Woolf as Cage

“‘There’s no such thing as silence,’ [Mr. Erskine] said positively. ‘I can hear twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your voices.’”

                — Jacob’s Room

“Miss La Trobe stood there with her eye on her script. ‘After Vic,’ she had written, ‘try ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows, etc.’ She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality. But something was going wrong with the experiment. ‘Reality too strong,’ she muttered.”

                — Between the Acts

An Internet search shows that Woolf's startling premonitions of Cage have already been noticed: David Toop quotes the Jacob's Room passage in his 2010 book Sinister Resonance, and the experimental dimensions of Miss La Trobe's pageant in Between the Acts have been explored by Patricia Laurence and Melby Cuddy-Keane, among others.