SOURCE: Henry, Holly. “Maps, Globes, and ‘Solid Objects.’” In Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy, pp. 71-92. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

In the following excerpt, Henry investigates the influence of Bertrand Russell's theories of material phenomena on her “Solid Objects.”

Bertrand Russell and Woolf's “multiform Artwork”

In her short fiction experiments like “Solid Objects,” “Kew Gardens,” and “The Mark on the Wall,” Woolf explored the questions that Russell and Whitehead were working out in their own theories regarding what can be known of the material world. Ann Banfield, in a carefully researched and comprehensive study of Russell and the Cambridge debates regarding theories of knowledge of the material world, points out that along with G. E. Moore, “Russell and Whitehead define[d] the contours of philosophy as Bloomsbury understood it” (The Phantom Table 7). Russell examined the interface between humans, objects and events...