one of the aspects of the Victorian
practice of natural history that Woolf criticised, an attitude that
placed her in agreement with the emerging class of professional
biologists who, in the words of Suzanne Le-May Sheffield, ‘sought
to rid science of its moral, religious, and metaphysical associations’.42
Ormerod herself, Sheffield continues, ‘focused exclusively upon the
practical utility of entomology, completely ignoring any entertain-
ment value or moral or religious worth’ and rejecting the decorous
forms of nature study made available to her as a woman.43 Woolf simi-
larly notes that the injurious insects that were Ormerod’s chosen spe-
ciality were ‘[n]ot … among God’s most triumphant creations’:Â€the
natural theology that had justified the study of nature for much of
the nineteenth century played no part in Ormerod’s motivation (136).
Though her brother Edward sought to bar her from the unseemly
study of anatomy, ‘never lik[ing] [her] to do more than take sections
of teeth’, Ormerod persevered, and Woolf has her heroine preface her
discussion of her anatomical investigations with the airy remark, ‘My
brotherÂ€– oh, he’s dead nowÂ€– a very good man’ (ibid.). The death of
this embodiment of Victorian morality released Ormerod to engage
with nature on new terms.
This casting off of the moralised view of nature Woolf regards
as Ormerod’s greatest triumph. Apostrophising Ormerod, Woolf
declares:
Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power over you than
Mr Edward Ormerod himself. Under the microscope you clearly perceive
that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most emphatic-
ally, copulate. Escorted on one side by the Bot or Warble, on the other by the
Hessian Fly, Miss Ormerod advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never
did her features show more sublime than when lit up with the candour of her
avowal. ‘This is excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the con-
trary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve proved it.’ Upon her head the
hood of Edinburgh most fitly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of
Paris Green. (ibid.)
It is Ormerod’s frank, scientific treatment of anatomy, sex, andÂ�Â�

bodily functionsÂ€– purifying organs and excrement of tabooÂ€– that
Woolf celebrates above all her other accomplishments. Clark takes
Woolf’s description of Ormerod as ‘a pioneer of purity’ as an indi-
cation of Woolf’s agreement with his own assessment that Ormerod
denied her sexuality in order to achieve success in the masculine world
of science (ibid.). Yet Woolf’s description suggests that Ormerod’s
science, far from being grounded in a suppression or rejection of sex,
was based upon a frank and unashamed treatment of it.
It is this demystification that Woolf highlights as well in her dis-
cussion of Ormerod’s campaign against the house sparrow. By the
1890s, the systematic destruction of birds of prey by farmers and
gamekeepers had upset the ‘balance of birds’, as E. M. Nicholson
termed it:Â€the numbers of natural predators had declined and as a result
adaptable species such as the sparrow had proliferated and, in some
areas, become pests.44 That the young Virginia Stephen was familiar
with the sparrow problem is suggested by a diary entry from 6 June
1897:Â€‘we planted seed in the back garden. This is to produce grassÂ€–
but whether the sparrows will have left any is a question. As soon
as we had left the garden, the horrid little creatures swooped down
twittering & made off with the oats’ (PA 96). There was considerable
controversy over the best method of addressing the proliferation of
sparrows:Â€sparrow clubs dedicated themselves to the extermination
of the birds, but the domestic associations of the house sparrow in
English culture and the biblical significance of the sparrow suggested
in the statement, ‘one of them shall not fall on the ground without
your Father’, meant that the persecution of the sparrow was opposed
with particular vehemence by Victorian animal protectionists.45
Woolf argues that the momentum of Ormerod’s scientific work
compelled her, despite her cultivated ‘disposition’ towards tradition,
to defy conventional sentiment and in an act of ‘disloyal[ty] to much
that she, and her fathers before her, held dear’ set herself against
the sparrow, emblem of ‘the homely virtue of English domestic life’
(EÂ€iv: 139). As a scientist, Ormerod challenged conventions that as
her father’s daughter she felt it her duty to protect, for her science
accepted nothing as sacred, just as it accepted nothing as profane.
Through her campaign against the house sparrow, Woolf suggests,
Ormerod set herself in opposition to both the traditionally femin-
ine domestic sphere and the paternalism of Christian tradition and
Victorian society more broadly.
In her account of the sparrow controversy, Woolf displays Â�little
sympathy for Ormerod’s opponents, the animal protectionists. She
mocks the moralising clergymen of The Animals’ Friend and the
‘“spirity, discourteous, and inaccurate”’ women of the Humanitarian
League (ibid.). As I have suggested in my discussion of ‘The
Plumage Bill’, Woolf was not opposed to the cause of animal pro-
tection in principle; the source of her objections to the protection-
ist movement lay in the religiosity and sentimentality of tone that
often characterised the movement’s rhetoric and the reinforcement
of gender stereotypes that occurred under its banner. The Reverend
J. E. Walker’s response to Ormerod’s campaign against the sparrow,
printed in The Animals’ Friend under the title ‘God Save the Sparrow’
(to which Woolf alludes in her essay), exemplifies the biases of pro-
tectionist rhetoric:
Madam,Â€– It is with infinite regret that I see a lady’s name quoted in the Daily
Chronicle as giving ‘the sentence of death’ to the very bird of which the gentle
voice of the Son of God said … ‘[O]ne of them shall not fall on the ground
without your Father.’ Surely as having the compassionate heart of woman,
unsteeled (I hope) by your scientific studies, you will feel a throb of agony
whenever you hear those all-sacred words, and know that your verdict has
been taken as a wholesale sentence of extermination … upon these birds,
which ‘the Father’ cares for.46
Walker’s argument illustrates the tendency of Victorian protection-
ism towards sentimentality, religiosity, and misogyny and suggests
why Woolf was reluctant to align herself with the protectionist pos-
ition against Ormerod and her science.47
However, in expressing reservations regarding Victorian protec-
tion, Woolf was in fact in accord with modern protectionist opinion.
By the mid-1920s, when ‘Miss Ormerod’ appeared in print, a new
generation of protectionists had begun to display impatience with the
prevailing form and rationale of protection. In 1926, E. M. Nicholson,
who would go on to become a pivotal figure in the twentieth-
Â�century conservation movement, published a book entitled Birds in
England:Â€An Account of the State of Our Bird-Life, and a Criticism of
Bird Protection. Nicholson’s work offered a critique from within the
protectionist camp of the outlook and practices that had dominated
the movement since its nineteenth-century inception. Nicholson
wrote ‘from the point of view of [bird] protection’ and denounced
specimen collection and sport shooting as perversions of the love of
nature, but he also argued that protectionists endangered the cred-
ibility of the movement with their ‘sentimental and pseudo-scientific
heresies’, and maintained that protection, to be effective, must discard
the emotionalism that had long underpinned it and adopt a more sci-
entific approach.48
Even Ormerod’s campaign against the house sparrow might well
have received support from modern protectionists such as Nicholson.
In Birds in England, Nicholson observes that as a result of ‘the unnat-
ural régime of the last century’, ‘gaps have been created in the machin-
ery of Nature and the balance upset’, so that adaptable species such
as the starling, the rook, and the gull had proliferated Â�dramatically.49
While he maintains that ‘steady, calculated interference with Nature
is wrong and must be unsuccessful’, he suggests that ‘there are emer-
gencies when a wholesale battue seems the best rough and ready
solution’.50 On points such as this, early twentieth-century scientific
protectionists had more in common with Ormerod than with her
critics.
Consideration of the concerns of early twentieth-century ecology
is also useful to an understanding of Woolf ’s outlook on Ormerod
and the protection movement. To assume Woolf ’s agreement with
current ecocritical condemnations of Ormerod’s science is to ignore
the fact that ecology as it existed during Woolf ’s lifetime was itself
concerned with the control of pest species. As Julian Huxley indicates
in his introduction to Charles Elton’s Animal Ecology, ecology was
viewed by its early twentieth-century practitioners as a science that
would make it possible for ‘man … to assert his predominance’ over
‘his cold-blooded rivals, the plant pest and, most of all, the insect’.51
Far from existing in opposition to ecology, disciplines such as eco-
nomic entomology that dealt with the impact of pest species on other
organisms and of chemical or biological agents upon pest species
were precursors to ecology. Huxley presents the science of ecology
as the ‘body of general principles’ underlying the ‘specific know-
ledge and specific remedies’ that ‘economic entomologists, mycolo-
gists, soil biologists, and the rest’ had developed in their efforts to
control pest species and boost productivity in crops and stock, and
he views this complex of practical disciplines as ‘in reality no more
and no less than Applied Ecology’.52 Charles Elton’s work existed on
a continuum with that of Eleanor Ormerod, and Woolf ’s approval
of Ormerod’s work was consistent with an early twentieth-century
ecological outlook.
Woolf herself regarded the control of pest species with sufficient
approval to employ it as an analogy for social activism. In Three
Guineas, Woolf recommends the destruction of the existing social
order that has been the source of fascism, militarism, imperialism,
and patriarchy, and she does so through an analogy with insect exter-
mination. Three Guineas is a work at once pacifistic in its message
and combative in its tone, and the violence that it recommends takes
scientific form. Woolf likens fascism, militarism, imperialism, and
patriarchy to an infestation of caterpillars feeding on ‘the mulberry
tree, the sacred tree, of property’, which is also ‘the poison tree of
intellectual harlotry’ that nourishes censorship and propaganda (TG
261, 298). She describes the threat as ‘a very dangerous as well as a
very ugly animal … here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting
his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the
heart of England’ (229). Woolf suggests that women, in their strug-
gle against patriarchal oppression, are already engaged in ‘fight[ing]
this insect’, and she contends that ‘if we knew the truth about war, the
glory of war would be scotched and crushed where it lies curled up
in the rotten cabbage leaves of our prostituted fact-purveyors’ (229,
295). Woolf had no qualms about recommending the extermination
of dangerous ideologies through the analogy of pest control, a fact
that suggests that she absorbed the early twentieth-century view of
pest control as a socially responsible science.
In ‘Miss Ormerod’, Woolf offers only a superficial view of pesti-
cide use:Â€she never identifies Paris Green as an arsenite pesticide nor
does she note the repercussions of pesticide use on human health or
the environment. However, in this, too, Woolf reflected the outlook
of her age. Concern over the hazards of pesticide use developed incre-
mentally:Â€recognition of the dangers of prolonged exposure to arsenic
led only gradually to a concern over the health hazards of pesticide
residues, and awareness of the environmental damage done by arsen-
ical pesticides developed even more slowly.
It is possible to locate Woolf’s outlook in ‘Miss Ormerod’ quite
precisely in relation to the timeline of developing British concerns
over the use of arsenical pesticides. By December 1924, when ‘Miss
Ormerod’ appeared in The Dial, there was some awareness of the
dangers of prolonged exposure to arsenic. In the winter of 1900, an
epidemic of peripheral neuritis among the poor in Manchester was
linked to long-term exposure to arsenic in cheap beer.53 This contam-
ination was not the result of pesticide use, but it raised concerns about
the presence of arsenic in food and drink and led to the appointment
of a Royal Commission to investigate the dangers of arsenic contam-
ination and to set an official limit for arsenic levels in foods. Yet in
spite of this ‘sensational demonstration of the harmful consequences
of long-term exposure to arsenic’, well into the twentieth century an
attitude of ‘uninformed optimism’ towards the use of arsenical pesti-
cides prevailed, and it was in this climate of opinion that Woolf wrote
‘Miss Ormerod’. 54 However, in late November 1925, less than a year
after the publication of Woolf’s essay, four Londoners fell ill after
eating imported American apples that were subsequently revealed
to be heavily contaminated with arsenic. The British press launched
an attack on American produce and the British Ministry of Health
threatened an embargo of American fruit unless British tolerance lev-
els were observed.55 This incident resulted in a heightened awareness
of the dangers of arsenical pesticide residues, and criticism from the
medical establishment and consumer commentators continued to build
until the introduction of synthetic pesticides after the Second World
War shifted attention from the debate over ‘the old arsenicals’.56
Even after the health hazards of arsenical pesticides were recog-
nised, however, pesticide use was defended in many quarters as a
means of halting the spread of disease and safeguarding the food sup-
ply. Much of the practical work carried out by early ecologists was
concerned with pest control, and this work included the development
and testing of pesticides.57 In 1944, Charles Elton was still writing to
commend the use of Paris Green in a ‘brilliant and imaginative’ cam-
paign to eradicate a species of malaria-bearing mosquito accidentally
introduced into north-east Brazil, although he noted in passing that
‘the use of 260 tons of arsenical material at first caused poisoning in
as many as 15.8% of the operators’.58 Elton’s outlook in this period
can be set against his later views outlined in The Ecology of Invasions
by Animals and Plants (1958). There, he cautions against irrespon-
sible pesticide use and draws attention to the environmental impact
of pesticides. He notes that pesticides ‘never act only on the single
species that is being attacked’ but instead affect the entire community
into which they are introduced, with results potentially more dam-
aging than the depredations of the pests being combated; he reports
that targeted species have shown signs of developing resistance to the
pesticides used against them; and he suggests biocontrol by means of
counterpests as an alternative to the ‘rain of death’ to which pesticide
use was subjecting the environment.59 Opposition to pesticide use
developed gradually, and concerns over public health arose before
consideration was given to issues of environmental degradation.
Woolf’s endorsement of Ormerod’s science and her inattention to the
environmental repercussions of pesticide use thus reflect the historiÂ�
cal moment in which she wrote.
In another sense, too, Woolf’s representation of Ormerod was of
her time. Woolf championed Ormerod’s economic entomology on
the basis of what it replacedÂ€– the narrow focus of taxonomic work
and the sentimentality, religiosity, and conservatism of the Victorian
protection movementÂ€ – as much as what it promoted, and in this
Woolf was not alone. In February 1915, the New Statesman contribu-
tor Lens offered an account of ‘the new entomology’.60 He suggested
that the defining characteristic of modern entomology was its focus
on insects ‘as living things to love and hate, instead of corpses to label
and dissect’.61 As Lens observed, the modern study of insects as liv-
ing creatures encompassed not only the behavioural work of Fabre
but also the work of the economic entomologist who sought ‘to con-
quer and use’ insects for humanity’s ‘own endless ends’.62 Whether
the motivation behind the study of the living insect was to understand
its behaviour or to engineer its extermination, both approaches were
seen as a positive shift from the work of the taxonomic entomologist,
‘an obsessed or eremite specialist who invents names for each kind
[of beetle], and records their differences in death’.63 In championing
Ormerod’s work as a positive advance upon the taxonomic natural
history of her predecessors, Woolf was wholly in accord with the sci-
entific outlook of her time.
E t h ol o g y
However, if practitioners of the new entomology and analogous mod-
ern disciplines studied living organisms in part for the purpose of their
control, this was only one aspect of a wider turn towards the study
of living nature, and ethology focused on understanding the behav-
iour of organisms as an end in itself. Woolf represents the shift from a
taxonomic perspective towards a more observational outlook in ‘The
Death of the Moth’. In this essay, Woolf’s narrator initially displays
a disdain for her subject that is taxonomic in nature. Scrutinising the
‘specimen’ fluttering against her window, she dismisses the moth on
the grounds that ‘moths that fly by day are not properly to be called
moths’ (CE i: 359). The narrator seeks to understand the creature in
terms of familiar categories, but into these the day moth will not fit,
being ‘neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like [its] own species’
(ibid.). The day moth breaches the boundaries of established group-
ings and as a result calls up no immediate associations on the basis
of which the narrator may formulate a response to it. Within a taxo-
nomic frame of reference, the day moth is reduced to insignificance
by its exclusion from existing categories. Yet despite her taxonomic
dismissal of the day moth, the narrator finds that ‘one could not help
watching him’ (ibid.). Declaring, ‘my eye was caught by him’, she
inverts the dynamics of capture into a statement of observation and
thus signals her movement away from a taxonomic view of her subject
(360). Struck by the ‘enormous energy’ and ‘strangeness’ of not only
the moth but also the rooks rising and settling in a clamorous mass
upon the tree-tops and the view of the fields and downs seen from her
window, she is drawn from classification to observation (ibid.).
A similar inclination towards observation can be seen in ‘Kew
Gardens’. Kew is home to some of the most comprehensive herbaria
and living plant collections in the world and visitors to the gardens
encounter rare and exotic flora from around the globe. Woolf refers
in passing to Kew’s exotic holdings, its orchids and the ‘shiny green
umbrellas’ of the palm house, but neither its order beds (in which
plants are grouped according to their Linnaean classification) nor the
foreign rarities on display hold her attention (CSF 89). Instead, she
intersperses her account of the thoughts and conversations of human
visitors to the gardens with descriptions of a snail, a subject both com-
monplace and obscure. She records the snail’s actionsÂ€– its laborious
progress over crumbling earth, its testing of the security of a dead
leaf, and its decision to creep under rather than over this obstacleÂ€–
and guesses at its psychology, according it the ability to evaluate con-
ditions, feel doubt, and make decisions.64 Woolf’s attention to the life
of a snail suggests the fascination of even the most lowly and familiar
organisms and suggests as well that the significance of any creature is
most fully realised when it is observed as a living thing in its natural
surroundings. The story’s closing description of London as ‘a vast
nest of Chinese boxes’ suggests the worlds within worlds that make
up the city, but the description refers backwards as well, suggesting
the innumerable overlapping lives being lived in the gardens at Kew,
of which the snail’s life serves as a single example (ibid.).
Early ethologists recognised the extent to which the lives of even
the most common local species were unfamiliar and mysterious. In
Souvenirs entomologiques, Fabre described the behaviour of the dung
beetles, glow-worms, crickets, and weevils that he encountered in the
vicinity of his home at Sérignan. Woolf’s writing and the writing
of others in her circle suggest that she was acquainted with Fabre’s
work. In a diary entry for April 1918, she records Roger Fry’s unfin-
ished remark that Fabre left him ‘relieved in his mind’ with a sense
‘that after all our war, hideous though it isÂ€–’ (D i:Â€134). Fry’s com-
ment suggests the distraction and consolation to be found in the con-
templation of the intricate lives of insects. That Woolf found similar
consolation in observing the natural world is illustrated by the nature
notes in her Asheham House diary, recorded during 1917 and 1918 as
she recovered from a bout of mental illness and monitored the events
of the war during her intermittent stays in the Sussex countryside. The
entries in this diary are shorter and more perfunctory than her regular
diary entries and give attention primarily to household matters and to
observations of natural phenomena. In this diary, Woolf records the
occurrence of plants and her sightings of birdsÂ€– ‘Ladies Bedstraw,
Round-headed Rampion, Thyme, Marjoram. Saw a grey look-
ing hawkÂ€– not the usual red-brown one’ (40). She reports finding
aÂ€Â�caterpillar on the verge of pupation and watching it as it becomes a
chrysalis, its ‘head turning from side to side, tail paralysed;Â€… like a
snake in movement’ (43). She describes the group flights of swallows
and observes that flocks of starlings sometimes accompany rooks in
their collective flights (45, 48). She records the contents of a hawk’s
meal, notes the effect of weather on birds’ activities, and speculates
that the red spots appearing on butterflies in the area might be the
result of ‘some parasite’ (45, 52, 45, 46, 44). While she mentions using
a butterfly net as a receptacle for apples, her diary records only her
sightings of butterflies:Â€ ‘Saw 3 perfect peacock butterflies, 1 silver
washed frit[illary]; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung. All
freshly out & swarming on the hill’; ‘saw a clouded yellow … the
first for a long time’; ‘Painted Lady seen near Glynde’; ‘saw 2 clouded
yellows by the warren, & another pair over towards Bishopstone’ (53,
40, 48, 49). Woolf’s focus on the observation of natural phenomena
in her Asheham House diary suggests her affinity with Fabre’s behav-
ioural approach to the natural world.
Another telling allusion to Fabre occurs in the letter written by
Virginia’s sister, Vanessa, that is often cited as Woolf’s source of
inspiration for The Waves (which Woolf originally planned to title
The Moths). In the letter, written from a house at Cassis that was ‘beset
by moths of a night-time’, Vanessa notes that she writes ‘with moths
flying madly in circles round [her]’ (D iii:Â€139 n. 9).65 She recounts
that one night a huge moth, half a foot across, tapped so loudly at the
window that the assembled company initially mistook it for a person
or a bird, and she relates their efforts to catch and set the moth out of
a sense of obligation to the children. She recalls:
We had a terrible time with it. My maternal instinct which you deplore so
much, wouldn’t let me leave it … We let it in, kept it, gave it a whole bottle of
ether bought from the chemist, all in vain, took it to the chemist who dosed
it with chloroform for a dayÂ€– also in vain. Finally it did die rather the worse
for wear, & I set it, & now, here is another! a better specimen. But though
incredibly beautiful I suspect they’re commonÂ€– perhaps Emperor moths. Still
I know how one would have blamed one’s elders for not capturing such things
at all costs so I suppose I must go through it all again.66
From this passage it might appear that the practice of specimen col-
lection was as prevalent in the third decade of the twentieth century
as it had been in the final decade of the nineteenth. However, while
still practised by children, specimen collection in the early twenti-
eth century was far from the pervasive activity, sanctioned as a form
of rational recreation for all ages, that it had been during Vanessa
and Virginia’s own childhood. Vanessa’s representation of the cap-
ture of the moth as a tedious and terrible obligation accords with the
twentieth-century view of collection as a pastime ‘frowned upon
except in the very young … and the very old’.67 Furthermore, in a
significant shift of focus, Vanessa concludes her story with a refer-
ence to Fabre and his findings regarding moth behaviour:Â€she recalls,
‘[D]idn’t Fabre try experiments with this same creature & attract
all the males in the neighbourhood by shutting up one female in a
room?’68 Fabre offers the following description of his first encounter
with this phenomenon:
Candle in hand, we entered the room. What we saw is unforgettable. With a

