Neville

Character Analysis

Neville begins the novel as a sensitive, delicate child who is not allowed to exercise with the other children because it will exhaust him too much. We never really learn what makes him so delicate. Naturally, of course, he falls in love with the uber-athletic Percival, who he fears will hate him due to his physical weakness. Yup, that sounds like your typical youthful romance.

Along with Bernard, Neville is one of the novel's primary artist figures. He writes poetry and aspires to artistic genius, though it's not clear that he ever feels he has attained it. From a young age, he is gifted with languages and has an interest in the classics, so it is unsurprising that he pursues a career as a classics professor. You probably noticed that the book is overrun with different kinds of artists and writers, and Neville's literary pursuits and interests are definitely on the traditional side of the artistic spectrum.

In fact, Neville is actually one of the novel's most conservative characters. Unlike the promiscuous Jinny, who refuses to settle down with one suitor, Neville is notoriously single-minded in his affections, yearning for "the limbs of one person" (2b.35).

He remains in love with Percival for a good portion of his life, and then he takes on another long-term love later in the novel, after Percival's death. In both his professional and personal interests, therefore, Neville seems to align himself with more traditional and conservative behavior and ethics, contrasting sharply with more freewheeling characters like Jinny or Rhoda.

Finally, it might interest you to know that Neville may have been modeled after Woolf's good friend Lytton Strachey, who was also an author.