Switching, if I may, from Victorian novelists to more contemporary novelists, who do you think are good novelists of today?

Woolf was succinct in her assessment of the difference between the Victorian novelists and artists like herself.

In short, all the Victorian novelist could offer as a solution to the problems of industrial capitalism were: a legacy, a marriage, emigration or death.

The Victorian novelists that Wolfe viewed as his models had often written their novels in serial instalments.

This isn't a period thing, as I read most Victorian novelists, male and female, with great pleasure.

Thomas Hardy, one of the last great Victorian novelists, didn't die until 1928, well into the age of movies.

Meanwhile an admiring gang of early Victorian novelists stood ready to take their cue.