Wilson+Battershill (Editor) - Virginia Woolf and The World of Books-Clemson University Press - Liverpool (2019)

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books:
The Centenary of the Hogarth Press
Selected Papers from the Twenty-seventh

Annual International Conference on
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf and the World of Books:
The Centenary of the Hogarth Press
Selected Papers from the Twenty-seventh

Annual International Conference on
Virginia Woolf
Edited by
Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill

© 2018 Clemson University Press
All rights reserved
First Edition
print ISBN: 978-1-942954-56-9

epdf ISBN: 978-1-942954-57-6
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please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.
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with production and design specialist Charis Chapman.
Cover imagery by Matthew Standage.
iv
Table of Contents
Introduction by Claire Battershill and Nicola Wilson...................................................... vii
List of Abbreviations............................................................................................................... x
Keynote
Ted Bishop  Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf ’s Inks.................................... 1
In the Archives
Alice Staveley  A Voice in the Archives: In Search of Woolf ’s Lost Tape..................... 20
Amanda Golden  On Manuscripts: Virginia Woolf and Archives................................ 26
Paulina Pająk  Echo’s Voices: Virginia Woolf, Irena Krzywicka, and The Well
of Loneliness.................................................................................................................... 31
Craftsmanship
Michael Black  “Wood is a pleasant thing to think about”: William Blake
and the Hand-Printed Books of the Hogarth Press.................................................. 40
Aimee Gasston  Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and “Short Things”.................... 50
Karina Jakubowicz  “Scarcely a Brick to Be Seen”: Breaking Boundaries in
“Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”............................................................. 56
Alexandra Peat  Virginia Woolf ’s Arts and Craftsmanship........................................... 62
The Hogarth Press
Megan Beech  “obscure, indecent and brilliant”: Female sexuality, the
Hogarth Press, and Hope Mirrlees.............................................................................. 70
Sangam MacDuff  After the Deluge, The Waves............................................................... 74
Eleanor McNees  Alternative Histories: Hogarth Press’s World-Makers
and World-Shakers Series............................................................................................. 83
Virginie Podvin  The Hogarth Press, a Singular Art Gallery......................................... 93
Hours in A Library
Tom Breckin  Hours in a Library: Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen....................... 102
Anne Reus  Two Libraries: Reading A Room of One’s Own and
Margaret Oliphant’s “The Library Window”............................................................ 109
Leslie Arthur  Bibliographers, Booksellers, and Collectors of the Hogarth Press...... 115
The Art of the Book
Hana Leaper  Ekphrastic Writing, Illusive Illustration: Vanessa Bell’s
Embroideries for Virginia Woolf ’s “Kew Gardens”................................................ 122
Claudia Tobin  “The active and the contemplative”: Charles Mauron,
Virginia Woolf, and Roger Fry.................................................................................. 128
Maggie Humm  Vanessa Bell’s “tiny book”: Woolf, Impressionism, Roger Fry,
and Anti-Semitism...................................................................................................... 135
The Art of the Narrative
Adam Hammond  Woolf as a Model Builder: Complex Form in the
“Ode to Cutbush”......................................................................................................... 142
v
Brian Richardson  “Books Were Not in Their Line”: The Material Book
and the Deceptive Scene of Reading in To the Lighthouse..................................... 149
Elisa Kay Sparks  Mrs. Brown and the Trojan Cow: Deconstructing
Aristotle in “An Unwritten Novel”............................................................................ 155
Making New Books: Creative Approaches
Jane Goldman, Calum Gardner, Colin Herd  Queer Woolf: Queer
Approaches and Creative-Critical Research............................................................ 162
Leslie Kathleen Hankins  Following Virginia Woolf ’s Call for a Press of One’s
Own: Making Waves Press Launches Judith’s Room.............................................. 189
Paula Maggio  Thinking Is Our Fighting: How to Read and Write Like
Woolf in the Age of Trump........................................................................................ 195
The Book in the World: Woolf’s Global Reception
Adriana Varga  The Woolf Behind the Iron Curtain: The Reception of
Virginia Woolf ’s Works in Romania, 1947–1989.................................................... 202
Maria Oliveira  Virginia Woolf: Translation, Reception and Impact
in Brazil......................................................................................................................... 208
Riley Wilson  Zines, Polyvocality, and Sound: How Modernist First-Wave
Feminism Inspired Riot Grrrl.................................................................................... 220
Lindsey Cordery  Virginia Woolf and South America: Border-reading.................... 226
Editing and Teaching Woolf
Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Tyler Johansson, Sara Grimm, and
Rynelle Wiebe  Learning Through the (Digital) Archive:
Notes on Undergraduate Research............................................................................ 234
Jessica Berman, Jane Goldman, Susan Sellers, Bryony Randall, and
Madeleine Detloff  Editing Woolf........................................................................... 241
Intertextuality
Joyce E. Kelley  Virginia Woolf ’s Appreciation for Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass: Book Making/Reading, Intimacy, Collectivity............................ 254
Yukiko Kinoshita  Reading Intercultural, Intergenerational and
Intertextual Woolf: Virginia Woolf ’s “The Lady in the Looking-Glass,”
Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx without a Secret,” and Lady Murasaki’s Yugao......... 260
Kathryn Simpson  To “write about Mrs Lindbergh”: Woolf, Flight, and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient....................................................... 268
Lives in Writing
Aaron J. Stone  Taste and the Tasteful: Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and the
Culture of Queer Elitism ........................................................................................... 276
Julie Vandivere  Defining Life in Essays and Reports: “Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown” and the Government Reports on Infant Human Mortality............ 283
Gill Lowe  “Penning and pinning”: Vita, Virginia, and Orlando................................. 289
Notes on Contributors........................................................................................................ 296
vi
Introduction
by Claire Battershill and Nicola Wilson
“By the way, we’ve bought our printing press.…Heaven knows how one
prints—but please consider whether you haven’t a page or two of practically
faultless prose in some desk.” —Virginia Woolf to Lady Robert Cecil, 14 April
1917 (L2 149)
T
he year 2017 marked the centenary of the founding of the Hogarth Press. Begun
small and domestic, with barely-paid assistants brought in to help typeset and
print “all our friends [sic] stories” (L2 120), Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s table-
top press grew into a financially prosperous and well-respected publishing house. It
outlived its like-minded models and contemporaries in the period of modernist small
presses—including Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops (1913–19), Nancy Cunard’s Hours
Press (1928–31), and Laura Riding and Robert Graves’ Seizen Press (1927–35)—to
flourish in the postwar era. With Leonard still at the helm, the Hogarth Press was ac-
quired as a limited company by Chatto & Windus in 1946 when John Lehmann sold
his fifty per cent share.
The Hogarth Press as run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf was constantly surprising
in its output. Though it is still best known for its publishing links within Bloomsbury,
its lists were eclectic and outward-looking, generically and geographically diverse. The
Press published educational pamphlets, essays, letters, self-help books, and children’s
literature, as well as poetry and works on aesthetics, biographies and histories, and
innovative and bestselling novels. We have been working on the Hogarth Press for
several years now, but it was still a delight to be pulled up short by Professor Susheila
Nasta’s description of it as “a radical left-wing publisher” during her keynote on “The
Bloomsbury Indians.” Looking through Hogarth’s lists consistently asks us to re-think
well-worn narratives and to question what we know about Virginia Woolf. Just like her
writing, the Hogarth Press offers a queering of knowledge, a questioning of the basis of
our assumptions. There are so many surprises in the nearly 500 works published up to
and including its incorporation with Chatto in 1946. The Hogarth Press is a delight for
collectors and readers and writers to explore.
The 27th Annual Virginia Woolf conference was all about the centenary and the
chance it offered us to rethink Woolf as publisher and author and to celebrate the world
of small presses, the resurgence of letterpress, and the role of independent publishers
today. The idea for the conference was conceived in the back of a taxi cab in Vancou-
ver, as members of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) travelled home
refreshed and enthused from the 23rd Annual Virginia Woolf conference in 2013. The
idea to host at the University of Reading in the UK, which holds the business archives
of the Hogarth Press as part of its Archive of British Publishing and Printing, made
perfect sense. We hoped to recognize the growth of new work on the Hogarth Press,
in book history and material culture in Woolf studies, and we adopted the title, “The
vii
World of Books,” from Leonard’s weekly column in the Nation and Athenaeum (1923–
1929). We were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for the topic as the abstracts rolled
in and are delighted to share some of these essays with you here. Thanks to all of the
contributors, to Wayne Chapman and Clemson University Press for making this vol-
ume possible, and to everyone who took part over five scintillating days in June 2017.
Alongside the conference, we wanted to celebrate the contribution of the Hogarth
Press to women’s writing and independent publishing and to engage with contemporary
printers and letterpress artists working in our digital age. We put out a call for artworks
to the letterpress community and received a stunning range of work that went on dis-
play in Special Collections at the University of Reading between June–September 2017.
This formed part of an exhibition “#HogarthPress100: Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s
Hogarth Press” (kindly supported by the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading and
the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain), that juxtaposed new letterpress artwork
alongside archival materials and objects: original Hogarth artwork and advertisements,
Order Books, correspondence, woodblocks by Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, as well as
the Woolfs’ travelling bags (loaned from the Penguin Random House archives in Rush-
den). We worked hard to maintain this emphasis on praxis throughout. Geoff Wyeth
and the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading ran a
letterpress workshop for delegates; Guy Baxter of Special Collections took guided tours
through the exhibition and offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Archive of
British Publishing and Printing. Our first keynote, Professor Ted Bishop, treated us to
an interactive demonstration of ink-making in a celebration of his recent work on the
history of ink. We also printed a limited edition centenary keepsake—designed by Su-
sann Vatnedal, a student in the department of Typography at Reading—that included
Woolf ’s 1924 essay “The Patron and the Crocus” and an unpublished readers’ report
from the Hogarth Press archives on John Hampson’s early submissions to the Press.
The Hogarth Press centenary also offered the chance to work with the current
Hogarth imprint (now under the aegis of Penguin Random House) and brought us into
the orbit of the fabulous publisher, Clara Farmer. We hooked up with her team on social
media to capture the variety of Hogarth-centenary themed events taking place over the
year (see #HogarthPress100 on Twitter and Instagram). We got involved with printing
Hope Mirrlee’s “Paris” in the old printing rooms in Oxford with Dennis Duncan and
Oxford’s Centre for the Study of the Book, and celebrated the centenary with Mariella
Frostrup and author Mark Haddon on BBC Radio 4’s “Open Book.” On the first night
of the conference we hosted a Hogarth Press birthday party—complete with Hogarth
colophon cake designed by Cressida Bell—cut by Clara Farmer and the inestimable
Cecil Woolf. The following evening we had a discussion of Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf
Works” with Uzma Hameed (dramaturg) and our keynote Professor Anna Snaith; fol-
lowed by a multi-media performance by artist and violinist Michiko Theurer, “Circling
the Waves.” The next day, Claire led a discussion between Clara Farmer and Nicola
Beauman of Persephone Books on the challenges facing publishers and (independent)
booksellers today. We talked brands, readers, and day-to-day working practices. And
we reflected on what being able to publish their own work meant to the Woolfs, and
what they model for us today.
viii
The conference also featured three roundtables—one on pedagogy, another on the
difficulties and ethics of editing Woolf, as well as our own session where we launched
the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). There are essays from the first
two roundtables in this volume and we hope you will want to learn more about MAPP:
www.modernistarchives.com. MAPP is the fledgling product of our collective endeav-
ors on the Hogarth Press and we hope it will live up to the generous welcome offered
by conference delegates. We encourage readers of this volume to get in touch and be
involved with the project and, if you are a teacher, to think about getting your students
involved as contributors too.
Organizing an international conference for a large and diverse group is no mean
feat, and we toasted to feminism, friendship, and collaboration during our Saturday
banquet. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed
to the conference in so many ways and to thank all of our contributors to this volume
for their dedication and good humor. Asking Woolfians to consider the Hogarth Press
brought us everything that makes up the world of books: from the material and histori-
cal to the textual and ineffable. Our conference keynotes began with Ted Bishop on the
solid object, materiality, and ink on paper; we worked through Susheila Nasta’s talk on
silence in the archive and the colonial and postcolonial geo-politics of the Press; we
ended with Anna Snaith on ethereality, sound, and stunning recordings of the bird-
song and war sounds that cluttered the air during Woolf ’s lifetime. We look forward to
further conversations with you about Woolf ’s books in the world, and Woolf ’s world
of books, and we hope you enjoy reading these wonderful papers as much as we did.
Works Cited
Theurer, Michiko. “Circling the Waves.” Web. https://www.michikotheurer.com/circling-the-waves.html

Wilson, Nicola. “#HogarthPress100: Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s Hogarth Press.” Web. http://www.reading.
ac.uk/special-collections/exhibitions/sc-exhibition-hogarth.aspx
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol 2. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1976.
ix
Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)
AHH A Haunted House

AROO A Room of One’s Own
AWD A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf
BP Books and Portraits
BTA Between the Acts
CDB The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays
CE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4)
CR1 The Common Reader
CR2 The Common Reader, Second Series
CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick)
D The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5)
DM The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
E The Essays of Virginia Woolf (ed. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie,
6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6)
F Flush
FR Freshwater
GR Granite and Rainbow: Essays
HPGN Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe)
JR Jacob’s Room
JRHD Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop)
L The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann,
6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6)
M The Moment and Other Essays
MEL Melymbrosia
MOB Moments of Being
MT Monday or Tuesday
MD Mrs. Dalloway
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
PA A Passionate Apprentice
RF Roger Fry
TG Three Guineas
TTL To the Lighthouse
TW The Waves
TY The Years
VO The Voyage Out
WF Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own
(ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)
x
Keynote
Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf’s Inks
by Ted Bishop
Figure 1: Gall nuts and gum arabic. Author photo.
I
want to thank Elizabeth Willson Gordon for inviting me, and the whole com-
mittee (Claire Battershill, Nicola Wilson) for their superb organization. It’s
wonderful to be back at the University of Reading, an institution that invests
in archival research and chooses a Vice-Chancellor who writes with a fountain pen.
Since I was last here my work has taken me in new directions, both literal and liter-
ary—to Texas, Italy, and James Joyce for Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles
and Books, from the ballpoints of Buenos Aires to Uzbekistan and the Quran for The
Social Life of Ink—but both books open with an episode from my Virginia Woolf
research. I was a young Virginia Woolf scholar working in the British Museum Li-
brary, and,
I found myself reading a letter I had read in print dozens of times before.
Anybody who works on Woolf practically knows it by heart, it’s reprinted so
often. It begins:
Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No
one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I
know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this
madness…
I felt a physical shock. I was holding Virginia Woolf ’s suicide note. I lost any
bodily sense, felt I was spinning into a vortex, a connection that collapsed the
intervening decades. This note wasn’t a record of an event—this was the event
itself.
I turned the sheet over.
Getting a Hold on Haddock 3
There Leonard had written in green ink the date: 11/5/41. This detail set off
an unexpected aftershock. I had seldom thought of him, of how he had had
to wait twenty-one days before the body was found. Three long weeks, an-
swering questions from The Times, taking calls from friends. Then a group of
teenagers, throwing rocks at a log in the river, found it was not a log at all and
dragged what was once Virginia Woolf ashore. (Riding 34–35)
The episode taught me about the impact of the material text, but what I hadn’t con-
sidered was that I was responding to ink. Ink testifies to the presence of a body in a
particular place at a particular time, a fact more vivid to us today in the non-space of
the internet.
Woolf ’s was a life lived in ink (as are many of ours) yet ink is a substance so ubiq-
uitous we don’t see it, we see through it. I began my academic life immersed in Woolf ’s
style, with no concern for the materialities of her texts. I spent hours transcribing the
Jacob’s Room manuscript but when Elizabeth Willson Gordon asked me over coffee
the other day about ink blots I couldn’t remember any—I never looked at the ink. Yet
Anthea Callen, writing about the Impressionist painters, insists, “Any work of art is
determined first and foremost by the materials available to the artist, and by the artist’s
ability to manipulate those materials” (Ball 5). Today I want to consider the substrate
of Woolf ’s work, the actual stuff it’s made of. I’m going to talk about three kinds of ink
that defined Woolf ’s life: (1) iron gall ink—the ink of official documents; (2) printers’
ink, the ink of the Hogarth Press; and (3) writing ink, the ink in which she created.
[I pointed to the hammer, jars, and bags of material laid out on the table and warned the
audience that in a few minutes they would be conscripted as ink-making apprentices.]
Iron-gall ink
On that August day in 1912 when Virginia married Leonard at the St. Pancras Registry
office her transition from Steven to Woolf would have been consecrated in iron-gall
ink. This was the ink used for birth, marriage, and death certificates, for house deeds
and court documents. Iron-gall ink is the medium of history. The writers of the Dead
Sea Scrolls wrote with it, Leonardo da Vinci drew with it, Bach composed in it, and
Shakespeare punned on it (in Twelfth Night Sir Toby urges Sir Andrew, “Let there be
gall enough in thy ink…” combining rancour and pigment), as would Virginia Woolf
in Orlando. Gall nuts are not nuts, they are pathological growths, “vegetable antibod-
ies,” produced by oak trees in response to eggs laid by gall wasps in the soft tissue of the
tree. For permanence there was nothing better than gall nut ink. Its virtue is that it does
not sit on the surface, it reacts with the collagen in parchment or the cellulose in paper,
forming a chemical bond, so that it cannot be altered. The dark side of this power to
bond is that it can destroy what it seeks to preserve, leaving brown-haloed holes where
once were musical notes, poetry, or deal-sealing signatures. This is because, if you don’t
have the proportions right, one by-product of the reactions between the iron sulphate
and the tannic acid of the gall nuts is sulphuric acid (Bishop, Ink 245).
4 Virginia Woolf and the World of Books
Figure 2: Ink ingredients, Cobb.