soft flic-flac the great night-moths were flying round the wire-gauze cover,
alighting, taking flight, returning, mounting to the ceiling, re-descending.
They rushed at the candle and extinguished it with a flap of the wing; they
fluttered on our shoulders, clung to our clothing, grazed our faces. My study
had become a cave of a necromancer, the darkness alive with creatures of the
night!69
He estimates that in a single night nearly forty male Emperor moths

were drawn to his study, and he attempts through experiment to
determine how the male moths locate the female. Vanessa’s closing
allusion to Fabre’s behavioural work suggests the turn from collec-
tion to observation in the modern interest in nature.
In her reply to Vanessa’s letter, Woolf remarks, ‘your story of the
Moth so fascinates me that I am going to write a story about it. I could
think of nothing else but you & the moths for hours after reading your
letter.’70 Woolf’s early reflections on the projected novel then titled
The Moths suggest the aspects of Vanessa’s account that fascinated
her. ‘The current of moths flying strongly this way’ that Woolf envi-
sions resembles the ‘stream that [she is] trying to convey:Â€life itself
going on’ (D iii:Â€229). She muses, ‘The contrasts might be something
of this sort:Â€[the female character] might talk, or think, about the age
of the earth:Â€the death of humanity:Â€then moths keep on coming’, the
moths seeming to suggest the persistence of life (139). The moth that
appears in the earliest draft of the novel confirms this impression.
The moth sits ‘quiver[ing]’, ‘trembl[ing]’, ‘stirr[ing]’ on the wall, the
pattern on its wings making ‘a mysterious hieroglyph, always dis-
solving’ (TWHD 2, 19, 2). In ceaseless motion, the living moth is
imbued with meaning but not reducible to a simple classification.
Following her recollection that ‘[m]oths … dont fly by day’, Woolf
substituted breaking waves for the current of moths as the recurring
image suggestive of ‘life itself going on’ in the novel, for the power of
her imagery depended in part upon its truthfulness as a representa-
tion of nature (D iii:Â€229, 254). Woolf’s descriptions of the seasonal
activities of birds in the interchapters of The Waves offer an example
of her attention to behavioural detail. She distinguishes between the
confrontational song of male birds declaring and defending their ter-
ritory, singing as if to ‘shatter[] the song of another bird with harsh
discord’, and courtship songs, ‘passionate songs addressed to one ear
only’ (TW 81, 112). These preliminaries are followed by the building of
nests and the nesting period itself, during which the birds, not wishing
to draw attention to the location of their nests, ‘sat still save that they
flicked their heads sharply from side to side. Now they paused in their
song as if glutted with sound’ (125). Woolf describes the games and
group flights that the birds engage in as a means of honing Â�necessary
skills and strengthening the bonds within a flock:Â€‘they chased each
other, escaping, pursuing, pecking each other as they turned high in
the air’; ‘some raced in the furrows of the wind and turned and sliced
through them as if they were one body cut into a thousand shreds’
(54, 139). Once the young are grown, the birds depart, leaving their
nests behind (181). Woolf depicts the seasonal activities of birds as a
way of symbolising the passage of time, but the knowledge of bird
behaviour that informs her descriptions adds power to her figurative
use of the avian life cycle.
Another link between Woolf and the emerging study of ethology
was W. H. Hudson, who was known to Woolf as a writer of fiction
and autobiography as well as nature essays. Beginning in 1892 with
the publication of The Naturalist in La Plata, Hudson’s nature essays
won him respect both as an observer of nature and as a literary styl-
ist, and his admirers came to include many of the most celebrated
writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most
frequently cited compliment regarding Hudson’s style is a comment
made by Joseph Conrad and recorded by Ford Madox Ford:Â€‘ConradÂ€–
who was an even more impassioned admirer of Hudson’s talent than
am even IÂ€– used to say:Â€“You may try for ever to learn how Hudson
got his effects and you will never know. He writes down his words
as the good God makes the green grass grow.”’71 That the seeming
simplicity of his subjects and the naturalness of his style were also the
reason for his reputation in other circles is suggested by Ezra Pound’s
remark that ‘The Shepherd’s Life [sic] must … be art of a very high
order; how otherwise would one come completely under the spell of
a chapter with no more startling subject matter than the cat at a rural
station of an undistinguished British provincial railway.’72
Woolf was similarly impressed by Hudson’s work. In a diary
entry for 4 February 1919, as she attempts to express her opinion of
Lytton Strachey’s writing, she remarks as a means of comparison,
‘Thomas Hardy has what I call an interesting mind; so have Conrad
& Hudson; but not Lytton nor Matthew Arnold nor John Addington
Symonds’ (D Â€i:Â€238). In ‘Modern Fiction’, as she criticises the materi-
alism of Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett, Woolf again declares, ‘we
reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr Hardy, for Mr Conrad,
and in a much lesser degree for the Mr Hudson of The Purple Land,
Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago’ (E iv:Â€158). She men-
tions Hudson again in ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’. Lamenting
the absence of any whole and complete contemporary masterpiece,
she argues that the modern age is ‘an age of fragments’, and she com-
piles a list of those modern fragments that are, nevertheless, ‘equal
to the best of any age or author’:Â€between allusions to the enduring
phrases of T. S. Eliot and the ‘memorable catastrophe’ of Ulysses, she
prophesies, ‘Passages in Far Away and Long Ago will undoubtedly
go to posterity entire’ (E iii:Â€355, 356).73 A letter written to Katherine
Arnold-Forster on 23 August 1922 suggests that Woolf regarded
Hudson as a particularly apt example of the fragmentary brilliance
of modern literature. She relates, ‘I was to have been taken to see Mr
Hudson this winter by [Dorothy] Brett, who adored him … Parts
of his books are very goodÂ€– only others are very bad, isn’t that so?
Anyhow, I wish I had seen him’ (L ii: 549).
Woolf’s earliest and most extensive treatment of Hudson’s writ-
ing suggests which parts of his work she thought very good. Late in
September 1918 she received a last-minute request from The Times to
review a book:Â€in a diary entry for 23 September 1918 she records, ‘For
a wonder, the book, Hudson, was worth reading’ (D i:Â€197). The book
in question was Far Away and Long Ago, Hudson’s autobiographical
account of his upbringing in Argentina, and Woolf’s review, enti-
tled ‘Mr Hudson’s Childhood’, appeared in the TLS on 26 September
1918. Like Conrad and Pound, Woolf praises the impression of natur-
alness and immediacy created by Hudson’s style, remarking:
one is reluctant to apply to Mr Hudson’s book those terms of praise which are
bestowed upon literary and artistic merit, though needless to say it possesses
both. One does not want to recommend it as a book so much as to greet it as a
person, and not the clipped and imperfect person of ordinary autobiography,
but the whole and complete person whom we meet rarely enough in life or in
literature. (E ii: 298)
Woolf’s admiration for Hudson’s ability to present the reader with a

real person rather than a mere replica recalls Hudson’s own prefer-
ence for living creatures over lifeless specimens and suggests a link
between Hudson’s commitment to the observation of living nature
and the vitality of his literary subjects.
Woolf notes that Hudson is ‘constantly tempted to make “this
sketch of [his] first years a book about birds and little else”’ (301).
While she judges that he successfully resists this temptation, she
nevertheless argues:
a colour gets into his pages apart from the actual words, and even when they are
not mentioned we seem to see birds flying, settling, feeding, soaring through
every page of the book … [F]rom them his dreams spring and by them his
images are coloured in later life. Riding at first seems to him like flying. When
he is first among a crowd of well-dressed people in Buenos Aires he compares
them at once to a flock of military starlings. (ibid.)
Although Woolf’s praise here is for Hudson as a writer rather than
as a naturalist, she suggests the extent to which nature and Hudson’s
training in the observation of nature inform the content and style of
his writing. Hudson wrote about animals as though they had minds
and motivations comparable to though different from those of human
beings and at the same time observed human beings, both as individ-
uals and as populations, with the acuity of a bird-watcher. Hudson’s
intermingling of the roles of ethologist and novelist suggested to
Woolf the way in which the study of nature might serve as an ana-
logy for the representation of life in fiction.
Woolf elaborated on the parallel between the study of life in nature
and the study of life through literature in a letter to her nephew Julian
Bell in which she offered her thoughts on some poems he had writ-
ten. In her response to a poem describing sugaring for moths, Woolf
refers to W. H. Hudson and Richard Jeffries both as naturalists and
as literary stylists in order to suggest what she admires in writing.
She cautions her nephew against merely listing details, ‘pil[ing] up so
many separate facts’, and she cites Hudson and Jeffries as examples
of a better method of observation and expression (L iii:Â€ 432). She
remarks, ‘I think both Jeffries and Hudson succeed because they are
very careful what they observe. I mean they do not make a catalogue
of things, but choose this that and the other’ (ibid.). Woolf refers to
the outlook and style of these nature essayists as a means of suggest-
ing an alternative to a taxonomic approach in which the tabulating of
features is regarded as an adequate response to one’s subject. Woolf’s
allusions to Hudson and Jeffries as models of style suggest her sense
that the observation of living nature and the literary recording of life
shared key concerns.
T h e n e w n at u r a l i s t s
The New Naturalist was a series of monographs on nature subjects
that began its run in 1945 and continued into the 1990s. Although the
series was a product of the era that followed the Second World War,
Allen argues that already in the early decades of the twentieth century
‘[t]he lineaments of the so-called “New Naturalist” were emerging’.74
He identifies E. M. Nicholson, with his focus on the study of Â�behaviour
and the balance of birds, his hatred of collection, and his insistence
upon rational protection, as ‘that New Naturalist incarnate’.75 The
term suggests that the nineteenth-century natural history tradition
had metamorphosed into a new approach to the study of nature, and
that ‘[t]he sense of direction that had been lost with the passing of pri-
vate collecting was now being recovered’.76
The transition from collection to observation can be traced in the
activities of the Stephen children. By the turn of the century, Virginia
was no longer recording Thoby’s butterfly- and moth-hunting expe-
ditions; instead, she was remarking on his preoccupation with bird-
watching. In February 1904, Virginia commented in a letter to Violet
Dickinson that ‘Thoby is wild with his BirdsÂ€– there are all kinds here
[Manorbier in Pembrokeshire]; and George tramps about too with
his glasses’; similarly, in June 1905, she wrote, ‘Old Thoby went off
like the disreputable old ruffian he is to look for birds on the Norfolk
broads’ (L i: 130, 192). Thoby kept ‘a detailed nature notebook, with
excellent illustrations’, and long after his death, Woolf, imagining
what her brother might have become had he lived, suggested that he
might one day have written ‘a book on birds, with drawings by him-
self’ (MOB 143).77
Woolf’s novels contain several new naturalists. Ralph Denham is
perhaps the most fully developed of these. Denham’s benign interest
in nature sets him in opposition to William Rodney, who is notable
for his participation in the hunt and his unkindness to monkeys at
the Zoo (ND 388, 390). It is primarily through Denham’s interest in
birds that a shift in approaches to the study of nature is suggested.
Even the simple act of feeding the sparrows in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
identifies Denham as belonging to the new generation of bird-lovers
raised on protectionist principles, for feeding birds did not become
commonplace until the cold winter of 1890–91 led nature writers to
recommend the practice (163–5).78 Denham’s sheltering of an injured
rook is a further demonstration of his protectionist leanings. Denham
at times appears crankish in his views, as when he peevishly argues
that children should not be allowed to bowl hoops in parks because
it disturbs the birds and their human observers (164–5). Mary’s dis-
missal of this complaint suggests that in this instance he is unneces-
sarily extreme (her disapproval of his destruction of a poacher’s trap
has already been noted); nevertheless, as a result of her acquaintance
with Denham, Mary Datchet comes to view ‘the study of birds’ as
part of a ‘programme for a perfect life’ (167).
During Denham’s encounter with Mary Datchet’s sporting broth-
ers, his love of nature again appears in a positive light. He brings his
field-glasses with him to the country, and when the Datchet brothers
invite him to go out shooting with them, he replies, ‘I won’t shoot,
but I’ll come with you … I’ve never shot in my life … I shall watch
birds’ (196). Although this initially nonplusses the brothers, Denham
quickly ingratiates himself by praising their region as ‘about the best
place in England’ for observing water fowl, and their previously
stilted talk ‘develop[s] into a genuine conversation about the habits of
birds’ (197). Edward Datchet confirms the popularity of bird-watch-
ing in the area with the remark, ‘I can show you the place for watch-
ing birds … if that’s what you like doing. I know a fellow who comes
down from London about this time every year to watch them’ (196).
It is also worth noting that while Woolf sets Denham’s bird-watching
in opposition to Rodney’s hunting, she pairs ‘the enthusiasm which
led Christopher to collect moths and butterflies’ with ‘Edward’s pas-
sion for Jorrocks’ (188).79 Woolf’s alignment of insect collection with
hunting stories suggests that by the time Night and Day was written,
specimen collection was a pastime just as likely to be associated with
the sport of hunting as with the study of nature.
Eleanor Pargiter in The Years is another character who displays an
observer’s appreciation of birds. In 1891, while still playing the part
of the Victorian spinster-daughter keeping house for her widowed
father, Eleanor watches ‘a file of birds flying high, flying together;
crossing the sky. She watched them … Cabs piled with boxes went
past her. She envied them. She wished she were going abroad’
(TYÂ€108–9). Her interest in birds reflects her desire for mobility and
independence. Eleanor’s commitment to bird-watching grows over
the years:Â€following the Colonel’s death and her consequent release
from domestic obligations, she carries field-glasses with her when she
goes visiting, in case of bird sightings. She worries that she will be
labelled ‘an old maid who washes and watches birds’ (193), but in fact
her engagement with nature appears a part of her late-life rebellion.
People and pastimes that others in her family find difficult to acceptÂ€–
‘Eleanor’s Indians’ and her ‘friendships with men who did not love
women’Â€– are of a piece with her botanising excursions on Wimbledon
Common in the company of a charming dentist (336,Â€310). The most
striking example of the way in which Eleanor’s interest in nature
underscores her lack of concern with social convention comes while
Eleanor is a guest at Celia’s house in the country and sits waiting to
catch sight of an owl while the family interrogates her about Rose’s
activities as a suffragette:
Eleanor came out on to the terrace with her glasses …
‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ said Peggy, drawing up a chair. ‘He’ll come
along that hedge.’
She pointed to the dark line of hedge that went across the meadow. Eleanor
focused her glasses and waited.
‘Now,’ said Celia, pouring out the coffee. ‘There are so many things I want
to ask you …’
‘What’s all this about Rose?’ she asked.
‘What?’ said Eleanor absent-mindedly, altering the focus of her glasses.
‘It’s getting too dark,’ she said; the field was blurred.
‘Morris says she’s been had up in a police-court,’ said Celia …
‘She threw a brickÂ€– ’ said Eleanor. She focused her glasses on the hedge
again. She held them poised in case the owl should come that way again.
‘Will she be put in prison?’ Peggy asked quickly.
‘Not this time,’ said Eleanor, ‘Next timeÂ€– Ah, here he comes!’ she broke
off. The blunt-headed bird came swinging along the hedge. He looked almost
white in the dusk. Eleanor got him within the circle of her lens. He held a little
black spot in front of him.
‘He’s got a mouse in his claws!’ she exclaimed.
‘He’s got a nest in the steeple,’ said Peggy. The owl swooped out of the field
of vision. (194–5)
Although Eleanor’s preoccupation with bird-watching in the midst

of a conversation about Rose’s clash with the law might be read
as a form of escapism, it can also be seen as another instance in
which Eleanor remains unperturbed by an unorthodox situation
that troubles the sensibilities of others. Eleanor’s eccentric old age
is in its own way a protest against the conventions that controlled so
much of her adulthood, and her bird-watching is a part of this. Just
returned from India, Eleanor strikes Peggy as ‘a fine old prophet-
ess, a queer old bird, venerable and funny at one and the same time’
(311). She has attained the movement and freedom that she once
envied in a flying file of birds, and this in part through her ornitho-
logical activities.
Eleanor Pargiter and Lucy Swithin share a number of characteris-
tics:Â€both possess an insatiable curiosity about science and what it can
reveal about nature, the past, and the future, and both are viewed as
eccentric and out of touch while displaying more discernment than
their critics can boast. Although Lucy is often dismissed by her family
and acquaintances as a vague mystic, she shows herself to be scientifiÂ�
cally well informed. Gazing at the swallows flying around the barn,
she remarks, ‘“They come every year … the same birds … They
come every year … [f]rom Africa”’ (BTA 62–3). Mrs Manresa is
sceptical, ‘smil[ing] benevolently, humouring the old lady’s whimsy’
while commenting to herself, ‘It was unlikely … that the birds were
the same’ (62). Yet Lucy’s information is accurate, suggesting her
familiarity with the results of the bird-ringing and migration studies
that had become a significant element of ornithological work since the
1910s.80 Bart marvels at ‘[h]ow imperceptive [Lucy’s] religion made
her’, but Lucy often shows herself to be more knowledgeable than
those who condescendingly think themselves her superior (120).
Although Denham, Eleanor, and Lucy can appear mildly comical
in their absorbed observation of nature, their attention to the natural
world is one of the ways in which Woolf suggests that they possess a
frame of reference that others lack. Woolf gently mocks all three of
her new naturalist characters; however, she does not undercut them
as she does the brittlely complacent William Rodney or the rigidly
rational Bartholomew Oliver. The new naturalists’ consciousness of
lives other than their own can be interpreted as a guard against self-
absorption.
T h e n e w n at u r a l i s t i n a n ol d n at u r a l i s t
Another sign of Woolf ’s alignment with the emerging discipline of
ethology is her revisiting of the work of Gilbert White in the late
1930s. The 1899 diary entry quoted in the previous chapter indicates
Virginia’s early familiarity with The Natural History of Selborne. As
a girl, Virginia displayed both admiration for and impatience with
White’s sequestered country life and his endless and meticulous
recording of the minute details of his surroundings. However, in
March 1937 she re-read White and in the spring of 1938, at about the
same time that her ideas for the novel that would become Between
the Acts started to form, she began contemplating an article on his
life and work. She finally wrote ‘White’s Selborne’ in August 1939
and it appeared in the New Statesman and Nation on 30 September
1939.
Woolf’s essay on White opens with a quote from the naturalist
himself:Â€‘“… there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first
sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pro-
nounce upon them with some certainty”’ (CE iii: 122). Woolf con-
tinues, ‘Gilbert White is talking, of course, about birds; the good
ornithologist, he says, should be able to distinguish them by their
airÂ€– “on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well
as in the hand”’ (ibid.).81 This interest in the living bird in the wild
was what set White apart from his contemporaries and caused him
to be hailed as a precursor by twentieth-century ethologists. That
Woolf chooses to introduce White in these terms suggests that she
was in accord with modern ethologists in noting and approving this
approach.
Woolf presents White, contemplating from all angles the ‘great
question’ of bird migration, as an ‘image of science at her most inno-
cent and most sincere’ (123). In contrast to the self-aggrandising
Professor X, who wields his measuring rod to prove himself supeÂ�rior,
White, Woolf suggests, is unselfconscious in his scientific efforts.
Woolf’s gendering of science here further demonstrates that her com-
ment that science is ‘a man, a father, and infected too’ does not hold
for science in all forms (TG 360).
Woolf also suggests her approval of White by adopting his own
methods in her analysis of him. As Woolf contemplates White, he
seems to her to merge with his subject of study, leaving her in the
position of the naturalist-observer:Â€‘he loses that self-consciousness
which so often separates us from our fellow-creatures and becomes
like a bird seen through a field-glass busy in a distant hedge. This
is the moment then, when his eyes are fixed upon the swallow, to
watch Gilbert White himself’ (CE iii: 123). Both Woolf’s blending
of the roles of writer and bird-watcher and her assertion that White’s
approach enables him to imaginatively inhabit his subject suggest
that Woolf appreciated White’s method of observation not simply as
a scientific technique but also as a model for the literary treatment of
one’s subject.
Woolf’s appreciation for White’s method of observing the natural
world did not prevent her from critiquing other aspects of his out-
look. Citing his comment that church spires were ‘“very necessary
ingredients in the landscape”’ and his attribution of the complexity of
the natural world to Providence, Woolf expresses a degree of regret
at the ‘hedges’ that ‘shut in’ White’s personal ‘landscape’ (124). She
notes his exaggerated reverence for the nobility and criticises him for
being ‘far less tender to the poorÂ€– “We abound with poor”, he writes,
as if the vermin were beneath his noticeÂ€– than to the grasshopper’
(125). But although such characteristics momentarily tempt Woolf
to classify White as a ‘specimen of the eighteenth-century clerical
naturalist’, she remains faithful to White’s ethological approach and
resists describing him in taxonomic terms, noting, ‘[J]ust as we think
to have got him named he moves. He sounds a note that is not the
characteristic note of the common English clergyman’ (ibid.). White,
Woolf suggests, cannot be reduced to a type.
In place of a taxonomic description, Woolf borrows White’s own
words to summarise his nature:Â€‘“The kestrel or wind-hover”, he says,
“has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all
the time being briskly agitated”’ (126). This image of dynamic sta-
sis is suited to White, who, though he remained for most of his life
at Selborne, was ceaselessly active in his observation of the natural
world. The quote is also fitting in that it highlights once more White’s
keen observation of living behaviour, the aspect of his science that
made him unique in his time and anticipated twentieth-century
developments.
As a young girl, Woolf expressed admiration for White’s manner
of observation and expression but concluded that his methods could
not be her own (PA 138). Returning to the consideration of White’s
work as an adult, however, and viewing his approach to nature in the
context of modern ethology, she found new relevance in his methods
and emulated his approach in her description of him.
E c ol o g y
If Woolf’s attitude towards pest species and pesticides in ‘Miss
Ormerod’ reflects the emphasis on the control of nature character-
istic of early ecology, her depiction of the natural world and human
beings’ place in it in Between the Acts illustrates her concurrent
absorption of early ecology’s view of nature as a complex system of
interacting and interdependent organisms. Wells, Huxley, and Wells
open their chapter on ecology in The Science of Life (a work that, as
has been mentioned before, Woolf records reading in late 1931 and
early 1932) with the assertion that ecology provides ‘a fresh way of
regarding life, by considering the balances and mutual pressures of
species living in the same habitat’.82 They declare it to be a fundamen-
tal principle of ecology that ‘[i]n every habitat we find that there is a
sort of community or society of organisms not only preying upon but
depending upon each other, and that a certain balance, though often a
violently swaying balance, is maintained between the various species
so that the community keeps on’.83 Between the Acts may be interpreted
as a reflection on the human place within a wider natural community
and a representation of the balance, very often violently swaying, in
which all co-exist.
From the earliest pages of the novel, Woolf suggests that humans are
no longer attuned to their place in nature. Reflecting on the placement
of Pointz Hall, Lucy wonders, ‘“Why, Bart, did they build the house
in the hollow, facing north?”’Â€– to which Bart replies, ‘“Obviously
to escape from nature”’ (BTA 8). Bart’s response suggests that it is
only common sense to view human beings as existing in opposition
to nature, but the narrative voice intervenes with another opinion,
judging that ‘it was a pity that the man who had built Pointz Hall had
pitched the house in a hollow, when beyond the flower garden and the
vegetables there was this stretch of high ground. Nature had provided
a site for a house; man had built his house in a hollow’ (9). It is a sign
of human beings’ disconnection from nature that they do not inhabit
the most suitable place in their environment. Rather than occupying
the niche available to them, they place themselves in opposition to
their surroundings.
Louise Westling has noted the fact that human beings in Between
the Acts often appear oblivious to the natural world.84 When Mrs
Sands, the cook, enters the barn to lay out the refreshments for the
pageant, a cursory glance around the building suggests to her that
‘the Barn was empty’ (61). But the narrator goes on to qualify this
statement, drawing attention to the multiple, overlapping micro-
cosms in which
[m]ice slid in and out of holes or stood upright, nibbling. Swallows were busy
with straw in pockets of earth in the rafters. Countless beetles and insects of
various sorts burrowed in the dry wood … A blue-bottle had settled on the
cake and stabbed its yellow rock with its short drill. A butterfly sunned itself
sensuously on a sunlit yellow plate. (61–2)
Although this world goes unnoticed by manyÂ€ – ‘butterflies [Mrs

