'A Note on Virginia Woolf'

Bates criticises Woolf both as a writer and as 'a shrine'.

In his view, she was removed from 'life (i.e. the street, factory, pub, home, of the ordinary bloke and the common things)', in a 'room with a view [that] cut her off from nine-tenths of life, leaving her to rarify and decorate the remaining fraction with the luscious colourings of a highly refined private consciousness.' He also claims her style was derivative of Dorothy Richardson ('the finer talent, the real innovator of the stream-of-consciousness novel').

Bates expressed similar thoughts on Woolf in a 1937 review of The Years and a September 1941 review of Between the Acts.

In Books of the Month (April/May 1941, pp. 11-12, attached).