All ink is composed of three basic ingredients: a pigment to give it colour, a vehicle
to make it flow, and a binder to make it stick. Up until the mid-nineteenth century,
people made their own ink. It’s very simple—“cottage science”—as a curator assured me.
[Here I announced that Elizabeth Willson Gordon was going to crush the gall-nuts, and
that audience members were going to grind them in the mortar and pestles (ten strokes
each, then pass it on), then we would mix the powdered galls with gum arabic (the
binder) and ferrous sulphate (which combines with the tannin of the gall nuts to make
the pigment), and finally combine them with one of the four traditional vehicles: water,
wine, vinegar, and beer. Elizabeth bashed the gall nuts in a folded-over section of the
London Times, shaking the table and rattling the water glasses. “Is that good enough?”
she asked. It was not. Gall nuts are as hard as walnut shells, and the smaller you can
make the fragments with the hammer the less onerous the grinding with the pestle. She
wacked them again.]
Printers’ Ink
Iron gall ink registered the Woolf ’s marriage, but it was printers’ ink that consolidated
their union. As Hermione Lee says, “The story of the Press is, in a way, the story of
their marriage….They instituted themselves as a couple on the title page of their first
publication, two stories ‘written and printed by Virginia Woolf and L.S. Woolf…and
from then on (until 1938 [when John Lehmann became a partner]) their joint names
became the sign of a marriage which was also an imprint” (362–63).
The two basic forms of ink—writing ink and printing ink—should have different
names because they’re as different as water is from syrup. Philip Ruxton calls printers’
ink a “glutinous adhesive mass” (1), a description I like because the syllables move
as slowly as a thick varnish oozing out of the jar: and it was this varnish that was the
salient element in print technology. Every schoolchild knows that Johann Gutenberg
revolutionized the Western world by inventing the printing press. But every school-
child is wrong—printing presses had been in use long before, not only for block
printing but, in Korea, with movable metal type. The real breakthrough was an ink that
would spread evenly on and adhere to the type, an ink that, unlike the thin water-based
ink Asian ink, was oil based. Gutenberg boiled down linseed oil until it thickened (and
often spontaneously combusted—in the years to come it would burn down printing
houses, and may have started one of the great fires of London), a technique he learned
from painters, who had developed the new medium of oil paint (Bishop, Ink 100).
[Here we passed around a can of goopy printers’ ink with some thin plastic gloves so
people could get a feel of it. The ink was supplied by Geoff Wyeth, who had given a fabu-
lous typesetting tutorial the day before in the University of Reading’s Typography and
Graphic Communication Department—they have the Gutenberg press used in the BBC
documentary with Stephen Fry, “The Machine That Made Us,” as well as a table-top press
similar to the one the Woolfs started out on.]
Figure 3: Table-top press, University of Reading. Author photo.

The Woolfs offer different motives for their purchase of the press—Leonard said it was
to provide a calming diversion for Virginia / Virginia said she wanted something to drag
Leonard away from the tiresome Webbs, who were consuming his time—but they were
united in their enthusiasm. Virginia writes to Vanessa on 26 April 1917, “Our press ar-
rived on Tuesday….We get so absorbed we can’t stop; I see that real printing will devour
one’s entire life” (L2 150). A month later her enthusiasm is unabated; she tells Vanessa “I
can hardly tear myself away to go to London, or see anyone. We have just started print-
ing Leonards story; I haven’t produced mine yet, but there’s nothing in writing compared
with printing” (L2 156). Three weeks later (now into June) she writes again to Vanessa,
“We’re half way through L’s story—it gets ever so much quicker, and the fascination is
something extreme” (L2 159). They are setting Leonard’s “Three Jews” and still learning
about spacing—note the gap-toothed title and the yawning paragraph indents:
Figure 4: Title page, “Three Jews.” Image courtesy of Bruce Peel Special Col-
lections, University of Alberta.
They’re much better by the time they get to Virginia’s story, but by this time the type for
Leonard’s story would have been “distributed”—put back in the cases. (We forget that
even big publishers would not have enough type to set up a whole book before begin-
ning to print). Leonard’s hands shook, so Virginia did the type-setting, the distributing,
and the binding. “In between each printing of a page…Virginia had to inkily distribute
the type” (Lee 363).
And inky it was.

Leonard Woolf documented the steep learning curve of the seemingly simple act of
transferring ink from type to page. “None of the letters printed completely black, there
were tiny white dots everywhere” (172). After struggling with the page “for hours” he
took a proof and walked into the shop of McDermott, the local printer.
‘Wrong?’ he said; ‘it isn’t on its feet, that’s all; it isn’t on its feet.’ He explained
to me that, in locking up type on the chase, you might get the whole page
infinitesimally not flat on the imposing surface—it would be ‘off its feet’ and
would not print evenly. (172)
They bonded over ink—it turned out that McDermott had worked for a large Lon-
don printing firm that had printed The Spectator, and, Leonard writes, McDermott
was “never tired of telling me stories of the editor, St. Loe Strachey, Lytton’s cousin,
and what a fuss he made about the ‘colour’—i.e. the inking—of the paper; it had to be
very black indeed, too black for McDermott’s liking” (173). The encounter not only set
the type on its feet but laid the foundation of a reciprocal friendship. Pressing on, they
incorporated Carrington’s woodcuts, and you can see that even if they’re not perfectly
centred they are good enough. Further, by this point the Woolfs have mastered the
spacing: the paragraph indents, the spaces between the words of the title, and the space
between the lines of the title (the “leading”), are all reduced, so that the whole coheres
as a unit. Compare this page with the opening of “THREE JEWS.”
Figure 5: Title page, “The Mark on the Wall.” Image courtesy of Bruce Peel Special Collec-
tions, University of Alberta.
Nonetheless, the work was still improvised. Woolf writes to Carrington in July, “We
like the wood cuts immensely….The ones I like best are the servant girl and the plates,
and the Snail” (see Figures 5 and 6). But there is a problem with the press and the ink:
Our difficulty is that the margins would mark; we bought a chisel, and
chopped away, I am afraid rather spoiling one edge, but we came to the con-
clusion at last that the rollers scrape up the wood as they pass [you can see
the rollers on the round plate in the photo of Reading’s table-top press, Figure
3], as sometimes the impression would be clean to start with, and end with
smudges. Next time we must have them cut exactly round the picture by a
shop (L2 162).
Figure 6: Carrington’s snail. Note the smudges, the

chunks cut out of the frame. Image courtesy of Bruce
Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta.
Published in July, Two Stories had taken them two and a half months. As Hermione Lee
points out, to print 134 copies of each page of Two Stories, a 32-page booklet, would
have involved a minimum of 4,154 pulls v.s. just over 1,000 had they been able to print
four at a time, as they would three years later when they bought their Minerva treadle
press (816).
“The Mark on the Wall” represents a new mark on the page for Woolf. The story,
a fusion of inspiration, the materials of production, and physical labour, constitutes a
shift from the more conventional Duckworth publications to the more experimental
Hogarth works. “The Mark On the Wall” launches the style that would come to define
Woolf, a mode called into being by the new press.
Through 1918 they struggled with the printing of Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude, set-
ting up the type at home and taking it down to McDermott’s shop where they used his big
machine to print four pages at a pass. The book took nine months, from early October to
Halloween to July, as they worked through new problems with press and ink (the “colour”
varies widely from page to page). McDermott had been a compositor, not a printer—an
important professional (and class) distinction. Compositors worked in separate rooms
from printers, and did not get their hands as dirty. Thus he did not really understand the
new machine he had bought, and “he was a terribly impatient, slapdash worker,” writes
Leonard. He frequently found McDermott “covered with oil and ink, pouring with sweat,
and pouring a stream of the most hair raising language over his bloody machine. When
that happened, instead of machining Prelude I spent the next few hours helping him to
tinker at his bloody machine until I too was covered with oil and ink and pouring with
sweat” (174). By the spring of 1919 they had surpassed McDermott in craft. Virginia
notes crisply, “Today we finished printing Eliot’s poems—our best work so far by a long
way, owing to the quality of the ink. McDermott has done Murry’s poem with such blots
& blurs that we must at any rate reprint the title page”(D1 257).
Figure 7: Eliot, 2 faces, 2 fonts; evenly inked. Image courtesy

of Bruce Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta.
The Woolfs weren’t “fine printers,” but Woolf used that goop you’re passing around;
she had an appreciation for its “glutinous adhesive mass” and the way it brought prose
and poetry into being on the page. They produced thirty-four hand-printed books, and
Woolf never lost her interest in printing.
In a brilliant vignette for the New Yorker Evelyn Irons (editor, future war corre-
spondent, and the only one of Vita Sackville-West’s lovers to leave her), tells of showing
Leonard and Virginia around the press room of the London Daily Mail in 1932. Leonard
has aggressive eyebrows but Virginia evokes “the moon in the daytime sky—ethereal,
bone-pale,” and Irons thinks, “You might as well show these clattering presses to a ghost”
(115). However it is Leonard who is bored. Virginia first impresses a printer by reading
a paragraph of the upside down type, and then quizzes a linotype operator with “such a
stream of complex questions that the man stopped work to attend to the conversation….
both had to shout, because of the chattering of the other linotypes” (118). When they
conclude, the operator does not give her the usual tour souvenir of a slug with her name
on it, for, “This had been a talk between professionals.” But they’re still not done. Woolf
pokes among the type, “the Caslon, Cameo, and Goudy Bold, asking how many points
the most sensational headlines ran to (seventy-two),” and then plunges into the room
where the plates corrode in acid baths. Woolf no longer seems “wan or moth like, delicate
or remote” to Irons: “Her long slender fingers were smudged with black ink, and her be-
havior that of a mechanically minded man” (118). “‘I want to see it all,’” says Woolf. “‘I’m
interested in exactly how things are done here.’”
Writing Ink
the erotics of the dip pen

But what about creation? From the first, the act of composing and the act of writing
were inseparable for Woolf. In the summer of 1899, just seventeen, she writes, “My pen,
I must add, is rather unwell at present.…I cannot write prettily when my pen scratches
& all joy in the art is lost to me. I love writing for the sake of writing, but when my pen
is enfeebled it becomes a task & bother to me” (PA 139). In the autumn of the same year
she notes, “Tomorrow at this hour I shall be in my room in London!…I write this down
to see if it looks any more credible in pen & ink” (PA 162). The entries anticipate her
famous remark four decades later about how one gets a hold on haddock by writing it
down; the capacity of ink to fix reality would be a lifelong preoccupation.
The Chinese still speak reverently of the Four Treasures of the Study—ink, ink-
stone, brush, and paper—a tradition utterly foreign in the Western habit of ballpoints
and post-it notes, but Woolf had her four treasures: pen, ink, inkpot, and writing
board. For Woolf ’s twenty-third birthday Violet Dickinson brought her “a huge china
inkpot which holds almost a jar full of ink, & is rather too large to be practicable. I
must cultivate a bold hand & a quill pen…” (PA 227). As we learn in Orlando, a book
about writing, inkpots are not nugatory: “Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious
one at that.…the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table
and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected frag-
ments” (74). Proust has his madeleine to trigger memory, Woolf has her inkpot. Inking
the pen, like a calligrapher grinding ink, is part of the creative process: “Thus it was
that Orlando, dipping his pen in the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and
asked himself a million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall…” (74).
The “gall” is of course both bile and gallnut ink, and, given that the galls come from
oaks, appropriate for a novel wound about a poem called “The Oak Tree.”
That “dipping” is not innocent. He “…approached the inkhorn, fingered the quill,
and made other such passes as those addicted to this vice began their rites with” [73],
an action prefigured by the “rather fat, rather shabby man” the young Orlando catches
turning “his pen in his fingers, this way and that way.” Gill Lowe in her insightful paper
in this volume, “Penning and Pinning,” links this to masturbation, and in fact Woolf
had written to Vita Sackville-West about the genesis of the book: “[I]dipped my pen in
the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biog-
raphy. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture, and my brain
with ideas…” (L3 428). As Lowe says (citing John Irwin through Gilbert and Gubar),
writing is an auto-erotic act, part of the whole scheme of pleasure that, as Orlando
finds, surrounds the consumption and producton of words: “For once the disease of
reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that
other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to
writing” (71). Orlando takes to hiding himself “in the cupboard behind his mother’s
bedroom…an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in the other,” at one point so worked up over
Sasha that he “plunge[s] his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted [sic]
over the table” (72, 74). (Though the Hogarth Press had published The Ego and the Id in
January of this year, we hardly need Sigmund Freud to gloss this. The perpetually saucy
Jane Goldman stopped me in the hallway here to point out the most loaded double-
entendre in a novel full of them: “The Queen had come” [21]. )
Ink is suffused not just with the personal and the erotic but the social and the
political, and Orlando discovers that “the transaction between a writer and the spirit
of the age is one of infinite delicacy” (239). In the nineteenth century the “damp” per-
meates everything: “…it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork—sentences
swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays
a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes” (207). More than
that, it seems ink will not be controlled and the pen has a mind of its own: “Again she
dipped her pen and off it went….Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to
feel the ink flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration” (214). She wonders,
“What had happened to her?” It is what hasn’t happened to her: she needs a wedding
ring. Once that is in place and decorum assured, “she plunged her pen neck deep in
the ink. To her enormous surprise, there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was
wet, but not dripping. She wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they
did” (238). Female rapture, brought under strictures but still possible.
Gill Lowe notes the clitoral pen and the unequivocal orgasmic associations, and
indeed Vita would write to Virginia, “My (once) Virginia, You said I was a fool not
to write to you when my pen wriggled to do so. Well, it wriggles now. I write from
the pink tower, which you like” (VSW/VW 404). In writing to Vita even the paper
is eroticized: “By the way (but this’ll need a new sheet, and theyre double bed sheets,
there, fit for Long Barn on a summer’s night….)”; the postscript adds, “I have not the
face to write another double bedded sheet. Do you really love me? Much? passionately
not reasonably?” (L3 569, 570). But the larger concern for Orlando is the intersection
of, the negotiation between, the corporeal and the social. The writer cannot escape the
zeitgeist, which threatens to spread the ink in spite of one’s intentions, but s/he is also
grounded in the body: Orlando discovers, “We write not with the fingers but with the
whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our
being, threads the heart, pierces the liver” (219).
the respectability of the fountain pen

The notion of pens writing on their own may seem fanciful, but we see it echoed in the
Diary, voiced in her life-long aversion to fountain pens. As early as 1918 she writes,
“The degradation of steel pens is such that after doing my best to clip & file one into
shape, I have to take to a Waterman, profoundly though I distrust them, & disbelieve
in the capacity to convey the nobler & profounder thoughts” (D1 207). It is only the dip
pen that will convey life with precision. Here she is the next year: “Having smashed my
ink pot, I have recourse to safety pots again & purple ink I see dwells in this one; but I
can’t use with any effect the muffled respectability of a fountain pen” (D1 250). Did the
Duckworths use fountain pens? Because “muffled respectability” is what Woolf would
be working beyond in her own prose.
Her vehicle would be a dip pen with a good nib: “Here I am experimenting with
the parent of all pens—the black J. the pen, as I used to think it, along with other ob-
jects, as a child, because mother used it; & therefore all other pens were varieties &
eccentricities” (D1 208). The terms can be confusing because although in later diary
entries “pen” refers to the whole instrument, in the early twentieth century “pen” still
referred to the nib, which was held in a pen holder. The J-pen referred to in this 1918
entry was a common nib, often black. She tried a fountain pen in 1922. “Perhaps the
greatest revolution in my life is the change of nibs—no longer can I write legibly with
my old blunt tree stump—people complained—But then the usual difficulties begin—
what is to take its place? At the present moment I’m using Blackie [a fountain pen]
against his nature, dipping him, that is to say. I should be reading the last immortal
chapter of Ulysses…” By the end of the long entry she has switched back to a dip pen.
“I am galloping on, astride a J pen now, not very compactly….Yes, on looking at the
pages, I think the balance is all in favour of a steel nib. Blackie too smooth; the old
blunderbuses too elephantine. Look how neat this is” (D2 196–98). So the male foun-
tain pen is rejected in favour of the J-pen, her mother’s nib. “We think back through
our mothers if we are women…,” she writes in section four of A Room of One’s Own,
then returns to the line in section six and flips it: “…a woman writing thinks back
through her mothers” (97). The thought was grounded in her practice—with the J-nib
Woolf was both thinking and writing back through her mother.
When she was in her 50s she gave the fountain pen another try. She writes to
Elizabeth Bowen the summer of 1934, “Excuse this illegible scrawl which I have now
made all one blot, the result of writing lying down with what is called a fountain pen”
(L5 303). A week later she wails to Ethel Smyth, “…how can you ever write with a
fountain pen? This is fountain pen, now writing. Disgusting, slippery, false, yet conve-
nient” (L5 304). She notes in her diary for 18 May: “I write this with a gold Waterman,
& have some thoughts of supplanting steel Woolworth” (D4 220). We hear no more of
the Waterman, but on 6 July she records, “I went out and bought a pen with which I
write, a Swan pen, on a broiling hot day….” Advertised as “thoroughly English,” and a
combination of “beauty and utility,” a major feature was that you could change your nib
for free as long as it was returned in perfect saleable condition.
Figure 8: Swan Pens.