Sands] never saw; mice were only black pellets in kitchen drawers;
moths she bundled in her hands and put out the window’Â€– the empti-
ness of the barn is a matter of perspective only (62). A complex world
of interpenetrating lives occupies this supposedly empty space.
Woolf’s assertion of human beings’ lack of attunement to the nat-
ural world also resonates with the novel’s repeated allusions to extinc-
tion. Based on her reading of The Outline of History, Lucy creates a
composite scene of prehistoric Britain in which a dinosaur from the
Mesozoic appears alongside the mammoths and mastodons encoun-
tered by early humans in the Pleistocene:Â€she imagines ‘rhododendron
forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then divided by a
channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied,
seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed,
barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the masto-
don’ (8).85 Despite their vast temporal separation, the Â�iguanodon and
the mammoth are alike in their extinction. In A Short History of the
World and The Outline of History, Wells stresses the seeming secur-
ity of the Mesozoic reptiles during their 80-million-year habitation
of the earth, remarking, ‘Had any quasi-human intelligence been
watching the world through that inconceivable length of time, how
safe and eternal the sunshine and abundance must have seemed, how
assured the wallowing prosperity of the Dinosaurs and the flapping
abundance of the flying lizards.’86 However, this long history was
no Â�guarantee of security:Â€subsequent changes in climate and envir-
onment exceeded the dinosaurs’ ‘utmost capacity for variation and
adaptation’ and as a result they ‘left no descendants’.87 Woolf’s allu-
sions to the disappearance of formerly dominant species suggest the
fundamental precariousness of human existence and the dangers of
falling out of harmony with one’s environment, whether through a
physical or philosophical failure to adapt.
However, while calling attention to humanity’s habitual blindness
to the natural world, the precariousness of human existence when
viewed in the long term, and the potential consequences of inadapt-
ability, Woolf also affirms the possibility of a greater attunement to
and integration with nature. Not everyone is oblivious to the lives
being led alongside their own:Â€ although Mrs Sands sees the barn
as empty, Lucy Swithin, ‘gazing up’, looks ‘not at the decorations.
At the swallows apparently’ (62). And just as it offered the perfect
site for a house, the landscape provides the ideal setting for a play,
with ‘trees … regular enough to suggest columns in a church; in a
church Â�without a roof; in an open-air cathedral, a place where swal-
lows darting seemed, by the regularity of the trees, to make a pattern’
(41). There is even an ideal backstage area:Â€‘Beyond the lily pool the
ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground, bushes and bram-
bles had mobbed themselves together’ (36). Miss La Trobe recognises
this spot as ‘the very place for a dressing-room, just as, obviously,
the terrace was the very place for a play’ (ibid.). In contrast to the
misplaced house, the play occupies a suitable niche. Nor does the play
find a place for itself at the expense of the existing inhabitants of the
area. It exists in harmony not competition with its surroundings. As
Westling has noted, ‘nonhuman forces and beings are crucial play-
ers in the human drama’:88 while a tune plays on the gramophone,
‘the view repeated in its own way what the tune was saying … The
cows, making a step forward, then standing still, were saying the
same thing to perfection’ (81). Nature further sustains the play when
its effect seems about to be dispersed:Â€‘as the illusion petered out, the
cows took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of
time she lifted her great moon-eyed head and bellowed … From cow
after cow came the same yearning bellow … [T]he cows annihilated
the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the
emotion’ (84–5). Moments such as this cause Miss La Trobe to remark
with relief that ‘Nature … had taken her part’ (107). What has not
been previously noted is the suggestion that nature’s contributions do
not go unreciprocated. The play contributes to the natural environ-
ment as well:
Cardboard crowns, swords made of silver paper, turbans that were sixpenny
dish cloths, lay on the grass or were flung on the bushes. There were pools of
red and purple in the shade; flashes of silver in the sun. The dresses attracted
the butterflies. Red and silver, blue and yellow gave off warmth and sweet-
ness. Red Admirals gluttonously absorbed richness from dish cloths, cabbage
whites drank icy coolness from silver paper. Flitting, tasting, returning, they
sampled the colours. (40)
The play and its props provide metaphorical nourishment through

their beauty, forming a link in a figurative food-chain. When Miss La
Trobe despairs, declaring, ‘It was a failure, another damned failure!
As usual. Her vision escaped her’, the narrative belies this verdict by
noting that still ‘butterflies feasted upon swords of silver paper’, sug-
gesting the ongoing sustenance provided by the play (60–61). (That
the nourishment of art and beauty is equally available to Miss La
Trobe’s human audience is indicated by the fact that with the appear-
ance of Mabel Hopkins on the stage in the role of Queen Anne, ‘eyes
fed on her as fish rise to a crumb of bread on the water. Who was
she? What did she represent? She was beautiful’ (75).) Woolf gestures
towards ecological concepts such as habitat niches and food-chains to
suggest the interrelatedness and interdependence of the human and
more-than-human occupants of a shared environment.
In Between the Acts, individuals’ dealings with nature offer insight
into their wider outlooks and human relationships. The discord in Isa
and Giles’s marriage was foretold in their first meeting:
They had met first in Scotland, fishingÂ€– she from one rock, he from another.
Her line had got tangled; she had given over, and had watched him with the
stream rushing between his legs, casting, castingÂ€– until, like a thick ingot of
silver bent in the middle, the salmon had leapt, had been caught, and she had
loved him. (31)
Giles’s display of dominance over nature captures Isa as well.89
However, this dynamic appears inadequate to sustain their relation-
ship, as is demonstrated by Isa’s response when Giles crushes a snake
with a toad in its mouth and looks to her for approval of his bloodied
shoes. Although Mrs Manresa regards Giles’s blood-stained shoes as
evidence of his valour and is flattered by this manly action, Isa is no
longer impressed by feats of violence and silently conveys the mes-
sage, ‘“I don’t admire you … Silly little boy, with blood on his boots”’
(68). It is worth noting that Giles’s act of violence against the snake
and toad results from a misinterpretation of natural processes. Giles’s
horror at the sight of the snake with the toad in its mouth arises from
his assumption that the snake is ‘choked’ on its kill, ‘the snakeÂ€ …
unable to swallow; the toad … unable to die’, and that the natural
relationship of predator and prey has been upset, resulting in a ‘mon-
strous inversion’ (61). Whether or not they condone Giles’s violent
response, readers of this scene generally accept his assumption that
the struggle between the snake and the frog is an unnatural one:Â€Alex
Zwerdling describes it as ‘a perverse assault in which both antagonists
are inevitably destroyed’; Gillian Beer suggests that the situation rep-
resents an ‘impasse of toad and snake’.90 In fact, what Giles describes
is typical feeding behaviour for snakes. A snake, by virtue of the flex-
ible connections between its jaws and skull, can consume prey several
times the size of its own head:Â€it works its mouth slowly around its
prey and gradually, by means of muscle contractions (which Giles
notes as ‘a spasm [that] made the ribs contract’ (ibid.)), draws the often
still-living prey down its throat. The laborious process could easily
be misinterpreted as choking, but it is entirely natural.91 Only Giles’s
interference constitutes unnatural violence. His misreading of nature
provokes him to violence against it, and Mrs Manresa’s admiration for
his misguided act contrasts with her condescension towards Lucy on
the subject of Lucy’s (accurate) comments on bird migration.
This opposition is representative, for Lucy Swithin’s observation
of the natural world stands as an alternative to Giles’s violent engage-
ment with nature, which functions as an assertion of dominance. Lucy
is often dismissed by family and acquaintances as a devout woman left
behind in an age of unbelief, but there are persistent Â�parallels between
the mystical and the scientific in Between the Acts that indicate a new
outlet for faith. The narrative suggests a continuity between Greek
oracles, Christianity, and science:Â€the meteorologist’s weather fore-
cast (a ‘recent innovation’ as an editorial note states (132 n. 13)) is a
modern, secular, scientific prophecy. When the forecast is read out,
‘[A]ll looked to see whether the sky obeyed the meteorologist’ (16).
There is a scientific basis to Lucy’s seemingly mystical attunement
with nature.
For all that Lucy is viewed by others and indeed views herself as a
devout individual, there are suggestions that she derives greater con-
solation from nature than from religion. Standing by the lily pond,
‘perfunctorily she caressed her cross. But her eyes went water search-
ing, looking for fish … Faith required hours of kneeling in the early
morning. Often the delight of the roaming eye seduced her’ (121).
Woolf implies that this observation completes rather than distracts
from Lucy’s devotions:
Then something moved in the water; her favourite fantail. The golden orfe
followed. Then she had a glimpse of silverÂ€– the great carp himself, who came
to the surface so very seldom. They slid on, in and out between the stalks, sil-
ver; pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied.
‘Ourselves,’ she murmured. And retrieving some glint of faith from the
grey waters, hopefully, without much help from reason, she followed the fish;
the speckled, streaked, and blotched; seeing in that vision beauty, power and
glory in ourselves. (ibid.)
The observation of the natural world appears to accord Lucy a con-
solation more lasting than that which Giles finds through his attempts
to dominate nature, nor does the ephemerality of Lucy’s sightings
detract from their power. Through the juxtaposition of Giles’s and
Lucy’s respective modes of engaging with nature, Woolf seems to
extend the notion of ‘deliverance through ecology’ beyond the
bounds of the scientific establishment.92 This deliverance is by no
means assured, just as the closing tableau of Isa and Giles suggests
only that following their inevitable fight new life ‘might be born’
(129). Nevertheless, alongside the threat of destruction and extinc-
tion, the novel presents the possibility of integration and continuity.
Woolf’s writing, both fictional and non-fictional, demonstrates
her awareness of the complex changes occurring in the life sciences in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She kept pace with
the rapid shifts in the field, showing herself to be familiar with many
of the key figures and concepts of the emerging disciplines and accur-
ately representing new developments in her writing. In her rejection
of the taxonomic outlook, her sense of the revolutionary potential
of the new biology, her determination to hold protection to rational
standards, her sense of the pleasure to be found in the observation of
living creatures, and her awareness of humanity’s place in the wider
scheme of nature, Woolf encapsulated many of the dominant trends
in the modern study of nature. However, Woolf did not stop at the
accurate representation of scientific trends; she also put scientific
developments to metaphorical use in her writing. In the next chap-
ter, I will consider the ways in which Woolf employed these various
scientific models as analogies for the writing process and argued for
new methods of representing life in fiction through her treatment of
contrasting approaches to the study of nature.
Chapter 5
Representing ‘the manner of our seeing’

