Before one can become a Post-Victorian one has to establish what the ‘Victorian’ itself represents, and it is not until 1916 that Woolf's writings start to do this to any degree. In July of that year she reviewed a study of Samuel Butler, referred to in my introduction, that had advanced propositions about the Victorian age – one of ‘false values and misplaced enthusiasms’, with more in a similarly critical vein – that encouraged Woolf in her own generalisations: ‘The Victorian age, to hazard another generalisation, was the age of the professional man’ (Eii. 35). By 1916 this age had receded sufficiently to acquire definition and difference from the present: ‘the eminent men appear … already strangely formal and remote from us in their likes and dislikes’ (p. 36); ‘today we are less ambitious, less apt to be solemn and sentimental, and display without shame a keener appetite for happiness’, differences which ‘we owe … very largely to Butler's example’ (p. 37). Woolf's sense of having definitively moved on from the Victorians is repeated in a review appearing a month after the Butler piece, where the novel The Park Wall (1916), by the ‘landmark’ writer Elinor Mordaunt, is considered alongside ‘old novels of great reputation’ to show ‘how far we have travelled and in what respects we differ’ (Eii. 42).