But after less than a week she complains, “I don’t like this pattern [?] any better I think;
but no matter. L. says all Swans have soft snub noses. And this feels so but less taut.[?]”
(D4 224). And ten days later she notes, “A new nib…I have just finished, the other pen
continues, though very provisionally, the first truth telling chapter….” (D4 227), which
suggests she has gone back to the dip pen, though she is perhaps still trying to use the
Swan for “The Truth Tellers,” which became “Phases of Fiction.” By Christmas, how-
ever, the experiment is over. On 11 January 1935 she notes, “I have made a very clever
arrangement on the new board that L. gave me for Christmas: ink, pen tray & c. I never
cease to get pleasure from these clever arrangements” (D4 273). She would not need
to have an ink bottle if she were using a fountain pen; we hear no more of the Swan.
Inks were important to Woolf, though she was not pretentious and would have
scorned today’s expensive designer inks (I hope some young paleographer will find re-
ceipts—perhaps in the Reading archives—that will tell us precisely what inks she used).
She wrote to Dorothy Brett in 1923: “This ink is Waterman’s fountain pen ink. Cheap,
violet, indelible. (Which sounds as if I were paid to write their advertisements)” (L3 18).
Lewis Carroll used purple ink because it was cheap and Christ Church Oxford gave it
to faculty to mark student essays (see Reif). The medium was not only inseparable from
the message but from the writer’s identity: she entreats Edward Sackville-West, “But do
write again in your verdant ink” (L3 459); she teases Vanessa Bell, “Dearest, You will be
sickening of the sight of the Wolves purple ink…” (L3 497); she assures T. S. Eliot, “My
dear Tom, I was very glad to see your pencil again…” (L3 203). In the last year of her
life she wrote to Vita Sackville-West, “I must buy some shaded inks—lavenders, pinks
violets—to shade my meaning. I see I gave you many wrong meanings, using only black
ink. It was a joke—our drifting apart. It was serious, wishing you’d write….And one
pang of wild jealousy seized me, inopportunely, dining at Sibyls. No, no, I must buy my
coloured inks” (L6 461–62). Shades of ink, shades of meaning. Woolf might have liked
Noodler’s Red Black. Serious and formal with passion round the edges. She used purple
printers’ ink for “On Being Ill” and even saw it reflected in the natural world: “A violent
storm—purple ink clouds—dissolving like blots of ink in water…” (D5 177). For Woolf
ink was an aspect of meaning.
the rigidity of the typewriter

So why didn’t she type? She was a skilled typist, typing for others. When she was only
fifteen she recorded in her diary, “I type wrote Dorothea’s poems which arrived last
night—very long, watery effusions, with which she is going to invade the magazines”
(PA 111). In late January of 1914 while recovering from a breakdown she writes to
Lytton Strachey, “to ask you whether you have any manuscripts that want type-writing.
I should very much like to do them if you have, supposing that you are not in a great
hurry and it would save you 10d. a 1000,” and a week later, “I shall be delighted to do
[type] Esmeralda—and anything else chaste or otherwise” (L2 38).
Typing was part of her own literary process from the outset. In 1905 she writes in
her diary, “I finished the Note [for Fred Maitland’s biography of Leslie Stephen], which
fills 34 pages of hand writing: it is corrected for typing, which I must now do, & then I
shall be better able to judge….”(PA 225). The pattern of writing with pen in the morn-
ing and then typing up that work, to assess with a cold eye, in the afternoon would stay
with her all her life.
However, typing was not writing, even to friends. If she has to use the typewriter
it’s only as a last resort, and she apologizes through the decades:
to Ottoline Morrell, 25 September 1922: “Please excuse this hard faced typewrit-
er—but my hand has given up making letters clearly” (L2 562);
to Dorothy Brett, 8 July 1933: “My dear Brettt, (forgive the typewriter which has already
converted your name into another—but my hand is grown cursed and crabbed)” (L5 201);
to Mary Hutchinson, 10 February 1941: “I have been trying to write this letter in
hand writing, but my hand is like the cramped claw of an aged fowl: so I turn to type.
Please forgive. An odious habit” (L6 471).
Quentin Bell receives her most eloquent diatribe against the machine:
The truth is I cannot write on a typewriter; I make enemies whenever I do;

ladies are insulted; gentle men furious: old friendships are broke off…. It is
very odd how it rigidifies the mind; as if ones hands were half numb. This is
the reason why instead of being ablaze with brilliance, wit, profundity, news,
of every kind, it is flat as a charwoman’s back. One cant correct, thats it. Also
it pecks one along like a hen. (L3 507)
The mind and the hand are inseparable: if the one is numbed the other is rigidified,
and brilliance reduced to hen pecks. And the typewriter is duplicitous, conniving, the
mask of the erotic. She sneers in jealous pain at Vita’s secretary Audrey le Bosquet “Le
Boski writes to say how much she misses you. And then you pretend the woman is all
typewriter within! all wires and ribbon, for writing your business letters on. No—Next
month she will be flinging herself on your hearthrug” (L3 570).1
[Here I passed out the bag of gum arabic and asked the audience to add a chunk about
as big as my thumbnail to the gall nuts. The crystals of gum arabic shatter easily and only
needed a few strokes of grinding.]
haptics, space, and labour