Literary experimentation and scientific analogy
Woolf ’s familiarity with trends in the life sciences led her to draw
upon the study of nature as a source of analogy when consider-
ing methods of representing life in fiction. Collection and clas-
sification have been recognised before as metaphors important
to Woolf ’s conception of writing. As I noted in the introductory
chapter, critics such as Richter and Robinson have interpreted the
hunting of moths and the netting of butterflies as analogies for
Woolf ’s own creative process, while Sarsfield regards ‘the ques-
tion of how to “pin down” life in words without destroying it, to
“pin” the moth without killing’ as a ‘perennial dilemma’ for Woolf
and sees no solution to the ‘writing = pinning = killing conun-
drum’ in Woolf ’s work.1 Whether they assume Woolf ’s approval
or disapproval of collection and classification as a metaphor for
writing, Richter, Robinson, and Sarsfield are alike in regarding
the taxonomic method as the sole analogy for the writing process
that Woolf drew from the life sciences. In fact, however, Woolf
also drew analogies from other, emergent approaches to the study
of nature. Reflecting contemporary scientific attitudes, Woolf
employed the taxonomic method as a symbol of a limited mode of
representation while taking disciplines focused on the observation
of living organisms as analogies for new methods of seeing and
describing life. In place of a literary method focused on exhaustive
description in the service of definitive classification, Woolf advo-
cated acceptance of the fact that only fleeting glimpses of a moving
subject were possible or, indeed, desirable.
168
Literary experimentation and scientific analogy 169
Wo ol f ’s u s e o f t h e a n a l o gi e s o f
c ol l e c t ion a n d ta xon o m y
Contrary to the assumptions of Richter and Robinson, Woolf’s use
of collection and taxonomy as analogies for the writing process
typically suggests a criticism of the writing under discussion. In ‘A
Scribbling Dame’, Woolf refers to taxonomic natural history as a
means of expressing reservations regarding a writer’s approach to his
subject. Woolf’s essayÂ€– a review of George F. Whicher’s The Life and
Romances of Mrs Eliza Haywood that appeared in the Times Literary
Supplement on 17 February 1916Â€– begins, ‘There are in the Natural
History Museum certain little insects so small that they have to be
gummed to the cardboard with the lightest of fingers, but each of
them, as one observes with constant surprise, has its fine Latin name
spreading far to the right and left of the miniature body’ (E ii: 22).
Although purporting to admire the labour of the ‘humble, indefat-
igable men’ who devote themselves to such work, Woolf implies her
doubt as to its value (ibid.). She suggests a parallel between the labour
of these taxonomists and the work of Mr Whicher, who has endeav-
oured ‘to pin down this faded and antique specimen of the domes-
tic house fly’, Mrs Eliza Haywood, for no discernible reason beyond
the fact that ‘Mrs Haywood has never been classified’ (22,Â€ 23). To
classify simply as an end in itself, out of a desire to fill a gap in a ser-
ies, strikes Woolf as an unworthy task. Part of Woolf’s dispute with
Whicher centres on his choice of subject, for she regards Haywood
as an author unworthy of exhaustive cataloguing; however, she also
questions Whicher’s method, arguing that it is in part Whicher’s
treatment of his subject that renders Haywood so unremittingly
uninteresting to the reader. Woolf suggests that Haywood was a sub-
ject not without potential:Â€‘A woman who married a clergyman and
ran away from him, who supported herself and possibly two chil-
dren, it is thought without gallantry, entirely by her pen in the early
years of the eighteenth century, was striking out a new line of life
and must have been a person of character’ (23). Rather than attempt-
ing to provide insight into Haywood’s life, however, Whicher offers
a taxonomic description, ‘a careful, studious, detailed account of all
her works regarded from every possible point of view, together with
a bibliography which occupies 204 pages of print’, and the product,
Woolf argues, does not justify the labour (ibid.). While Whicher suc-
ceeds in definitively classifying Haywood, locating her within the lit-
erary hierarchy, he fails to convey anything of significance about her
as a living subject, and to Woolf’s mind, the classification of one’s
subject is a project of questionable value.
Woolf at times criticised her own work in similar terms. She
expressed her mixed feelings regarding her biography of Roger
Fry with the remark, ‘I cant help thinking I’ve caught a good deal
of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net’ (D v:
266). Here again Woolf uses an analogy drawn from the natural
history tradition to suggest the inadequacy of a literary formÂ€ –
‘“The official life”’, as Maynard Keynes dismissively called itÂ€– and
her sense that the method in common use failed both author and
subject (314).
Elsewhere, too, Woolf interrogates the efficacy of collection and
classification employed as literary methods. In ‘The Mark on the Wall’,
she examines the effects of classification on the imaginative process.
The eponymous mark on the wall acts as a catalyst for imaginative
activity:Â€the narrator remarks on ‘how readily our thoughts swarm
upon a new object’ (CSF 77). However, it is not simply the presence
of the mark but its unidentifiability that stimulates her thoughts. Its
indefinability allows it to become in turn a hole made by a nail to hold
a miniature, a small rose leaf, a smooth tumulus, and a crack in the
wood, and each guess expands into a train of Â�associations and reflec-
tions (77, 78, 80, 82). It is from this flow of speculation that the entire
narrative derives. Ultimately, however, the narrator’s imaginative
flow is interrupted:Â€feeling that ‘something is getting in the way’, she
loses her train of thought and emerges from her reverie to discover
someone, preoccupied with empirical facts such as can be found in
newspapers, standing over her and complaining, ‘“Curse this war;
God damn this war! … All the same, I don’t see why we should have
a snail on our wall”’ (83). With this positive identificationÂ€– ‘Ah, the
mark on the wall! It was a snail!’Â€– the uncertainty that was the source
of the narrator’s imaginative outpouring is removed, and the narra-
tive comes to an abrupt end (ibid.). The story as a whole can be read as
a deferral of classification, and conclusive categorisation is presented
as inimical to the creative process.
Likewise, in ‘Reading’, the analogy of specimen collection pro-
vides Woolf with a means of expressing her disapproval of the materi-
alist approach to literature. Richter, in her interpretation of ‘Reading’,
argues that Woolf took the business of bug-hunting as an analogy for
writing in general and her own writing process in particular. Richter
contends that, in the course of Woolf’s description of the moth hunt,
one is made to realise that the forest in which the hunt takes place ‘is
the mind of the writer’ and that the account describes the writer wan-
dering in ‘the dark forest of the imagination’, ‘searching to pin down
words and images that flit in the dark places of the brain’.2
However, in ‘Reading’, Woolf is more critical of the moth hunt
than Richter suggests. The hunt, carried out in the ‘gloom of the
unknown’, calls to mind writing of a sort, but rather than serving
as an emblem of Woolf’s ‘own creative process’, as Richter suggests,
it functions more specifically as a parallel to Woolf’s description of
the tales of adventure and discovery told by Hakluyt and his con-
temporaries, tales of ‘the unknown; and of themselves, the isolated
English, burning on the very rim of the dark, and the dark full of
unseen splendours’ (E iii: 150, 147).3 Woolf’s essay suggests her sense
of the limitations of these Elizabethan narratives, and she employs
the analogy of the moth hunt to advance her argument.
From the outset of her discussion of Elizabethan exploration nar-
ratives, Woolf stresses the extent to which they are concerned with
the material. The narratives catalogue the wealth brought back to
England by Elizabethan adventurers:Â€ ‘a black stone, veined with
gold, or an ivory tusk, or a lump of silver’; ‘beasts and plants, …
the seeds of all our roses’; a ‘precious stream of coloured and rare
and curious things’ (146, 147). Accounts of the practices and cere-
monies of other cultures are riches of another sort, ‘preserved as if
under shades of glass’ in the records of travellers (148). Woolf analyÂ�
ses the Elizabethans’ descriptions of the indigenous people dis-
turbed by European exploration, accounts that ‘fall like lantern light’
upon individuals, such as the ‘savage caught somewhere off the coast
of Labrador’ who is taken back to England and ‘shown about like a
wild beast. Next year they bring him back and fetch a woman savage
on board to keep him company. When they see each other they blush;
they blush profoundly; the sailor notices it but knows not why it is’
(ibid.). It is this lack of interest in or comprehension of the inward life
of human beings that Woolf presents as the flaw of the early modern
chroniclers:Â€she reflects, ‘We seem able to guess why they blushed;
the Elizabethans would notice it, but it has waited over three hun-
dred years for us to interpret it’, and she concludes that ‘there are not
perhaps enough blushes to keep the attention fixed upon the broad
yellow-tinged pages of Hakluyt’s book’ (ibid.). While full of material
wonders, the Elizabethans’ narratives contain no psychological elem-
ent. It is this ‘thing doubtful as a phantom’ that Woolf misses in their
writing, and she finds as a result that ‘one tires of the long, dangerous,
and memorable voyages … for the perhaps unsatisfactory reason that
they make no mention of oneself’ and only ‘talk of their commodities’
(148, 149).
It is in the context of this critique of the materialism of Elizabethan
exploration narratives that Woolf introduces her account of the moth
hunt. The hunt is presented in terms that echo the descriptions of the
voyages of discovery previously offered. The moth hunters embark
on an expedition, ‘the leader of the party … draw[ing] us, unheed-
ing darkness or fear, further and further into the unknown world’
where the dark not only extinguishes light but also ‘buries under it
a great part of the human spirit’, a comment that suggests a parallel
with the Elizabethan explorers, unconscious of themselves (150). The
moths discovered upon the sugared trees are regarded as ‘lumpsÂ€…
unspeakably precious’, the scarlet underwing in particular ‘a pos-
session of infinite value’, recalling the treasures that captivated the
Elizabethan explorers (151). The capture of the underwing is sup-
posed to be a moment of ‘glory’ and ‘boldness … rewarded’, evi-
dence that they have ‘proven [their] skill against the hostile and alien
force’ of nature (152). Yet, read in conjunction with the reservations
already expressed about the Elizabethans’ exploration narratives, the
Â�description of the moth hunt only confirms the inadequacy of this
approach to one’s subject, for, like the Elizabethan adventurers, the
moth hunters are concerned only with the material. The capture of the
scarlet underwing ought to function as the culmination of the moth
hunt, but there is instead a sense of anticlimax surrounding its death.
Of the event, the narrator states, ‘There was a flash of scarlet within
the glass. Then he composed himself with folded wings. He did not
move again’ (ibid.). The reference to the moth’s composure echoes
Woolf’s earlier complaint regarding the inscrutability of Elizabethan
letter-writers who ‘like children on a Sunday compose themselves and
cease their chatter when they sat down to write what would pass from
hand to hand’ (143). This composed quality results in a paradoxical
indecipherability, for while composure makes the subject readable, it
at the same time leaves nothing to read.4 Woolf’s account of the moth
hunt thus serves not as a model for her own writing practice but as
a confirmation of the inadequacy of a purely materialist approach to
one’s subject.
However, Woolf maintains in ‘Reading’ that an alternative to such
composure exists. Putting aside the Elizabethan exploration narra-
tives, Woolf searches the bookshelves for something both ‘timeless
and contemporary’ and finds it in the writing of Sir Thomas Browne
(153). Unlike the Elizabethan chroniclers whose outlook is wholly
materialistic, Browne appears to Woolf ‘sympathetic’ and ‘ponder-
ing’, curious as to the inward nature of man (154). He stands ‘trans-
fixed by the astonishing vista’ of his own inward life, asserting, ‘“The
world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame
that I cast mine eye on”’ (156, 155). It is this focus on the psycho-
logical rather than the material, on the inner spirit rather than the
external world that gives Browne’s writing a ‘timeless and contem-
porary’ quality in Woolf’s eyes (153). It is recorded that his skin was
‘constantly suffused with blushes’, a detail that suggests that, unlike
the captors of the man from Labrador, Browne would have had the
sensitivity to interpret the cause of the man’s blushes, to understand
his inner state (155).
Woolf employs the moth hunt as an emblem of a method of per-
ception and description that she finds inadequate and to which, as the
writing of Sir Thomas Browne demonstrates, alternatives exist. In
‘Reading’, Woolf uses an analogy drawn from the study of nature only
in her description of the method of writing that she criticises. In other
works, however, Woolf employs analogies drawn from the study of
nature as a means of articulating not only the fictional method under
critique but also the alternative approaches possible. These alterna-
tives take different forms and might be variously described as a pro-
tectionist, an ethological, or an ecological perspective; regardless of
the specific alternative that she chooses in a given situation, however,
Woolf describes each through reference to contemporary trends in
the study of nature.
C on c e i v i n g o f a n a lt e r n at i v e
Woolf did not conceive of an alternative to the taxonomic approach
to writing all at once. However, by examining the revisions that she
made to essays in which she employed analogies drawn from the study
of nature to articulate her sense of how modernist writers should seek
to convey life in fiction, it is possible to trace her movement towards
an aesthetic of observation and protection.
Woolf’s drafting and redrafting of the essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown’ shows her testing and reworking her analogies for the writing
process, and the changes that she adopted suggest a shift in approach
and objective:Â€from a method of construction to one of deconstruc-
tion and from a goal of capture to one of protection. Rachel Sarsfield
cites the closing paragraph of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ as evi-
dence of Woolf’s conviction of ‘the overriding importance of captur-
ing “life”’ and her habitual expression of this conviction through the
‘association of life and lepidoptera imagery’.5 In the cited paragraph,
Woolf declares:
Sadly [the writer] must allow that [Mrs Brown] still escapes him. Dismally he
must admit bruises received in the pursuit. But it is because the Georgians,
poets and novelists, biographers and dramatists, are so hotly engaged each
in the pursuit of his own Mrs Brown that theirs is at once the least successful,
and the most interesting, generation that English literature has known for a
hundred years. Moreover, let us prophesy:Â€Mrs Brown will not always escape.
One of these days Mrs Brown will be caught. (E iii:Â€388)
This citation serves as a useful starting point for a review of Woolf’s
conception of the writing process, for it is drawn from the earliest
published version of an essay that Woolf repeatedly redrafted and
republished, in the course of which process her conception of modern
fictional methods underwent substantial revision.
Sarsfield cites Woolf’s essay as it first appeared in print in the New
York Evening Post Literary Review on 17 November 1923. (It appeared
in the same form in the Nation and Athenaeum on 1 December 1923 and
in Living Age on 2 February 1924.) However, Woolf later returned to
this text, reworking it first into a lecture delivered to the Cambridge
Heretics on 18 May 1924 and then into the essay published under the
title ‘Character in Fiction’ in the Criterion in July 1924. She published
the essay again, with a few further revisions and once more under
the title Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, as a pamphlet with the Hogarth
Press in October 1924. (This version was also reprinted, again under
the title ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in the New York Herald Tribune
in two parts on 23 and 30 August 1925.) The publication of the later
version of the essay with the Hogarth Press suggests Woolf’s author-
isation of her revisions. The alterations made between the early and
late versions may therefore be examined for evidence of a developing
argument. In particular, Woolf’s use of the imagery of capture, con-
tainment, deconstruction, and release may be read as evidence of a
changing conception of the modern fictional method.
The essay in all its versions discusses the disappearance of char-
acter from Edwardian fiction. It suggests that this was a reaction
against the vivid but superficial character-drawing of Victorian fic-
tion and argues that the Edwardians turned instead to the earnest dis-
cussion of social conditions in broad and often abstract terms. Woolf
declares that it is the Georgians’ responsibility to return character to
fiction, and it is in the argument of how the Georgians should seek to
represent character, personified in the figure of Mrs Brown, that the
early and late versions of Woolf’s essay differ.
In the earliest version of the essay, the figure of Mrs Brown
appears only in the penultimate paragraph, in the declaration that
the Georgian writer ‘finds himself hopelessly at variance with Mr
Wells, Mr Galsworthy, and Mr Bennett about the characterÂ€– shall
we say?Â€– of Mrs Brown’, and must therefore ‘set about to remake
the woman after his own idea’ (E iii:Â€387). In this early version of the
essay, Woolf presents fiction as a structure built to contain one’s sub-
ject. She depicts past fiction, ‘the house in which she [Mrs Brown] has
lived so long (and a very substantial house it was)’, as a now derelict
building and argues that ‘it is from the ruins and splinters of this tum-
bled mansion that the Georgian writer must somehow reconstruct a
habitable dwelling-place’ for his or her characters (387–8). The task
Woolf sets for the modernist writer is thus to construct a building to
house a captured subject, for as the early version of the essay con-
cludes, ‘The capture of Mrs Brown is the title of the next chapter in
the history of literature; and, let us prophesy again, that chapter will
be one of the most important, the most illustrious, the most epoch-
making of them all’ (388). However, these statements are not Woolf’s
final word on the subject, for they occur only in the first version of a
much-revised essay.
The later version of the essay begins with a reworking of the mateÂ�
rial with which the original version ends. In the opening paragraph
of the essay in its revised form, Woolf relates, ‘when I asked myself,
as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask
myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom,
a little figure rose before meÂ€– the figure of a man, or of a woman,
who said, “My name is Brown. Catch me if you can”’ (420). She
then elaborates upon this parallel between capture and the creative
process, commenting:
Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes
before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world,
‘Come and catch me if you can.’ And so, led on by this will-o’-the-wisp, they
flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in
the pursuit, and receiving for the most part very little cash in exchange. Few
catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp
of her hair. (420–21)
However, while the opening paragraphs of the revised version of
the essay echo the ideal of capture with which the earlier version
of the essay concluded, the implications of the imagery of pursuit
change as the revised essay continues. The Georgian novelist is no
longer presented as being drawn on to catch Mrs Brown; rather, Mrs
Brown is described as ‘luring the novelist to her rescue by the most
fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms’, so that ‘[a]t whatever
cost of life, limb, and damage to valuable property Mrs Brown must
be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world’
(433). Rather than recommending capture, Woolf now advocates
protection.
Woolf displays as well a changed attitude towards the acts of con-
struction and deconstruction.6 When in the revised version of the
essay she presents writing as a process of construction, she seems to
imply a regrettable falling back upon the outdated methods of an ear-
lier period:Â€she confesses to a moment of creative weakness in which
she was
tempted to manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady’s son, and
his adventures crossing the Atlantic, and her daughter, and how she kept a
milliner’s shop in Westminster, the past life of Smith himself, and his house
at Sheffield, though such stories seem to me the most dreary, irrelevant, and
humbugging affairs in the world. (431–2)
The only advantage of adopting such an approach to writing, she con-
tends, is that ‘if I had done that I should have escaped the appalling
effort of saying what I meant’ (432). Woolf associates the Edwardian
faith in the solidly constructed novel with the materialist focus of
Edwardian fiction and dismisses both with the comment, ‘They have
given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human
beings who live there’ (ibid.). To view the act of literary creation as
one of construction now appears a failure of imagination.
Instead of engaging in constructive art, Woolf now argues, the
Georgian writer must ‘begin by throwing away the method that was
in use at the moment’ (ibid.). The Georgian method is now presented
as one of discarding rather than accumulation, of deconstruction
rather than construction. She declares that ‘the sound of breaking
and falling, crashing and destruction … is the prevailing sound of
the Georgian age’ (434). Rather than coming upon an already ruined
house that they are responsible for building anew, as is implied in
the conclusion of the early version of the essay, the Georgians are
now encouraged to dismantle the edifices of the past. This is not to
say that Woolf glorified ‘smashing and crashing’ as an end in itself;
rather, she viewed it as a necessary act in light of the restrictive con-
ventions that hemmed in contemporary fiction (433). (She articulates
this idea again in A Room of One’s Own in her observation that Mary
Carmichael, the representative modern woman novelist, ‘is tamper-
ing with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she
has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both
these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for
the sake of creating’ (AROO 106).) The positive implications of the
urge to destroy that Woolf now attributes to the Georgians are sug-
gested by her reflection upon ‘language, and the heights to which it
can soar when free’, in contrast to ‘the same eagle, captive, bald, and
croaking’ when contained within limiting narrative forms:Â€both the
modern subject and the language used to describe it must be freed
from the restrictive structures in which the Edwardians and their
predecessors sought to contain them (E iii:Â€434). The Georgians are
no longer charged with rebuilding a literary tradition found in ruins,
but rather with actively dismantling conventions that function as a
cage. ‘The sound of their axes’ seems to Woolf ‘a vigorous and stimu-
lating sound’, and through this act of demolition they seek to liberate
the creature within, Mrs Brown, who is, ‘of course, the spirit we live
by, life itself’ (435, 436). Woolf anticipates that under these condi-
tions ‘the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and
chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr PrufrockÂ€– to give
Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous latelyÂ€– is a little
pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her’; nevertheless,
Woolf appears to regard a free, dishevelled subject as preferable to
the captured specimen that she previously presented as the writer’s
quarry (435).
The revised essay, like the earlier version, concludes with a pro-
phetic declaration regarding the coming age of literature, but Woolf
does not again close her essay with an image of capture. She declares
instead, ‘we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of
English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined
never, never to desert Mrs Brown’ (436). This subtle shift from
analogies of capture and containment to associations of rescue and
protection carries with it a fundamentally different conception of the
methods and objectives of modern literature.
The alterations that Woolf made to her 1919 essay ‘Modern Novels’
as she revised it for inclusion in The Common Reader (1925) under the
title ‘Modern Fiction’ are similarly illustrative of a shift in outlook.
Woolf’s reworking of ‘Modern Novels’ was less extensive than her
rewriting of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but the changes that she
made had a similar effect upon her argument.
In both versions of the essay, Woolf presents the proper subject of
fiction, ‘life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing’, as an
animate organism that is forever ‘mov[ing] off, or on’ and defying
writers’ attempts to capture it within conventional narrative struc-
tures (E iii:Â€32; E iv:Â€160). In both versions, she acknowledges the
well-constructed nature of the fiction of Mr Bennett and his contem-
poraries and admits that there exists in such structures no ‘chink or
crevice’ through which ‘decay can creep in’ (E iii: 32; E iv: 158). Yet
she questions the wisdom of such artificial preservation and fears that
‘life should refuse to live’ in structures such as these (E iii: 32; E iv:
158–9). In the later version of the essay she further stresses her sense
of the error of the approach adopted by the Edwardians through the
argument that ‘owing to one of those little deviations which the human
spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr Bennett has come down
with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two
on the wrong side[.] Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing
else is worth while’ (E iv:Â€159). Woolf’s criticism of Bennett suggests
not only that his aim is inaccurate but also that his chosen tools are
ineffectual and his approach to conveying life misguided. Describing
the construction of a conventional plot as a process of ‘embalming’,
she conveys her distaste for the transformation of the living subject
of fiction into a dead and artificially preserved specimen (160). At
the same time, her argument that the writer and, by extension, his or
her writing, should not be ‘confined and shut in’ by literary convenÂ�
tion but rather ‘set free’ suggests a conception of writing as a procÂ�
ess of release rather than capture (162). By loading her discussion
of Edwardian fiction with allusions to collection and preservation,
Woolf’s revisions to ‘Modern Novels’/‘Modern Fiction’ intensify
her critique of the Edwardians’ materialist methods. Taken together
with her efforts to distance Georgian fiction from associations of cap-
ture and containment through her revisions to ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown’/‘Character in Fiction’, this shift in representation illustrates
Woolf’s movement away from a taxonomic aesthetic and towards an
aesthetic of observation and protection.
Wo ol f ’s a d o p t ion o f a n a lt e r n at i v e m e t h o d
In addition to theorising about alternatives to the taxonomic method
of writing in her essays on modernist fiction, Woolf sought to real-
ise such an approach in her own novels. As was discussed in Chapter
3, in Jacob’s Room Woolf dismisses the cataloguing of features as a
futile occupation that brings one no closer to understanding one’s
subject. However, while Woolf rejects this taxonomic method
of arriving at an understanding of others, she does not reject the
impulse to understand and record human lives as futile in itself.
Although she admits that ‘a profound, impartial, and absolutely
just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown’, she is not
deterred by those who argue that ‘the novelists never catch it’, the
‘unseizable force’ by which we live, that ‘it goes hurtling through
their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons’ ( JR 96, 217). Woolf is
reconciled to the unseizable nature of life because she maintains
that glimpses of other lives are possible, that one may be ‘surprised
in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the
chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the
best known to us … [although] the moment after we know nothing
about him’ (96). Woolf embraces such fleeting glimpses of a life in
motion as ‘the manner of our seeing’ (ibid.).
Woolf ’s allusions to the study of nature illustrate the value of this
manner of seeing. In the midst of her description of Jacob’s attempts
to classify his dead moth specimen, which he never positively iden-
tifies, Woolf describes a ‘red underwing [that] had circled round
the light and flashed and gone. The red underwing had never come
back, though Jacob had waited’ (26–7). In contrast to his Â�methodical
scrutiny of the dead moth, Jacob’s sighting of the red underwing is
fleeting and beyond his power to control. However, far more than
the novel’s description of the capture, classification, and artificial
preservation of insect specimens, this encounter resembles Woolf ’s
own engagement with her written subject in Jacob’s Room. Woolf ’s
narrative is constructed as a series of sightings of Jacob:Â€the char-
acters who interact with him are unable to pin down his nature in
their descriptions of him, while, as Hermione Lee has remarked, the
narrator herself remains ‘always in pursuit of a vanishing hero, who
can only be known through unfinished glimpses’.7 Jacob remains an
elusive presence, sighted rather than caught, throughout the novel.
In a letter to Gerald Brenan written on 25 December 1922, shortly
after the publication of Jacob’s Room, Woolf argues that it is impos-
sible to represent the human soul with any completeness, declaring,
‘No one can see it whole … The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose,
a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement’ (L ii: 598).
This is not, however, a cause of despair for her:Â€she continues, ‘Still, it
seems better to me to catch this glimpse, than to sit down with Hugh
Walpole, Wells, etc., etc. and make large oil paintings of fabulous
fleshy monsters complete from top to toe’ (ibid.). She suggests that to
convey the impression of a fleeting glimpse of a living being is pref-
erable to producing an inert replica of one’s subject. Attempting to
elaborate upon her view in a postscript, she states, ‘I think I mean that
beauty, which you say I sometimes achieve, is only got by the failure
to get it’ (599). The renunciation of capture is thus central to Woolf’s
literary project.
The irreducibility of identity and the dangers of too-definite clas-
sification are recurring topics in Woolf’s writing and ones that she
often advances by way of language and imagery drawn from nature
and its study, even when these are not the ostensible subject of discus-
sion. In Mrs Dalloway, an interest in questions of identity and descrip-
tion is signalled early in the narrative as Scrope Purvis observes
Clarissa as she waits to cross the road:Â€‘A charming woman, Scrope
Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live
next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of
the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and
grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing
him, waiting to cross, very upright’ (MD 7–8). Musing on Clarissa’s
character and likening her to a jay on the basis of her carriage and
mannerisms, Purvis resembles a bird-watcher, species-spotting, a
pastime that underscores the impulse to know others that is a recur-
ring theme in the novel.
This curiosity regarding the identities of others is a powerful
impulse that can manifest as either a fascination with the complexity
of identity or an urge to reduce a multifaceted human being to a type
for the sake of classificatory clarity. Reductive taxonomising is often
employed as a means of dismissal or disparagement:Â€ Sally scorns
Hugh Whitbread as ‘a perfect specimen of the public-school type’,
while Peter more subtly undercuts Richard by asserting ‘the inexpli-
cable niceness of his type’ (80, 82).
Clarissa, conscious of ‘how different, how incompatible’ the dis-
parate aspects of her self appear to her, is reluctant to resign herself to
the identity that circumstance and society have imposed upon herÂ€–
‘this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being
Mrs Richard Dalloway’ (42, 15). She imagines her self as something
expansive, not confined to her person but spreading out beyond her to
encompass those who knew her and the places she had been,
she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly,
rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being
laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their
branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her
life, herself. (13)
This description of self suggests a radical interrogation of the bound-

