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Chris Townsend, ‘Nothing but Thought, Was It?’: Berkeley, Idealism and Woolf’s The Years, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 21–39, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqaa048
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Abstract
Although scholarship has noted that the ‘faded brown book’ mentioned in Woolf’s The Years – in which the world is ‘nothing but thought’ – is a probable reference to the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, the full extent of Woolf’s adoption of Berkeleian ideas has not been accounted for. In this essay I argue that Woolf’s use of specifically Berkeleian images – including a coin-like moon and mind-dependent trees – feeds into a larger narrative technique in The Years relating to semblance: the way things seem or appear to be. Although The Years is sometimes understood as a comparatively ‘realist’ work by critics, I show that even its most apparently ‘objective’ scenes retain a semblance of subjectivity, upon which Woolf’s idiosyncratic realist mode depends. Reading Woolf alongside Berkeley, I develop a case study in the ways in which literary aesthetics can take up, and also challenge, philosophical theories of knowledge.
