In “ Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf condemns the Edwardians H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy as “materialists” who “spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.” 1 Here, as well as in other essays such as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she emphasizes the misguided attention that the Edwardians give to the material world, whether it emerges in Galsworthy’s transformation of a character into a material object (Mrs. Brown, in Woolf’s anecdote, would become in Galsworthy’s story simply “a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner”), or in Bennett’s exhaustive consideration of every element of the setting, where he “would observe every detail with immense care,” from the advertisements to Mrs. Brown’s gloves. 2 In contrast, she writes, modern writers are interested in and strive to write about “the dark places of psychology” (“Modern Fiction,” 162).