aries of identity and a sense of the self as made up in part of one’s
interrelationships and environment, an ecological rather than a taxo-
nomic conception of the self.
Clarissa’s dissatisfaction with the circumscription of the self by
narrow categorisation leads her to resolve that she will not impose
similarly reductive identities upon others, that ‘[s]he would not say of
anyone in the world now that they were this or were that’ (12). Clarissa
is not invariably successful in carrying out this resolution:Â€for example,
exclaiming at the sight of her daughter, ‘“Here is my Elizabeth”’, she
treats Elizabeth as a possession by means of which to affirm her own
identity and choices to Peter and denies her daughter an independent
identity in the process (53). Nevertheless, Clarissa articulates the idea
of the irreducibility of the self that informs the novel.
This expansive view of identity contrasts with the diagnostic out-
look of the medical doctors Holmes and Bradshaw, practitioners of
an ‘exacting science’, who seek to classify Septimus on the basis of
his illness (107). Sir William Bradshaw in particular, with his reputa-
tion for ‘almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis’, embodies the desire
for definitive categorisation (103). Septimus recognises this classifi-
catory urge in Holmes and Bradshaw, describing his doctors as men
‘who differed in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw
another), yet judges they were; who … saw nothing clear, yet ruled,
yet inflicted’ (159). However, if Holmes and Bradshaw represent the
drive to fix and classify, the narrative as a whole complicates the pro-
gress towards definitive categorisation. Following Septimus over the
course of the day and making the reader privy to both his visionary
revelations and his commonsense remarks on the upkeep of motor-
cars and fashions in women’s hats, the narrator suggests the error
of reducing Septimus to a diagnosis. Championing observation, the
narrative resists the urge to classify.
The search for an alternative to classification is a matter of import-
ance to Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as well, for she is simultaneously
convinced of the need to record the unknown lives of women and
wary of the effects of taxonomic description on one’s subject. Woolf
observes that as a result of their exclusion from public institutions and
their neglect by conventional histories, women ‘remain even at this
moment almost unclassified’:Â€‘There is no mark on the wall to meas-
ure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly
divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against [their]
qualities’ (AROO 111). This lack of a recorded identity is an indicaÂ�
tion of women’s marginalisation within patriarchal society; how-
ever, it is also a source of freedom, as is suggested by the resistance
to categorisation evident in the narrator’s invitation, ‘call me Mary
Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you pleaseÂ€–
it is not a matter of any importance’ (5). The unclassified nature of
women suggests both the value and the challenge of the task facing
the modern woman writer as she seeks to record the lives of women
without reducing them to fixed types.
Casting Mary Carmichael, the representative of the modern woman
writer, in the role of an explorer who may ‘light a torch in that vast
chamber where nobody has yet been’ and reveal the ‘Â�infinitely obscure’
lives of women, Woolf initially seems to suggest an Â�uncomfortably
close resemblance between the female novelist and the taxonomising
‘professor with a measuring rod up his sleeve’ (109, 116, 139). Like
Professor X, Mary Carmichael will find herself confronted with an
unknown creature, an ‘organism that has been under the shadow of
the rock these million years’, and Woolf warns that Carmichael ‘will
be tempted to become, what I think the less interesting branch of the
speciesÂ€– the naturalist-novelist’Â€– concerned merely to classify the
human specimens appearing before her (110, 115). If, in seeking to
record the obscure lives of these unknown organisms, the modern
woman writer does no more than tabulate distinctions and locate her
subjects within the existing social hierarchy, she will succeed only in
perpetuating the taxonomic perspective of the patriarchal tradition
that preceded her.
Yet Woolf ’s scientific analogies also suggest the hope that a new
method of writing is possible. Despite the superficial resemblance
to the measuring-rod-bearing professor displayed by Woolf ’s imag-
ined explorer-novelist, Mary Carmichael’s methods differ from
those of the taxonomist. She seeks not to measure and classify her
female specimen but rather to note ‘what happens when’ this organ-
ism ‘feels the light fall on it, and sees coming her way a piece of
strange foodÂ€– knowledge, adventure, art’, what happens when ‘she
reaches out for itÂ€… and has to devise some entirely new combin-
ation of her resources, so highly developed for other purposes, so
as to absorb the new into the old without disturbing the Â�infinitely
intricate and elaborate balance of the whole’ (110–11). Mary
Carmichael’s approach to her subject recalls the observation of an
organism’s responses to environmental stimuli. In contrast to the
taxonomising professor, pinning his subjects with his pen, Woolf ’s
imagined female novelist must endeavour to ‘catch … unrecorded
gestures … unsaid or half-said words’, to observe, in other words,
the behaviour of her living subject (110). A change of method has
occurred, a shift from the technique of the taxonomist intent upon
the capture and classification of specimens to that of the ethologist
concerned with observing the functioning of a living organism in
interaction with its environment.
Woolf’s narrator adopts such an approach herself in her description
of Mary Carmichael. She presents Mary Carmichael as an organism
possessed of a sensibility that ‘responded to an almost imperceptible
touch on it. It feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight
and sound that came its way. It ranged, too, very subtly and curi-
ously, among almost unknown or unrecorded things; it lighted on
small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all’
(121). The narrator describes Mary Carmichael’s engagement with
her subject in terms of a plant or animal’s responses to new surround-
ings and stimuli. Observed in this way, Mary Carmichael appears a
representative of the female novelist in the process of adapting to new
roles and conditions and thus evolving:Â€already possessed of ‘natural
advantages of a high order’, ‘advantages which women of far greater
gift lacked even half a century ago’, ‘she will be a poet’, Woolf pre-
dicts, ‘in another hundred years’ time’ (121, 120, 123). Whereas under
a taxonomic system of literary criticism, Mary Carmichael, like Mrs
Eliza Haywood in ‘A Scribbling Dame’, would have been accorded a
fixed place within a hierarchy of literary merit, from an ethological
perspective, the female author appears an animate and responsive
creature, capable of adaptation and evolution.
Just as Professor X and Mary Carmichael represent opposing
approaches to the writing of one’s subject, Susan and Bernard in The
Waves exemplify contrasting approaches to life and language. Susan
is cast in the role of the collector. She is a collector in a literal sense,
proud of ‘â†œ“[her] shells; [her] eggs; [her] curious grasses”â†œ’; but, in a
more figurative sense, she also regards her entire life as a Â�process of
collection (TW 38–9). She confesses to an urge to gather and Â�preserve,
and Bernard confirms this, noting her perpetual desire ‘â†œ“to possess
one single thing (it is Louis now)”â†œ’ (10). She treats even her own emo-
tions as specimens to be scrutinised and classified:Â€hurt by the sight of
Jinny kissing Louis, she declares, ‘â†œ“I will wrap my agony inside my
pocket-handkerchief … I will take my anguish and lay it upon the
roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my
fingers”â†œ’ (8). As a young girl, she collected the Â�imperfect Â�specimens
of schooldays mutilated by routine, ‘“crippled days, like moths with
shrivelled wings unable to fly”’; as a mother, she ‘“collects under her
jealous eyes at one long table her own children”’ (38–9, 147). Her
accumulated experiences taken together form a ‘“laboriously gath-
ered, relentlessly pressed down life”’ (146). She is equally intent upon
arriving at definitive classifications and attempts to impose a certain
identity upon things through language, asserting, ‘“I see the bee-
tleÂ€… It is black, I see; it is green, I see. I am tied down with single
words”’ (10). She will not tolerate ambiguity, ‘“quenching the silver-
grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of
[her] clear eyes”’ (165).
Bernard’s approach to language is also presented in terms of a
relationship with nature and suggests a different conception of
words. For Bernard, words live:Â€he declares, ‘“They flick their tails
right and left as I speak them … They wag their tails; they flick
their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now
that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together”’
(14). Where Susan’s language restricts and fixes, Bernard con-
ceives of ‘“words, moving darkly”’, having the power to ‘“break
this knot of hardness, screwed in [Susan’s] pocket-handkerchief”’
and to do away with rigid classifications, so that ‘“we melt into each
other with phrases”’ (10). While Susan assembles her memories of
‘“dead”’ schooldays in order to revenge herself against the discipline
imposed upon her, seeking to ‘“cover it over, to bury it deep, this
school that I have hated”’, Bernard buries ideas so that they might
grow:Â€‘“bury it, bury it, let it breed, hidden in the depths of my mind
some day to fructify”’ (29, 45, 119). Susan recognises the difference
between Bernard’s use of language and her own, noting that, while
she is ‘“tied down with single words”’, Bernard uses language to
‘“Â�wander off; … slip away; … rise up higher, with words and words
in phrases”’ (10). While Susan’s use of language results in entrap-
ment, Bernard’s permits escape.
This does not mean that Bernard is not tempted by the thought
of language as a system productive of certain meaning. In fact, he
adopts this as his conscious ideal. He muses,
‘When I am grown up, I shall carry a notebookÂ€– a fat book with many pages,
methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come “Butterfly
powder”. If in my novel I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall look
under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful.’ (26)
Repeatedly in her writing, Woolf uses the analogy of alphabetising

to suggest a superficial or reductive treatment of one’s subject. She
ridicules the platitudinous Hugh Whitbread, ‘drafting sentiments in
alphabetical order of the highest nobility’ in his letters to The Times
(MD 119). She is similarly dismissive of Mr Ramsay’s rigidly linear
attempts to advance from Q to R in his philosophical musings, and, as
will soon be seen, in ‘Craftsmanship’ she warns that words die when
confined to dictionaries (CE ii: 249). Bernard’s systematic tabula-
tion of imagery appears equally ludicrous, and the phrase ‘butterfly
powder’ (which recalls Bernard’s criticism of the destructive effect
of religious dogmatism) itself suggests the deadening and reductive
effect of his alphabetisation of ideas. Significantly, however, despite
his declared determination to pursue this cataloguing of phrases, he
laments, ‘“[A]las! I am so soon distractedÂ€– by a hair like twisted candy,
by Celia’s Prayer Book, ivory covered … Soon I fail”’ (TWÂ€26). He
regards it as a sign of his ineffectualness that though he has ‘“filled
innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when [he] found the
true story, the one true story, to which all these phrases refer”’, he
has been ‘“always distracted, whether by a cat or by a bee buzzing
round the bouquet Lady Hampden keeps so diligently pressed to her
nose”’ (143). Although his inability to master his proposed systematic
method and compose the one true story leads him to ‘“dispassionate
despair”’, Bernard’s distraction from his cataloguing of phrases by
glimpses of life can be read as an indictment of his chosen method
more than of his competence as a writer (219).
Bernard’s ideal of writing the one true story in which all his sys-
tematically recorded phrases will find their proper place, and his dis-
appointment at his inability to complete this task, obscure the value
of the inconclusive, provisional tales that he tells in the meantime.
Others’ reactions to Bernard’s two modes of composition suggest
the varying success of his methods. Neville condemns Bernard’s
attempts at systematic narrative with the remark, ‘“We are all phrases
in Bernard’s story, things he writes down in his notebook under A or
under B. He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except
what we most feel”’ (51). Neville’s response stresses the reductiveness
of Bernard’s systematic method. Yet Neville is not always Â�dismissive
of Bernard’s narrative efforts. As a boy listening to Bernard’s Â�rambling
stories, he observes, ‘“Up they bubbleÂ€– images. ‘Like a camel’, …
‘a vulture’. The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel … [W]hen
he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes
over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I
have escaped, one feels”’ (27). It is when Bernard does not attempt
to reduce the workings of his imagination to an orderly table that
his stories transcend fixity and communicate with his audience. In
the systematic approachÂ€– based on the attempt to arrange ideas into
a single, fixed order that is the one true storyÂ€– the escape of life is a
sign of failure. However, in Bernard’s own instinctive style of story-
telling, escape indicates success.
Through Bernard’s failure to write the one true story, Woolf
implies not Bernard’s imaginative inadequacy but rather the limita-
tions of his conceived project, and Bernard’s self-perceived failures
suggest another form of success. Attempting to sum up the characters
of his friends, he finds that he cannot capture the quality of their living
selves in words. Feeling his efforts to encapsulate Louis’s character to
be unsuccessful, he observes, ‘“[L]ookÂ€– his eyes turn white as he lies
in the palm of my hand. Suddenly the sense of what people are leaves
one. I return him to the pool where he will acquire lustre”’ (188).
Although presented as an indication of his failure, Bernard’s decision
to release his living subject rather than cling to a dead Â�specimen sug-
gests the possibility of an alternative approach to writing. Bernard’s
idealisation of system and his despair at his failure to attain it are not
Woolf’s. Through Bernard’s attempts at narration Woolf suggests
both the futility of the systematic method and the possibility of an
alternative mode of story-telling that Bernard instinctively pursues
but does not himself recognise as valuable.
In ‘Craftsmanship’, a radio broadcast delivered on 20 April 1937,
Woolf again contrasts fictional methods through the use of scien-
tific analogy, juxtaposing taxonomic and observational approaches
to words portrayed as living organisms. She criticises the attempt to
reduce words to single and fixed meanings, each with an unalterable
place within a system, arguing that ‘words … are the wildest, fre-
est, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course,
you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical
order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries’ (CE ii:
249). Woolf cautions that to use words in this way is to ‘pin them
down to one meaning, their useful meaning … [a]nd when words are
pinned down they fold their wings and die’ (251). As I noted in the
introductory chapter, Sarsfield takes these statements as evidence of
Woolf’s Â�growing disillusionment with writing:Â€she argues that ‘see-
ing Â�language as lepidoptera and vice versa, it was perhaps inevitable
that [Woolf] should ultimately conclude that “when words are pinned
down they fold their wings and die”. This conclusion is a fatal one for
a writer to come to, and … may have been literally fatal to Virginia
Woolf.’8
However, it is not the image of words pinned and dead that domi-
nates ‘Craftsmanship’. Woolf does not accept the death of words as an
inevitable consequence of the attempt to write, for she contends that
while words may be forced ‘against their nature’ into limited mean-
ings and rigid systems, this is not the only way that they can convey
meaning (246). Though words cannot live in dictionaries, they can
and do ‘live in the mind’ (249).
Woolf presents words as animate organisms in constant motion and
interaction with one another, ‘ranging hither and thither, … falling
in love and mating together’ in a shared environment that is the mind
of an individual alive in a certain society and a certain time (250). She
depicts words as forming a community in an ecological sense, argu-
ing that ‘a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other
words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence … Nor
do [words] like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined
separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, some-
times for whole pages at a time’ (249–50). She further asserts that ‘it
is [words’] nature to change’ and explains this quality in evolutionary
terms, commenting, ‘[T]hey mean one thing to one person, another
thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation,
plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that
they survive’ (251). Woolf argues that words adapt to their environ-
ment and, in doing so, reflect the mind and society that they inhabit.
Their capacity for adaptation ensures both their own survival and
their ability to represent accurately the conditions of the time, place,
and consciousness in which they exist, ‘so that they survive, so that
they create beauty, so that they tell the truth’ (249).
If this is the nature of words, Woolf suggests, then writing is not a
process of capturing, classifying, and arranging words for display but
rather one of observing and recording the behaviour of words. She
depicts the writer as a witness to the interactions of living language,
‘peer[ing] at [words] over the edge of that deep, dark and fitfully illu-
minated cavern in which they liveÂ€– the mind’, and observing the ways
in which words ‘come together in … those swift marriages which are
perfect images and create everlasting beauty’ (250, 251). Viewed in
this way, composition becomes a matter of recording the actions of
words under the influence of environmental stimuli, the relationships
that words form, and the offspring that their unions produce.
Woolf concludes her talk with the admission that ‘nothing of that
sort is going to happen tonight. The little wretches are out of tem-
per; disobliging; dumb’; however, this too is an indication of a new
relationship with words:Â€she does not assume a position of authority
or ownership over them or regard them as amenable to her arrange-
ment (251). She presents herself as a witness to the life processes and
behaviour of living language rather than as a collector and organiser
of words viewed as inanimate specimens. In ‘Craftsmanship’, Woolf
draws upon a wide range of disciplines within the life sciences, invok-
ing evolutionary theory, ecological principles, and the observation of
behaviour in order to suggest alternatives to the taxonomic approach
to words and the writing process.
Woolf’s modernist reconsideration of the ways in which life could
best be represented in fiction coincided with a shift in approaches to
the study of nature. Woolf was aware of the changes occurring in
the life sciences, and from both past and emerging scientific methods
she drew analogies for the description of life in fiction. Through the
analogies of specimen collection and classification she critiqued the
restrictiveness and reductiveness of the conventions of the domin-
ant literary tradition, while through the analogies of ethology, ecol-
ogy, and the protection movement she suggested the possibility of
alternative means of seeing and recording life. Woolf’s belief that the
momentary glimpse of a life in motion constitutes the ‘manner of our
seeing’ found fitting expression through imagery drawn from sci-
ences focused on the study of living organisms in action in their own
environment ( JR 96).
Reading Woolf’s representations of nature and its study with mod-
ern developments in the life sciences as a frame of reference reveals
the complexity and coherence of her use of imagery taken from the
study of nature. Woolf drew upon the scientific understanding of
nature to enhance the particularity and power of her own representa-
tions of the natural world, but her engagement with the life sciences
was not limited to a sampling of biological facts. She was alert to the
disciplinary disputes that divided practitioners of the life sciences and
conscious of the shifts in focus and approach that altered the study of
nature during her lifetime. These tensions and trends provided her
with analogies through which to juxtapose contrasting approaches
to the representation of life in fiction and metaphors with which to
describe the shifts in method and objective that characterised literary
modernism. Woolf’s engagement with the life sciences allowed her
to address questions of perception and description that were funda-
mental to both the scientific study of nature and the representation of
life in fiction, and by returning again and again to analogies drawn
from the study of nature to express ideas central to her own literary
project, she asserted the continuity between early twentieth-century
developments across the arts and sciences.
Notes
I n t r o d u c t io n
1. Hudson, Birds and Man, p. 11.
2. Ibid., p. 30.
3. Following the example of historians of science such as Peter J. Bowler
and Iwan Rhys Morus, I use the term ‘life sciences’ when referring col-
lectively to nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to the study
of living organisms. The term ‘biology’ came into use only gradually in
Britain in the nineteenth century and was often employed in this period
by practitioners of science such as T. H. Huxley to distinguish the new
sciences of the laboratory from the older natural history tradition (Bowler
and Morus, ‘The New Biology’, pp. 165, 166).
4. Allen, Naturalist in Britain, p. 176.
5. Beer, Virginia Woolf:Â€The Common Ground, pp. 3, 112.
6. Fleishman, Virginia Woolf:Â€A Critical Reading, p. 8; Robinson, ‘Netting
Moths and Butterflies’, p. 141; Sarsfield, ‘Insect World’, p. 2. Other schol-
ars such as Bruce E. Fleming and Wendy B. Faris also construct argu-
ments in a broadly symbolic vein.
7. Froula, ‘Out of the Chrysalis’: 65–6.
8. Ibid.: 87.
9. Richter, ‘Hunting the Moth’, pp. 13, 15, 27.
10. Ibid., p. 16.
11. Robinson, ‘Netting Moths and Butterflies’, pp. iv, 155.
12. Sarsfield, ‘Insect World’, p. 245.
13. Ibid., p. 216.
14. Howarth, ‘Some Principles’, p. 69; Love, Practical Ecocriticism, p. 39.
15. Ibid., p. 11.
16. Donovan, ‘Ecofeminist Literary Criticism’, p. 76; Scott, ‘Virginia Woolf,
Ecofeminism’, p. 108; Westling, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the
World’:Â€857.
192
Notes to pages 9–18 193
17. For more extensive discussions of these scenes, see Bryson, ‘Modernism
and Ecological Criticism’, and Westling, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of
the World’.
18. Sultzbach, ‘Fertile Potential’, pp. 71, 75.
19. Waller, ‘Writing the Real’:Â€ 154; Charlotte Zoë Walker, ‘Letting in the
Sky’, p. 172.
20. Stopes, Botany, p. 50; Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, p. 578.
21. Westling, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World’:Â€855, 856, 857.
22. Blyth, ‘Woolf, Rooks, and Rural England’; Espley, ‘Woolf and the
Others’; Herbert, ‘Skye or St Ives’.
23. Gillispie, Science and Polity, p. 653.
24. Desmond, ‘Huxley, Thomas Henry’, p. 103; Paul White, Thomas Huxley,
pp. 51, 55–6.
25. Albright, Quantum Poetics, p. 9.
C h a p t e r 1: T h e n a t u r a l h i s t o r y t r a d i t io n
2. The low opinion of taxonomic work persisted for much of the twentieth
century. Taxonomy continued to be practised, for the job of classifying
the earth’s species was far from over, but it was widely regarded as sub-
ordinate to more modern disciplines. However, with the growing con-
cern over the conservation of biodiversity, taxonomy’s reputation has
recovered somewhat, for without the ability to identify threatened species
there is no hope of protecting them. While taxonomy will never regain
the dominant position that it once occupied in the life sciences, it has
acquired new importance in the contemporary scientific context, and this
shift in status is reflected in literature:Â€recent novels such as A. S. Byatt’s
The Biographer’s Tale and Martin Davies’s The Conjuror’s Bird discuss the
necessity of taxonomic work in the face of the extinction of species.
3. Lindroth, ‘Two Faces of Linnaeus’, pp. 25, 26.
4. Chatfield, ‘Introduction’ to White, Selborne, p. 8.
5. Gilbert White, Selborne, pp. 121, 48.
6. Ibid., pp. 118, 48.
7. Ibid., p. 192.
8. Nicholson, Birds in England, pp. 175, 172.
9. Armstrong, Parson-Naturalist, p. 2.
10. Barber, Heyday of Natural History, p. 43.
11. Ibid., p. 44.
12. Oliver, ‘Arthur Henfrey’, p. 193.
194 Notes to pages 18–24
13. Barber, Heyday of Natural History; Salmon, Aurelian Legacy, p. 37; Rupke,
Richard Owen, p. 14; Armstrong, Parson-Naturalist, p. 3.
15. Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World, p. 34.
16. Mearns and Mearns, Bird Collectors, p. 73.
17. Ibid., p. 43.
18. Farber, ‘Development of Taxidermy’:Â€565.
20. Lubbock, ‘Objects of a Collection’:Â€115.
21. Oliver, ‘Arthur Henfrey’, pp. 202–3.
22. Knight, Age of Science, p. 16.
23. Ibid.
24. France in both the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods was at the
forefront of developments in comparative biology; by mid-century, the
German universities had taken the lead in the development of the new
biology of the laboratory while also participating in the struggle for the
liberalisation and unification of the German states.
28. Paley, Natural Theology, p. 542.
30. Bowler and Morus, ‘The New Biology’, p. 183.
31. Paul White, Thomas Huxley, p. 33.
32. Annan, Leslie Stephen:Â€The Godless Victorian, p. 36.
33. Cardwell, Organisation of Science, p. 64.
36. Bowler and Morus, ‘The New Biology’, p. 176.
39. Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 12.
40. William Withering quoted in Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 42.
41. Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 42.
4 2. Fara states, ‘The term “Macaroni” was originally coined to denigrate
the aristocratic youths who had acquired continental manners during
their Grand Tour to Italy, but it became a more general term of abuse for
Â�deriding foppish young gentlemen’ (Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 9).
43. Ibid., pp. 9–11, 14–15; Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, pp. 6–7.
4 4. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, pp. 1–4.
45. Fitton, Fitton, and Marcet, Conversations on Botany, p. 2.
46. Stainton, ‘Address’:Â€10.
48. Epigraph to Drummond, Letters to a Young Naturalist.
49. Annan, ‘Intellectual Aristocracy’, pp. 251, 249.
51. J. C. Loudon quoted in Barber, Heyday of Natural History, p. 18.
52. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal quoted in Barber, Heyday of Natural History,
p. 33.
53. Hugh Miller, Old Red Sandstone, p. 2.
54. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 45.
55. Richardson, ‘Life Sciences’, p. 6.
56. Secord, ‘Artisan Botany’, p. 381.
57. Ibid., p. 392.
59. Ibid., p. 123.
6 0. Armstrong, Parson-Naturalist, p. 98.
61. Moss, Bird in the Bush, p. 68.
64. Philip Henry Gosse, Romance of Natural History, p. vi. Edmund Gosse
would later judge it ‘very curious that a man should write a long ser-
ies of popular books, and should add in many directions to the sum of
exact knowledge, and at the same time have so little in common with his
contemporaries as my father had’ (Edmund Gosse, Philip Henry Gosse,
pp.Â€vii–viii). This seeming paradox lies at the heart of an understanding
of the nineteenth-century life sciences, for Philip Henry Gosse’s retro-
spectively perceived backwardness in fact made him all the more repre-
sentative of the element of stagnation in the nineteenth-century natural
history tradition.
67. Barber, Heyday of Natural History:Â€pp. 71–2.
68. Lubbock, ‘Objects of a Collection’: 115.
69. Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son offers a similar critique of the links
between a pious Victorian upbringing and the pursuit of natural history.
While Gosse presents evolutionary theory as a force opposed to religion,
he depicts taxonomic natural history guided by natural theology as a con-
servative influence.
70. For a discussion of the contributions to natural history made by members
of the nineteenth-century intellectual aristocracy, see Allen, Naturalist in
Britain, pp. 79–82.
71. In ‘Sketch of the Past’, Woolf writes of ‘Morris’s Butterflies and Moths’, a
reference that conflates Morris’s A History of British Butterflies (1852–3) and
his four-volume A Natural History of British Moths (1859–70) (MOBÂ€113).
It is therefore unclear which work or works by Morris the Stephen chil-
dren received.
73. F. O. Morris, British Butterflies, pp. iii, iv.
74. M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris, pp. 91, 100.
75. Mullens and Swann, Bibliography of British Ornithology, p. 416.
7 7. M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris, pp. 98–9.
78. F. O. Morris, ‘Correspondence’:Â€147.
79. Allen, Naturalist in Britain, pp. 132, 133.
80. F. O. Morris, ‘New System of Nomenclature’:Â€122; ‘One or Two Criticisms’:
150; ‘For Many Years Past’:Â€367.
81. F. O. Morris, ‘Remarks’:Â€262–3; ‘For Many Years Past’:Â€367–8.
82. F. O. Morris, ‘Notice of the Discovery’:Â€88.
83. F. O. Morris, British Butterflies, p. 2.
84. Ibid., p. 128.
85. Judy Larrick Robinson devotes a chapter of her thesis, ‘Netting Moths
and Butterflies in Virginia Woolf’, to F. O. Morris, analysing the style of
his natural histories of butterflies and moths and offering a detailed sum-
mary of the collection methods that he recommends.
86. See other nineteenth-century guides such as The Book of Butterflies,
Sphinges, and Moths by Thomas Brown or The Butterfly Book by
W.Â€J.Â€Holland for comparison.
87. Allen, Naturalist in Britain, p. 160; M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris,
p. 217.
88. F. O. Morris, British Moths, p. xiv.
89. M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris, p. 71.
90. Annan, Leslie Stephen:Â€The Godless Victorian; Beer, Virginia Woolf:Â€The
Common Ground, p. 13.
C h a pt e r 2: T h e mode r n lif e sciences

