In 1924, during the heyday of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf tried to account for what was new about “modern” fiction. She wrote that while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Her main example of this change in human character was the “character of one's cook.” Whereas the “Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the Daily Herald and ask “advice about a hat.” Woolf's choice of December 1910 as a watershed referred above all to the first post-impressionist exhibition, organized by her friend Roger Fry in collaboration with her brother-in-law Clive Bell. The exhibition ran from November 8, 1910, to January 15, 1911, and introduced the English public to developments in the visual arts that had already been taking place in France for a generation. More broadly, however, Woolf was alluding to social and political changes that overtook England soon after the death of Edward VII in May 1910, symbolized by the changing patterns of deference and class and gender relations implicit in the transformation of the Victorian cook. Henry James considered that the death of Edward's mother Victoria meant the end of one age; Edward's reign was short (1901–10), but to those who lived through it, it seemed to stand on the border between the old world and the new.