Am I a Snob? Modernism and the Novel (review)

"Am I a Snob?" was the title of a paper that Virginia Woolf read to her Bloomsbury friends in the Memoir Club in the mid-1930s. She answered the question, with some irony, in the affirmative. Many of her less friendly contemporaries and many subsequent critics agreed with her, finding in snobbery her defining feature. Sean Latham notes that the feminist critics who in the 1970s began to bring Woolf back to major status in the modernist canon often countered this allegation by pointing out that she was an acute social critic. But the claims of snobbery and of social criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not mutually exclusive. In fact, as Latham demonstrates, they can look rather similar. Both entail an acute awareness of class and its aesthetic display. Both require an understanding of the power and penetration of markets. And both apprehend that once value stops being defined as inherent in a stable order of hereditary rank and privilege, it must be discerned from its outward manifestations. Outward manifestations can be counterfeited.