Arguing with Virginia Woolf

Abstract This essay explores the metamodernist engagement with Virginia Woolf in contemporary Australian fiction, focusing on how authors reimagine modernist legacies through narrative experimentation, ethical inquiry, and historical revision. Drawing on David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s defintion of metamodernism as a mode that revisits and reconfigures modernist aesthetics, the essay examines three recent Australian novels — John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives (2020), Michelle Cahill’s Daisy and Woolf (2022), and Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever (2022) — to illustrate the diverse ways Woolf’s influence is interrogated and transformed. Scott’s Shorter Lives engages in poetic and temporal play, constructing a speculative biography of Virginia Stephen that blends past and future through typographic and intertextual cues. His narrative disrupts linear chronology, echoing modernist techniques while embedding Woolf’s legacy within a metafictional framework. Cahill’s Daisy and Woolf adopts a more overtly ethical stance, reclaiming themarginalised character of Daisy Simmons from Mrs Dalloway to critique Woolf’s racial and class biases. Through autofiction and epistolary form, Cahill challenges the exclusions of modernist feminism and asserts fiction’s potential for moral redress. Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever offers a more ambivalent approach, using ghostly dialogues with Leonard and Virginia Woolf to refl ct on the limits of historical understanding and literary responsibility. Her protagonist, Alice Fox, confronts the futility and necessity of writing, ultimately embracing the contradictions inherent in metamodernist inquiry. Together, these works form a continuum of metamodernist responses to Woolf, ranging from experimental homage to ethical confrontation. The essay situates these texts within broader debates in modernist studies, neo-Victorian fiction, and postcolonial critique, arguing that Australian literature plays a vital role in global metamodernist discourse. It concludes by questioning whether contemporary fiction can truly atone for historical injustices or whether it merely replays the moral anxieties of the Victorian past. In doing so, the essay suggests that our continued fascination with Woolf refl cts both a desire to inherit modernism’s revolutionary aesthetics and a compulsion tojudge its ethical shortcomings.