Neuroscience supports Woolf ’s impressions. In “Digitizing literacy: reflections on the
haptics of writing,” Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay, a pair of scientists from Norway
and France, explore the physicality of writing with a pen rather than a keyboard. On a
keyboard there’s a “decoupling”—not only are you working with two hands, your atten-
tion is split into two distinct fields: the visual field of the screen and the motor field of
the keyboard. With a pen you use one hand, and your visual attention is concentrated
at the tip of the pen, where the ink flows. Also, unlike typing, with handwriting you
have to produce a different graphic shape for each letter. So when writers talk of the
“kinetic melody” of handwriting and the “visual melody” of the text, of the “sculptural
pleasure” and the sense of “craft” that comes with using a pen, they may sound ro-
mantic or nostalgic, but they may be getting at something scientists are beginning to
explore: the corporeal nature of knowledge (391).
Vivian Sobchack, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture,
goes further in documenting how the whole body is involved: “Unlike my upright pos-
ture at the typewriter or computer, when I wrote with pencil or pen, I generally curled
my body forward toward the protective half-circle of my left arm….even in school,
under the monitoring eyes of others, writing by hand with pencil or pen was a private,
enclosed, and intimate experience of material and social emergence.” Thus the space
of the pen is literally a safe space. And the space itself is creative: “This bodily circum-
scription of a lived space made intimate…is a space that Gaston Bachelard might have
described as shell-like…characteristic of the poesis of the shell, ‘the mystery of slow,
continuous formation’” (113). For Woolf the protectedness, the intimacy, and the slow
formation would all have been important, and so too would have been the combina-
tion of pleasure and labour. Sobchack speaks of the computer’s “frictionless electric
element,” and of the callus on her finger that calls her back to the friction and resistance
of pen and pencil, to the “aesthetic languor that locates its pleasure as much in the
manual forging and visual sight of the letters and words as in their semantic and com-
municative value.” Further, the “labour involved in handwriting” gives to the object “a
particular material value” (114, emphasis in original). Writing is pleasure but it is also
work. Writing is manual labour.
Woolf loved the feeling of sculpting a sentence: “How I should like, though, some
time on the drive up this afternoon, to write a sentence again! How delightful to feel it
form & curve under my fingers! Since Oct. 16th I have not written one new sentence,
but only copied & typed. A typed sentence somehow differs; for one thing it is formed
out of what is already there: it does not spring fresh from the mind” (D4 286). She is
of course typing drafts, revising The Years, but the passage does suggest that a sentence
cannot “form” the same way through a typewriter as it does “under her fingers.”
Writing with a pen is like riding a motorcycle; writing on a keyboard is like sitting
in a minivan. On a bike and with a pen you’re outside the frame, unbounded, with
naked metal doing the thing itself. Absorbed in the flow. Motorcycle-culture theorist
Steven Alford says, “the essence of motorcycling is…the effacement of the self in an
experience of ‘flow’….The rider is not travelling, he’s enacting movement.” If we replace
“rider” with “writer” we get something like: “The essence of writing is the effacement
of the self in an experience of flow….She is not transcribing, she’s enacting thought.”
Woolf finished The Waves “having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments
of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice…”
(D4 10). Immersed in the flow of ink, enacting thought.
For this talk I went back to the same volumes of Letters and Diaries that I’d used for my
dissertation; all my pencil marks delineated passages on literary technique, nothing on
ink, pens, presses, or printing. I had skimmed them the same way I had hurried over
the wrangles with servants. Philip Ball, in Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
says, “This neglect of the material aspect of the artist’s crafts is perhaps a consequence
of a cultural tendency in the West to separate inspiration from substance” (5). Yet in
Woolf ’s efforts to render the flight of the mind the materials of production are never
far from her own mind. The issue, finally, is preservation. In her 1941 essay “Anon” she
wrote, “It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press that
also preserved him…The printing press brought the past into existence” (384–85); and
as she said in her penultimate diary entry, “I think it is true that one gains a certain
hold on sausage & haddock by writing them down” (D5 358). The lance against Death
is the ink-filled pen.
[Here we poured the gall nuts and gum arabic, well-powdered by the audience, into each
of the four vehicles. Orlando makes ink from berries and wine (133) and we used water,
white wine, vinegar, and beer. I added the ferrous sulphate and we watched the brown
mixture turn to black. I told them how it was important to let the beer go flat, how the
first time I made ink it fizzed over the top, like a black iron-gall milk shake. The Woolfians
signed their names on sheets of acid-free paper, and I assured them that, save for fire
and flood, their names would be preserved for 500 years. The Chinese have a saying:
“The weakest ink is mightier than the strongest memory.” In this era of bit rot and hard-
drive crashes we could amend that to, “The weakest ink is stronger than the most vibrant
pixel,” for who among us has not faced the void of the blue screen? Centuries hence, ar-
chaeologists will find our sheets and conclude that these people must have been the most
important members of the civilization, their names alone preserved from the millions
dissolved in electronic impulses.]
Note
1. Jane Lilienfeld contends that the typewriter could be erotic for Woolf. In a twenty-year-old article I
discovered after this talk, she declares that “for Woolf the physical act of writing was an emotional
exercise, inseparable from the creation of meaning,” wonders what it must have felt like for Woolf, typ-
ing out “Friendships Gallery” with a violet typewriter ribbon for Violet Dickinson, “to strike each key
onto the page and see a violet mark spread out on the paper like the spreading folds of the many-hued
purples of the vulva? Did the flow of ink on paper recall Woolf ’s haunting image of Violet’s ‘flowing all
night long—the flame streaming like a river’ (L1 389)?” Dickinson’s gift of a “deep” inkpot was sym-
bolic of her deep love for Virginia, and “its shape, ‘a pot,’ recalls the locution ‘honey pot’ for the vagina”
(44–45).
Works Cited
Alford, Steven, “Popular Travel Narratives and the Motorcyclist: Traveling In, Not Traveling Through.” Con-
ference paper, English Language and Literature Association of Korea, 2011.
Bishop, Ted. Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word. Penguin Random House,
2017.
Bishop, Ted. Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. Toronto: Penguin, 2005.
Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Chandler, Daniel. “The Phenomenology of Writing by Hand.” Intelligent Tutoring Media 3:2/3 (May/August
1992): 65–74.
Cobb, Vicki. The Secret Life of School Supplies. New York: Lippincott, 1981.
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Eliot, T. S. Poems. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1919.
Fry, Stephen. “The Machine That Made Us.” BBC documentary. 2008.
Irons, Evelyn. “An Evening with Virginia Woolf ” New Yorker, 30 March 1963, 115–121, www.newyorker.
com/magazine/1963/03/30/an-evening-with-virginia-woolf. Accessed 5 June 2017.
Lilienfeld, Jane. “The Gift of a China Inkpot.” Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. Ed. Eileen Barrett and Patri-
cia Cramer. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 37–56.
Lowe, Gill. “‘Penning and pinning’: Vita, Virginia, and Orlando.” In this volume, 289–295.
Mangen, Anne, and Jean-Luc Velay. “Digitizing literacy: reflections on the haptics of writing.” Advances in
Haptics. Ed. Mehrdad Hosseini Zadeh. 2010. 385–402. https://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-
in-haptics/digitizing-literacy-reflections-on-the-haptics-of-writing. Accessed 12 February 2012.
Reif, Rita. “Following the Wonderful Logic of ‘Wonderland.’” New York Times, Nov. 15, 1998. http://www.
nytimes.com/1998/11/15/books/art-architecture-following-the-wonderful-logic-of-wonderland.
html?mcubz=1. Accessed 10 August 2017.
Ruxton, Philip. Printing Inks, Their composition, Properties and Manufacture. Chicago: United Typothetae
of America, 1918.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Louise De Salvo and Mitchell A.
Leaska, intro. by Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1985.
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2004.
Swan pen advertisement. London Daily News, 1 December 1934, 141. www.ebay.ie/itm/Mabie-Todd-Swan-
Leverless-Pen-Fyne-Point-Pencil-Gift-Set-1934-1-Page-Advert/152647185588?hash=item238a7b34b
4:g:scYAAOSwnDZUBz5y. Accessed 15 June 2017.
Woolf, Leonard. An Autobiography, Volume 2, 1911–1969. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.
—— and Virginia Woolf. Two Stories. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1917.
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tury Literature 25: 3/4 (Autumn–Winter 1979): 356–441.
——. Orlando. London: The Hogarth Press, 1928.
——. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989.
In the Archives
A Voice in the Archives:
In Search of Woolf’s Lost Tape
by Alice Staveley
I
want to begin this paper unconventionally, and to offer first my inspiration for
writing it. If you’ll forgive me, I’m going to be musing, while, I hope, telling you a
rollicking good story, about a topic deserving of more exacting attention: archives,
what they are, and why we’re in them. I particularly want to think about why as femi-
nist critics and historians of women’s lives, we need to be in them more, and not alone:
we need others—the living alongside the dead—at a crucial moment in our political
history when the forces of cultural amnesia about the power of collective, and crucially,
intergenerational feminisms, is, I fear, on the rise.1
Amnesia, loss, gatekeepers, tangerine tinted trash-can fires as leaders of the free
world (thank you, Samantha Bee2) are all real and existential threats to progressive cul-
tural memory. Searching for origins in the archives may, pace Derrida, be an exercise in
infinite regress,3 but there is also joy and the rock-solid hope of connection that should
drive us there, as academics, as humanists, and as teachers leading the new generation.
Ted Bishop has described the jouissance of archival pursuit in terms that resonate with
my ruminations today and connect with discussions begun at the MSA last November
on Jane Garrity’s panel “What Are We Doing When We Are in the Archives?”: “Part
of the reason we work in archives is, I’m convinced, for the archival jolt, a portal to
knowledge and, in itself, an assurance that we have connected with something real.”4
For feminists, there are still many voices to be found, still more wily reckonings of
self and other, to be unearthed in archives. What I’m going to recount here—essentially
the story of my search for a cassette tape that promised a lost recording of Woolf ’s
voice—touches on all of those things, most particularly that self and other piece: that
is, the often-uncanny ways in which what begins as a purely “academic” pursuit, can
turn tail, surprising us with apparently unsought revelations. Archival work can make
us feel that, far from being well-trained detectives in pursuit of that lost archival gem,
the journey itself, for which the archive is the road, is pursuing us, telling truths about
our collective lives as scholar-adventurers that propel us forward even in the murki-
est of times.5 This is not so much about fever or haunting—although I confess I have
touched those third rails of archival frisson enough times to know there is something
to them—but rather about colloquy, delight, and recuperation, in both the ontological
and morphological meanings of a word that denotes healthful recovery.
It is this sense of “recuperation” as the act of retrieval, revival, and propulsive
future making that explicitly ties my remarks to debates within the new modernist
studies where, as Anna Snaith has so eloquently put it, the “potential consequence of
the transnational turn…is the removal of feminist politics from the critical frame.[…]
[I]t is as though that primary recuperative project is now complete, and critical mo-
mentum needs to look elsewhere.”6 My work with my colleagues on the Modernist
Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) has heightened my sensitivity, and my fortitude,
A Voice in the Archives 21
for keeping my gaze trained not elsewhere, but on the archive itself as a mobile, animate,
necessarily transnational entity. As people migrate, so do papers, and the diasporic na-
ture of archives is part and parcel of the histories of people on the move. The archive
is a stand-in, at once an object and an activity of doing or making in the collective, not
merely a passive object to be “found” and reanimated.
Case in point: I have become aware latterly of just how much the transnational
archive can refract itself upon the researcher-archivist rather than, or not only, upon
the putative subject of inquiry, when I was updating for republication new details about
Woolf ’s marketing agent, Norah Nicholls, whose life I had published in Book History in
2009. I remember when I first “heard” Nicholls’ voice in the archives. It was actually at
the end of my graduate work in the UK, my dissertation almost done, and I was poised
to depart, heading westwards. What struck me about the voice’s vivacity was—forgive
me my impertinence—how un-English she sounded: there was an edge, and an energy
to the sound in the archives that didn’t match the surrounding vocal ecology. Was
she American, I thought? Fancifully, or perhaps just because my ear had started to
make its own turns. I dropped the idea, but found evidence she was a traveler and had
worked internationally, in Asia and the USA. It was only after publication when my
article, online and open source, was itself discovered by Norah Nicholls’ London-based
grandson, Richard Ashworth, that more transnational crossings fell into place. His
mother had been Norah’s daughter, and there were many questions about genealogy
and geography that entered our conversations. Ashworth was particularly interested
in what he called Norah’s lost New York years in the late 1920s. With Ancestry.com at
our fingertips, he and I worked new digital pathways, and suddenly there they were:
all the shipping manifests plying the waves between Liverpool, Southampton and New
York with passenger Norah Nicholls crisscrossing back and forth several times a year. I
had spent most of my twenties, for personal reasons, plying the Atlantic between Eng-
land and the eastern seaboard, and here, posthoc, was Nicholls doing the same, not on
Richard Branson’s Virgin Airways, but on Cunard’s passenger lines. I had already told
her story, I thought, but here she was anew, anticipating parts of my own. The formalist
scholar in me was shocked; the feminist adventurer relieved.
Which brings us (speeding forward in time, Orlando-like) to 2016 and that lost
tape. This time, the voice comes from an honors student in my program, Bojan Sr-
binovski, who, on Virginia Woolf ’s birthday, sends me a link to The Paris Review with
the ear-grabbing headline: “Have you Ever Heard Virginia Woolf Speak”? And the re-
joinder: “What follows is the only known surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, part
of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937. The talk is titled ‘Craftsmanship.’”7 Silently, at my
desk late on a Friday afternoon, I nod sagely and think about composing my thank
you note to Bojan averring that yes, I know about that recording, how kind of you
to write. But in the moment’s pause between type and send, I decide to glance at the
readers’ comments beneath the link, something I’m not sure I’ve ever really done, not
even for the New York Times. Amongst the expected ones lamenting Woolf ’s estranging
accent, several down, one stands out: it retorts with italics, “the only known surviving
recording; I have another given to me in the 1970s by Nigel Nicolson.” Signed: Janet
Sternburg. I pause again. Take another look. Think: this might be crazy, but that Nicol-
son reference sounds knowing. A moment later, I’m Googling Janet Sternburg, and find
that she’s a writer, poet, memoirist, editor of the groundbreaking anthology, The Writer
on Her Work (Norton 1980 & 2000), playwright, photographer. She has a Wikipedia
page. She has just published an acclaimed memoir, White Matter: A Memoir of Family
and Medicine, about her family’s experiences with lobotomy. I immediately write to her
publisher, asking if she might wish to talk. I leave the office, pick up the kids, get home,
and there waiting for me is a message in my inbox from Janet: “I wondered how long it
would take for someone to write me” it starts—turns out the comment was two years
old already, but no matter—“Can you call me tomorrow? I live in LA.”
Now since it’s a Saturday but this sounds urgent, I make complicated arrangements
for my children to be out of the house so I can speak without distraction to Janet. And
speak we do. For almost 2 hours. She has the most fascinating backstory which moves
through, and around, many of the academic currents in Woolf studies of that era in the
United States that Woolf scholars will well know. But her perspective about this era is
at once fresh, outsiderly, bicoastal, and transatlantic. Born to Jewish parents in Boston
in 1943, she escapes what she calls her “provisional” upbringing and lights out for New
York city in her early 20s. She had always felt herself to be a writer, but the 1970s were
what she terms the “golden years”; a “time to do things” in public television, and film
and drama drew her professional energies. While working in a local public television
station whose bread and butter were BBC documentaries on British writers, she was
asked by her boss to make a filler-film, on anything she liked, 10 minutes long to segue
from one documentary the next. She told me she had always loved Woolf ’s writings,
but could not countenance the “etherealized woman writer” then in vogue, which did
not reflect, as she put it to me, the woman writer Janet imagined, the woman “with ink
on her hands.” (Given how long I have been unearthing the narrative of Woolf ’s inky
printer’s hands, this was a moment of pure living archival jolt). As Janet put it to me, “I
had to do something about it.” So she made a short 10 minute film about Woolf which,
several years later, when she had moved to the Rockefeller Foundation, she discussed
with Mitchell Leaska when, one day, he arrived in her office looking for advice about
grants. He showed her film short at the MET Bloomsbury Centennial Celebration in
1982, and recommended Janet pursue a full-length documentary going to the UK to
interview Woolf ’s surviving relatives and friends. With a NEH (National Endowment
for the Humanities) grant in hand, Janet did just that…and therein lies the journey to
Nicolson and the tape recording.
Throughout our telephone conversation, I think I want to ask more about the tape,
but it takes me ages to frame my inquiry without looking mercenary—and in any case,
everything else is going so well and I’m learning so much. (I’m compressing here as you
can imagine). When I finally ask what’s on the tape, Janet says, “oh, it’s Virginia and
Vita, talking together.” I am dumbstruck. Can this be at all possible? I imagine them
there sitting—what, with a tape recorder between them? And then find myself not even
able to imagine what an interwar recording device might have looked like and realizing
how shallow is my technological memory. At that point, Janet invites me to LA to visit
and hear that tape for myself. The intervening years between her aspirations to make
that documentary, which ended up unmade, and a new life on the west coast brought
Janet illness in the form of breast cancer, and an enduring second love, to Steve Lavine.
The two of them moved to LA in the mid-1980s when Steve took up the Presidency of
California Institute of the Arts, one of the West coast’s premier academies for film, art,
and technology and founded by Walt Disney. Steve (whose first cousin is Bob Dylan,
but that’s a whole other story) was just ending his 30-year tenure as President so Janet
urged me to visit soon. Never having been to LA despite living in Northern California
more than a decade, I saw this as my chance. Once my husband and I synced our iCals,
and he confirmed he could care for our boys, I booked my ticket for early July.
Two days before departure, while emailing complicated instructions on how to
navigate the freeways down south, Janet writes, embarrassed, that she can’t find the
tape anywhere, but she knows it’s somewhere in the house. I find myself strangely not
disappointed. I’m going to see Janet, and LA, and have three whole days to play. We
meet at Bob Hope Airport like two lost friends, and immediately fall into conversation
again. Her house is full of her photographic prints, inspired by iPhone technology,
her dining table covered with exquisite haunting images of everyday objects refracted
in spangling rays of light that conjure unexpected superimpositions. She has a series
of exhibitions coming up and a book coming out, aptly titled “Overspilling World.”8
We make a series of touristy plans, one of which, however, is a bit unexpected. Janet
says that she had the whole weekend mapped out, but there’s been a bit of a wrinkle,
and there’s this funeral she needs to attend. With Steve in Italy, would I like to go with
her? The funeral is for an old friend of Janet’s and Steve’s, and she assures me I’ll want
to go—as we’re navigating the freeway (and I think she might have been putting on
mascara while thrusting her iPhone at me) she tells me it’s for Elyse Grinstein and I’m
to look up her obituary in the LA Times. I read, rapt. Elyse and her husband, Stanley,
were two of LA’s preeminent art patrons from the 1960s on and very early advocates
for contemporary American art and artists. Once Elyse’s children had grown, she also
launched a highly successful independent career as an architect, in what was, and is,
a highly male-dominated profession. I sit in the synagogue with Janet, watching the
memory reel, Janet quietly, gently touching my arm to stop me gaping at the images of
David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Gehry, and Robert Rauschenberg themselves
at play with the Grinsteins. By the time Judy Chicago gets up to offer a eulogy my inte-
rior voice is screaming (“The Dinner Party!! The Dinner Party!!”) but my outer façade
maintains its cool. Later, Janet and I sit outside a Shell gas station licking ice cream
cones in the searing LA heat and reflect on life and art, friends, family, and the found
serendipities of our lives.
By now, I have forgotten—almost—about the tape. As I’m getting ready for bed
that night in the guest room—a cozy pull-out in the library whose books I’ve already
fingered: a delicious merge of the married reading lives of Steve and Janet—I notice
that all the Woolf books are lined up neatly in the bottom shelf just below my sightline
as I lie down. There on top of them is a bulky brown manila envelope. I get up, and here
it is: the tape cassette I’ve come to find. Right out in the open, almost. I decide to wait
until morning to show it to Janet, and when I do, she says, in pure LA-speak, “oh it was
the flood, a few years after the earthquake, the one that almost destroyed Cal Arts, and
I had a man come in after we got the water out, to reorganize the library, and he must
have done an excellent job! So that’s where it was!” By this time, I’m sure there is no
there there. This can’t be what I think it is, and there are two tapes anyway, one record-
ing Janet’s interviews with Michael Holroyd and Nigel Nicolson, and the other the tape
Nicolson had given her. They’re regular 1980s cassette tapes, but when Janet suggests
we head to her car and play them, my heart skips a beat: I can see the tapes already get-
ting stuck, shredded, and utterly lost. I confess, I am relieved to discover Janet herself
has forgotten she’s just bought a new car and there are no such things as cassette players
in new cars anymore. We sit in the car in peels of laughter.
After more touristy outings, it’s time for me to head home. Janet says I can take
the tapes—in fact, she generously offers many of her papers, which, as I shift through
them now, are themselves a crucial snapshot of a woman and an era compelling more
archives, more study, more talk. Back at Stanford, I head to the basement of the Music
School where, I’m told, there are still cassette recording devices. I put on the head-
phones, and listen. The interviews with Nicolson and Holroyd have some very brief
snatches, and some telling moments, but are mostly marred by static. Still, it’s a peep-
hole into the past, and the present, and I am satisfied. Then, I pop in the Vita and
Virginia tape. I have already guessed, as you might have also by now, that this will
not be some intimate unrecorded exposé; somehow “Craftsmanship” will be involved,
and we’ll be back to the one known recording of Woolf ’s voice. But having met Janet,
I’m also convinced her memory of Vita can’t be entirely wrong. Why, then, did she
remember this as Vita and Virginia in conversation? I listen. And there at the opening
of the tape are those sonorous words from “Craftsmanship.” But suddenly, they cut
off, and there is Vita talking about them. This, it turns out, appears to be an excerpt
from Vita’s own BBC recording in the mid-1950s that Woolf scholars may know from
its condensed republication in The Listener, the BBC’s magazine. But I’m not sure that
without ready access to the BBC auditory archives, we have known, before now, just
how the editing of Vita’s talk involved the repurposing of Virginia’s. Certainly, to hear it
is different from reading about it. So there is a conversation here that, in Brenda Silver’s
terms, is a kind of versioning,9 or to change the metaphor, a re-hearing, not so much of
Woolf herself as lone expositor of the glory of words, but of the latent, ever-excavatable
potential for communality and colloquy in women’s conversations. We need perhaps to
remember that those conversations, in the digital era and the jet age, benefit from being
intergenerational, intracultural, and memorializable in new forms of archive.
My most recent conversation with Janet had her handing me her new book, as I
dropped her off at the Cal Train station following a quick luncheon in Palo Alto this
past April, and turning to exclaim, “Just think, 74 years old and I’ve just gotten my first
photographic monograph!” She waved, heading down the platform to meet a prospec-
tive gallery director in the city. I pulled away, a refreshed 45-year-old heading off to
teach a class of 21-year-olds reading Woolf and Mansfield for the first time.
“Ah life!” as Woolf might say.
Notes
1. This presentation occurred before the rise of the #MeToo movement in fall 2017, one of whose many
cultural reverberations was increased visibility of cross-generational feminist conversations in the me-
dia.
2. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/11/05/here_s_everything_samantha_bee_has_called_
donald_trump.html
3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996). What I term “infinite regress,” Carolyn Steedman wryly describes as Derrida’s
aspiration “to recover moments of inception, beginnings and origins which—in a deluded way—we
think might be some kind of truth, and in ‘Archive Fever’, desire for the archive is presented as part of
the desire to find, or locate, or possess that moment of origin, as the beginning of things” (3).
4. Ted Bishop, Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books (New York: W.W. Norton & Com-
pany, 2007), p. 36.
5. My use of this term alludes to Richard Altick’s 1950 (revised 1987) surprise best-seller on literary
research, The Scholar Adventurers, and to my recent collaborative book with my team members about
our DH initiative, Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: The Making of the Modernist Archives
Publishing Project (New York: Palgrave, 2017).
6. Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2014), p. 10.
7. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/05/21/have-you-ever-heard-virginia-woolf-speak/
8. Janet Sternburg, Overspilling World (Berlin: Distanz, 2016).
9. Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 13.
Works Cited
Altick, Richard D. The Scholar Adventurers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1950 and 1987.
Battershill, Claire, Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Michael Widner and Nicola
Wilson, Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities. New York: Palgrave, 2017.
Bishop, Ted. Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1996.
Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.
Snaith, Anna. Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London 1890–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014.
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Sternburg, Janet. Overspilling World. Berlin: Distanz, 2016.
On Manuscripts: Virginia Woolf and Archives
by Amanda Golden
W
hen Virginia Woolf visited Haworth in 1904, she was among the few who
explored the parsonage. In The Brontë Myth (2004), Lucasta Miller tells us
that while the area had become widely advertised as a tourist destination and
the museum was open to the public, the parsonage was only open to those with “special
permission from the resident clergyman” (114). In “Haworth, November, 1904,” Woolf,
as Miller notes, points out that “the personal relics…made one forget ‘the chiefly memo-
rable fact that [Charlotte Brontë]…was a great writer’” (qtd. Miller 112). Woolf frames
this contrast with a reference to manuscripts. She stresses: “It is better to read Carlyle in
your own study chair than to visit the sound-proof room and pore over the manuscripts
at Chelsea.…The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the coun-
try in which it is set adds something to our understanding of his books. This justification
you have for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters”
(E1 5). Woolf argues that for those interested in literature, material contexts—like manu-
scripts and houses—are less significant without bearing on texts.
When she came to write about the Brontë Parsonage and museum, Woolf drew on
her memory of Carlyle’s house, which she had visited with her father in 1897. At the
time, she recorded in her diary seeing “Cs sound proof room, with double walls—His
writing table, and his pens, and scraps of his manuscripts” (PA 24). Woolf is describing
a literal padded work-room that Carlyle had designed. In her sketch, later published
as “Carlyle’s House,” Woolf remembered “glass cases with specimens of handwriting
in the middle of rooms” (CH 3).1 Handwriting alone, for Woolf, tells little. But both
impressions of Carlyle’s house miss the opportunity to “pore over” his manuscripts
that Woolf included in her piece on the Brontë house. This detail is an exception to the
skepticism that she often grants to manuscripts and archives. Five years after “Haworth,
November, 1904,” Woolf may have had the opportunity to see Brontë manuscripts first
hand. She told Lady Robert Cecil, “I am also promoted to dine with Reginald; and to
have the Brontë manuscripts shown me” (L1 397). Woolf was meeting, the editors of
her letters tell us, “Reginald Smith, editor of the Cornhill, […] son-in-law of George
Smith of Smith, Elder & Co, the publishers of the Brontë novels” (L1 397).2
By 1928, Woolf begins A Room of One’s Own with an updated consideration of the
Brontës’ surroundings: “When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I…
began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about
Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of
Haworth Parsonage under snow” (AROO 3). These figures, like the items on display or
for sale in Haworth may not be “women and fiction,” but they are part of how the story
has been told. And while she attempts to distance herself from it, Woolf was a part of
this system. When she visited Haworth, she returned with one or more souvenirs that
she referred to as “Brontë pictures,” and which the editor of Woolf ’s letters identifies as
postcards that Woolf included with her letter to Violet Dickinson on November 26 (L1
On Manuscripts 27
159). These cards do not remain with the letter in the Berg Collection,3 but a copy of
Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1865) from the Library of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf at Washington State University4 contains a frontispiece sketch of the
parsonage. Here, the parsonage is not covered in snow and there is life inside, with a
window open and smoke coming out of the chimney. The catalogue notes that Leonard
may have annotated this 1865 edition, but Woolf may have bound it. Its presence in
their library means that it is not only an image with which she may have been familiar,
but it is likely that so would those to whom she is writing.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argues that our sense of literary history is incom-
plete. It leaves out what “women and fiction” means, reducing it to the name of authors.
To make her point, Woolf turns to manuscript alterations and revisions, and the fact that
they can tell us a version of history with which we are not familiar. When her protagonist
remembers Charles Lamb’s reference to John Milton’s Lycidas manuscript, she imagines
that she could view it as “Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any
word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is” (AROO 7). Brenda R. Silver too
has noted this moment, and, while she notes that Woolf ’s protagonist is unable to better
understand the paths that the writer took, she turns to the fact that the kind of knowledge
that Woolf ’s protagonist sought is that which comes to inspire later scholars of her fiction.
The irony, which Silver points out that Woolf would enjoy, is that this becomes feminist
work as “critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s…found one of their strongest arguments
in…textual editing, including the publication of manuscript versions of her [Woolf ’s]
novels” (195). The collaborations that enabled others to access materials, rather than ex-
cluding them from doing so, further rewrites what Woolf ’s protagonist experienced.
For Woolf, however, this instance in A Room of One’s Own is one in which she
begins to articulate an awareness of the value of the alterations that manuscripts con-
tain. In one earlier moment in Night and Day, Katharine asks Mr. Denham if he would
like to see “the original manuscript of the ‘Ode to Winter.’ The early poems are far less
corrected than the later” (15–16). But even as Woolf was a writer herself, editing her
own manuscripts, she tends to refer to manuscripts as authors’ finished work, often for
the Hogarth Press. It is anachronistic to think that Woolf would be concerned with the
creative process as scholars are now, but her memory of Lamb’s essay gestures toward
this unknown past, even as he, in “Oxford in the Vacation” (1920), finds the version of
Milton’s poem at Cambridge to be less pure and more human: “How it staggered me
to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal,
alterable, displaceable at pleasure!” (Lamb 19, qtd. Gubar 117). Woolf may have turned
to this essay as she began her Newnham and Girton talks; Lamb reveals early in the
piece that he too was “defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic in-
stitution” (Lamb 17). Locked out in some respects as she was, Lamb differs of course in
that he was able to see the manuscript and she was not.5
Lamb favors a view of print that is locked in, finalized. He sees archives as the
province of historians: “Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS.
Those variae lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and
unsettle my faith.…I leave these curiosities…to G. D. [George Dyer who wrote His-
tory of the University and Colleges of Cambridge (n.15, p. 326)]—whom, by the way, I
found busy as a moth over some rotten archive” (Lamb 19). In Choosing Not Choosing,
Shannon Cameron questions identity and interpretation as she argues that “the variant
is a way of getting at what the text ‘is.’ That is, in [Emily] Dickinson’s poems, variant
words…raise the question of what counts as the identity of the text in question” (Cam-
eron 5). This too stands for Woolf, as it is the variants she cannot see that prompt her
to question the ways her understanding of literature has been lacking. With choosing
comes the paradox that “The difficulty in enforcing a limit to the poems turns into a
kind of limitlessness, for…it is impossible to say where the text ends because the vari-
ants extend the text’s identity in ways that make it seem potentially limitless” (Cameron
6). For Woolf, this moment brings her to question the limitations of history. Even as
words are fixed in print, however, they are still fixed in manuscript, as a variant or ver-
sion, a text in an archive, preserved and often locked away.
Repeatedly, Woolf associates manuscripts with their spaces, from Carlyle’s sound-
proof room to the Brontë Museum, to the library at Cambridge, and, as we will see, to
Orlando’s cabinet.6 In The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Repre-
sentation, Lisa Stead introduces Paul Voss and Marta Werner’s understanding of “the
archive” as “both a physical site—an institutional space enclosed by protective walls—
and an imaginative site—a conceptual space whose boundaries are forever changing”
(2). The physical enclosure is “a room,” but the larger concept of the archive, one that
can be imagined and built, is one to which Woolf speaks in texts like A Room of One’s
Own, Orlando, and Three Guineas.7
In A Room of One’s Own, Milton’s manuscript records the impressions of what
came before. To borrow an image from the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali’s
“Vacating an Apartment,” Milton’s manuscript acts as “the corner table that memo-
rized / my crossed out lines” (Ali 62). The image of the table is also valuable, as Woolf ’s
archives are often workspaces. Tracing this archival thread through A Room and Orlan-
do allows us to see the way Woolf ’s research and treatment of primary sources changes,
particularly as documents in her work come to present evidence of controversy and
voices that history has overlooked, rather than records that exclude these voices, such
as those in the British Museum of A Room of One’s Own. As J. Ashley Foster has not-
ed, Woolf harvests materials for Three Guineas and—unlike her earlier critique of the
Haworth Parsonage sketch—photographs become “a crude statement of fact” (TG 14).
While she is referring to the images’ offensiveness here, manuscripts and archives too
preserve the crudeness of jagged edges and “crossed out lines” that others were not
meant to see.
Woolf is dubious, but also glib as she speaks of archives in Orlando, and more
directly to institutional repositories in Three Guineas. In Orlando’s Preface, she cred-
its “Miss M. K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in the archives of Harrogate and
Cheltenham that were nonetheless arduous for being vain” (O 5). The history to which
Woolf is speaking is not in these collections. The idea of an archive is fuller in Three
Guineas. After Woolf has completed more research herself, she is aware of conventions
like those of institutional records as “A long and dreary list of those barren, if neces-
sary, triumphs lies presumably along with other broken records in college archives,
and harassed head mistresses still consult them, it is said, when desiring official proof
of impeccable mediocrity” (139).8 Here and in A Room of One’s Own, the archive is an
On Manuscripts 29
extension of an institution, but Woolf turns to private space in Orlando, dramatizing

