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This chapter examines Pyotr Ilyich's opera Eugene Onegin, which is based on Alexander Pushkin's novel. It suggests that though there were criticisms on the opera's occasional mishandling of Pushkin's text, its musical narrative struck a profound resonance with a public brought up on psychological novels and socially charged literary criticism. The chapter also highlights the importance of the emotional landscape created by the opera's music in sealing the fate of Eugene Onegin.

This introduction calls attention to situational and relational understandings of character that modernist writers developed in order to free their representations of people from the moralistic ideals of consistency. It emphasizes the central part played by the vitalist psychologies of Bergson, William James, and Nietzsche, and the scientific theories of Darwin, in literary efforts to reimagine character. Vitalism was interested in conceptualizing the emergence of change within living processes. It made available a sophisticated conceptual language for grappling with the open-ended, adaptable, and responsive elements of psychic life. The chapter treats ethics as concerned with what is good or bad for life. It suggests that this was a topic of special concern to James, Stein, and Eliot, who thus form a vitalist literary genealogy. To understand previous literary treatments of character, it contrasts their approaches to those of important nineteenth-century precursors, George Eliot, Herman Melville, and Joseph Conrad.

Woolf appears in consummate command in her 1924 diary. She curbs her number of diary entries and brakes her previous need for praise. London supplies the motion she craves. As she finishes Mrs. Dalloway and her Common Reader essays, she sends out shoots of other works. The diaries she reads assist her. The Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers, which Woolf reviews in February 1924, were edited by Chalmers’ daughter. They recall and preserve a dead mother, describe summer holidays at the Scottish seaside with “a large and clever family,” and even offer the name Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf then reads The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West, another case of a daughter thinking back through, and immortalizing, a dead foremother. Lady Clifford's Renaissance diary also offers women’s history and grist for Woolf’s essays “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” and “Donne after Three Centuries.” Even more important, its tale of a ferocious fight over a daughter’s inheritance inspires the plot of Orlando. In July, Woolf reviews the early journals of Stendhal, the father of the psychological novel. They direct her mind (yet again) to the soul and to the many nuances and contradictions of character.

This chapter examines The Tale of Genji or the Genji monogatari, written in the early eleventh century by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu. The title The Tale of Genji comes from the surname of the hero, who is the son of the emperor regnant at the beginning of the narrative and whose life, marriage, and relationships with various women are described over the course of the first forty-one chapters. The remaining thirteen chapters are primarily concerned with the affairs of Kaoru, Genji's putative son. Shikibu's creation of highly individualized characters in a realistic social setting and her subtle presentation of inner thought and emotion have encouraged critics to call the Genji the world's first psychological novel.