This week, I’ve been attending the annual Modern Language Association Convention, which this year is in Philadelphia. On Saturday, January 6, I was a member of a panel celebrating “100 Years of Mrs. Brown” where we looked at the implications and influence of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, first published in a short version in 1923, then in later more expanded versions as both “Character in Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (the version history is quite tangled). It was an honor to be on a panel with wonderful fellow-panellists (Mary E. Wilson, Pamela Weidman, and Beth Rigel Daugherty), and it was a joy to have such a warm, supportive, and thoughtful audience.
My paper looked at Ursula K. Le Guin’s use of Woolf’s essay in a 1975 essay of her own, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”. I’d wanted an excuse to write about Woolf and Le Guin for years, and this was a perfect one, because it was “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” that introduced me to Woolf. When I was a science fiction-obsessed kid, I went to the library looking for books that would tell me how to write science fiction, and somehow I landed on The Language of the Night, Le Guin’s essay collection (edited by Susan Wood) thatb includes the essay. However, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. What was she saying? I wondered. I thought perhaps reading this “Mr. Bennett & Mrs. Brown” essay she mentioned might help, so I went in search of it. I doubt that I found it (I don’t really remember), since any of the books the library had would have had it as “Character in Fiction”, and I don’t know that I would have found it, at least not right off. But I did find other Woolf essays and her fiction and … thus began a life’s journey of reading.
I won’t have time to do anything more with this paper for quite a while, and I don’t know really what sort of project I might fit it into, so I’m going to post here my longer version of the piece, with a few paragraphs I had to cut for the sake of time at the MLA presentation. As with most conference papers, this is one step above a rough draft — it’s a first attempt, a stab at the dark, an offering of ideas. At the end, I’ve put a couple of points for further exploration.
Mrs. Brown in a Spaceship: Woolf, Le Guin, and the Character of Fiction
by Matthew Cheney, Plymouth State University
MLA Convention, Philadelphia, 6 January 2024
Mrs. Brown entered her spaceship in January 1975, when the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin traveled to London to give a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was the opening lecture of a months-long festival exploring ideas of science fiction’s conjunctions with other aspects of contemporary life and culture: science fiction and history, science fiction and science, science fiction and change — and, in Le Guin’s case, science fiction and character. Texts of the lectures were published the next year in an anthology edited by one of the festival organizers, Peter Nicholls, titled Science Fiction At Large. Le Guin’s essay was then reprinted in 1979 in a collection of her nonfiction, The Language of the Night, a book that gained quite a bit of attention in the years around its release, but which has now been out of print for some time, and the essay has not been reprinted since, leaving Mrs. Brown stranded in her spaceship, with hardly anyone back here on Earth to talk to.
(Note: The Language of the Night is coming back into print this spring!)
But Mrs. Brown still has things to say to us, as she did in 1923 when Virginia Woolf published the first version of her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, and as she did throughout the 1920s, when the railway car she rode in got more defined and more observed.
In fact, right now, as I speak to you, we are only a year shy of half a century from when Ursula Le Guin put Mrs. Brown on a spaceship, while Le Guin was only a couple years past half a century beyond Virginia Woolf’s first discovery of Mrs. Brown on a train ride from Richmond to London. The time seems right to see what Mrs. Brown has to tell us about language and character, about reading and noticing, about knowing and dreaming.
Le Guin begins by retelling the story of Virginia Woolf discovering and describing Mrs. Brown. Importantly, Le Guin presents the trip from Richmond to Waterloo Station as a real one that Virginia Woolf took, and Mrs. Brown as a real person Woolf saw but then imagined details about. This is how Woolf presents it in the essay, but I have never felt, myself, compelled to believe that Woolf was being journalistic in her presentation of Mrs. Brown. Woolf is frequently playful in this essay, and, as in many of her best essays, she relies at least as much on the tools of the fiction writer as of the essayist. Le Guin likely noticed this — she was an intelligent person and an insightful reader — but in her own lecture-essay, she took Woolf’s words, always, at face-value. Her job, she suggests, is less analysis than mimicry. She seeks to extrapolate from Woolf’s ideas, and to do so she must first replicate those ideas that she is most interested in. The essay evidences some problems with mimicry, however, and in doing so I wonder if it does not inadvertently highlight some problems of realistic representation in fiction — problems that Le Guin seems effortfully trying to keep locked in Pandora’s box, but which Woolf let out, selectively and carefully, in her own work.
