Capital, By John Lanchester
Virginia Woolf did not much approve of the intrusion of estate agency into fiction. "House property," she sniffily wrote in the talk that became her 1924 essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown", "was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy." Her polemic, against Arnold Bennett in particular, and the painstaking social realism of pre-1914 British fiction in general, scorns Bennett for "describing accurately and minutely the sort of house Hilda [his heroine] lived in, and the sort of house she saw from the window." Against this plodding artisan's view, she sets the intangible "character" of Mrs Brown, the elusive human spirit that no amount of sociological annotation can ever pin down. "I believe," Woolf maintained, "that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite". And no amount of estate agent's patter will ever capture what Woolf, in another essay, rather bafflingly called the "luminous halo" or "semi-transparent envelope" of her inner life. That task falls to the modern novelist.