1. Ritvo, ‘Ordering Creation’, pp. 55–6.
2. Bower, ‘Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker’, p. 316.
3. Moore, Post-Darwinian Controversies, p. 195.
5. Ibid.
7. Julian Huxley, Evolution, p. 22.
8. Ibid., p. 23.
9. Ibid., p. 24. In fact, as would later be recognised, ‘mutations could be of
any extent’, and Mendel’s laws of heredity therefore applied to ‘appar-
ently continuous as well as obviously discontinuous variation’ (ibid.,
p.Â€25).
10. Wells, Ann Veronica, pp. 287, 134, and see also pp. 284–5; Olby, ‘Huxley’s
Place’, p. 55.
11. Olby, ‘Huxley’s Place’, pp. 58, 57.
12. Desmond, ‘Huxley, Thomas Henry’, p. 103.
13. Paul White, Thomas Huxley, p. 42.
14. Rupke, Richard Owen, p. 13; Paul White, Thomas Huxley, p. 56.
15. Gillispie, Science and Polity, p. 656. See also Bowler and Morus, ‘The New
Biology’, p. 168.
16. Stearn, Natural History Museum, p. 31.
17. Paul White, Thomas Huxley, pp. 65–6.
18. Bower, ‘Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker’, p. 308.
19. Oliver, ‘Transactions’, pp. 733, 738, 733, 735.
20. T. H. Huxley, ‘Autobiography’, p. 7.
22. Desmond, ‘Huxley, Thomas Henry’, p. 106.
23. T. H. Huxley, Elementary Instruction, p. x.
25. T. H. Huxley, Elementary Instruction, p. xi.
26. Bower, Sixty Years of Botany, p. 102.
27. Ibid.
28. Oliver, ‘Transactions’, p. 735.
29. Lindroth, ‘Two Faces of Linnaeus’, p. 26.
30. Wells, Ann Veronica, p. 11.
31. Ibid., pp. 21, 13.
32. Ibid., p. 29.
33. Ibid., p. 37.
36. Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, p. 162.
37. Doughty, Feather Fashions, p. 32.
38. M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris, pp. 254–5.
39. F. O. Morris quoted in M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris, p. 227.
40. See, for example, the London Anti-Vivisection Society’s Who Are the
Ultimate Victims?
41. M. C. F. Morris, Francis Orpen Morris, p. 222.
4 2. Rupke, ‘Pro-Vivisection in England’, pp. 198–9.
43. Nicholson, Birds in England, pp. 195, 203.
4 4. Ibid., p. 196. Hudson’s legacy as a protectionist is sometimes disputed.
Moss describes Hudson as an example of the outdated ‘anthropocen-
tric Victorian approach’ to protection and declares that ‘by the 1950s his
particular brand of sentimentality and spirituality had gone out of fash-
ion’ (Moss, Bird in the Bush, pp. 129, 85). This disparity in assessments
of Hudson suggests that he was a transitional figure, viewed by his con-
temporaries and immediate successors as having revolutionised attitudes
towards nature but judged by later generations as having not gone far
enough.
46. Nicholson, Birds in England, p. 247.
48. Nicholson, Birds in England, pp. xi–xii; Squire, ‘Introduction’ to Lure of
Bird Watching, p. 14.
49. Pearce, On Collecting, p. 6.
50. Freud quoted in Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections, p. 74; Abraham,
Selected Papers, p. 67.
51. E. Jones quoted in Pearce, On Collecting, p. 7.
52. Pearce, On Collecting, p. 8.
54. Nicholson, Birds in England, pp. 258–9.
55. Beirne, ‘Fluctuations’:Â€8.
57. Ibid., p. 217.
58. Ibid., pp. 207–8; Mearns and Mearns, Bird Collectors, p. 7.
6 0. Mearns and Mearns, Bird Collectors, p. 28.
62. Nicholson, How Birds Live, p. v.
63. Salmon, Aurelian Legacy, p. 370.
64. Legros, Fabre, p. 14.
65. Ibid., p. 270.
66. Ibid., p. 328.
67. Burstein, ‘Waspish Segments’: 157.
68. Nicholson, Art of Bird-Watching, p. 6.
69. Hudson, Naturalist in La Plata, p. v.
70. Ibid., pp. 5, v.
71. Hudson, Book of a Naturalist, p. 150.
72. Moss, ‘History of Birding’:Â€25; Allen, Naturalist in Britain, p. 215.
73. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, p. 3.
74. Ibid., p. 14.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., pp. 737, 876.
77. ‘New Natural History’: 206.
78. These are just a few of the subjects covered by Thomson in his articles
for the New Statesman (‘A Peculiar People’; ‘Concerning Puffins’; ‘The
Homing of Sea-Swallows’; ‘The Passionate Pigeon’; ‘Sensitive Plants’;
‘By the Light of the Moon’; ‘Sea-Horses’).
79. Nicholson, ‘Shearwaters’; ‘The Great Crested Grebe’; ‘Bird-Roosts’;
‘Bird-Marking Discoveries’.
80. Julian Huxley, Bird-Watching, pp. 43, 61, 83, 101.
81. Ibid., p. 3.
82. Ibid., p. 7.
83. Field and Smith, Secrets of Nature, p. 139. The response to nature
shorts was not always so enthusiastic:Â€Jean Painlevé, a French nature-
Â�documentary film-maker who produced many such shorts for the
cinema, noted that among some groups of moviegoers ‘it became fash-
ionable to arrive late and skip the documentary altogether’ (Painlevé,
‘Castration of the Documentary’, p. 149).
84. Laura Marcus, Tenth Muse, p. 4.
85. Field and Smith, Secrets of Nature, p. 27.
86. Ibid., p. 21; Julian Huxley, ‘Secrets of Nature’: 120.
87. Field and Smith, Secrets of Nature, pp. 236–7.
88. Humm, Modernist Women, p. 75.
89. Laura Marcus, Tenth Muse, pp. 100, 266.
90. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, p. 7. As Wells, Huxley, and Wells
explain in The Science of Life, the queen ant controls the sex of her off-
spring through the selective fertilisation of her eggs, while diet and the
length of time allowed prior to pupation determine physical type and
thus social role (Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, p. 698).
91. Sailer, ‘Methodology of Reading Finnegans Wake’:Â€196.
93. Worster, Nature’s Economy, pp. 192, 198.
94. Ibid., p. 205.
95. Stopes, Botany, p. 50.
96. Thomson, Science, Old and New, p. v.
97. Nicholson, How Birds Live, pp. 1, 3.
99. Elton, Animal Ecology, p. 34.
100. White quoted in Elton, Animal Ecology, p. 1.
101. Tansley, review of Animal Ecology:Â€168; Anker, Imperial Ecology, p. 31.
102. To ensure its accuracy, the chapter on ecology, which was written by
Huxley, was ‘scrutinized in its entirety by Elton before it was edited to
fit the science-for-all style by Wells’ (Anker, Imperial Ecology, p. 112).
104. Elton, Exploring the Animal World, p. 19.
105. Ibid., p. 27.
106. Worster, Nature’s Economy, p. 299.
107. Hagen, Entangled Bank, p. 62.
108. Elton, Animal Ecology, p. 52.
109. Julian Huxley, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Animal Ecology, pp. xiv, xv.
110. Elton, Exploring the Animal World, pp. 13–14.
111. Ibid., p. 13.
113. Ibid., p. 880.
114. Anker, Imperial Ecology, p. 111.
115. Wells, Men Like Gods, pp. 91–3.
117. Tansley quoted in Anker, Imperial Ecology, p. 80.
118. Blackman et al., ‘Reconstruction’:Â€243.
119. Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, pp. 5, 10.
120. Ibid., pp. 13, 16.
121. Ibid., p. 28.
123. Ibid., p. 110.
125. Ibid.
126. Lens, ‘Fratricide Biology’: 556, 557.
128. Blyth, ‘Woolf, Rooks, and Rural England’, p. 84.
129. Ibid., p. 83.
130. Ibid.
C h a p t e r 3: ‘ T o p i n t h r o u g h t h e b o dy
with a na me’
1. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 31.
2. Stainton, ‘Address’: 10.
3. Bell, Virginia Woolf:Â€A Biography, vol. II, p. 129.
4. Writing in 1899, Virginia rejected White as a stylistic model. In the 1930s,
however, she would reread The Natural History of Selborne and, viewing
his work in the light of twentieth-century developments in the observa-
tion of living nature, emulate his approach to nature in her description of
him. See Chapter 4.
5. Phillips, Virginia Woolf against Empire, pp. 155, 154.
6. Other accounts of turn-of-the-century public school life confirm this
impression of cricket, the drill, and the Natural History Society as cor-
nerstones of conventional schoolboy existence. See Kipling, The Complete
Stalky & Co.
7. Phillips, Virginia Woolf against Empire, p. 161.
8. Popular entomology manuals such as Morris’s do not overtly encourage
brutality. They recommend killing insects as instantaneously as pos-
sible, both for reasons of humanity (although they consistently maintain
that insects are incapable of feeling pain) and because a live, struggling
insect would do damage to itself that would render it useless as a cab-
inet specimen. Nevertheless, the means recommended to despatch speci-
mensÂ€– driving red-hot needles through the thorax; immersing the insect,
contained in a ‘stifling box’, in boiling waterÂ€– had every appearance of
cruelty (Allen, Naturalist in Britain, pp. 130–31).
9. Taxonomic natural history also reinforced gender boundaries in the sense
that the principles on which the taxonomic system was based transposed
the human gender hierarchy on to nature. Londa Schiebinger observes
that Linnaean taxonomy ‘import[ed] … traditional notions about sexual
hierarchy’ into science and then employed these as evidence that the exist-
ing cultural order was a natural one (Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, p. 13).
10. Beer, Virginia Woolf:Â€The Common Ground, p. 8.
12. Gillian Naylor explores the latter idea in ‘Modernism and Memory:
Leaving Traces’. Through a study of the personalised items that furnished
an early twentieth-century family home designed on Corbusian lines and
intended to be unencumbered by ‘sentiment-objects’, she suggests that
while ‘the icons of Modernism were designed to defy memory and deny
the past’, this was a resolution difficult to live by (Naylor, ‘Modernism and
Memory’, pp. 92, 91).
13. Mao, Solid Objects, p. 22; Baudrillard, System of Objects, p. 93.
14. Baudrillard, System of Objects, p. 93.
15. Ibid., p. 92.
16. Ibid., pp. 96–7.
17. Ibid., p. 114. Elsewhere, too, Woolf presents the urge to collect and clas-
sify as detrimental to human relationships:Â€ in ‘The Mark on the Wall’,
Woolf tells the story of a retired colonel who has a passion for antiquities,
who digs up bones and names them, and whose dying thoughts are ‘not of
wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in
the case at the local museum’ (CSF 81).
18. Mao, Solid Objects, p. 78.
19. Ibid., pp. 78, 26.
20. Ibid., pp. 78, 26, 27.
21. The debate over the Elgin Marbles began long before this. See, for
example, Byron, ‘The Curse of Minerva’.
22. Forster, ‘For the Museum’s Sake’, p. 322.
23. Woolf does not always present gardens as places of order and control. In
Mrs Dalloway, for example, she presents the garden as a place of escape
from the conventions governing life indoors, ‘rose-bushes and giant cau-
liflowers’ providing a space where one can think and speak freely (MD
83). However, she remains conscious that the cultivation of gardens
involves the imposition of human order upon the natural world, and, as
is vividly illustrated in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse, she
questions the permanence of this order. For further discussion of Woolf’s
views on gardens, see Hancock, Gardens, and Sparks, ‘Accounting for the
Garden’.
24. For a history of seaside aquaria, see Pearson, The People’s Palaces.
25. Baudrillard, System of Objects, p. 94.
26. Ibid.
27. Froula, ‘Out of the Chrysalis’: 86; Richter, ‘Hunting the Moth’, p. 15.
29. In ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, Woolf similarly describes war
and its effects on human beings through images of insects and their cap-
ture:Â€fighter planes resemble ‘little silver insect[s]’ and drone like hornets
overhead, while those waiting in dread below lie as if ‘[a] nail fixed the
whole being to one hard board’ (CE IV:Â€176).
30. Phillips, Virginia Woolf against Empire, pp. 128–9.
31. Ibid., p. 125.
32. Mullens and Swann, A Bibliography, p. 416.
33. Robinson, ‘Netting Moths and Butterflies’, p. 89.
34. F. O. Morris, British Butterflies, pp. 79–80.
35. Linnaeus quoted in Foucault, Order of Things, pp. 173–4.
36. Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World, p. 35.
37. Bowlby, Feminist Destinations, p. 90.
38. Robinson, ‘Netting Moths and Butterflies’, p. 75. Robinson similarly
regards Jacob’s habit of disappearing in pursuit of butterflies as evi-
dence of his rebellious independence (ibid.). Other critics, however, chal-
lenge the idea that Jacob is an exceptional young man. Phillips asserts
that Jacob ‘manages no intense individual sensibility but only a muddled
acquiescence to the norm’, and Bowlby confirms Jacob’s typicality with
the argument that the ‘great man’ that Jacob is predicted to become is
among the most stereotypical of characters, being ‘given due weight or
gravity by being shown to resemble, rather than to differ from, every
other:Â€his greatness is a function of his life’s proceeding not exceptionally
or idiosyncratically, but along well-known, recognizable lines’ (Phillips,
Virginia Woolf against Empire, p. 122; Bowlby, Feminist Destinations,
p.Â€88). Jacob’s rebellious gestures only confirm his typicality.
C h a p t e r 4: L a bor atory coats