Le Guin accepts, she says, Woolf’s definition of character and the novel, which Le Guin presents via this edited quotation:
I believe [Woolf wrote] that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved. … [the] great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise, they would not be novelists; but poets, historians, or pamphleteers. (Essays of VW vol. 3, pp. 425-426)
Le Guin elides the rest of the paragraph she started with and most of the following paragraph. She cuts out Woolf’s description of how writers of different nationalities would present Mrs. Brown, cuts out discussion of writers’ generations and temperaments as affecting their presentation of character, and cuts out the sentence “Thus Mrs. Brown can be treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country, and temperament of the writer.” Le Guin cuts out discussion of Arnold Bennett and the idea of reality, a discussion that includes the sentences “But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” Finally, Le Guin cuts out discussion of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Part of the reason for these cuts is that Le Guin wants to mimic and update them. Where Woolf discussed French and Russian writers, Le Guin not only mentions Pasternak and Solzehitsyn, she brings in Germany’s Heinrich Böll and Australia’s Patrick White, then adds: “Mrs. Brown turns up in India, in Africa, in South America, wherever novels are written. For as Mrs. Woolf said, ‘Mrs. Brown is eternal. Mrs. Brown is human nature. Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface; it is the novelists who get in and out. There she sits’” (102-103).
This brings Le Guin to her central concern. “There she sits,” she repeats, Woolf’s words now free of quotation marks, now her own. “And what I am curious about is this: Can the writer of science fiction sit down across from her?” She then proceeds to describe a spaceship in considerable detail. There is gusto to her writing here, great energy in her description of “gleaming spaceships moving out across the galaxy, antiseptic vehicles moving faster than the Richmond-Waterloo train, faster than the speed of light, ships capable of containing heroic captains in black and silver uniforms, and second officers with peculiar ears, and mad scientists with nubile daughters…” (Language 103). It is a fond caricature of pulp stories, but it is also mimicry, because in the form of this long sentence, which goes on well past what I have quoted, she has imitated the winding, lyrical sentences Woolf is famous for. In its structure, this sentence is closer to Woolf than most science fiction dares to be; yet in its content, it is all pulp magazine clichés.
Where, Le Guin wonders, can Mrs. Brown sit in a spaceship? At first, Le Guin proposes that Mrs. Brown, as Woolf describes her, is too small for the vast and heroic vehicle, too ordinary for epic interstellar battles. Then she wonders if Mrs. Brown is not “too roundfor it — so that when she steps into it, somehow it all shrinks to a shiny tin gadget, and the heroic captains turn to cardboard, and the sinister and beautiful aliens suddenly appear to be, most strangely, not alien at all, but mere elements of Mrs. Brown herself, lifelong and familiar, though startling, inhabitants of Mrs. Brown’s unconscious mind” (103).
It is here where Le Guin, for whatever reason, consciously or unconsciously, simplifies Woolf’s ideas of character and fiction. Indeed, despite whatever quotations she offers as evidence, the idea of character she works from in “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” owes more to E.M. Forster than to Virginia Woolf. By suggesting that Mrs. Brown is “tooround” for science fiction, she is alluding to one of E.M. Forster’s concepts from Aspects of the Novel. When Woolf reviewed Forster’s book in 1927, it caused some hurt feelings between the two writers, because while she praised the book’s elegance, she thought it failed to define and defend the artfulness of the novel as a form. Le Guin, however, is saying that science fiction might find more artfulness if it were to attend to making its characters more convincingly lifelike.
In calling for science fiction characters to mimic life, Le Guin slips away from her mimicry of Woolf, whose concern is far more complicated than with whether characters are round or flat. For Le Guin, the figure of Mrs. Brown represents the kind of ordinary life that escapes the pulp and heroic modes of fiction; for Woolf, Mrs. Brown represents something more mercurial, more quantum metaphysical.
