There seems a pleasing comic irony in setting the conclusion of The Years (1937), a novel charting the disintegration of the bourgeois family, in the office of an estate agent. This location accords with Woolf's own anti-individualist ambition for the future of the novel, that it will ‘escape a little from the common sitting room’. As I have suggested, from Sense and Sensibility through to Persuasion, Jane Austen propels her female protagonists out from the patriarchal place into ever wider, more socially heterogeneous spaces. A similar process can be traced in Woolf's fiction. In To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, a culminating meal or party in the private home is the location for the dropping away of individualism, division and differences in an experience of shared commonality, a moment of common life. In The Waves, this experience of shared being occurs in the public space of a restaurant among those who have no family ties. The culminating party in The Years is located in a commercial office whose sole function depends upon social mobility. The occasion produces no moment of shared communality among the heterogeneous guests. This is perhaps unsurprising since in The Years, Woolf explores the challenges as well as the desirability of the common life, underpinned by shared creaturely necessity.

That the greater part of the ‘Present Day’ section of The Years takes place amidst sales notices for desirable domestic properties would have been taken by Woolf's first readers as indicative of the novel's topicality. During the whole of the 1930s, housing was an issue rarely out of the news. ‘We are all housing reformers now’, declared the New Statesman in 1935. Also in 1935, the Archbishop of York spoke out on the subject of housing conditions, as did the Prince of Wales in 1933 and H. G. Wells, Rose Macaulay and Hugh Walpole in a letter to the New Statesman that same year. Maynard Keynes put forward a proposal to set up a National Housing Corporation also in 1933. Parliament, newspapers and multiple public bodies conducted an energetic and endless debate on issues of housing throughout the decade.

Sense and Sensibility (1st drafts c.1795–7; pub. 1811) opens with a wrenching moment of change and loss as the Dashwood women are forced to leave their home. Yet the pressures and insecurities of lives caught up in processes of change seem barely to figure in popular screen adaptations of Austen's novels which serve largely to perpetuate an idealist consensus. Visually beautiful and nostalgic in tone, these versions of her stories offer viewers entry into a charmingly organic English world of pretty young women, safely comic idiosyncrasy, wealthy young men and country estates. This is a popularised idealism of eternal verities, benign hierarchy, predictable plots, all untouched by historical forces and seeming to have existed always in a sunny clarity of the imagination. Such depictions represent what Raymond Williams has criticised as ‘idealised abstractions’ of Austen's novels. Yet this bland popularism belies the critical seriousness with which Austen's writing was received by some, at least, of her first readers. Walter Scott, for example, immediately recognises that Austen is doing something new in fiction. Not only is she dealing with characters and feelings taken from ordinary life as opposed to the nobility, it is the innovative quality and detail of this ordinariness in her writing that is interesting and illuminating for Scott. What Scott appears to grasp here is that Austen is shifting the field of the perceptible, to use Jacques Rancière's term, making visible and audible a familiarity which was nevertheless previously below the horizon of notice, deemed inappropriate to the dignity of representation. Rancière locates this shift of representational regime at around the end of the eighteenth century.

The potential insights contained in Scott's assessment of Austen had dissipated by the mid-nineteenth century. George Henry Lewes condescendingly concurred with those like Bishop Whately who, in 1822, praised the Shakespearean realism of Austen's dramatic dialogues; for Lewes, however, the smallness of scale and limited social range of her work denied it serious artistic stature. This view of an unhistorical, unchallenging Austen was reinforced by her family's posthumous emphasis upon her retiring, lady-like demeanour. Although she remained steadily popular through into the twentieth century, there was no early critical reappraisal of the importance and scale of her work.

‘We think back through our mothers, if we are women’, Woolf famously said. If Woolf has a literary mother it must surely be Jane Austen. The recurrent references to Austen throughout Woolf's critical writing express a fascination with and admiration for her artistic achievements. In the essay devoted to Austen in The Common Reader, Woolf's language constitutes Austen's writerly effect in terms that seem almost identical to her own aesthetic. From out of the stream of the commonplace in Austen's narrative, Woolf claims, a moment is suddenly full of meaning, ‘It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second’ (Essays, 4.152). Had Austen not died young, Woolf suggests, her art would have continued to develop. She seems to draw Austen into a continuity with modernism, predicting she would have ‘devised a method […] for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid […] She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust’ (Essays, 4.155). Persuasion marks the beginning of a shift in Austen's sensibility, Woolf claims, ‘the observation is less of facts and more of feelings’ (Essays, 4.152–3). Yet despite the apparent dichotomy here between facts and feelings, what Woolf most pervasively shares with Austen is an aesthetic of worldly realism and an antipathy to idealist modes of thought. As against a world ordered vertically and hierarchically, Woolf, like Austen, perceives self, social world, the world of things and the physical universe as a horizontal, material continuum.