a nd fie ld - gl a sses
1. Jansen, ‘Is Science a Man?’:Â€235.
2. Beer, Virginia Woolf:Â€The Common Ground, p. 19.
3. Ibid., p. 19.
4. Ibid., pp. 27, 20.
5. Ibid., p. 13.
6. Lambert, ‘“And Darwin Says”’:Â€1.
7. Ibid.
8. Carmichael was Stopes’s mother’s maiden name. For the sake of clarity, I
shall refer to my subject as Marie Stopes throughout this discussion, even
when speaking of her in her capacity as a pseudonymic novelist.
9. Snaith, ‘A Room of One’s Own’.
10. Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, p. 175; Rusk,
Life Writing, p. 25. Marcus later gives a more accurate account of the plot
of Stopes’s novel; nevertheless, her initial statement has demonstrably
encouraged misreadings by others.
11. Joannou, ‘“Chloe Liked Olivia”’, p. 207.
12. Ibid., p. 202.
13. Gualtieri, Virginia Woolf’s Essays, p. 7.
14. Ibid., p. 71.
15. Hermione Lee argues that Woolf’s presentation of Olivia as a mar-
ried mother constitutes an act of self-censorship, a means of concealing
beneath the appearance of conventional heterosexuality the suggestion
of a lesbian relationship made more explicit in earlier drafts of A Room of
One’s Own (Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 525–7). However, Woolf’s represen-
tation of married mothers working as professional scientists was itself a
challenge to the status quo, even if it was not the purely ‘Utopian’ vision
that Jane Marcus has claimed it to be (Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the
Languages of Patriarchy, p. 176). For a discussion of historical models for
Chloe and Olivia, see Lesley A. Hall’s study of early twentieth-century
women scientists, ‘Chloe, Olivia, Isabel, Letitia, Harriette, Honor, and
Many More’.
16. Rose, ‘Evolution of Marie Stopes’, p. 13.
18. Rose, ‘Evolution of Marie Stopes’, p. 25.
19. Stopes, Botany, p. 8.
20. Ibid., p. 79.
21. Ibid., p. 80.
22. Ibid., p. 88.
23. Ibid., p. 89.
25. Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, pp. 244–5.
26. McNeillie, ‘Introduction’ to The Essays, p. xviii.
27. Massingham, ‘A London Diary’:Â€463–4.
28. Meta Bradley quoted in Abbott, ‘Birds Don’t Sing’, p. 277.
29. Abbott, ‘Birds Don’t Sing’, p. 277.
30. Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, p. 54.
31. Ibid., p. 55.
32. Clark, ‘Eleanor Ormerod’:Â€447.
33. Ibid.:Â€443, 452.
34. Ibid.:Â€446.
35. Whorton, ‘Insecticide Spray’:Â€227.
36. Ibid.:Â€225–7.
37. Ibid.:Â€226.
38. Ormerod, Eleanor Ormerod, pp. 206–7.
39. Clark, ‘Eleanor Ormerod’:Â€431.
40. Ibid.:Â€451.
41. Ibid.:Â€435.
4 2. Sheffield, Revealing New Worlds, p. 179.
43. Ibid., p. 172.
4 4. Nicholson, Birds in England, p. 25.
45. Matt. 10.29.
46. J. E. Walker, ‘God Save the Sparrow’:Â€241.
47. For another example of the protectionist arguments employed against
Ormerod, see F. O. Morris, The Sparrow Shooter.
49. Ibid., p. 304.
50. Ibid., p. 305.
51. Julian Huxley, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Animal Ecology, p. xiv.
52. Ibid., p. xv.
53. Whorton, ‘Insecticide Spray’:Â€230.
54. Ibid.:Â€232.
55. Ibid.:Â€235.
56. Ibid.:Â€241.
57. Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, pp. 19, 28–9.
58. Elton, ‘Biological Cost’:Â€87, 88.
59. Elton, Ecology of Invasions, pp. 141, 140, 142.
6 0. Lens, ‘New Entomology’:Â€459.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Animal psychology and the question of the extent to which the behaviour
of any organism was governed by instinct or intellect were subjects that
occupied early ethologists, and Woolf alludes to this in Night and Day
when she includes ‘the psychology of animals’ among Cassandra’s inter-
ests (ND 385).
65. Bell, Virginia Woolf:Â€A Biography, vol. ii, p. 126.
66. Ibid.
67. Martin, Popular Collecting, p. 29.
69. Fabre, Social Life in the Insect World, p. 181.
71. Ford, Mightier than the Sword, pp. 72–3.
72. Pound, ‘Hudson:Â€Poet Strayed into Science’, p. 429.
73. Hudson was not equally appreciative of Woolf’s writing. For his evalu-
ation of The Voyage Out, see Hudson, 153 Letters from W. H. Hudson,
pp.Â€130–31.
75. Ibid., p. 240.
76. Ibid., p. 236.
7 7. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 117.
78. Allen, Naturalist in Britain, p. 209. In July 1892, the Stephen children note
in the Hyde Park Gate News that Julia Stephen has been scattering crumbs
for birds, a fact that suggests the family’s attentiveness to such trends
(HPGN 79).
79. John Jorrocks was the title character of R. S. Surtees’s popular Victorian
hunting stories, collected in Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities.
80. See, for example, J. Arthur Thomson’s ‘The Homing of Sea-Swallows’
or E. M. Nicholson’s ‘Some Recent Bird-Marking Discoveries’, both of
which appeared in the New Statesman. See also Allen, Naturalist in Britain,
p. 213.
81. In the early twentieth century, the term ‘jizz’ was coined to refer to the
indefinable ‘somewhat’ of which White writes (Moss, Bird in the Bush,
p.Â€130).
83. Ibid.
84. Westling, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World’:Â€867.
85. The Outline of History that Lucy reads is not quite that written by
H.Â€G.Â€Wells. Gillian Beer suggests that Woolf ‘amalgamates’ The Outline
of History with Wells’s A Short History of the World and ‘writes her own
version rather than quoting Wells directly’ (Beer, Virginia Woolf:Â€ The
Common Ground, p. 21).
86. Wells, Short History, p. 30.
87. Wells, Outline of History, p. 32.
88. Westling, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World’:Â€865.
89. That the fate of a fish may be regarded as symbolic of human fate is sug-
gested elsewhere as well. Giles himself identifies with a fish in the cur-
rent:Â€ he grieves that ‘he was not given his choice. So one thing led to
another; and the conglomeration of things pressed you flat, held you
fast, like a fish in water’ (BTA 31). In To the Lighthouse, fishing again
appears negatively symbolic. On the long-awaited trip to the lighthouse,
as James and Cam reflect on their father’s ‘crass blindness and tyranny’,
the Macalister boy fishes:Â€he ‘caught a mackerel, and it lay kicking on the
floor, with blood on its gills’; he ‘took one of the fish and cut a square out
of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was
thrown back in the sea’ (TTL 183–4, 195). This wastefulness and indif-
ference to suffering mirror Mr Ramsay’s selfish absorption and waste of
the energy of others. (It is worth noting that such representations did not
always offer a just portrait of their subject. In ‘Sketch of the Past’, Woolf
records Leslie Stephen’s moral objections to fishing and attributes her
own childhood decision to abandon the pastime to his comments on the
subject (MOB 139). Yet despite this fact, in a diary entry from 14 May 1925
Woolf states that ‘the centre [of To the Lighthouse] is my father’s charac-
ter, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes
a dying mackerel’ (D iii:Â€18–19). Such misrepresentations illustrate that
Woolf was not immune from the temptations of over-simplification.)
90. Zwerdling, ‘Between the Acts and the Coming of War’:Â€ 225; Beer,
‘Introduction’ to Between the Acts, p. xxvi.
91. The nature documentary Predatory Behavior of Snakes describes the man-
ner in which snakes feed:
many [snakes] … feed on animals that are larger in diameter than they
are. Nevertheless, because they can neither chew up nor dismember their
food, they must swallow their prey intact … By means of alternate move-
ments of the opposite sides of its flexible skull and by alternate movements
of the left and right lower jaws, the snake walks its mouth around [its
prey]. Longitudinal movements of the jaws disengage and then re-engage
the recurved teeth in a ratchet-like motion that forces [the prey] down
the snake’s throat … After [the prey] has been swallowed, it is pushed
along the oesophagus and into the stomach by peristaltic movements of
the walls of the gut and by undulations of the snake’s body.
The documentary also notes that those species of snake that do not rely on
venom or constriction to kill their prey simply ‘overpower prey by seizing
it in their jaws and then swallowing it alive. The prey dies in the snake’s
stomach.’
C h a p t e r 5: R e p r e s e n t i n g ‘ t h e m a n n e r
o f o u r s e e i n g’
1. Sarsfield, ‘Insect World’, pp. 253, 250.
2. Richter, ‘Hunting the Moth’, pp. 14, 17, 15.
3. Ibid., p. 13.
4. Woolf makes similar use of the idea of composure in Jacob’s Room and ‘The
Death of the Moth’ ( JR 200, 216; CE i:Â€361).
6. I use the term ‘deconstruction’ not in its Derridean sense but simply as an
antonym for construction in a material sense.
7. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 8.
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Index
Abbott, Reginald 134 and Marie Stopes 115–16, 117, 120–22,

