Gender, Greatness, and the “Third Generation”
This chapter argue that Virginia Woolf's Night and Day marks an effort as a third-generation daughter to represent and work through the literary and personal legacy of her antecedents. It elaborates how Woolf excised significant parts of a late-Victorian legacy from the literary-historical narrative that Night and Day shaped for its readers. It also analyses Woolf's deliberate framing of her own relation to a dominant strand of the English novelistic tradition in “maternal generation.” The chapter discusses the view of late-Victorian literary production that Woolf helped to construct that became more homogeneous than what Ann Ardis, Sally Ledger, Lyn Pykett, Talia Schaffer, and Margaret D. Stet created. It highlights Woolf's essays, reviews, and novels that created a gulf between the Georgians and their immediate predecessors, the Edwardian materialists.