What Woolf’s work in general — fiction and nonfiction — argues for is the instability of character, the unknowability of people. Erich Auerbach saw this all the way back in 1946 when in Mimesis he wrote of the narration of To the Lighthouse that Woolf represents “herself to be someone who doubts, wonders, hesitates, as though the truth about her characters were not better known to her than it is to them or to the reader” (535). In a useful discussion of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in her 1991 book Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, Pamela Caughie identifies just how slippery Woolf’s concepts and questions are, writing that
what the essay does is examine not what character is but how character functions, how character is used by writer and reader, how writer and reader respond to character. In pursuing Mrs. Brown, Woolf does not seek a new type of character; after all, Mrs. Brown is in many ways like a Bennett character. Rather, Woolf explores the means of expressing character in fiction. (63)
Though Le Guin invokes Mrs. Brown, she is mostly on the side of Arnold Bennett. She describes the utopian novel Islandiaby Woolf’s contemporary Austin Tappan Wright as a book “full of real people. There is plenty of room in Islandia for Mrs. Brown.” She says that Wright created a vivid world, a “nonexistent continent” in which there is “geology and weather and rivers and cities and houses and weaving-looms and fireplaces and politicians and farmers and housewives and manners and misunderstandings and love affairs and all” — and in creating this, “he rendered questionable Virginia Woolf’s statement, ‘There are no Mrs. Browns in Utopia.’ I think it possible she might have been quite pleased to know it” (105).
I’m not sure Woolf would have been as approving as Le Guin supposes. Because all of those things — weather, houses, weaving-looms, fireplaces, et cetera — those were all things Arnold Bennett relished describing. Imagining Bennett writing about Mrs. Brown, Woolf says, “He, indeed, would observe every detail with immense care.” Woolf is not arguing that the older generation of writers did not attend to details and worlds. She is arguing that what the contemporary reader needs, what art demands, is not detail but insight. “One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description,” she says of a Bennett passage she dissects.
There is no room for Mrs. Brown in Utopia not because utopian writers lack skill at what people now might call worldbuilding,but because utopian writers want to torture Mrs. Brown on the Procrustean bed of their agendas. Here we can begin to see what Le Guin is really up to, the argument she is, in fact, making, and the way that she will get herself back closer to Woolf than Bennett.
As always, context matters. In May 1974, Harper & Row published Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia. Seven months later, in “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”, Le Guin discusses writing that book and how it came to her via the protagonist, Shevek.
There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, that he might well come from a better place than this. But where? The better place; no place. What did I know about Utopia? Scaps of More, fragments of Wells, Hudson, Morris. Nothing. It took me years of reading and pondering and muddling … before I could begin to see where he came from and could see the landscape about him … and the other people, the people whom his eyes saw… (111-112)
Having created a utopian novel, Le Guin, whose entire definition of a worthwhile novel is based on characterization, gets a little defensive. She writes: “at the heart of it you will not find an idea, or an inspirational message, or even a stone ax, but something much frailer and obscurer and more complex: a person. … If I had to invent two entire worlds to get to him, two worlds and all their woes, it was worth it. If I could give the readers one glimpse of what I saw: Shevek, Mrs. Brown, the Other, a soul, a human soul, ‘the spirit we live by…’” (112).
Having defined Mrs. Brown as a being best suited to an Arnold Bennett novel, Le Guin is a bit stuck, since she so very much wants to be more Woolf than Bennett, despite the fact that she has just written a utopian novel, however ambiguously. She gets out of this jam ingeniously (and maybe a bit disingenuously) at the end of her essay. She gives Mrs. Brown to Mr. Bennett and keeps Mrs. Woolf for herself.
In the technological age of 1975, Le Guin writes,
There is poetry, still, but there is no more Mrs. Brown. There are snapshots of a woman at various moments. There are moving pictures of a woman in various places with various other persons. They do not add up to anything so solid, so fixed, so Victorian or medieval as a ‘character’ or even a personality. They are moments; moods; the poetry of flux; fragments of the fragmented, of the changing of the changed.
Do we not see this foreshadowed in the art of Virginia Woolf herself? (115)
Mrs. Brown, it turns out, didn’t fly away on a spaceship. Technological society, reflected in the forms and structures of modernism, pixellated her with a flux capacitor.
