‘Nothing but thought, was it?’: Berkeley, idealism and Woolf’s The Years

Although scholarship has noted that the ‘faded brown book’ mentioned in Woolf’s The Years – in which the world is ‘nothing but thought’ – is a probable reference to the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, the full extent of Woolf’s adoption of Berkeleian ideas has not been accounted for. In this essay I argue that Woolf’s use of specifically Berkeleian images – including a coin-like moon and mind-dependent trees – feeds into a larger narrative technique in The Years relating to semblance: the way things seem or appear to be. Although The Years is sometimes understood as a comparatively ‘realist’ work by critics, I show that even its most apparently ‘objective’ scenes retain a semblance of subjectivity, upon which Woolf’s idiosyncratic realist mode depends. Reading Woolf alongside Berkeley, I develop a case study in the ways in which literary aesthetics can take up, and also challenge, philosophical theories of knowledge.