Embattled tendencies: Wharton, Woolf and the nature of Modernism

Edith Wharton eyed Bloomsbury as an intellectually remote and morally murky world, admiring only one of its members, Lytton Strachey. After Mary Berenson urged her to read Virginia Woolf’sOrlandoin 1928, Wharton responded viscerally to the advertising photographs of Woolf, claiming the images made her ‘quite ill’. The novel’s portrait of Vita Sackville-West, who had had an affair with Wharton’s friend Geoffrey Scott just prior to her liaison withWoolf, pressed a nerve: ‘I can’t believe that where there is exhibitionism of that order there can be any real creative gift’. Woolf’s ‘creative gift’, however, could not be dismissed easily;