Le Guin is right — Woolf’s work beautifully embodies, as she says, “the poetry of flux”. There are few, if any, solid, fixed characters in Woolf’s novels from Jacob’s Room onward. Le Guin is stuck, because in January 1975, at least, she does not like this fact. She likes Arnold Bennett characters. She is proud that she has published a utopian novel based on Bennettian principles. (And Samuel Delany read it that way. In his 60-page essay “To Read The Dispossessed” [collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw], he implies it is a text whose novelistic language functions closer to that of Bennett’s generation — he specifically names the translator Constance Garnett, mother to the Bloomsbury group’s David Garnett (JHJ 111) — than to a language informed and inflected by the life and literature that came after modernism.) Le Guin all but admits this straight out. Still, she loves Virginia Woolf’s work — there is hardly a writer she cites more frequently throughout her interviews and essays from her earliest publications until her death. And so she has twisted herself into a rhetorical corner where she must disavow Woolf’s work even as another part of her cherishes it.
And so she gives Virginia Woolf to something else she twisted herself into a complicated relationship with: science fiction. She asks “what is science fiction at its best but just such a ‘new tool’ as Mrs. Woolf avowedly sought for fifty years ago, a crazy, protean, left-handed monkey wrench, which can be put to any use the craftsman has in mind…” (115). Woolf, it turns out, was waiting for science fiction! Le Guin didn’t know quite how right she was. A few years after 1975, various publications providing and discussing the notes and drafts of what eventually became Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years would show that she at least briefly entertained the idea of having the book extend one hundred years into the future. (And I have written elsewhere that The Years may productively be read as a novel containing utopian shadows and gestures, but that’s a topic for another time.)
By separating Mrs. Brown from Mrs. Woolf, and by giving science fiction to Woolf, Le Guin is able to suture it all back together by arguing that both Woolf and science fiction need Arnold Bennett, or someone like him. “If Mrs. Brown is dead,” she writes, “you can take your galaxies and roll them up into a ball and throw them into the trashcan, for all I care. … I really see no hope anywhere except in Mrs. Brown” (116, 117). For Le Guin, science fiction is a key to honest hope “because it is a promise of continued life for the imagination, a good tool, an enlargement of consciousness, a possible glimpse, against a vast dark background, of the very frail, very heroic figure of Mrs. Brown” (119).
If we accept Delany’s reading of The Dispossessed as a novel beholden to the literary language and conventions of someone born in the 19th century, then it is a model of what Le Guin has, in “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”, implied, and sometimes stated, as what she sought to achieve (at least with her work of the mid-1970s). Though for Delany, who values the innovations of modernist and post-modernist writers greatly, the achievement of Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia is at best ambiguous in its failure. On the other hand, perhaps the abiding popularity and reputation of The Dispossessed, which remains a touchstone for many readers and critics, is that it put not Mrs. Brown but Mr. Bennett into a spaceship.
Meanwhile, here in the fragments, flux, and flow of life and literature, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Brown still remains with us, riding into a future we cannot know, but which perhaps we can continue to try to write.
Ideas left out of this talk, but of value, perhaps, for the future:
· Le Guin herself as model of flux, at least in aesthetic personality — it wasn’t long after 1975 that her work began to change, to get weirder structurally, more innovative, more meta. It was at this time that her feminism was growing deeper and more thoughtful. “Mrs. Brown on a Spaceship” embodies some of that struggle, and it’s not surprising she never chose to reprint it. Still, I find it a fascinating essay for exactly this reason, that you can see her working her way toward future ideas that would be a bit different. Le Guin was an exemplary model of someone who analyzed herself and kept moving her ideas in new directions. Her life as a writer, thinker, and person was one of constant examination, reflection, and recalibration.
· It would also be valuable to explore material from recent writing about Woolf the idea of character in fiction. It’s not an infinite corpus, but it is large enough that to dip into it during this talk would have extended things far too long. I focused on Pamela Caughie’s book here because I think her reading is astute and her whole book deserves more attention. In fact, she was — to my great surprise and delight — in the audience for this panel, and asked me afterward if I feel that her book holds up now. It was written, she said, by a very different Pamela Caughie than the one I was talking to. I said indeed, I think it’s a significant and still tremendously valuable study, one all Woolf readers can benefit from. Seek it out!
