The right of Woolf's novels to occupy the literary pantheon is undisputed. Still, there are to this day few major writers whose merits provoke so much argument. She is probably most widely criticized for being classbound -- for writing convincingly, and at length, only about members of the upper classes, the people she not only knew best but liked best. This is simply true -- it would be foolish to try to deny it -- though for those of us who admire her work what she did accomplish so far outstrips what she failed to accomplish that the failing sheds some of its weight. When the world produces a novelist able to write fully about everything and everyone, we will have no need of further novels.

Still, it seems pertinent to at least briefly discuss Woolf and class, particularly in regard to her first novel, where her strengths do not yet so entirely overwhelm her weaknesses. In "The Voyage Out," the only novel in which she would attempt to set the action in a place she had never been, the South Americans are not characters at all and the only one with any role to speak of is a murderously incompetent local doctor. If she was much concerned with questions of empire and subjugation while she wrote the book, she didn't noticeably address herself to the reactions of those most affected.

There is, at least to this North American reader, a surprisingly unquestioned torpor to the lives and acts of the complacently fortunate English people in the book. What, after all, are they all doing there, not for days or weeks but for months, sitting on verandas and complaining about one thing or another, arguing about the issues of the day over meals prepared and served by invisible servers? What are they resting from, or preparing for, that justifies such an enormous span of leisure?

Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell wrote, in his biography of her:

There was much in Good Society that she found hateful and frightening; but there was always something in it that she loved. To be at the centre of things, to know people who disposed of enormous power, who could take certain graces and prerogatives for granted, to mingle with the decorative and decorated world, to hear the butler announce a name that was old when Shakespeare was alive, these were things to which she could never be wholly indifferent. She was in fact a romantic snob.

Woolf, however, was nothing if not self-aware, painfully and sometimes even debilitatingly so. She could be hard on others, but she worried over almost everything it was possible to worry over in her own character. She knew she was a snob; she admitted she was a snob. She did not consider it one of her worst or most interesting failings.

Late in her life she did, in fact, deliver a humorous lecture on the subject, "Am I a Snob?" to the Memoir Club, in which she said:

Witness this letter. Why is it always on top of all my letters? Because it has a coronet -- if I get a letter stamped with a coronet that letter miraculously floats on top. I often ask -- why? I know perfectly well that none of my friends will ever be, or ever has been impressed by anything I do to impress them. Yet I do it -- here is the letter -- on top. This shows, like a rash or a spot, that I have the disease ... I want coronets; but they must be old coronets; coronets that carry land with them and country houses; coronets that breed simplicity, eccentricity, ease.

And so, there she stands.

Woolf's work is also criticized for a certain tea-table delicacy, for veering away from all matters concerning the flesh, even though it was written during a period when sex was considered, for the first time in centuries, a permissible subject. While Woolf was fully aware of the power of sexuality, she had little interest in going into its particulars.

"The Voyage Out" does contain an implied rape, in the form of a kiss forced on Rachel by Richard Dalloway, but Woolf would never again venture even that far into the physically violent possibilities between women and men. She would later depict a kiss, one with very different consequences, in "Mrs. Dalloway," when Sally Seton surprises the young Clarissa by kissing her, suddenly and unexpectedly, only once, while they are briefly separated from the incessant company of men. These are the two major sexual episodes in Woolf's entire body of work, and each involves one of the Dalloways, those emblems of all that Woolf found terrible and compelling in English society. Richard assaults Rachel, and Clarissa, in the later book, is assaulted, more kindly, by Sally. Interestingly, it is Clarissa who is more undone by the experience of being kissed.

Woolf did appreciate the complexity of sex -- its risks and marvels, its capacity to transform lives. Her characters' sexuality is always highly idiosyncratic and deeply personal; she understood, more fully than many authors who were far more explicit on the subject, that everyone possesses a sexual geography as particular to him or her as a fingerprint. Richard Dalloway's kiss excites Rachel even as it humiliates and terrifies her, and Sally Seton's kiss implies for Clarissa in "Mrs. Dalloway" a fleeting promise, lost almost as soon as found, that runs to depths far greater than those implied by questions of hetero- vs. homosexuality.

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