Rebellion in the suburbs

First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf himself was Jewish) and its tart comments on suburban life.

From the first page, Woolf reveals himself as an astute observer of social undercurrents:

The thin brick walls and the manners of civilisation divide the stockbrokers, the lawyers, the merchants, the rich and the poor into families, as effectually as the jungle and ferocity divided their savage forefathers. It was their naked and feeble bodies and their cunning brains that herded them into the blocks of great houses, into the avenues of snug villas, into the rows of mean streets; but behind the long lines of brick and window and gable and front door… each is still a monogamous and solitary animal… jealous for the woman who has come to him, despite the clergyman and the gold ring, as she came to the cave, to be possessed by him and to possess him and to bear him children in the large brass bed.