the writing and preserving of materials.
Due to her status and literary aspirations, Orlando handles others’ manuscripts
and sees Carlyle’s House. We learn that “All her life long Orlando had known manu-
scripts; had held in her hands the rough brown sheets on which Spenser had written
in his little crabbed hand; she had seen Shakespeare’s script and Milton’s. She owned,
indeed, a fair number of quartos and folios…and sometimes a lock of hair” (O 208).
These manuscripts, however, are not those that contain alterations. They are the rel-
ics, those items that are valuable, but do not teach us about a past we did not know.
Like Woolf, Orlando also “visited Carlyle’s sound-proof room at Chelsea” (214). Car-
lyle’s room lingers in Woolf ’s imagination, and near the close of A Room of One’s Own,
Woolf expresses her frustration that “to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room
or a sound-proof room, was out of the question.”9 The room to which Woolf aspires
at the close of this essay becomes the archive where alternate histories can be drafted.
When she recommended reading Carlyle in one’s own home over his, Woolf may have
assumed that the central difference between his manuscript and one’s personal copy is
that the former is handwritten.10 The space of the archive becomes one in which the
writer, like the reader, creates and interprets texts.
Notes
1. I thank Kristin Czarnecki for sharing this passage with me. John M. Picker in Victorian Soundscapes
notes that Carlyle did not actually work in the study he designed, as while he “invested in a plan to
construct a soundproof study at the top of his house…once it was finished, he found it difficult to work
there, claiming the shock of stray sounds had become worse than ever before” (6).
2. The manuscripts of Currer and Acton Bell, Jane Eyre and Shirley respectively, were sent to Cornhill
which published both in 1848 (Lee xxi). Cornhill also published Emily Brontë’s poem “A Farewell to
Alexandria” in 1860 (Hatfield 5). I learned of Cornhill in Rachel Crossland’s presentation at the Annual
Conference on Virginia Woolf in Leeds, UK, June 2016.
3. Email from Josh McKeon, Librarian, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, to the author. Decem-
ber 30, 2016.
4. Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short Title Catalogue. http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/
onlinebooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.html. Accessed December 29, 2016.
5. Even as Woolf ’s heroine was prohibited from seeing Milton’s manuscript in A Room of One’s Own,
Christine Froula reminds us that Woolf could have seen it with her brother Thoby Stephen at Cam-
bridge (348, n. 19).
6. Regarding Carlyle’s “sound-proof room,” see http://andrewvanz.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-so-much-
dwelling-place-as.html. Sabatini has also addressed the role of psychological archives in Woolf ’s work.
7. Maureen Gallagher observes that critics have treated A Room of One’s Own and Orlando in tandem,
particularly with regard to their treatment of Shakespeare, and it is difficult to determine whether
Woolf ’s composition of both overlapped (1). As Gallagher quotes Elena Gualtieri, both texts “share
a constant preoccupation with the question of writing English literary history from a position that is
inflected by sexual difference” (Gualtieri 116, qtd. Gallagher 2).
8. As Jane Marcus points out, Woolf even “donated some manuscript pages of Three Guineas (now in
the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library) to be sold for the aid of refugees from the Span-
ish Civil War” (li). While it is not clear whether these pages contained alterations, in doing so, Woolf
acknowledged the value of her materials.
9. Sutton brought this passage in Orlando to my attention and calls “Carlyle’s sound-proof room (a syn-
ecdoche of the ‘coddl[ed]’ male ‘genius’)” (56).
10. I would like to thank the audience member who asked about the role of displacement in visiting literary
archives at a distance from the sites their writers depict.
Works Cited
Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems. New York: Norton, 2009.
Cameron, Shannon. Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. U of Chicago P, 1992.
Crossland, Rachel. “The Magazine on the Table: Virginia Stephen and the Cornhill Magazine.” Paper Presen-
tation. June 17, 2016. Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Leeds, UK.
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.
Gallagher, Maureen. “Thinking Back Through Our Fathers: Woolf Reading Shakespeare in Orlando and A
Room of One’s Own. MA Thesis, Georgia State University, 2008. http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_
theses/40.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Author of “Jane Eyre,” “Shirley,” “Villette,” “The Pro-
fessor,” Etc. Smith, Elder, 1865. Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Washington State University
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC).
Gualtieri, Elena. Virginia Woolf ’s Essays: Sketching the Past. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
Hatfield, C. W. “Introduction,” The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë. Edited by C. W. Hatfield. 1941. New
York: Columbia UP, 1995.
King, Julia and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic, ed. and Compilers. Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short
Title Catalogue. Pullman, WA: Washington State UP, 2003. http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/
onlinebooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.html.
Kopley, Emily. “Virginia Woolf ’s ‘immature and ill considered and wild and annoying ideas about prose
and poetry.’” Conference Paper. Modernist Studies Association Conference, Boston, MA, November
21, 2015.
Lamb, Charles. Essays of Charles Lamb. Ed. George Armstrong Wauchope. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1904.
Lee, Sidney, ed. Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement Volume I. London: Smith Elder, & Co., 1901.
Marcus, Jane. Introduction. Virginia Woolf. Three Guineas. 1938. Ed. Jane Marcus. New York: Harcourt,
2006.
Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Culture. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002.
Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
Sabatini, Federico. “Archiving the Unarchivable: The Role of Archives in the Biographical Writing of Virginia
Woolf and Lytton Strachey.” Textus 3 (September-December 2015): 119–38.
Silver, Brenda R. “Textual Criticism as Feminist Practice: Or, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Part II.” Rep-
resenting Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation. Ed. George Bornstein. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan
P, 1991, 193–222.
Sutton, Emma. Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013.
Stead, Lisa. Introduction. The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation. Ed. Carrie
Smith and Lisa Stead. Ashgate, 2013, pp. 1–14.
Woolf, Virginia. Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches. Ed. David Bradshaw. Hesperus Press, 2003. 3–4.
——. The Common Reader: First Series. 1925. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1904–1912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1986.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One 1888–1912. Eds. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1912–1922. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1976.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923–1928. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.
1977. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978.
——. Night and Day. 1920. New York: Harcourt, 1948.
——. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Ed. Maria DiBattista. 1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2006.
——. Roger Fry: A Biography. 1940. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968.
——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2005.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. Ed. Jane Marcus. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2006.
Echo’s Voices: Virginia Woolf,
Irena Krzywicka, and The Well of Loneliness1
by Paulina Pająk
“
E
very burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or ex-
punged word reverberates through the earth from side to side,” announced
Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Compensation” (299). This dream of
global solidarity has come true for Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, one of the
first novels with an undisguised lesbian/transgender theme. When in 1928, Sir Char-
tres Biron judged the novel obscene and all copies were burned, it seemed probable
that novel would perish. Indeed, The Well was not published in Britain again until
1949 (Doan and Prosser 1–3).2 Nevertheless, not only did Hall’s novel survive the de-
struction and censorship, but it traveled across countries and continents, both in the
original version and in numerous translations.
While Hall’s trial has become one of the most studied events in British LGBTQ
history, the fascinating story of The Well’s early global reception has remained unwrit-
ten, despite fruitful areas of research enabled by the transnational turn in modernist
studies. Already in 1929, the novel became a bestseller in the United States, and was
translated into Danish and German. In 1931, The Well was available in Czech, a year
later in French, and in 1933 it entered Polish culture under the title Źródło samotności
(see Figure 2, on next page). In this paper I would like to compare the reception of
Hall’s novel in Britain and Poland, juxtaposing two important statements by public
intellectuals: Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own and Irena Krzywicka’s preface to
Źródło. I argue that the Polish reception casts some light on how The Well became the
“bible of lesbianism” in different cultures for at least half a century, while also revealing
new networks of transnational modernism.
Although many factors are responsible for the global popularity of Hall’s novel,
there are two most likely explanations. First, The Well is an emancipatory landmark
and an important legacy to the LGBTQ community, raising issues still relevant in the
debates on LGBTQ rights such as minority stress and marriage equality. Moreover, its
hero(ine) Stephen Gordon becomes an Every(wo)man, rendering the diverse faces of
LGBTQ people, oscillating between the contemporary concepts of transgender, gender
queer and lesbian identity. Secondly, The Well survived censorship and entered other
cultures due to modernist networks created around the world by intellectuals striving
to preserve a fragile peace and demanding rights for various groups in the increasingly
hostile war cultures of the 1930s. Among those voices were Virginia Woolf and Irena
Krzywicka, who as public intellectuals played vital roles in preserving Hall’s emancipa-
tory message, embodying it in their “echo texts,” to use Jane Marcus’s term.
As Marcus has shown, Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own responded to the censorship of
The Well. If “Judith Shakespeare was, to contemporary audiences, very clearly a portrait
of Radclyffe Hall” (Marcus, “To the Women’s Review” 19), then Woolf herself became
a custodian of the banned novel. Thus, a reader of A Room of One’s Own is invited to
join the conspiracy of exploring hidden lesbian themes, believing that “the disembodied
voice of Echo can be reconstituted” (Marcus, “To the Women’s Review” 164).
In Poland, Irena Krzywicka (1899–1994), a feminist writer and journalist (see Fig-
ure 1, below), advocated and popularized The Well. When in 1933, its Polish version
Źródło samotności was issued by the Publishing Society “Rój” translated by Dr J. P.
Zajączkowski, Krzywicka wrote a preface to the novel (see Figure 2). The implications
of Krzywicka’s text for Polish LGBTQ culture are enormous, as in May 1933 this eman-
cipatory manifesto was published as a feature in the influential weekly “Wiadomości
Literackie” [Literary News]. Both Hall’s novel and lesbianism literally made the head-
lines.
Figure 1: Irena Krzywicka, 1925. The Figure 2: Źródło samotności, title page. Source:
National Digital Library Polona, references Radclyffe Hall and Irena Krzywicka. Źródło
F.33147. Public Domain. samotności. Towarzystwo Wydawnicze Rój, 1933.
A cultural taboo still surrounds the history of minorities’ emancipation—since the
lost poetry of Sappho, their past has survived only in fragments and echoes. The Polish
translation of The Well is never mentioned in studies of “Rój” Publishing, monographs
on modernism, nor publishers’ memoirs. A few Polish feminist and LGBTQ scholars
have briefly discussed the fact that Hall’s novel was translated in 1933, others are prob-
ably not aware that it was published, as they use its English title. During broad archival
research, I have discovered that the interwar fate of Źródło can be partly reconstructed
through the novel’s reviews and advertisements. The search for archival materials con-
cerning Źródło resembles looking for a needle, not in a haystack, but in a pile of ashes,
Echo’s Voices 33
as during the Second World War many Polish libraries and archives were lost. Fortu-
nately, some publishers’ letters and “Rój” catalogues have survived. Analysis reveals
that “Rój” wanted to publish The Well in 1931 (“Rój” 1930–1938)—it could have been
delayed because of planned changes in Polish law on homosexuality.3
Moreover, in the Polish translation, almost all passages concerning “inversion”
and the Great War are omitted or manipulated. For instance, while in The Well the
fourth part of Chapter 34 consists of five paragraphs (WL 319–21), in Źródło only two
survived (ZS 265). It seems that the publishers decided to suppress the “sensitive” parts
of Hall’s novel, using Biron’s trial statements on women war workers and “inversion”
as guidance. Most probably, the translator(s)4 worried about their names on the title
page of a censored novel. As a result, it was issued under a group pseudonym—“Dr J. P.
Zajączkowski”—used by “Rój” translators and editors.
Concluding my brief discussion of Hall’s novel in Poland, I would like to underline
that though it was severely censored, Źródło still conveys its original message. While
the omission of inversion, and consequently of some early sexologist assumptions hid-
den in that label has not only negative effects, the novel is most seriously weakened by
the censoring of passages on lesbian/transgender visibility and emerging community
in the Great War. Nevertheless, the emancipatory values of The Well could have been
lost, if not for its contemporary preservers, Woolf and Krzywicka, who embodied them
in their own—to use Marcus’s term—echo texts.
Echo Texts: Woolf and Krzywicka
I would now like to look at the reception of Hall’s The Well in Britain and Po-
land from the perspective offered by two public intellectuals: Virginia Woolf and Irena
Krzywicka. In the comparison of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own with Krzywicka’s pref-
ace to Źródło, I explore the discussion of Hall’s novel and its trial, as well as their textual
strategies. Finally, as there is substantial research on the press reaction to The Well and
A Room of One’s Own, I will discuss only the responses of the Polish press.
The legislative context in which Woolf and Krzywicka defended the novel could
not have been more different. While attending the exhibition “Queer British Art 1861–
1967” in Tate Britain (5 April—1 October, 2017), I could stand right in front of the
door to Oscar Wilde’s cell in Reading prison and think about the writers who needed
to “face” that door and find their own strategy of survival. In the United Kingdom,
(male) homosexuality was penalized and remained illegal until 1967 (Moran 1996 pas-
sim), while in independent Poland it has never been mentioned in the Criminal Code.
Though censorship in both countries was repressive, it seems that its chilling effect was
more profound for British intellectuals.
Consequently, in Britain, self-censorship was a matter of survival—allowing the
writer only allusions, which could turn into echoes if readers joined in the conspiracy.
In her book Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, Marcus presents a capti-
vating interpretation of A Room of One’s Own and invokes the term “Sapphistry” to
denominate Woolf ’s subversive narration. Marcus’s Echo is inspired not by Ovid’s tale,
in which Echo dies because of her unrequited love to Narcissus, but by Longus’s story,
in which the nymph—musically talented and indifferent to male charm—is tormented
yet resurrected by compassionate Gaia. Thus, Woolf ’s essay becomes “an echo cham-
ber, in which Echo, the woman artist, who transgressed both sexually and verbally…
may speak in her own words” (164).
Nonetheless, the chilling effect casts a shadow over Woolf ’s brilliant essay, which is
one of the first attempts at analyzing the social and material circumstances of women’s
creative activity. As Hermione Lee notes, “while she committed herself publicly to the
protest against censorship which the Radclyffe Hall case aroused…, she carried out a
telling piece of self-censorship in those cancelled pages of A Room of One’s Own” (519).
Lee refers to Woolf ’s draft note on a passage that begins with “Chloe liked Olivia. They
shared a.…” This excision is quoted in Marcus’s analysis:
The words covered the bottom of the page: the pages had stuck. While fum-
bling to open them there flashed into my mind the inevitable policeman…
the order to attend the Court; the dreary waiting: the Magistrate coming in
with a little bow…for the Prosecution; for the Defense—the verdict; this book
is called obscene + flames sing, perhaps on Tower Hill, as they compound (?)
that mass of paper. Here the paper came apart. Heaven be praised! It was only
a laboratory. (1987 186)
Woolf ’s ominous vision of her own persecution reveals how difficult it is for the mod-
ern author, say Mary Carmichael, to tell this story. Consequently, the fragmented scene
“Chloe liked Olivia” is revived several times—first in the “flirtatious passage” (Marcus
1987 169), which subtly alludes to lesbian attraction:
I turned the page and read…I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no
men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the
figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure
me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe
liked Olivia…” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our
own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like
women. (AROO 70)
In the final part of her essay, Woolf, again playing on the word “like,” comes back to the
lesbianism: “The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their
completeness. I like their anonymity. I like—but I must not run on in this way. That
cupboard there—you say it holds clean table-napkins only; but what if Sir Archibald
Bodkin were concealed among them?” (AROO 96). The allusion must have been clear
to her audience, as the Director of Public Prosecutions opposed Hall’s novel.
If, as Marcus has convinced us, A Room of One’s Own “sings sisterhood in homo-
erotic tones, slyly seducing the woman reader and taunting patriarchal law just this
side of obscenity” (1987 163), then it is important to notice that all allusions to lesbian-
ism are accompanied by the ubiquitous censors. While Hall’s name does not appear
in Woolf ’s essay, all the patriarchal figures involved in the trial are identified and ridi-
culed: Biron eavesdrops behind a red curtain, Hicks is summoned to give the evidence,
and Bodkin hides in a cupboard. As Leslie Kathleen Hankins underlines, “Woolf ’s
Echo’s Voices 35
lesbian signatures, messages, and strategies were shaped by the brooding presence of
the censor” (182–83). In Woolf ’s essay, there is no “inversion,” yet there are passages
on William Shakespeare, whose androgynous mind allows for the gender and sexual
transgressions in his art. As Marcus has shown, Woolf through her subversive textual
strategies of “Sapphistry”—ellipses, pauses, broken sequences—successfully creates a
discourse of interruption and a women’s community. Importantly, this conspiracy em-
powers her readers to write the blank pages of Orlando with their own experience and
enables the rebirth of The Well in new literary shapes.
Writing in a different legal context, Irena Krzywicka was more explicit in her pref-
ace to Źródło. Characterizing her style of reviewing, Agata Zawiszewska notices that
in the 1930s, Krzywicka adopted “the role of popularizer and advocate” and used free
indirect speech to render the meaning and poetics of reviewed texts (155), creating her
own echoes. In the preface to Źródło, Krzywicka introduces Hall as an author of a “no-
toriously and provocatively lesbian novel,” yet asserts that it is not pornographic but on
the contrary “full of love poetry” (vi) and “reverential about religion” (x). However, she
treats Hall’s literary talent with reserve: “Hall is not a great writer. Yet, she is courageous
and conscientious, loyal and honest” (ix).
It is interesting that for Krzywicka, “inversion” emerges as an amalgam of iden-
tities, close to Jack Halberstam’s “tangle of cross-gender identification and sexual
preference that is not easily separated out or comfortably accounted for under the
heading of ‘lesbian’” (303). While she describes Stephen as “a new woman,” “with little
breasts and good brains” (vi), she also calls the protagonist “a boy, an unhappy boy”
(vii).5 Furthermore, from the very first words, Krzywicka restores the word “inversion”
lost in the translation:
Sexual inversion? I do not want to translate this word as “perversion”. Perversion

