Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity. Woolf addresses what she sees as the arrival of modernism, with the much-cited phrase «that in or about December, 1910, human character changed», referring to Roger Fry's exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. She argued that this in turn led to a change in human relations, and thence to change in «religion, conduct, politics, and literature». She envisaged modernism as inherently unstable, with society and culture in flux. She develops her argument through the examination of two generations of writers. Her argument is that as times change, writers and the tools that they use must evolve, «the tools of one generation are useless to the next». She places Bennett in the Edwardians, and the subjects of his attacks as «Georgians» to reflect the change of monarch in 1910 that coincided with Fry's exhibition. She characterizes Georgian writers in modernist terms as impressionistic, and those that are «telling the truth.»