Now is the season of Virginia Woolf centenary celebrations. This decade will see certain—and certainly valuable—100-year returns to major works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own. But, to adapt Woolf’s plea in “Modern Fiction,” let us not assume that life exists more fully in works that are commonly thought big than in those that are commonly thought small. This panel considers a “small” work of Woolf’s—the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”—and finds that in its 100^th year it continues to challenge and provoke readers in unexpected and complex ways.

The essays on this panel explore this essay’s impact and legacy, engaging with its ideas about literary form, characterization, genre, and criticism within and beyond Woolf’s work. Reflecting the Presidential Theme “Celebration: Joy and Sorrow,” in celebrating this Woolfian anniversary we take up anew the gauntlet Woolf threw down in 1924. The variety of perspectives offered by the papers on this panel are likely to draw a diverse audience—certainly those interested in Woolf specifically, but also those engaged in research on modernism, fiction, and literary history more broadly.

The panel begins with failure. Mary Wilson’s “‘A season of failures and fragments:’ Virginia Woolf, ‘Mrs. Brown,’ and the Queer Art of Failure,” begins with the observation that failure is written all over “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Woolf describes herself as perhaps “the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel”; as the essay concludes she implores her audience to “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.” The essay itself is founded on narrative failure: written in response to Arnold Bennett’s assessment of Woolf’s failure to “create characters that are real, true, and convincing,” it also contains Woolf’s admitted failure to capture her Mrs. Brown. But drawing on Jack Halberstam’s conception of “the queer art of failure,” Wilson argues that here and in the novels that enact Woolf’s principles, failure is refigured not as a waystation on the way to success but an artistic end of its own.

Woolf’s worst failure, asserts Bennett, is characterization. Pamela Weidman takes up the significance of Woolf’s character creation in dialogue with another modernist essay, also set partly in a train station, to argue that limited characterization becomes a mode of criticism that can unsettle ideas about type and stereotype, rendering assumptions changeable, visible, and available for critique. In “Minimalist Character and Modernist Type: ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ and ‘The Little Man at Chehaw Station,’” Weidman draws together two different modernist essays to uncover similarities in Woolf’s and Ralph Ellison’s minimalist characterization that provide models for modernist engagement with other selves that are psychologically deep and fundamentally unknowable. Weidman demonstrates that these writers’ shared aesthetics of limited characterization lay out modernist uses of incomplete and revealing knowledge of human character.

Matthew Cheney also examines “Mrs. Brown” in conversation with another essay, productively unsettling the generic conventions that categorize, and perhaps limit, Woolf’s fictions. In 1976, Ursula K. Le Guin published “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown, an essay that brings Woolf’s ideas to bear on a mode of writing only beginning to form during Woolf's lifetime, teasing provocative ideas about fiction, character, utopia, and her own creative process. In “Mrs. Brown in a Spaceship: Woolf, Le Guin, and the Character of Fiction,” Cheney revisits Le Guin's essay with the same chronological distance from which Le Guin viewed Woolf. Such layered critical distance, Cheney suggests, might enable contemporary readers to go even farther than Le Guin: what if we think of Woolf as, like Le Guin, a writer of speculative fictions?

The final paper also reaches back into the critical past to project into the future of Woolfian criticism. Beth Rigel Daugherty’s “Time Passes: Revisiting ‘The Whole Contention Between Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf, Revisited,’” is a personal and critical presentation exploring several contexts: those around the original essay, its extensive revisions, and its audiences; the Anglophone Woolf criticism landscapes around 1982, Woolf’s centenary; and our current cultural and critical moment. Rigel’s survey of “Mrs. Brown’s” 100-year history insists on the importance of returning to Mrs. Brown as character, and considers what she might be saying to us as we read and write fiction, memoir, and criticism now.

A four-paper format will allow the panel to introduce a wide range of ideas on Woolf’s essay while still reserving time for open discussion. Panelists will be limited to 12 minutes for paper presentation.