suggests pathology. Yet, it is rather a shift, a reversal of instinct. This reversed
instinct could be completely normal at its core. Nobody will call a left-handed
a pervert. Therefore, in accordance with the rules of contemporary knowledge,
it is high time people stopped to consider these…sexual “lefties” to be degener-
ates and understood how many fine full people are among them. (v)
In her preface, Krzywicka uses several strategies to oppose the prejudices faced by
LGBTQ people. She refers to scientific authorities (“contemporary knowledge”) and jux-
taposes “inversion” with more familiar left-handedness (“sexual lefties”). Moreover, she
questions social norms when she underlines that the ideal woman of the 1930s would
have been considered “a freak and born spinster” (vi) in the past. Krzywicka also chal-
lenges conventional notions. “Good writers are few, yet lesbians are numerous” (vii); “this
two women couple is a common marriage” (ix); and she speaks up for common “inverts”:
“What could a woman do, if she resembles Stephen, but could not tell people to their face
a well-known name?” (vii). It is also worth noting that rhetorically, Krzywicka starts with
the mistranslation of the word “inversion” as “perversion,” then experiments with neolo-
gisms such as “sexual lefties” and “majoritians,” and towards the end of her text repeats
the words “normal,” “human being(s)” and “love.” She concludes the preface in a moving
“love” manifesto and opposes the censorship of the novel:
Love, true love, is the most demanding test of morality on the heart. Where
there is no love, there are boredom, abomination, and dissolution, yet where
there is love all becomes pure and bright. This novel, confiscated in England
as “immoral” in the common meaning of this word, propagates the sanctity of
feeling and all noble impulses of the human heart. (xi)
When in May 1933 the text was published as a feature in “Wiadomości Literackie,”
it provoked a heated debate, resulting in Wanda Melcar’s polemical review and brutal
attacks from the conservative press. A case in point is the article by Adolf Nowaczyński,
a radical right-wing journalist and writer, entitled “Safona z Y.P.S.U.,” which appeared
in a weekly “Myśl Narodowa” [National Thought] in June. Nowaczyński uses polemics
to promote his anti-Semitic and homophobic views, attacking the echo of Hall’s reli-
gious vision and Krzywicka’s Jewish identity:
Not for this purpose, in hospitable and tolerant Poland hundreds and thou-
sands of Goldbergs [Krzywicka’s maiden name] were rescued from the foul
smelling abyss of the Ghetto, taught not to use the Yiddish jargon, taught to
use the Polish language,…so that colleague Krzywicka might write…her god-
less, trivial and anti-Catholic shmontzes. (Nowaczyński 399)
In September 1933, Bolesław Dudziński, a literary critic and activist, formulated the most
positive response to the novel, published in the papers of the Polish Socialist Party:
Describing courageously and with gravity, the matters, which are not trifles,
yet are usually kept under the hat, Miss Hull [sic], with fiery faith and almost
religious (Yes!) passion, defends the right to existence and happiness of crea-
tures similar to Stephen. She understands well their personal tragedies and is
aware that “the intellect and courage often go together” with what the major-
ity see as “physical perversion”. (4)
The role of Dudziński’s review cannot be overestimated, since the socialist press was
read by the intelligentsia and social leaders who may have educated working class com-
munities.
While reconstructing the history of The Well in Poland, I came across a poignant
epilogue to the story of Źródło in the internet archives of the British Embassy. In 2011,
Ric Todd, the Ambassador to Poland, and Clare Dimyon, an activist of PRIDE Soli-
darity, visited the National Library to see Źródło. Their homage was inspired by Joan
Nestle of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, who recalled the story of a Polish Jewess that
had survived the Holocaust: “I had a chance to read The Well of Loneliness that had
been translated into Polish before I was taken into the camps. I was a young girl at the
time, around 12 or 13 and one of the ways I survived in the camp was by remember-
ing that book. I wanted to live long enough to kiss a woman.” As Dimyon comments,
“this is what lesbian history often looks like…tiny fragments that escaped destruction,
the most tenuous of connections.…These two or three sentences and this book are the
only fragments we have of this woman and this astonishing story of survival” (“LGBT
Echo’s Voices 37
History Month”). Not often can we have such proof—paraphrasing Czesław Miłosz—
that literature does save people and nations. Not often can we hear the voice of a lesbian
Holocaust survivor. And yet, the questions are numerous, starting with the name of a
woman who gave that testimony.
In the context of the dramatic trajectory of The Well’s history, in which it helped
to sustain the survival of LGBTQ people, Hall, Woolf and Krzywicka embody
Woolf ’s ideal “custodians of literary culture” who manifest their “power to foster
survival and renewal” (de Gay 93). Modernism cherished this ability, enhancing
networks of solidarity and hospitality. In one of her last published works, Marcus
warns us that “the whole weight of the war culture is working against us. So the
bonds of scholars working together as ‘communal modernists’ studying ‘communal
modernisms’ are fragile and we must work to keep them alive” (Marcus 2013 179).
In Poland, the story of Źródło reminds us that while the Solidarity movement has
brought us freedom, the Polish word “gościnność” (hospitality), or rather as Paweł
Leszkowicz and Tomek Kitliński propose “gość-inność” (hospit-alterity), still asks
us to embrace otherness (279).
Notes
1. This peer reviewed article will appear in a longer form in “Echo Texts: Woolf, Krzywicka and The Well
of Loneliness,” Woolf Studies Annual 24 (2018), forthcoming. The work is reused by permission of Pace
University Press.
2. I use the following abbreviations for works frequently cited: The Well for The Well of Loneliness and
Źródło for its Polish translation, Źródło samotności.
3. In the years 1795–1918, when Poland was conquered by three partitioning powers (Austria, Prussia,
and Russia), homosexuality was criminalized. In interwar Poland, the judicial system must have united
the systems of former partitions. In 1932 it was decided that homosexuality would not be penalized in
the new Criminal Code. (Śmieja 2008 65).
4. Most probably it was the writer and Varsavianist Karolina Beylin.
5. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
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Craftsmanship
“Wood is a pleasant thing to think about”:
William Blake and the Hand-Printed
Books of the Hogarth Press
by Michael Black
I
n July 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf marked the beginning of the Hogarth
Press by hand-printing 150 copies of Two Stories, contributing one story each. An
announcement was issued in May, and printing was completed once Dora Car-
rington delivered her woodblocks. In October, Woolf began to devote her attention to
the eighteenth-century poet and visual artist William Blake in a TLS review of Edward
Thomas’ book, A Literary Pilgrim in England (1917). This simultaneous occurrence
is the starting point for a discussion of Two Stories as an avant-garde artefact which
drew inspiration from Blake’s woodblock illustrations. I will seek to demonstrate that
a Blakean resonance is an unexpected facet to Two Stories. In doing so, I am not only
looking back to 1917, but to Diane Gillespie’s introduction of Blake to Woolf studies in
The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (1988) and
her “Blake and Bloomsbury: Mental Warfare” (1990).
Experts describe the early twentieth century as “a period of extraordinary vi-
tality” in woodblock printmaking (Brett 5). This development appears in the use of
woodblock illustration by luxury printing presses such as Kelmscott and the Golden
Cockerel, whose designs were often highly ornate. To avoid saturating this piece with
images I have not reproduced examples but I have included relevant bibliographies
which provide illustrations in the works cited section. The woodblock illustrations of
Two Stories were made at the Omega Workshops led by Roger Fry between 1913 and
1919, whose directorship allowed artists to “avoid the preciosity of conventional fine
book production of this period” (Carey and Griffiths 49). By experimental, I mean the
freedoms obtained in textual illustration by turning away from the “preciosity” exhib-
ited by figures such as William Morris at the Kelmscott Press whose work was precious
precisely because it favoured an ornate finish over the rough and exciting touch of the
artists’ own hand. Comparison between woodblock illustrations made by artists at the
Cockerel or Kelmscott, and those working in Fry’s workshop, reveals that the striking
variety in style of the Omega Workshops was not matched by wood engravings made
at luxury printing houses. This suggests that artists at the Omega Workshop were not
burdened by ideas of house style. As Judith Collins notes, in the late nineteenth cen-
tury “artists and craftsmen demonstrated a new interest in the woodcut” (Greenwood
9). The Omega Workshops therefore represents an avant-garde aspect to the twentieth
century woodcut revival.
At the same time, Blake was being rediscovered by a modernist generation seeking
to understand Blake on their own terms. W. B. Yeats’ view of Blake as a mystic vision-
ary was a source of confusion to the younger generation of intellectual authors such as
Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, the latter arguing Blake’s “genius” was no saving grace
for “confusion of thought, emotion and vision” (Eliot 322). In her review, Woolf subtly
“Wood is a pleasant thing to think about” 41
addresses the difficulty Thomas faced by including Blake in a study of the relation be-
tween poets and their surroundings. As Woolf reminded her reader, a Blakean image
such as “the tree that was filled with angels” cannot actually be found in Peckham Rye
(E2 162). Unlike Eliot, Woolf engages with Blake’s eccentric “sensibility,” manifest in
his refusal to be bound by his environment. For Woolf, Thomas’ volume offers “a fine
opening into the mind of Blake” (E2 162).
Woolf ’s writing on Blake belongs to the trend whereby Blake’s work became in-
creasingly eminent, finding a major champion in Woolf ’s friend Geoffrey Keynes, who
worked on facsimile editions of Blake’s wood engravings designed for Doctor Robert
Thornton. As early as 1910 Keynes submitted a draft Blake bibliography to the scholar
John Sampson, whose criticisms delayed publication until 1921 (Keynes xiii–iv). On
John Linnell’s recommendation, Thornton commissioned Blake during the 1820s to il-
lustrate Ambrose Phillips’ imitations of Virgil’s Eclogues. It is likely that Blake scholars
agreed with Keynes that Thornton’s volume appealed to a modern reader solely due to
“Blake’s contribution to the 230 illustrations” (Blake 9). Between 1888 and 1937 six fac-
similes of Blake’s wood engravings were issued, either alongside Phillips’ poetry or on
their own, testament to Keynes’ perceptive enthusiasm (Bentley 630–31).
Blake’s work also gained attention from the visual art world. An exhibition of
Blake’s work ran until December 1913 at the Tate Gallery, reopening on the 6th Febru-
ary 1914 at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. The display included “Blake’s
journeyman work in engraving pastorals” (Manchester Guardian, 6 Feb. 1914, 11).
Despite the reviewer’s suggestion that this was “journeyman work,” based on another
artists’ designs, it is likely that the reviewer is describing impressions of Blake’s in-
tensely pastoral wood engravings. In 1886 Roger Fry had given a paper on Blake at
Kings College, Cambridge, and he would have brought this knowledge to the Omega
Workshops (Gillespie Blake and Bloomsbury 7). We can therefore see Woolf developing
her knowledge of Blake in 1917 and earlier evidence of this interest is provided by two
drawings made in 1904 (see Figures 1–4, below and on the next page).
Figure 1: Virginia Stephen. Drawing by Figure 2: William Blake. The First Book of Urizen
Blake. 1904. Permission of The Society of Plate 3. Permission of the British Museum.
Authors as the Literary Representative of the
Estate of Virginia Woolf (see also Gillespie,
Sisters’, 28).
Figure 3: William Blake. Study for Plate 11 Figure 4: Virginia Stephen, Death and Life
of Blair’s “Grave,” “Death’s Door” c. 1805. by Blake. 1904. Permission of the Society of
Permission of the Museum of Art, Carnegie Authors as the Literary Representative of the
Institute, Pittsburgh. Estate of Virginia Woolf (see also Gillespie,
Sisters’ 28).
The combination of these details indicates that key figures at the Hogarth Press
could have connected their involvement in woodblock illustration to the earlier example
of William Blake. As young artists and illustrators, Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington
knew Blake’s work and may have learned more at the Omega Workshop. Fresh from
completing her illustrations for the Hogarth Press, Carrington’s letters record a visit to
the British Museum to examine “Italian woodcuts” on 25 July 1917 (75). On this visit
Carrington might have consulted original blocks and early impressions of Blake’s wood
engravings, bought by the museum in 1863 (see British Museum Online Catalogue).
Woolf ’s milieu would not merely note a coincidence between their use of woodblock
illustration and these Blake facsimiles, because the link was bolstered by the recognition
that Blake’s work embodied the avant-gardism to which these artists aspired.
Despite Blake’s inspiring example, avant-garde, experimental designs proved dif-
ficult to market in the publishing business. Adrian Hunter has argued that Woolf ’s
short stories between 1917 and 1921 were unlikely to gather enormous sales but were
well suited to a “specially qualified audience” and “preserved art’s aura of discriminate
singularity in an age of mass mediation” (167). Unusual woodblock illustration is an-
other element in the Press’ pursuit of art for art’s sake. Blake was similarly reluctant to
adapt to the market, often relying on the intervention of friends and patrons to attain
commissions. Thornton, reluctant to include Blake’s work, insisted it be qualified as

