Woolf’s focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. (Her Writer’s Diary notes:“the only honest people are the artists, whereas those social reformers and philanthropists …harbor…discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind…”) Woolf detested what she called “preaching” in fiction,too,and criticized novelist D.H.Lawrence (among others) for working by this method.