Taking Note: Text and Context in Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

In this article I argue that the note attached to “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which states that it was “A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on May 18, 1924," is central to our interpretation of Woolf’s essay, especially in relation to contexts that politicize, historicize, or aestheticize the text. I trace the different manifestations of "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" in order to reveal the contextual and textual ways in which Woolf and the organs in which she published directed interpretation and dealt with the essay as an aesthetic object enmeshed in history. The note will prove an integral, though not isolated example of this project, as I analyze the bibliographic and linguistic changes in the essay's publication trajectory throughout Woolf’s lifetime, from it inception as a brief piece in the Nation & Athenaeum (1923), to its inclusion in a collection of The Hogarth Essays (1928).