follows: “The illustrations of this English Pastoral are by the famous Blake, the illustra-
tor of Young’s Night Thoughts, and Blair’s Grave; who designed and engraved them
himself…they display less of art than genius, and are much admired by some eminent
painters” (sic) (Blake 28). Thornton objects to the rude, unsophisticated technique
perceived in Blake, the merit of “genius” being to the detriment of “art.” Reducing the
idea of art to technical skill potentially favours the repetitive ornate designs privileged
by companies such as William Morris’s workshop, Morris & Co, and his Kelmscott
Press. The Kelmscott Chaucer represents the style dismissed by Carrington in favour
of rougher, more individual Blakean imagery.
Figure 5: William Blake. Wood Engraving Illustration to Thornton’s

Virgil. 1821 Permission of the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of
Glasgow.
One advantage of Blake and Carrington’s stylistic choices described above is that
they allowed their imagery to amount to an immediate visual paraphrase of the text. A
reader is likely to understand illustration and text in dialogue, a characteristic which
Carrington and Blake seek to utilise through mimesis. For example, Blake’s tranquil
sunset scene (figure 8.5) is a mirror of the hope for harmony expressed by Thenot’s
invitation to Colinet—“thy care with me forget”—(Blake 39).
Figure 6: Original page

from Two Stories (1917).
Courtesy of St Andrews
University Library special
collections. Classmark
r PR6045.O72T8
The relation of Carrington’s images to the text is also mimetic. She aimed to capture
details in the stories, such as the snail in the final words of Virginia Woolf ’s “The Mark
on the Wall” (Figure 6.6). In total, Carrington made four illustrations to Two Stories, a
frontispiece and tailpiece to each story.
Figure 7: (above) Dora Carrington’s tailpiece designs for “Three Jews” by Leonard Woolf.
(1917). Courtesy of St Andrews University Library special collections.
Figure 8: (left) Blake’s

design for Thornton.
1821. Permission of the
Hunterian Art Gallery,
University of Glasgow.
The block which is especially Blakean is the tailpiece to Leonard Woolf ’s “Three
Jews.” Its minute size, 34 by 81mm, and the draughtswomanship, recall Blake’s wood
engravings which measured approximately 35 by 84mm (Figure 6.8). Although
Carrington’s woodcuts were seldom large scale, these pieces were particularly small—
Virginia and Leonard damaged the blocks by taking a chisel to the edges to make
printing possible (Porter 15). Yet Blake’s wood engravings undoubtedly serve as a
masterful example of fine detail in small scale imagery. Carrington’s undated woodcut
Shepherd in Arcadia indicates she was versed in Blakean pastoral imagery (a reproduc-
tion can be consulted in Greenwood’s Omega Cuts (1998)). Her desires to achieve a fine
line and variety of tone are also Blakean. By contrast, Vanessa Bell made bolder wood-
block images in stark black and white to illustrate Kew Gardens (1919) and Monday or
Tuesday (1921). This effect is easier to achieve with woodcut, since wood engraving is
more suitable for very fine lines due to the engraving tools used by the artist allowing
for greater control. Woolf informed Carrington that Bell appreciated her subtle tonal-
ity: “Nessa says that the greyness of the wood cuts seems better to her than the extreme
blackness” (L2 173).
It is hard to discern a mimetic link to Woolf ’s text in Bell’s woodcut illustrations
to the short stories. Bell adopted an impressionistic approach, believing the relation
between text and image need not be immediately obvious. As Gillespie notes, Bell
“cautioned Woolf that the design might be somewhat remote from the text” (Sisters’
118). Her woodcuts belong to this discussion, for ten years later she borrowed a motif
directly from Blake (figures 6.9 and 6.10) when illustrating the limited edition of Kew
Gardens (1927) (Gillespie, Sisters’ 133–34).
Figure 9: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Page Figure 10: William Blake. “Introduction”
12 of Kew Gardens (London. Hogarth Press, 1927). Plate 4 from The Songs of Innocence and
C Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta of Experience (1794). Permission of the
Garnett (see also Gillespie, Sisters’, 133). British Museum.
Unlike Bell, Carrington did not borrow motifs directly from Blake but chose to
subtly emulate his work. As demonstrated by Greenwood’s selection, Carrington’s
woodcuts appropriate imagery from engravings by the eighteenth-century art-
ist Thomas Bewick (Greenwood 49–53). Yet Carrington’s pastoral work is evidently
“Blakean.” Due to the size and style Carrington employed, there is a noticeable visual
chime which an informed reader, such as Geoffrey Keynes, would perceive. Hunter’s
arguments about a “specially qualified audience” pertain to this point. It is true that
to identify this similarity, a reader would need to possess prior knowledge of Blake’s
wood engravings, but Hunter’s point concerns Woolf ’s conception of her audience, as
much as who actually read her work and their response. Further, there is no reason
not to presuppose and posit a general or common reader familiar with Blake. By his
centenary year, Blake was a national figure; representatives of the Blake society wrote
to the TLS about placing his memorial tombstone in Bunhill fields (TLS, 20 Jan. 1927,
44). Geoffrey Keynes’ name, Dr G. Keynes (figure 8.11) appears in the sales list for the
hand-printed edition of On Being Ill (1930), suggesting he was himself a dedicated
reader of Woolf ’s work, and therefore likely to have taken an interest in Woolf ’s first
independent publication at the Hogarth Press.
Figure 11: Hogarth

Press Order Books.
Archives of the
Hogarth Press,
University of
Reading Special
Collections. MS
2750 A/32/2.
Permission of
the University of
Reading Special
Collections.
The connection between the Hogarth Press’ and Blake’s wood engravings en-
riches our understanding of the advantage of controlling the means of publishing
one’s own texts. It allowed Woolf to pursue “discriminate singularity,” moulding her
short stories to suit their form, rather than the market expectations which dictated
conventional notions of what constitutes a beautiful book. As we approach Blake’s bi-
centenary, his fame has grown enormously, but he struggled in his lifetime to reach a
large audience. Like Woolf, Blake was situated outside the mass market, allowing him
to control his artistic production, developing the technique known as relief etching,
which facilitated the combination of word and image on one copper plate to fascinat-
ing effect. This was a breakthrough which “liberated him from the constraints and
expense of conventional illustrated book production” and allowed him not to rely on
mass sales (Phillips 103). An overarching affinity between Blake’s wood engravings
and the woodcuts by Bell and Carrington is that these artists were able, to borrow
from Fry’s Omega prospectus in 1913, to privilege the “directly expressive quality
of the artist’s handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction” (Fry, 199). In
Blake’s wood engravings and Carrington and Bell’s woodcuts, the artist’s hand and
sensibility can be discerned, strengthening the ability of the images to compete with
the text for attention.
Before ending I want briefly to note that Blake’s pastoral engravings represent a
response, via Phillips’ verse, to Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which means the illus-
trated text in question cannot be reduced to Ambrose Phillips’ unexciting verse. At first
glance this would seem not to inform us about Woolf ’s short stories, but the title of her
1917 October review for the TLS suggests a means of introducing the connection. Five
months after publishing Two Stories, Woolf decided to quote Virgil’s Georgics in her
review title, Flumina Amem Silvasque. Written during the civil war between Anthony
and Octavian, the Georgics are an allegorical set of instructions which in the words of
Cecil Day Lewis “sang in time of war the arts of peace” (Virgil, The Eclogues, 48). Woolf
takes her title directly from book II of the Georgics:
sin; has ne possim naturae accedere partis, / frigidus obstiterit circum prae-
cordia sanguis, rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, / flumina amem
silvasque inglorius.—But if the chill blood about my heart bar me from reach-
ing those realms of nature, let my delight be the country, and the running
streams amid the dells—may I love the waters and woods, though fame be lost
(Virgil, 149, Eclogues, 150).
The transient harmony glimpsed throughout the Eclogues and Georgics is mocked by
the narrator of The Mark on The Wall who “waking from a midnight dream of horror,”
needing to rediscover similar harmony:
hastily turns on the light, and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of draw-
ers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal
world, which is proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one
wants to be sure of…Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a
tree; and trees grow; and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years,
they grow without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by
the side of rivers—all things one likes to think about. (CSF 88).
The beneficial reciprocity between humankind and nature, central to Virgil’s vision of
peace, is parodied through the transposition of similar ideas into a domestic setting
in which they are foreign. This effect is intensified through the narrator’s insistence
that trees cannot be known, rendering hollow Virgil’s ideal reciprocity between gods,
nature and humankind, which is signalled by the lacuna in Woolf ’s ellipses. Blake’s im-
portance to Woolf as an exemplar of avant-garde literary illustration therefore reveals
more of her complex intellectual life in which Blake and Virgil are associated with one
another as pastoral artists. We must not overstate the extent to which Woolf viewed
her early publications for the Hogarth Press as Blakean. Yet our image of her Blake
becomes clearer through this tantalising glimpse of Woolf in October of 1917 writing
and looking back with the benefit of hindsight to the printing of Two Stories in July, and
making an association between Blake and Virgil, a thought stemming from the pastoral
element of her avant-garde collaboration with Dora Carrington.
Works Cited
“The Art of William Blake.” Anonymous review. Manchester Guardian, 6 Feb. 1914.11. ProQuest Historical
Newspapers: The Guardian and The Observer. Web. 25 Aug. 2017.
Bentley, G.E., Jr. Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Bibliography of the Golden Cockerel Press, 1921–1949: Three Volumes in One. 1975. San Francisco: Alan Wolfs
Fine Arts. Reprint.
Blake, William. The Illustrations of William Blake for Thornton’s Virgil with the First Eclogue and the imitation
by Ambrose Phillips. With an introduction by Geoffrey Keynes. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1937.
Brett, Simon. Out of the Wood: British Woodcuts & Wood Engravings 1890–1945. London: The British Coun-
cil, 1991.
British Museum Online Catalogue, 30 Aug. 2017. <http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collectiononline/
collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1361771&partId=1&searchText=William+Blake+wood+eng
raving&page=1>
Burne-Jones, Edward. Kelmscott Chaucer. London: Kelmscott Press, 1896.
Carey, Francis, and Griffiths, Anthony, Avant-Garde British Printmaking 1914–1960. London: British Mu-
seum Publications Ltd, 1990.
Carrington, Dora. Carrington Letters and Extracts from her Diaries. Ed and introduced by David Garnett.
London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
——. Shepherd in Arcadia. Private Collection. Undated Woodcut.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1932.
Fry, Roger. “Prospectus for the Omega Workshops” (1913), reproduced in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christo-
pher Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Gillespie, Diane Filby. “Blake and Bloomsbury: Mental Warfare.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920
33.1 (1990): 5–28.
——. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New York: Syracuse
Greenwood, Jeremy. Omega Cuts. with an introduction by Judith Collins. Woodbridge: The Woodlea Press,
1998.
Hunter, Adrian. “The ‘Custom’ of Fiction: Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Modernist Short Story.”
English 56.215 (2007), 147–169.
Keynes, Geoffrey. Bibliotheca Bibliographici: A Catalogue of the Library Formed by Geoffrey Keynes. London:
Trianon, 1964.
——. A Bibliography of William Blake. London: Grolier Club, 1921.

Porter, David H. The Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press: An Artful Fugue. London: Cecil Woolf, 2008.
Phillips, Michael. William Blake: Apprentice & Master. Oxford: Ashmoleon, 2014.
Peterson, William S. A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Thomas, Edward. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Virgil. The Eclogues: The Georgics, trans. C. Day. Lewis. With an introduction and notes by R.O.A.M. Lyne.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
——. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. Latin with an English Translation by H. Rushton Fairclough. London:
Heinemann Ltd., 1935.
Woolf, Leonard, and Virginia Woolf. Two Stories. London: The Hogarth Press, 1917.
Woolf, Virginia. Kew Gardens. London: The Hogarth Press, 1927.
——. Kew Gardens. London: The Hogarth Press, 1919.
——. Monday or Tuesday. London: The Hogarth Press, 1921.
——. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The Hogarth Press, 1985.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume II: 1912–1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press,
1987.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two 1912–1922. Ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann.
New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1978.
Wright, Thomas (Secretary of the Blake Society). “Blake’s Grave” (a letter to the editor). Times Literary Sup-
plement, 20 Jan. 44. 1927.
Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and “Short Things”
by Aimee Gasston
W
oolf ’s short fiction has rarely been viewed as a serious literary output, at
times considered an infrequently practiced hobby to which too much at-
tention shouldn’t be paid. Julia Briggs has observed that the short story
“remained for Woolf a place for experiment and an occasion for learning,” stating that
“the value was primarily for her, rather than her readers” (224), so casting the form as
a private rather than public pursuit. Yet the first Hogarth Press publication comprised
two works of short fiction: one by Virginia, one by Leonard. Under the simple, bold
title Two Stories, it was the short fiction genre that was chosen to launch a private enter-
prise onto the public stage. In fact, it could be said that the short story was what made
Woolf a modernist—it was in writing “The Mark on the Wall” that she found a suitably
experimental voice for her fast-roving meditations.1 Yet Woolf often viewed her short
fiction with an excess of diffidence, describing her stories as mere “short things” (L2
167). This chapter will dwell on the affinities between the Hogarth Press and Woolf ’s
stories, and begin to explore the free literary thinking they encouraged.
In her 1981 essay “The Short Story—The Long and the Short of It,” Mary Louise
Pratt explores the canonical sidelining of short fiction from several approaches. One ex-
planation she puts forward for the genre’s persistent under-evaluation is summed up in
the following statement: “The shorter a performance, the less the participants have at
stake in it, and the less is lost if it fails in any way” (97). On one level, this statement bears
resonance with the business decision which led to short fiction being the first product of
the Hogarth Press’s first mechanical embodiment, the handpress. Stories are of course
shorter than novels and do not require the sophisticated type arrangement that poetry
can demand. Consequently, their shortness confers a reduced financial investment.
Yet, with thirty-four densely-packed pages, the printing process was laborious and
the first handpress only allowed two pages of type to be set at a time. Two Stories also
included woodcuts by Dora Carrington and Woolf recorded the difficulty they had in
printing them (L2 159). The material form of the books and pamphlets produced by
the Press were a key concern. J. H. Willis describes how in the high summer of 1917,
the Woolfs “covered the book with a variety of wrappers including Japanese grass paper
and paper-backed cloth in a geometrical design” (17). The fiscal investment involved
in producing this first publication may have been small from a commercial point of
view, but not from that of the Woolfs whose finances had helped to delay the purchase
of the press for two years since the decision to found it was made.2 Beyond money, they
invested their labor and spirits, throwing everything in to the text’s production and
achieving ambitious standards for amateur printers.
While Virginia was pouring all her efforts into the press, she almost forgot her writ-
ing. Two Stories was distributed to its subscribers in mid-July 1917, but at the end of
May, Virginia had still not produced her contribution, explaining to Vanessa Bell that the
printing process was so absorbing that she hadn’t yet begun to write. We could read this
Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and “Short Things” 51
delay as demonstrative of a writer behaving lackadaisically, either disorganized or over-