Nevertheless, the emphasis upon subjective interiority rather than facts would certainly have seemed, to many of Woolf's first readers, wholly applicable to Woolf's own art. Early criticism of Woolf's novels interpreted them within an idealist perspective as privileging inner states of mind rather than an object world. According to idealist inflected readings, Austen was held to deal with universal and timeless moral values, albeit in a limited domestic sphere, whereas Woolf was read, yet more negatively, as a writer only concerned with a nebulous and class-privileged inner life. Again, as with Austen, Woolf's own family helped seal the negative image. In his biography, her nephew, Quentin Bell, wrote, ‘Her gift was the pursuit of shadows, for the ghostly whispers of the mind and for Pythian incomprehensibility.’

What Robert Macfarlane describes here can be thought of as a redistribution of the perceptible, a turning away from the tangible experience of physical existence. Macfarlane's concern is the very modern one of the threat posed by this distancing and abstraction of our experience of the world to its ecological survival. Much earlier, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen is also writing in reaction to this same redistributive formation, albeit still in process of emergence and consolidation. In Sense and Sensibility, the term ‘society’ retains for her the immediacy of personal interaction and shared feelings, even while its meaning is in process of change as part of the shift towards abstraction and aggregation as a way of knowing the world.

Struggles of representation as to what is noteworthy, what is above or below the horizon of visibility, are equally aesthetic and political. I have argued that both Austen and Woolf come to maturity as writers in periods of radically contested values in the eras respectively of the French Revolution and the First World War. In addition, their materialist understanding of reality and the writing practices they fashion from that understanding draw upon a tradition they share of British Enlightenment scepticism. The thinking of David Hume, Adam Smith and David Hartley substantiated a position of dissent from what became, increasingly, a consensual aesthetic and political regime, an ideology sustaining the hierarchical ordering of the mental above the material. For both Austen and Woolf what is at stake in this disembodiment of experience is the pushing out of sight of our shared existence as creaturely beings, beings subject to the same physical needs and vulnerabilities. It is recognition of this commonality that underlies the immediacy of Mrs Jenkins's response, in Sense and Sensibility, to threat of hardship, ‘I must see what I can give them’ (p. 241).

The Waves (1931) is widely acknowledged as Woolf's most ambitious and achieved modernist work. Woolf herself appears to underwrite the critical consensus as to its radical break with past conventions, most notably realism. In her diary entry, setting out her aims for the new novel, she writes, ‘I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity […] this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.’ The impression that, in The Waves, Woolf is relentlessly excluding the social and material in order to focus upon the subjective and spiritual realms of experience is strengthened by further comments in her diary as to the novel's genesis. Her remarks are undeniably couched in what seems the language of idealist interiority. She writes, on 28 September 1926, of experiencing, while at Rodmell, an introspective, melancholy mood that she recognises as the intimation of a new novel. The solitude of Rodmell, she says, allowed expansion of ‘this odd immeasurable soul’ so that ‘one goes down into the well and nothing protects one from the assault of truth’ (Diary, 3.112). A month later, she notes in her diary that the new work is to be a ‘dramatisation of my mood at Rodmell. It is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren't there’ (Diary, 3.114). And yet this ‘thing’ that exists in our absence is not otherworldly or immaterial. Adding some remarks ‘on the mystical side of this solitude’, she concludes, ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with’ (Diary, 3.113).

The bypassing of self and focus upon the physical universe here is crucial. The Waves is, indeed, a supremely ambitious work. Stylistically and thematically, Woolf moves radically beyond both individualist psychological realism and actualist social realism. Her aim is to produce a comprehensive materialist vision of existence. It is a vision that bases understanding of human life upon the fact of self as embodied and thus in metonymic continuity with the vast scale and duration of the physical world. This worldly realism produces a new egalitarian regime of the perceptible.

Austen frequently condenses into the opening of her novels intimations of the themes and ideological debates that will structure the entire narrative. Nowhere is this condensation of narrative concerns achieved with more effective economy than in the first paragraph of Persuasion (1816) where the final phrase ‘ELLIOT OF KELLYNCHHALL’ circles back, mirror-like, to repeat the opening words. This narcissistic formation comically figures Sir Walter's essentialist pride in the accidents of appearance and title while the subsequent four repetitions of ‘there’ within the single sentence point to the solipsistic fixation of Sir Walter's imagined idea of self as in every sense entitled. The circularity of the paragraph structure mimics Sir Walter's denial of time and change within his own mental world, expressed by him as contempt for those unable to resist the material depredations of empirical temporality. By contrast, the actual physical vulnerability of all creaturely life and the processes of change to which it is necessarily subject are relentlessly foregrounded by the many accidents and illnesses that recur throughout the narrative. Mrs Clay's hypocritical assumption of elitist hauteur when she declares that only those not obliged to work hold the blessings of ‘health and good appearance to the upmost’ is more literally true than she perhaps realises (p. 23).

