Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Virginia Woolf speaks in the first person to a room of listeners, in a text dated 1924, about writing and about character in fiction. She says she may be the only person present who has written, tried to write or failed to write a novel, and she imagines a little figure who says, “My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.” She adds that Brown, Smith or Jones comes before many novelists and says, “Come and catch me if you can.”

In another passage she sets out to ask what we mean by character in fiction and takes up the question of reality raised by Mr. Bennett. She sorts writers into Edwardians, such as Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, and Georgians, such as Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce and Eliot, and claims that on or about December 1910 human character changed. A further passage pictures how Mr. Bennett would describe Mrs. Brown on a train from Windsor that calls at Richmond, and then looks at a page of his novel Hilda Lessways.