Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence are connoisseurs of consciousness who experiment with new fictional forms in order to redress older fiction's putative falsification of elusive inner realities. Woolf's “Modern Fiction” (1925) strikes a characteristically modernist note of rebellion in the name of inner freedom: “if a writer … could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style.” Woolf's choice of pronoun masks and dramatizes her struggle to find new ways to express not only life in its immediacy but female experiences of modernity. In 1923 she credits Richardson with inventing a “woman's sentence”: “It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes.” Richardson too sees her writing as an attempt “to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.” Although Lawrence has been characterized as the exemplary patriarch targeted by Woolf, Richardson, and feminism generally, Lawrence believes he is enlisting formal innovations to liberate the female voice from long-standing misrepresentation, and to subvert received notions of masculinity and normative sexuality. All three writers are sexual dissidents. Their shared effort to represent more faithfully the fullness of existence – being rather than “mere” doing – underscores the fact that what we call modernism is for many of its practitioners a newly heightened realism.