In recent years, there has been substantial exploration of the relationships between modernism as a literary and artistic movement and modernity as a state of human history and social relations, whose beginning is variously dated, but usually taken to precede modernism. The work of Virginia Woolf is of particular significance here. In her writing we find those features associated with literary modernism – fluid characterizations and explorations of subjectivity, experiments with temporality – in conjunction with the depiction of aspects of modernity – the centrality of the city as metropolis and an acute and often uneasy awareness of time and historicity.

The modern city is of particular significance for a number of reasons. Most importantly for literature, the city came to function as a metaphor for the trajectories of narrative itself. Its new forms of transport and the chance encounters it sustains also provided powerful metaphors for human relationships. For women, specifically, entry into the public spaces of the city was used to mark their liberation from enclosure in the private, domestic sphere. Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage is in part a celebration of Miriam Henderson, her protagonist and alter ego, journeying in and around London, finding opportunities, despite economic hardship, for self-creation and relationships denied to the heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. Woolf 's second novel, Night and Day, is enacted against the backdrop of London. In Jacob's Room the mapping of the city becomes an analogue for the exploration of human ‘character’. In The Years Woolf charts the changing relationships of her protagonists to the city over half a century. London is central to Flush (Woolf's ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel) and to Orlando.

Woolf also recorded and dramatized her relationship to London in her diaries. The following entry was written in January 1919, while she was at work on Night and Day: