This paper explores the literary and historic relationship between Virginia Woolf and the writers of the so-called Younger Generation, a small, homogenous group of male writers who were born in the first years of the twentieth century, who came of age shortly after World War I, and whose work conventionally constitutes the literary canon of the 1930s. As Bernard Bergonzi explains, it is a commonplace in literary studies to understand “the thirties” as referring “generically to a group of writers and the work they produced mostly in that decade, occasionally later” (Reading the Thirties 1): conventional “wisdom” reinforced by the work of scholars like Samuel Hynes and Valentine Cunningham. In this popular understanding of the thirties, the cultural meaning eclipses the bounds of the historical designation. In other words, the literary-historical construction of the thirties is less about a decade of history and more about a small group of young writers whose work has come to signify the economic instability and political tensions of the thirties and symbolize the slow but definitive break between Britain's imperial past and welfare state future. However, by taking the decade designation seriously as a shared context for modernist and Younger Generation writers, I intend to illustrate the relevance of national history and politics for all those interested in what it means to be English and what it means to write English literature in the thirties. Although the writing of the Younger Generation, according to Stephen Spender, most directly highlights the “necessary connection between politics and literature” suggesting (World Within World 249), as David Margolies explains, that “traditional notions of literature and criticism [were] irrelevant” (67), a close look at Woolf's thirties writing reveals her investment in contemporary politics, the politics of literature, and narratives of national history that were both threatened and called into service during the decade.

Marked by watershed events at the beginning and end—the Slump and the Spanish Civil War—the thirties are often excised from the longer, influential narrative of British history that links the industrial revolution, the rise of empire, and the Great War to World War II.