Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a "lady novelist." As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it.

Exploring the connections between Woolf's immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation's concerns and controversies to Woolf's considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf's creative works, politics, and criticism in relation to women writers including the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, the novelist and playwright, Lucy Clifford; the novelist and anti-suffragist, Mary Augusta Ward. It explores Woolf's attitudes to late-Victorian women's philanthropy, the social purity movement, and women's suffrage. Closely tracking the ways in which Woolf both followed and departed from these predecessors, Corbett complicates Woolf's identity as a modernist, her navigation of the literary marketplace, her ambivalence about literary professionalism and the mixing of art and politics, and the emergence of feminism as a persistent concern of her work.

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Corbett's meticulously researched study... locates influence socially as well as literarily, and details the societal changes wrought by the female Victorian writers...

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In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Well-written and well-informed, this book draws on the latest debates in Woolf scholarship concerning public life, political activism, the professions, and history, and it adds an important dimension to discussion of Woolf and the Victorians.

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The book provides a road map to guide us through the obscured routes of Woolf's neglected second-generation female predecessors. Corbett makes us pause to consider diversions from the Victorian male-dominated high road trodden by Woolf's father's venerated literary companions—Hardy, James, Meredith—and in some ways by Woolf herself. Through extensive research—patiently plodding along these archival paths—Corbett has made some of those second-generation voices more richly accessible to us.

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A considerable achievement. For too long Woolf has been placed on a pedestal as the 'exceptional' modernist woman, despite the efforts of scholars to challenge this narrative. Corbett offers us a different Woolf, one entangled and immersed in a world richly populated with exceptional women; perhaps a messier, more complicated picture, but one truer and all the more interesting for that.