The recognition of life as physically embodied derives from Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume, David Hartley and Elizabeth Hamilton, a perception that challenges the Cartesian mind−body hierarchy. It is this materialist perception of human nature that informs Austen's radical representation of self and consciousness as a biological, emotional, rational and social dynamic. In so doing, she inaugurates a redistribution of the perceptible. In the representation of Sir Walter she turns into caricature the idealist verisimilitude which, Jacques Rancière claims, ‘asserts a naturalised affinity between characters, situations and forms of expression’. Sir Walter's class essentialism constructs an absolute congruence between self, rank, physical body, speech and action. In opposition to this myth of congruent identity, the novel asserts a heterogeneous, biological and communal recognition of human existence. Rancière claims that a new inclusive regime of writing institutes a form of realism embraced by modernist writers. Undoubtedly, Austen's innovative realism, especially in Persuasion, looks directly forward to Virginia Woolf's equally materialist perception and representation of the horizontal continuities of consciousness and world.

Jacob Flanders’ room in Cambridge contains the works of only one woman writer among all the many male-authored texts scattered about; that writer is Jane Austen. Even so, her presence is there by default, in ‘deference, perhaps, to someone else's standard’. It is as if Woolf pays a quietly humorous tribute here, across the space of a hundred years, to her most important literary progenitor. Yet had Jacob availed himself of the pleasure of reading Northanger Abbey (1st drafts c.1798–9; pub. 1816), he might well have been struck by the similarities between its narrative, initiating Austen's mature style, and his own, in which Woolf, too, establishes her mature artistic form. In those two works, respectively, Northanger Abbey and Jacob's Room, both writers find the means and the voice to articulate the sceptical irreverence which constitutes the distinctive force of their artistic sensibilities and vision, a scepticism that is their shared inheritance from the tradition of Scottish Enlightenment.

In these early novels, both writers are consciously challenging the authority of previous representational modes. Jacob's Room, appearing in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, has, not surprisingly, been largely considered as part of the modernist rejection of traditional literary forms. Yet, Alex Zwerdling is surely right when he suggests that critical commentary on the novel can only illuminate if it moves beyond a mere inventory of innovative techniques. Also required is consideration of why Woolf felt the need for a new kind of narrative. Slotting writers into their generic pigeon hole can close off wider recognition of their artistic aims and achievements. Discussion of Northanger Abbey tends also to focus upon generic convention, especially Austen's debunking of the gothic novel. For some critics, like Alistair Duckworth, the novel ultimately fails because, while it makes fun of gothic form, the narrative remains too indebted to it to achieve its proposed moral vision.

Emma (1815) is one of those literary works which can seem to exist within the timeless glow of its own perfection. For many readers, Emma's world evokes an ideal of England. Of all Austen's novels it is perhaps the one that most lends itself to what Roger Sales calls the promotion of a ‘particular idea of Englishness’. The ‘association between Austen and Englishness is currently a very strong one’, he says. The perception of timeless, quintessential national values is, however, an illusion largely imposed on Austen's text by an idealist regime of interpretive practice. Rather than depicting a pastoral England that never was, Emma is a novel that proclaims, from its very first page, the inevitability of change. As in Sense and Sensibility, this process is enacted as a shift away from the settled order of inherited place to the motility of social space. A vertical regime of the proper gives way to horizontal recognition of those previously regarded as below notice. Again, as in the earlier novel, the focus of change is a young woman, Emma Woodhouse. The transition that Emma makes in the novel continues Austen's social critique of subjective idealism, as an imposition of self upon the world. Equally, the narrative trajectory explores the changing identity of the English nation, challenging the consensual acceptance of hierarchical social exclusiveness with the possibility of greater horizontal inclusivity.

Questions as to the proper nature of social relations and political settlements were central concerns within eighteenth-century British Enlightenment. Austen was rooted in that interrogative mode of thinking but she was writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and, importantly, after the publication of Edmund Burke's influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke's romantic idealism produced a powerfully imagined vision of an immemorial England, sustained by hierarchical traditions of patrician and religious ideals. National sentiment, Burke claimed, is nurtured in the small ‘platoon’ of childhood and that early reverence for local attachments expands and cements the ties of gratitude, benevolence and obedience that secure the unity of the nation. This ideal appealed powerfully to public reaction and anxiety in the wake of the Revolution and has retained a central place ever since in conservative concepts of English national identity.