"The Difficult Business of Intimacy"

Public speakers often strive to overcome the barrier erected by the stage or lectern, to gain the acceptance of the audience by making friends with them, to have a conversation with their listeners rather than talking at them. The opening sentence of Virginia Woolf's lecture on modern fiction, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, seems to flout that convention by setting her apart from her audience: It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel.' Yet the lecture as a whole is a plea to establish a kind of community between them. While she opens by positing a gap between herself, as the sole novelist present, and her listeners, who are soon identified with the (British) reading public, she closes with a vehement denial of that sharp distinction

Aesthetics · Art · Friendship · Sociology · Irish and British Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology