Modern Fiction

Bond Street is a road in London’s West End that since the 18th century has been occupied by expensive fashion retailers and tailors. For Woolf it is emblematic of the upper-class and traditional London dwellers. Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway begins with two short stories, one of which is entitled “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923). The story describes the eponymous Clarissa Dalloway, a member of London society who embodies the sexual and economic repression of the Victorian upper-class woman, as she travels around London’s wealthy shopping district. The street also features briefly in “Modern Fiction,” where Woolf remarks that a work that succeeded in capturing life would likely have “not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it” (160). In its association with both the superficial (i.e., clothing) and the traditional, the street therefore stands in for stifling genre conventions.

Conventionally, the term “materialist” refers to someone who prioritizes material possessions or, in philosophy, one who believes that nothing exists except matter. Woolf uses the term to denote writers who focus on things she deems insignificant, dedicating time, effort, and skill to “making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring” (159).