GRE Reading Comprehension
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Source: CHP
"I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf's provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since ithighlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional picture of the "poetic" novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as a visionary: literary critics' cavalier dismissal of Woolf's social vision will not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people's lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine people's fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise historical time.
It can be inferred from the passage that the most probable reason Woolf realistically described the social setting in the majority of her novels was that she
- A was aware that contemporary literary critics considered the novel to be the most realistic of literary genres
- B was interested in the effect of a person's social milieu on his or her character and actions
- C needed to be as attentive to detail as possible in her novels in order to support the arguments she advanced in them
- D wanted to show that a painstaking fidelity in the representation of reality did not in any way hamper the artist
- E wished to prevent critics from charging that her novels were written in an ambiguous and inexact style