For some time now, it has been common to separate modernist from realist writing, both historically and formally. Either way, realism is the loser: whether it is seen as the lumbering nineteenth-century precursor of modernism (what else is the nineteenth century there for, but to give way to the twentieth?), or whether instead it is seen as based on the sort of simplistic narrative assumptions that modernist texts undermine. Such demarcations simplify in their turn; and the underlying argument of this chapter is that Woolf – without ceasing to be a modernist – is much more of a realist than she has been given credit (or discredit) for. She assumes, that is, that writers try, and rightly so, to represent that elusive thing that in her critical essays she calls ‘life’ or ‘reality’. But this life is not non-verbal or even non-narrative: it is a reality that is already made up of stories. Life is sustained by being perpetually represented and retold.

To show how this works, I will approach Woolf’s realism mainly through Mrs Dalloway, and mainly through minor characters – or rather, through minor minor characters: the obscure, the outsiders, those who appear to have only a passing significance. Subordinate to the principal figures, they enter the novel briefly and their departure from it, quite often, is unrecorded. Such figures both generate and reinforce what are always active questions for Woolf about visibility and representation, about who gets to have or to tell a story. The semi-presence, half-written or half-noticed, of the characters who exist to one side, or in the corner, then opens onto issues about the recognition and imagining of other people in the storytelling and story-making of everyday life.