School of Distance Education

School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
59 
deploy her equivalent of Fielding’s authorial irony. 
Somewhere between the lost epistolary novel Elinor and 
Marianne and its rewriting as 
Sense and Sensibility
, Jane 
Austen discovered free indirect style. She discovered it 
in the women novelists of slightly older generation, 
Fanny Burney and Maria Edgworth, because it appears 
briefly and fragmentarily in their work.
Henry James is a crucial figure in the transition 
from classic to modern fiction, and “consciousness” is 
one of the key words in his criticism of fiction. In his 
famous essay of 1884, “The Art of Fiction,” James says, 
“Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it 
is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of 
the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of 
consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its 
tissue. “His words remarkably resonates with Virginia 
Woolf’s assertion in her essay “Modern Fiction” :” The 
mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, 
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. 
From all sides they come, an incessant shower of 
innumerable atoms . . .life is a luminous halo, a 
semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the 
beginning of consciousness to the end”. The essay, 
published in 1919, was a manifesto for the modernist 
stream-of consciousness novel, and an attack on the 
perpetuation of the nineteenth-century novel tradition of 
social realism by writers like Wells, Bennett, and 
Galsworthy, whom Woolf calls “materialists.” Virginia 
Woolf was excited and inspired by Joyce’s technical 
innovations in rendering the stream of consciousness. 
James Joyce was publishing Ulysses in The Little 
Review at that time.

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
60 
Joyce creates the illusion of representing what 
Virginia Woolf called “the quick of the mind” partly by 
a technique of condensation. Joyce represents the stream 
of consciousness by leaving out verbs, pronouns, 
articles, and by leaving sentences unfinished. Joyce’s 
representation of consciousness was a quite new 
combination of third-person and first-person discourse. 
The third-person narrative is impersonal and objective— 
there is no trace of an authorial persona. Joyce represents 
the consciousnesses of his three main characters, Bloom, 
Molly, and Stephen Daedalus, in three quite distinctive 
styles—as regards vocabulary, syntax, and the type of 
association. He came as close to representing the 
phenomenon of consciousness as perhaps any writer has 
ever done in the history of literature. Henry James, 
although dedicated to representing life through the 
consciousness of his characters, did not go so far. He 
would not surrender the coherence and control of the 
well-formed grammatical sentence. His preference was 
for a third-person narrative that was intensely focalized 
through the consciousness of one character, as in 
The 
Ambassadors
, He did not approve of the first-person, 
pseudo-autobiographical mode for full-scalenovels, 
deploring “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation” it 
encouraged.
Surface and Depth 
The modern novel the artistically innovator E 
cutting edge literary fiction that evolved in the first few 
decades of the 20th century, is a conscious reaction 
against the classic realism of the previous century. The 
kinds of novel pioneered by Henry James, Virginia 

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