Æsop 60 123, 138
agriculture 67, 136 and the protection movement 48–9
Albright, Daniel 13 and VW 3, 109–10, 111–12, 115, 119–20,
Allen, David Elliston 3, 27, 35, 85, 155, 126, 127, 138
195n.70, 201n.8, 205n.80 and W. H. Hudson 56
alphabetisation 187, 189 as creative endeavour 120, 121–2
anatomy, comparative 42 criticism of 67
Anker, Peder 67, 68 delay in introduction to Britain 19, 22,
Annan, Noel 25 43–4
ants 5, 29, 36–7, 60, 94, 199n.90 modern enthusiasm for 45–6, 138
aquaria 79, 91, 202n.24 rise of 2–3, 11, 19, 38, 41–2, 43–5, 194n.24
Armstrong, Patrick 25, 33 birds
and F. O. Morris 32, 33
Bacon, Francis 20, 39–40 and Gilbert White 17, 159–60
Barber, Lynn 17, 21, 29 and Julian Huxley 56, 58
Bates, Henry Walter 55 and Thoby Stephen 155
Bateson, William 40 and W. H. Hudson 1, 153–4
Baudrillard, Jean 87, 88–9, 91 as game 129–30, 131
Beer, Gillian 4, 83, 107, 165, 206n.85 as metaphor 178, 181–2
bees 29, 36–7, 60 as pests 136, 137, 141–2
beetles 15, 73, 78, 81–2, 92, 97, 135, 162 behaviour of 3–4, 56, 57, 58, 59, 70–71,
behaviour studies: seeÂ€ethology 151, 160
Beirne, Bryan 52 bird ecology 9
Bell, Julian 154 bird-ringing 58, 158, 205n.80
Bell, Vanessa 149–50 collection of 15, 19, 49–50, 51–2,
Bewick, Thomas 24 78, 94
and VW 30 egg-collecting 127, 185
binoculars: seeÂ€field-glasses feeding birds 155, 205n.78
biology migration 58, 73, 158, 159, 166, 205n.80
use of term 192n.3 observation of 2, 30, 70–71, 149, 151,
biology, the new 153–4, 155–8, 159–60, 162, 163, 166
and amateur natural history 46, protection of 47–8, 49–50, 51–2, 132–4,
48–9, 52 142–3
and Eleanor Ormerod 135 taxonomy of 18
and field studies 53 bird-watching 11, 53, 56, 58
and H. G. Wells 45–6, 138 and Gilbert White 159–60
220
Index 221
and Thoby Stephen 155 classification: seeÂ€taxonomy
and VW 2, 70–71, 149, 155–8, 159–60, clergyman-naturalist
181–2 and VW 76, 141–2, 160
Blyth, Ian 10, 70–71 F. O. Morris as 32–3
Bose, J. C. 58 Gilbert White as 17, 61, 160
botany nineteenth-century 18, 25, 27
and Leslie Stephen 3, 30–31 collection
and Marie Stopes 120–21 and Eleanor Ormerod 135
modern 43, 109, 120–21 and F. O. Bower 44
plant ecology 3, 9 and F. O. Morris 33–4
taxonomic 23, 43 and hunting 156
teaching of 27 and imperialism 97–8
VW’s childhood practice of 3, 31 and John Lubbock 29
VW’s depiction of 15, 79, 83, 84–5, 103, and Marie Stopes 120–21, 122–3
109, 110–11, 147–8, 157 and militarism 97–8
Bower, F. O. 43, 44, 58 and religion 92
Bowlby, Rachel 101, 203n.38 and the protection movement 47,
Bowler, Peter J. 192n.3 49–50
Bradshaw, David 4 and Vanessa Bell 149–50
British Ecological Society 3, 62 and W. H. Hudson 1, 49
British Ornithologists’ Union 50 as literary method 1, 2, 6–8, 168, 169, 170,
Browne, Thomas 173–4 171–4, 180, 189, 190
Bryson, J. Scott 193n.17 as material basis of taxonomy 16
Bureau of Animal Population 68 as obsession 87, 88–9, 91–3
Burstein, Jessica 61 as symbol of the Victorian age 85–7
butterflies criticism of 1, 29, 44, 49–52, 85–7, 89,
and F. O. Morris 32–3, 34 120–21, 122–3, 127, 150
VW’s childhood study of 3, 31, 32, 36, nineteenth century as golden
73, 74 age of 18–19
VW’s depiction of 15, 78, 80, 83, 97–8, psychoanalytic interpretation of 51–2,
99, 102–3, 149, 156, 162, 164 87–9, 201n.17
VW’s figurative use of 5–6, 7, 92, 105, 187 techniques 34, 201n.8
Byatt, A. S. 193n.2 VW’s childhood engagement with 3, 31,
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 202n.21 32, 35–7, 73, 74–5, 76, 127
VW’s depiction of 15, 78, 83, 84, 85–9,
Cantrell, Carol H. 8 91–3, 94, 96–8, 102–4, 156, 172–3,
Č apek, Karel and Josef 60 185, 201n.17
capture VW’s figurative use of 1, 2, 6–8, 72,
as literary method 174, 176–7, 178–9 83, 84, 85–9, 91–3, 96–8, 102–4,
seeÂ€alsoÂ€collection 105, 124, 125, 171, 172–3, 185,
Cardwell, D. S. L. 21 202n.29
Carmichael, Marie: seeÂ€Stopes, Marie composure 173, 207n.4
Carson, Rachel 9, 67 Conrad, Joseph 152
caterpillars 144, 149 construction as literary method 174, 176,
Chance, Edgar 59 177, 179
Chatfield, June E. 16 Continental science 19, 20, 22, 43, 61–2,
Childs, Donald J. 4 194n.24
chrysalis 5–6, 73, 149 Coward, T. A. 54
Clapham Sect 25 craniology 106
Clark, J. F. McDiarmid 136–8, 140 Cuvier, Georges 18, 42
222 Index
Darwin, Charles 22, 32, 39–41, 65, 69 Elton, Charles
and F. O. Morris 35, 36 and conservationist arguments 68
and Leslie Stephen 35 and ecology 62–3, 64–5, 66, 143,
and Marie Stopes 122, 123 200n.102
and taxonomy 39 and environmental control 66, 68
and VW 36, 38, 85, 107–9 and Gilbert White 63
modern challenges to 40, 108 and laboratory biology 63
seeÂ€alsoÂ€evolutionary theory and pesticides 145–6
Davies, Martin 193n.2 and practical ecology 67–8
deconstruction as literary method 174, and taxonomy 63
177–8 radio talks 64, 65, 66
de Gourmont, Remy 60 Empire Marketing Board 68
Desmond, Adrian 11, 41–2 entomology
de Vries, Hugo 40–41 and Eleanor Ormerod 135–41
dinosaurs 162–3 and F. O. Morris 32–4, 35, 201n.8
Donovan, Josephine 8 and Jean-Henri Fabre 54–5, 57, 146, 148,
Duckworth, George 31, 155 150
and John Lubbock 29, 36
ecocriticism 8–10, 193n.17 and Julian Bell 154
ecofeminism and Marie Stopes 122, 123
and Eleanor Ormerod 136–8, 143 and Vanessa Bell 149–50
and VW 8, 9, 137–8, 143 behavioural 29, 36–7, 54–5, 57, 60, 148,
ecology 3, 9–10, 11, 38, 53, 61–9 150
and agriculture 67 economic 112–13, 114, 135, 136–41, 143–4,
and control of nature 66–9, 138, 143–4 145–6
and F. W. Oliver 120 Stephen family Entomological Society
and imperialism 67, 68 31, 32
and industry 67–8 VW on behavioural entomology 36–7,
and interrelationship 69 99, 150–51
and Marie Stopes 120 VW on economic entomology 112–13,
and pest control 67, 143–4, 145–6 114, 135, 141, 144, 146
and pesticides 145–6 VW on insect collection 3, 6–7, 15, 31,
and scientific co-operation 64, 69 32, 73, 74–5, 76, 78, 80, 81–2, 83,
and VW 3, 9–10, 69, 135, 138, 143–4, 92, 96–8, 102–3, 105, 156, 169, 171,
161–7 172–3, 202n.29
animal 62–4 VW on insect development 5–6
as practical science 67–8 VW on taxonomic entomology 3, 15,
conservationist 68–9 31, 32, 73, 74, 76, 78, 98, 101, 169,
Gilbert White as precursor 63 180–81
institutionalisation of 67–8 VW’s childhood practice of 3, 31, 32, 73,
overarching perspective of 69 74–5, 76
plant 61–2 Espley, Richard 10
popularisation of 62–3, 64–5, 200n.102 ethology 3, 11, 38, 53, 54–61
rise of 61–4 amateur contributions to 55
ecophenomenology 10 and Jean-Henri Fabre 54–5, 57, 60, 146,
education, science 21, 27, 44, 126, 136 148, 150
Edwardian fiction 175–6, 177–9 and John Lubbock 29, 36
Einstein, Albert 108 and Julian Huxley 56–7, 58
Elementary Education Act (1870) 44 and VW 3–4, 36–7, 70–71, 99, 126, 127,
Elgin Marbles 89–90, 202n.21 147–61
Index 223
and W. H. Hudson 55–6, 57, 153–4 gardens 202n.23
bird 3–4, 56, 57, 58, 59, 70–71, 151 Gaskell, Elizabeth
Gilbert White as precursor 16–17, 159, Mary Barton 26
160–61 gender and taxonomy 124–5, 201n.9
insect 29, 36, 54–5, 57, 60, 139, 146, 148, gendering
150 of nature 93
institutionalisation of 56 of science 106, 136, 137, 159
popularisation of 56–60 Georgian fiction 174, 175–7, 180
evolutionary theory 2, 11, 22, 38, 39–42, 69 Germany, scientific developments in 19, 20,
and inductive reasoning 39–40 43, 120, 194n.24
and Leslie Stephen 35 Gibbon, Edward 93
and popular natural history 28–9 Gillispie, Charles Coulston 11, 42
and taxonomy 39 glass case 84, 85, 125
and VW 3, 4, 36, 38, 41, 107–9, 111, 185 Gordon, Craig 4
death of Darwinism 40 Gosse, Edmund 195n.64, 195n.69
F. O. Morris opposed to 35, 36 Gosse, Philip Henry 27, 28, 195n.64
Lamarckian 26 Gualtieri, Elena 118–19
modern challenges to 40–41, 108 guinea pigs 30, 111
modern evolutionary synthesis 11, 41,
108, 109, 197n.9 Haeckel, Ernst 61
experiment, laboratory 111, 126 Hagen, Joel B. 65
extinction 34, 162–3, 167, 193n.2 Hakluyt, Richard 171
Hall, Lesley A. 204n.15
Fabre, Jean-Henri 54–5, 57, 60, 146, 148, 150 Hancock, Nuala 202n.23
and Roger Fry 148 Henry, Holly 4, 61
and Vanessa Bell 149–50 Herbert, Michael 11
and VW 3, 38, 148, 149–51 hierarchy
Fara, Patricia 23 and hunting 128–9, 131
Faris, Wendy B. 192n.6 and modern biology 138
Farrell, Sophia 74 and taxonomy 20, 25–7, 99,
field-glasses 53, 155, 156, 157, 160 101, 104–5, 124, 125, 184,
field guide 53 185
Field, Mary 58, 59 Hills, Jack 32
films, nature 56, 58–60, 199n.83 Howard, H. Eliot 3, 55, 57
‘Secrets of Nature’ series 59–60 Howarth, William 8
and VW 60 Hudson’s Bay Company 67
fish 164, 166, 188, 206n.89 Hudson, W. H.
fishing 165, 206n.89 and birds 1, 153–4
Fleishman, Avrom 5 and collection 1, 49
Fleming, Bruce E. 192n.6 and ethology 55–6, 57, 153–4
Forster, E. M. 90 and Gilbert White 55
France, scientific developments in 19, and Henry Walter Bates 55
194n.24 and observation 1
Freud, Sigmund 51, 52 and protection 49, 132, 198n.44
Froula, Christine 5–6, 97 and taxonomy 56
Fry, Roger and the new biology 56
and Jean-Henri Fabre 148 and VW 3, 10, 38, 152–4,
Quaker heritage of natural history 25, 205n.73
31–2 as literary stylist 152–4
VW’s biography of 170 Humm, Maggie 60
224 Index
hunting behaviour of 29, 36–7, 54–5, 57, 60, 139,
and collection 156 146, 148, 199n.90
and F. O. Morris 48 collections of 15, 19, 29, 76
and imperialism 129 figurative use of 5–7, 60
and social hierarchy 128–9, 131 seeÂ€alsoÂ€ants; bees; beetles; butterflies;
and VW 128–31, 155, 156 caterpillars; entomology; moths;
and war 128, 130 silkworms
men as victims of 130 intellectual aristocracy 32, 195n.70
protectionist opposition to 47, 48 interrelatedness 161–5
women as victims of 129–30
Huxley, Aldous 60 Jansen, Sue Curry 106
Huxley, Julian 3, 62 Jeffries, Richard 38, 154
and birds 56, 58 jizz 54, 206n.81
and ecology 10, 64, 66–7, 68, 143–4, 161, Joannou, Maroula 118
200n.102 Journal of Animal Ecology 63, 65
and environmental control 66–7 Journal of Ecology 3, 62
and ethology 56–7, 58 Joyce, James 60
and evolutionary theory 40, 41, 197n.9
and nature films 59 Kew Gardens 44, 147
and VW 3, 10, 38, 57, 161 Keynes, Maynard 170
radio talks 58 Kingsley, Charles 24, 27, 131
The Science of Life 3, 9, 38, 41, 56–7, 64, Kingsley, Mary 124
66–7, 161, 199n.90, 200n.102 Kipling, Rudyard 60, 201n.6
Huxley, T. H. 32 Knight, David 22, 40
and evolutionary theory 41–2
and laboratory biology 41–2, 43, 44, 48, labels 96
111, 121, 192n.3 laboratory 11, 21, 22, 43–5
and VW 38 and H. G. Wells 45–6
and Marie Stopes 115–16, 121
identity and VW 83, 109, 111–12, 115, 116, 119–20,
and classification 99–105, 181–4 123–4, 126, 138
ecological conception of 182 rise of the 19, 42, 44
imperialism Lambert, Elizabeth G. 4, 107–8
and collection 97–8 Lee, Hermione 181, 203n.15
and ecology 67 Legros, C. V. 54
and hunting 129 Lens 69, 146
and taxonomy 19, 20, 84–5 Lewis, Wyndham 60
infestation as symbol of 144 life sciences
inductive reasoning 19, 20, 39–40 lack of state support for 19, 21–2
insects nineteenth-century stagnation of 22,
anatomy of 140 28–9, 43–4
and Eleanor Ormerod 135–6, 139–40 professionalisation of 19, 20, 21–2, 23, 46,
and F. O. Morris 32–4, 35 48–9, 52
and Jean-Henri Fabre 54–5, 57, 146, 148, use of term 192n.3
150 seeÂ€alsoÂ€biology, the new; ecology;
and John Lubbock 29 ethology; science; taxonomy
and Marie Stopes 122, 123 Linnaeus, Carolus 16, 17–18, 23, 24, 29, 43,
and Vanessa Bell 149–51 45, 99, 100
as pests 135, 136, 140, 143–4, 145, Loudon, J. C. 25
146 Love, Glen A. 8
Index 225
Lowell, James Russell 30 VW’s figurative use of 5, 6–7, 171, 172–3,
Lubbock, John 19, 29, 36 186
Mullens, W. H. 33
mammoths 162–3 museums 11, 42–3, 49, 202n.17
Mao, Douglas 87, 89 and E. M. Forster 90
Marcus, Jane 115, 203n.10, n.10 and Marie Stopes 122
Marcus, Laura 59, 60 and VW 31, 32, 73, 76, 89–91
marine life British Museum (Natural History) 15, 19,
and Marie Stopes 122 22, 42–3, 76, 89–90, 124, 169
and VW 15, 78–9, 91, 98 Hunterian Museum 42
Massingham, H. W. 132, 133, 134 Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
materialists 89, 152, 171–4, 177, 180 22, 42
McNeillie, Andrew 132 nineteenth century as age of 18
medicine 83, 111–12 Stephen family museum 31, 32, 73
Mendel, Gregor 40–41, 197n.9 mutation theory 40–41, 197n.9
and VW 38, 108, 112
Mendelism 11, 40–41, 197n.9 naming
and VW 38, 41, 108, 112, 113 and identity 99–101, 103–4, 160
metamorphosis 5–6 as a means of control 94
meteorology 166 as capture 96, 103
microscopes as killing 96
and Marie Stopes 121 inefficacy of 98
and VW 80–81, 82, 123, 126, 140 taxonomic nomenclature 16, 34
migration 58, 73, 158, 159, 166, 205n.80 natural history
militarism 97–8, 144 and children in VW 78–83
Miller, Hugh 24, 25 and Eleanor Ormerod 135
Moore, James R. 39 and evolutionary theory 28–9
Morris, F. O. 27, 28, 32–6 and social conditioning 25–7, 78, 97–8
and collection 33–4, 196n.85, 201n.8 as pious pastime 24–5, 31–2
and Eleanor Ormerod 204n.47 as politically conservative 25–7
and evolutionary theory 35, 36, 48 as rational recreation 24, 27, 31
and sugaring 33 as self-help 24, 25–7
and taxonomy 33–4 as symbol of Victorian age 83–5
and the protection movement 47–8 decline of 52
and vivisection 48 expansion of 27
and VW 3, 32, 33, 36, 98–9, 102, 196n.71 lingering influence of 29–30, 35–7
as clergyman-naturalist 32–3 middle-class participation in 27
modern judgements of 33 nineteenth-century 18–37
nineteenth-century influence of 33, 35 nineteenth-century stagnation of 28–30,
Morus, Iwan Rhys 192n.3 33, 35–7, 195n.64
Moss, Stephen 27, 198n.44 popular natural history texts 27–9
moths popular practice of 23–9
and F. O. Morris 33–4, 35 publishing boom 27–8
and Jean-Henri Fabre 150 respectability of 23–4
and Julian Bell 154 role of amateurs in 22, 23
and Vanessa Bell 149–51 traditionalist element of 28
VW’s childhood study of 3, 31, 32, 36, VW’s childhood practice of 3, 6, 14,
73, 74–5 29–37, 72–8
VW’s depiction of 15, 78, 97–8, 101, 102, working-class participation in 25–7
147, 150–51, 156, 180–81 seeÂ€alsoÂ€collection; taxonomy
226 Index
natural history societies and taxonomy 135, 139
in Rudyard Kipling 201n.6 and the new biology 135
in VW 15, 79–80 and VW 3, 38, 135, 137–47
natural theology 17, 19, 20–21, 24–5, 28, ecofeminist reading of 136–8, 143
32–3, 42, 47, 69, 140, 141, 160, ornithology
195n.68 and F. O. Morris 32, 33
naturalist, the new 154–8 and Gilbert White 17, 159–60
naturalists, amateur 22, 23, 53 and Julian Huxley 56, 58
and professional biology 46, 48–9, 52 and VW 2, 3–4, 15, 70–71, 78, 94, 155–8,
contributions to ethology 55 159–60
nature bird behaviour 3–4, 56, 57, 58, 59, 70–71,
as threat to reason 93–4 151, 160
attunement to 161–7 bird ecology 9
conquest of 94 migration 73, 158, 159, 166, 205n.80
gendering of 93 taxonomic 18
misinterpretation of 165–6 seeÂ€alsoÂ€bird-watching
obliviousness to 161–3 Owen, Richard 18
Naylor, Gillian 201n.12 and evolutionary theory 41–2
New Statesman 57, 58, 69, 146, 159, 205n.80 and the museum 42–3
Nicholson, E. M. 10
and collection 50, 51–2, 155 Painlevé, Jean 199n.83
and ecology 9, 62, 141 palaeobotany
and ethology 55, 57, 58, 155, 205n.80 and F. W. Oliver 120
and Gilbert White 17, 61 and Marie Stopes 120
and protection 49, 142–3, 155 Paley, William 20, 21, 29
and W. H. Hudson 49 Paris Green 136, 137, 140, 144, 145
seeÂ€alsoÂ€pesticides
observation Pearce, Susan 51
and VW 1–2, 70–71, 127, 147, 148–9, Pearson, Lynn 202n.24
155–8, 166–7, 190 Pennant, Thomas 30
and W. H. Hudson 1 pest control 67, 68, 143–4
as literary method 1–2, 36, 153, 154, and ecology 145–6
160–61, 168, 174, 180–81, 183, and Eleanor Ormerod 136–42
184–5, 187–8, 189, 190 and VW 135, 141–2, 144
shift from collection to 155 pesticides
seeÂ€alsoÂ€ethology and ecology 145–6
Oliver, F. W. and Eleanor Ormerod 136, 137
and ecology 64, 120 and VW 137, 140, 144–5
and palaeobotany 120 early twentieth-century attitudes towards
and taxonomy 17–18, 20, 43, 45 144–6
and the new biology 43, 45 nineteenth-century understanding of 137
Ormerod, Eleanor 135–47 seeÂ€alsoÂ€Paris Green
and birds 141–2 Phillips, Kathy J. 79, 104, 202.n38
and classification 135 photography, wildlife 53
and collection 135 physics 4, 10
and economic entomology 136–41 physiology 19, 43, 44, 53, 109
and F. O. Morris 204n.47 plants
and insects 135–6, 139–40 and Leslie Stephen 30–31
and pest control 136–41 and VW 15, 31, 79, 84–5, 102, 103, 109,
and pesticides 136, 137 110–11, 147–8, 149, 185
Index 227
plant ecology 3, 9 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds 51
Plumage Bill, The 132–4 Rupke, Nicolaas 41–2
plumage trade Rusk, Lauren 115
and VW 127, 132–4 Russell, Bertrand 106
protectionist opposition to 47, 132–4
Pound, Ezra 60, 152 Sailer, Susan Shaw 60
preservation Sarsfield, Rachel 5, 7, 61, 168, 174, 175, 189
as literary method 179 Schiebinger, Londa 201n.9
as symbol 84, 85–7 science
Renaissance attitude towards 85–6 amateur and professional 46, 48–9, 52
techniques 18–19 and love and activism 115–20
Victorian attitude towards 85–7 and morality 139–41
protection as literary method 174, 177, and religion 19, 20–21, 24–5, 31–2, 112,
178–9 139–40, 141, 166, 195n.68
protection movement and VW 4–5, 105, 106–7, 112,
and F. O. Morris 47–8 125–6, 159
and religious rationale 47, 48, 142 and women 45–6, 76, 80–83, 111–20,
and rhetoric 127, 133, 142 125–6, 135–42, 203n.15–204
and specimen collection 47, 49–50 as creative endeavour 120, 121–2, 127
and the new biology 48–9 disinterested 106–7, 109–10, 126, 127, 159
and the plumage trade 47, 132–4 education 21, 27, 44, 126, 136
and the sparrow controversy 141 gendering of 106, 136, 137, 159
and vivisection 48–9 infected 106–7, 159
and VW 127–35, 141–2, 155 lack of state support for 19, 21–2
and W. H. Hudson 49 professionalisation of 19, 20, 21–2, 23, 46,
and women 133, 142 48–9, 52
modern 49–50, 142–3 scientific methods as literary models 1–2, 13,
Victorian 46–9, 141–3 154, 160–61, 167, 168–91
psychology, animal 112, 113, 148, Scott, Bonnie Kime 8
205n.64 Sea Birds Preservation Act 47, 48
Secord, Anne 26
radio talks self-help 21, 24, 25–7
on bird-watching 58 Selous, Edmund 3, 55, 57, 58
on ecology 64, 66 Sheffield, Suzanne Le-May 139
rats 126 silkworms 112–13, 114
release as literary method 178, 179, 188 Smiles, Samuel 24
religion Smith, Percy 58, 59
and collection 92 snails 148, 170
and identity 104–5 Snaith, Anna 115
and science 19, 20–21, 24–5, 31–2, 112, snakes 165–6, 206n.91–207n.91
139–40, 141, 166, 195n.68 social conditioning 25–7, 78, 97–8
and the protection movement 47, 48, 142 Sparks, Elisa Kay 202n.23
Richter, Harvena 6, 7, 97, 168, 171 Squire, J. C. 50
Ritvo, Harriet 39 Stainton, H. T. 24
Robinson, Judy Larrick 5, 7, 99, 102, 168, Stephen, Adrian 31
196n.85, 202n.38 Stephen family
Royal Agricultural Society of England 136 Entomological Society 31, 32
Royal Horticultural Society 136 museum 31, 32, 73
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Stephen, Julia 31, 205n.78
to Animals 46 Stephen, Leslie 3, 30–31, 35, 206n.89
228 Index
Stephen, Thoby 31, 36, 73–6, 155 definition of 15–16
Stephens, J. F. 135 eclipse of 2–3, 11, 38, 42, 45, 52
Stopes, Marie intensification of taxonomic work 18–19
and collection 120–21, 122–3 Linnaean system of 16
and ecology 9, 62, 120 modern criticism of 14–15, 17–18, 19,
and entomology 122, 123 43–4, 72, 120–21, 122–3, 146,
and modern botany 120–21 193n.2
and palaeobotany 120 nineteenth-century 18–37
and taxonomy 120–21, 122–3 popular practice of 23–9
and the laboratory 115–16, 121 rehabilitation of 193n.2
and the new biology 115–16, 117, 120–22, social 94–6, 101, 125
123, 138 VW’s childhood practice of 3, 31, 32,
and VW 3, 38, 114–20, 123–4, 127 35–7, 72, 73, 74, 75–6
scientific career of 120 VW’s depiction of 15, 78, 98–102, 111,
Love’s Creation 114–20, 121–3 123, 146, 147, 180–81
sugaring Thomson, J. Arthur
and F. O. Morris 33 and ecology 62
and Julian Bell 154 and ethology 57–8, 205n.80
and VW 15, 31, 74–5, 172 Time and Tide 57
Sultzbach, Kelly 9
Surtees, R. S. vivisection 48–9
Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities 156, 205n.79
Swann, H. Kirke 33 Walker, Charlotte Zoë 9
symbolism of VW’s nature imagery 5–8 Walker, J. E. 142
Wallace, Alfred Russel 40
Tansley, A. G. Waller, L. Elizabeth 9
and ecology 62, 64, 67, 68 Wells, H. G.
and laboratory biology 67 and ecology 10, 64, 66–7, 68, 161,
taxonomy 200n.102
and Eleanor Ormerod 135, 139 and environmental control 66–7
and F. O. Morris 33–4 and ethology 56–7
and gender 124–5, 201n.9 and evolutionary theory 41
and Gilbert White 16, 17 and Mendelism 41
and H. G. Wells 45–6 and taxonomy 45–6
and hierarchy 20, 25–7, 99, 101, 104–5, and the laboratory 45–6
124, 125, 184, 185 and the new biology 45–6, 138
and identity 99–105, 181–4 and VW 3, 10, 38, 57, 152, 161, 162–3, 175
and imperialism 19, 20, 84–5 Ann Veronica 41, 45–6, 114, 118
and inductive reasoning 19, 20 Men Like Gods 67
and Marie Stopes 120–21, 122–3 The Outline of History 162, 163, 206n.85
and religion 19, 20–21 The Science of Life 3, 9, 38, 41, 56–7, 64,
and Richard Owen 42–3 66–7, 161, 199n.90, 200n.102
and W. H. Hudson 56 A Short History of the World 163, 206n.85
as capture 96, 103 Westling, Louise 8, 10, 162, 164, 193n.17
as killing 125, 126 White, Gilbert
as literary method 154, 160, 168, 169, and birds 17, 159–60
170–71, 180, 183–4, 189, 190 and Charles Elton 63
as politically conservative 20, 25–7 and collection 17
British preoccupation with 19–23, 43–4 and migration 73, 159
classificatory mentality 93–4, 110, 124–5, and taxonomy 16, 17
126, 127, 147, 169, 186, 187–8 and VW 30, 77, 159–61, 200n.4
Index 229
and W. H. Hudson 55 Mrs Dalloway 38, 41, 84–5, 97,
as clergyman-naturalist 17, 61, 160 108–9, 131–2, 181–3, 187,
as precursor of ecology 63 202n.23
as precursor of ethology 16–17, 61, Night and Day 38, 41, 80, 89, 108,
159–61 110–11, 112, 128–9, 131, 155–6, 158,
Victorian perception of 17, 61 205n.64
White, Paul 11, 21, 41–2 Orlando 70, 77, 78, 85–6, 93, 96, 100,
Whitworth, Michael H. 4 128
Willinsky, John 18 A Passionate Apprentice 74–5, 76, 77,
Withering, William 23 141
women ‘The Plumage Bill’ 132–4, 142
and science 45–6, 76, 80–83, 111–20, ‘Reading’ 97, 171–4
125–6, 135–42, 203n.15–204n.15 Roger Fry 31–2, 170
as unclassified 183–4 A Room of One’s Own 93, 114–27, 159,
relationships between 115–16, 119–20 178, 183–5, 203n.15
Wood, J. G. 27, 28 ‘A Scribbling Dame’ 169–70, 185
and VW 30 ‘The Shooting Party’ 129–30
Woolf, Virginia ‘Sketch of the Past’ 6, 32, 36–7, 72, 74,
childhood practice of natural history 3, 196n.71, 206n.89
14, 29–37, 72–8 ‘A Society’ 15
Works ‘Solid Objects’ 88–9
Asheham House diary 148–9 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’
Between the Acts 9, 78, 83–4, 109, 158, 202n.29
159, 161–7, 206n.89 Three Guineas 95, 96, 100, 106–7, 124,
‘Character in Fiction’ 174–9, 180 128, 144, 159
‘Craftsmanship’ 187, 189–90 To the Lighthouse 8–9, 11, 77, 78–9,
‘The Death of the Moth’ 70, 147, 109–10, 187, 202n.23, 206n.89
207n.4 ‘An Unwritten Novel’ 3–4
Flush 131 The Voyage Out 38, 91–6, 205n.73
‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ 152–3 The Waves 78, 79–80, 87, 90, 102–5,
Hyde Park Gate News 30–31, 72–3, 127, 149, 150–51, 185–8
205n.78 The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts
‘The Introduction’ 5, 70 87, 151
Jacob’s Room 78, 79, 91, 96–102, 129, The Years 78, 80–83, 86–7, 111–12,
180–81, 202.n38, 207n.4 128, 156–8
‘Kew Gardens’ 147–8 words
‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A as dead specimens 189
Reflection’ 1–2 as ecological community 189
‘The Mark on the Wall’ 91, 170–71, as living organisms 186, 189–90
201n.17 behaviour of 190
Melymbrosia 38, 92, 94, 95, 96 evolution of 189–90
‘Miss Ormerod’ 135, 137–47 Worster, Donald 61, 64
‘Modern Fiction’ 152, 179–80
‘Modern Novels’ 179–80 Zangwill, Edith Ayrton
‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ 174–9, The Call 118
180 Zwerdling, Alex 165

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Reflecting the modernist fascination with science, Virginia Woolf’s

c h r i s t i n a a lt is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University

Cambridge University Press

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the

ISBN-13 978-0-511-78956-4 eBook (NetLibrary)

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

This book began as a dissertation, and I would first like to thank

Works by Virginia Woolf

Sarsfield’s conclusion of Woolf’s fatal pessimism offers one means of

The natural history tradition

Due to the unique conditions governing the life sciences in Britain

The same view is put forward in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

One of the ways in which the perpetuation of a mid-Victorian out-

The modern life sciences

In the late nineteenth century, the long domination of taxonomic

P ro t e c t ion a n d c on s e rvat ion

The later protection movement

The explanation of the paradox that the collector, by destroying comparatively

Pseudo-scientific collectors’ interest in rarities meant that their dep-

To weigh, count, measure, and dissect for purposes of identification, classifi-

This interest in observing the living creature in action in its natural

Men of intelligence are taking cameras and building watching-shelters in for-

In the section of the book devoted to animal behaviour, the authors

Taxonomy and laboratory biology, which had long been defined in

Ecologists, like ethologists, saw in the approach of the eighteenth-

Ecology as a science of control

‘To pin through the body with a name’

In the midst of the many changes occurring in the late nineteenth-

O b s e s s ion , P o s s e s s ion , a n d C on t rol i n

Baudrillard argues that the collector’s sense of the ‘sublimity’ of his

The collection thus functions as a material expression of an idée fixe.

Woolf, however, presents the naming process not as a revelation of

Laboratory coats and field-glasses

Woolf’s most frequently cited comment on science is her assertion

a r o o m o f o n e ’s o w nand the influence

Collection and classification are consciously employed, even by one

Woolf suggests that while measurement for the purpose of classifi-

It is Ormerod’s frank, scientific treatment of anatomy, sex, andÂ�Â�

Candle in hand, we entered the room. What we saw is unforgettable. With a

He estimates that in a single night nearly forty male Emperor moths

Woolf’s admiration for Hudson’s ability to present the reader with a

Although Eleanor’s preoccupation with bird-watching in the midst

Although this world goes unnoticed by manyÂ€ – ‘butterflies [Mrs

The play and its props provide metaphorical nourishment through

Representing ‘the manner of our seeing’

This description of self suggests a radical interrogation of the bound-

Repeatedly in her writing, Woolf uses the analogy of alphabetising

C h a pt e r 2: T h e mode r n lif e sciences

C h a p t e r 4: L a bor atory coats

Abbott, Reginald 134 and Marie Stopes 115–16, 117, 120–22,

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