WHAT IS A NOVEL?

Otago Witness, Issue 3830, 9 August 1927, Page 74

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

By Virginia Woolf, in Now and Then. If there were in England, as there is in France, an Academy of Letters with authority to decide disputed points, one would immediately bring to itg notice the chaotic state of fiction.

For 300 years the human brain has been applying itself with great vigour and fecundity in writing novels. Types of the most diverse kinds have come into existence.

Proust, Mr Kipling, Mr de la Mare, Mrs Elinor Glyn, Mr Hardy, Mr Wells are all novelists. But their books differ as the greyhound differs from the bulldog. So suggestible is the human mind that this .repetition of a single word does considerable damage. The reader comes to think that since all these varieties of book have the same name they must have the same nature.

Somewhere at the back of his mind is a vague shape called “ a novel ” to which often. with great loss of time and temper, he tries to make the specimen before him conform. Often he is extremely unjust. A notable instance was lately'provided by Mr Wells's “ William Clissold.” It was condemned a thousand times, not for this fault or for that, but because it was not “a novel.”

It is high time that this imaginarv but still highly potent bogey was destroyed. And since we are without law-givers, Jet us implore the novelists themselves to come to our help. • Wll . en they write a novel let them define it. Let them say that they have written a chronicle, a document, a rhapsody, a fantasy, an argument, a narrative or a dream. ’

For there is no such thing as ‘‘a novel.’’