confident. However, it seems more likely that Virginia was prioritizing her energies and
privileging investment in the skills she had practiced least and in which she was taking an
increasing pleasure and pride—as she wrote to Vanessa Bell: “there’s nothing in writing
compared with printing” (L2 156). And when she eventually did write the story, it was
with a breathless excitement which suffuses the pages. It was less of a “short thing” dashed
off than a pleasure that had been worth waiting for. In a later letter to Ethel Smyth, she
describes the ease with which the story came to her after wrestling with her novel: “I shall
never forget the day I wrote [it]—all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking
for months” (L4 231). Brevity is often aligned with intensity; an increased rather than
diminished investment.
While I have outlined the dangers of underestimating the value of short fiction to
Virginia’s career, there is still some merit in considering her early experimental stories
and the first incarnation of the Press itself as different types of hobby, or non-professional
pastimes, largely belonging to the private sphere. In his autobiography Beginning Again,
Leonard states that the Press remained always a “half-time occupation,” kept purpose-
fully small and within the territory of pastime rather than full-time employment (254).
As noted above, the short story is often viewed as a smaller-scale or private hobby—a
testing ground that contrasts with the professional and public sphere of the novel. The
story, argues Pratt, is seen always in relation to “the (‘full-fledged’) novel,” and used as a
“controlled lab for preliminary testing of devices before their release into the world at
large”; a humbler type of “craft” (110), rather than a highfalutin “art” (97). This is a place
where errors are forgiven, even expected, since it is essentially considered an amateur’s
form. Although the production of Two Stories was largely a success, there were typo-
graphical errors and the third woodcut was printed at an angle. If we conceive of the
short story as the home of the low-risk, private experiment, then the early days of the
Hogarth Press can be viewed in a similar light. Errors occurred but 94 buyers accounted
for the 134-copy print run—a hand-picked and sympathetic audience with friends and
relatives buying multiple copies at a time (Willis 17). Complementing Pratt’s view of the
form more widely, Dominic Head specifically describes Woolf ’s short fiction as having
“an incomplete […] ‘workshop’ quality” (108) about it, viewing the experimentalism of
the stories produced in and after 1917 as products not tested or finalized. There is also
something of the craft or hobby in Leonard’s description of Virginia’s short fiction in his
introduction to A Haunted House, where he states that whenever an idea for a story oc-
curred to her, she would “sketch it out in a very rough form and then […] put it away in a
drawer,” to later rescue and “rewrite it, sometimes a great many times” (AHH 7), suggest-
ing the stories as work which is never quite finished or presentable.
We see a clear and vigorous overlap between the first stages of the Hogarth Press
and the story in Woolf ’s hands, each embodying a quiet, understated craftsmanship
while also thriving on liberty and autonomy. If, as Ruth Hoberman argues, this process
“brought the acts of writing, selling, and reading closer together” (95), it also unshored
Woolf of oppressive obligation to the act of selling and to her readers. In “do[ing] what
[she] like[d]” and indulging her own aesthetic interests, she managed to succeed in
pleasing both the Hogarth Press account books (Two Stories turned a net profit of over
£7, Woolf 237) and the readers of the stories she produced. It is within this context of
artistic and commercial success that we might counter Pratt’s idea of short fiction as a
low-investment performance with Woolf ’s own words from “Modern Fiction” (1919):
“Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought
big than in what is commonly thought small” (CR 1, 150). Similarly, as Claire Batter-
shill and Helen Southworth have pointed out, a view of the Hogarth Press as coterie
or small-scale misses out “the publisher’s full range of production and distribution and
its significant international reach” (391). The enterprise excelled on the international
stage—as Mark Morrisson has observed, three Hogarth authors eventually won Nobel
Prizes in literature, while three won Nobel Prizes for peace (140).
In the essay “Reading in Bed,” Hermione Lee sketches a biography of women’s read-
ing, using terminology of relevance to our concerns here. She conceives of women’s
reading as “horizontal” against the canonical vertical; as the title of her essay suggests,
horizontal reading takes place away from designated areas such as the library and the
study and is instead undertaken as an illicit endeavor, in bed, after dark: “The history of
reading contains within it a conflict which recurs over and over again, in different formu-
lations, between what one might call vertical and horizontal reading: the first regulated,
supervised, orderly, canonical and productive, the second unlicensed, private, leisurely,
disreputable, promiscuous and anarchic” (46). Her formulation can be applied to the
related activities of publishing and writing. Both the Hogarth Press and Virginia’s short
fiction align more easily with Lee’s horizontal axis, even if the Woolfs’ idea of leisure
was both industrious and productive and their decision to publish what other publish-
ers would not eventually earned them a strong reputation. The writing produced for the
Press responded to its founding libertarian principles—as Adrian Hunter has noted, there
was “a direct relationship” between “the freedoms offered by the advent of the Hogarth
Press, in 1917” and “the emergence of [Woolf ’s] experimental, interrogative short stories”
(38). Both the stories and the Press were characterized by play: but play as an anarchic
response to traditions and calcified thought processes, and the aesthetic risks each took
were substantial. The Hogarth Press publication list bears out a puckish dedication to the
ludic. This is evident from Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude,” which the author worried
would be received as “a New Primer for Infant Readers” (169), such was its unashamed
ingenuousness in depicting a juvenile world replete with running, headless ducks and
children impersonating animals, to Hope Mirrlees’ “Paris” where words palpably cavort
and gambol on the page. The publications’ cover art also typifies this engagement with
exuberance. The cover of “Paris” resembles a harlequin’s costume; T. S. Eliot’s “Poems”
carries explosive ink-splats; and Vanessa Bell’s designs for Kew Gardens and To the Light-
house evoke otherworldly smoke plumes and fireworks. This was no stuffy commitment
to the coldly intellectual—it was a determined resolution to promote and foster experi-
mental art in all its unlicensed anarchy.
I will now move to a more detailed consideration of that first story of Virginia’s, “The
Mark on the Wall,” that made up one half of the Hogarth’s inaugural publication. As
we have seen, that story was the product of a writer wholly absorbed in the mate-
rial processes of book production, thinking deeply about what a book is, and what it
does. The book is not, though, described in that story as a wholly positive force. While
the narrator speaks of “stretch[ing her] hand out at once in self-protection” (CSF 79)
against self-aggrandizement, she also casually exclaims in relation to barrows on the
South Downs and the issue of their being tombs or camps: “There must be a book
about it” (CSF 80). Such a book may well be involved in the type of classification and
taxonomizing which the retired Colonel of the story falls prey to, favoring the camp in
the pamphlet he reads aloud to the local society; one version of history over another.
Corollary assertions made by the Colonel’s pamphlet are the preference for one truth
over many, and for an anthropocentric history which may miss out so much with its
singular point of view. This is a similar approach taken by another book which features
prominently in the story: Whitaker’s Almanack and its “Table of Precedency” which
“sets the standard” (CSF 80), a rigid standard which oppresses its readers; docile read-
ers who accept what they are told and believe in facts that are beyond discussion or
challenge. Woolf ’s first experimental story reveals much about the decisions she had
taken about the type of books she would produce. Her books would not promote an
idea of a falsely ordered world in which the subject presides. Instead, they would work
to reduce and diminish the secure reign of the ego, to encourage her readers to probe
and interrogate what they see beyond and within the book. Her readers would learn
to “think quietly, calmly, spaciously” and “slip easily from one thing to another” (CSF
79), enjoying the limber liberty of a world where “nothing is proved, nothing is known”
(CSF 81), rather than feeling threatened by it.
If Woolf ’s stories were “short things,” they were ones which appropriately medi-
tated on both shortness and thingliness, interrogating both transience and material
obduracy in a self-reflexive pose. While the story gestated, Woolf was working with
the machinery of literature, immersed in ideas of the book as object, the physicality
of objects and the relation of the subject to an object world. We can first detect an
intimation of the Press inflecting Woolf ’s thinking at the story’s beginning, where the
sighting of “a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches
above the mantelpiece” (CSF 77) invokes imagery of punctuation on blank sheets. The
story is all about the act of reading, of reading the world in front of one through phe-
nomenological interpretation. It leads the reader through a process of reading that is
so active that it borders on the act of creation, introducing a microcosm so diverse that
it incorporates philosophy alongside tube trains, turnips, hand organs and coalscuttles.
This story is a meditation on what it is to be a subject among objects, of the haphazard-
ness of the human relationship to the physical contingency of the world. The narrator
notes “how very little control of our possessions we have,” and “opals and emeralds”
are imagined to “lie about the roots of turnips” (CSF 78). This delineates a democratic
playing field where objects may well have the upper hand, as perhaps Virginia felt while
typesetting for the Press and “muddling her n’s and h’s” (Spalding 93).
The world of “The Mark on the Wall” is riotous, disordered, and unruly, offering
little comfort to its reading subjects, who cannot forget that they are holding a book
in their hands, even if that book is as unassuming as a soft-leaved pamphlet. As Tz-
vetan Todorov observed: “The public prefers novels to tales, long books to short texts
[…] because there is no time, in reading a short work, to forget it is only ‘literature’
and not ‘life’’’ (107). There is no room for escapism in Woolf ’s story; narrated from
the armchair, its setting may well mirror the reader’s environment. Further, the text’s
exploratory interrogation forefronts the act of reading in a way that brings the reader
back always to the book. The story’s imaginative exploration of the physical world is
intensive and discombobulating, dizzying in its cataloguing of growth and loss:
what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just
count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems
always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would
nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools. Then there were the
bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the
bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too (CSF 78).
In this story, to borrow the words of Susan Stewart, “the book’s minute description of
the material world is a device which tends to draw attention to the book as object” (29),
pointing even to the tools which fashioned it, the music which sounds through it, the
jewels which might inspire later stories, such as Woolf ’s own “Solid Objects” (1920). As
much of a hymn to things as that later story, here “The Mark on the Wall” speaks to the
power of the material world, “something definite, something real” (CSF 82). Material-
ity resonates in contrast to the fleetingness of individual mortal lives or the false bluster
of sturdy tradition built up as if it were a satisfactory antidote to the indefatigable cycle
of “waste and repair” (CSF 78) which informs the rhythms of our world.
In “The Mark on the Wall,” it is not only the story but also human life which is a
mere short thing. The “rapidity of life,” comparable to “being blown through the Tube
at fifty miles an hour” (CSF 78), is both explored and embodied in this story. Ali Smith,
writing not of Woolf but her sometime-ally, Katherine Mansfield, observes that her sto-
ries “celebrate life in face of the fact that neither the story nor life lasts” (xxiii). Woolf ’s
first story for the Hogarth Press works similarly. It is a short thing which examines and
lauds other small things, all that jostles and builds to make up lived experience, while
casting suspicion on grand ideas which might function as short-cuts to thinking. These
early philosophical explorations, which extend throughout Woolf ’s later work, were
first transcribed in fiction in “The Mark on the Wall,” a story produced by the Hogarth
Press in more than a strictly physical sense. In his recent work The Death of the Book,
John Lurz argues that Woolf ’s concern with the process of a book’s transmission “con-
tributes directly to [her novels’] larger projects of understanding the place of a mortal
readerly subject in the world of inanimate objects” (7). These large projects, which
continued throughout Woolf ’s literary career, have their roots in her first experimental
“short thing” and its indigenous habitat, the Hogarth Press.
Notes
1. As Laura Marcus notes, in Two Stories the “work of the amateur printer and the experimental writer
coalesce” in libertarian unity (274).
2. In January 1915, Virginia was writing to Margaret Llewelyn Davies: “Have you heard about our Print-
ing Press? We’re both so excited that we can talk and think of nothing else” (L2 59). Aside from fiscal
scarcity, another reason put forward for the delay in the Press being founded was Virginia’s health, and
the interruption of war.
Works Cited
Battershill, Claire, and Helen Southworth. “Woolf, The Hogarth Press, and Global Print Culture.” A Compan-
ion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jessica Berman. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 390–409.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Penguin, 2006.
Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1992.
Hoberman, Ruth. “Collecting, Shopping, and Reading: Virginia Woolf ’s Stories About Objects.” Trespassing
Boundaries: Virginia Woolf ’s Short Fiction. Ed. Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 81–98.
Hunter, Adrian. “The Short Story and the Difficulty of Modernism.” Modernism, Postmodernism, and the
Short Story in English. Ed. Jorge Sacido. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. 29–46.
Lee, Hermione. “Reading in Bed.” Body Parts: Essays on Life-writing. London: Chatto and Windus, 2005.
45–63.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Volume 2, 1918–1919. Ed. Vincent
O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Marcus, Laura. “Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor: The Hogarth Press.” The Edinburgh Companion to
Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 263–79.
Morrisson, Mark S. “Publishing.” A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Ed. David Bradshaw and
Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 133–42.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles
E. May. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994. 91–113.
Smith, Ali. “Introduction.” The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin, 2007. v–xxx.
Spalding, Frances. Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2014.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1993.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977.
Willis, J. H., Jr. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers—The Hogarth Press 1917–41. Charlottesville and
London: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
“Scarcely a Brick to Be Seen”: Breaking Boundaries
in “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”
by Karina Jakubowicz
I
n a diary entry written in 1920, Virginia Woolf imagines merging elements from
her stories “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” in order to create a style
that could apply to novels as well as short stories:
Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in An Unwritten novel—

only not for 10 pages but for 200 or so—doesn”t that give the looseness and
lightness that I want: doesn’t that get closer & yet keep form and speed, &
enclose everything, everything? […] I figure that the approach will be entirely
different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular,
but the heart, passion, humour, everything, as bright as fire in the mist. […]
conceive mark on the wall, K[ew]. G[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands
and dancing in unity (D2 13–14).
When considering the combination of “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”
Woolf invokes the image of a structure without scaffolding or barriers. She associates
her chosen style with “looseness, lightness,” while the images of “crepuscular” darkness
and “mist” suggest an indeterminate environment with imperceptible limits. Notably,
she describes the need to enclose her subject without restricting it, to create a meta-
phorical wall with “scarcely a brick to be seen.” This essay examines how “The Mark on
the Wall” and “Kew Gardens” depict this notion of a surrounding, yet porous bound-
ary, and asks how this concept came to be reflected in the production and presentation
of the texts themselves.
“The Mark on the Wall” was the first work that Woolf published with the newly
established Hogarth Press. Rather than featuring a traditional plot, it constitutes a
meditation on the perception of objects and the nature of knowledge. At the start of the
text the narrator notices a mark on the wall above the mantelpiece and questions what
it might be. They imagine it is “a nail, a rose leaf, [or] a crack in the wood,” (82) and as
they weigh up each likelihood their mind wanders through various thoughts and ideas.
Finally, after having considered a great number of possibilities and their implications,
they realize that the mark is a snail. The structure of the work is formed around a single
question and answer; the narrator poses a problem at the beginning of the text and by
the end it is apparently resolved. Yet what happens in-between undermines the validity
of answers, and even of reality itself. The narrator muses that “nothing is proved, noth-
ing is known” (81) and that everyday objects and rituals “were not entirely real, were
indeed half phantoms” (80). The “inaccuracy of thought” (78) means that the mark will
be understood (or misunderstood) according to who sees it and from what perspective.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the physical environment is continually changing.
As Woolf explains, materials are malleable, they shift meaning over time and engage
“Scarcely a Brick to Be Seen” 57
in a process of “perpetual waste and repair” (78). As a result, supposedly solid objects
(such as the mark and the wall) provoke doubt instead of providing certainty.
Walls typically represent definition, sturdiness and confinement, yet the wall in
Woolf ’s story is an object of fascination and limitless possibility. As the mark shifts
meanings in the narrator’s mind so the wall changes, inspiring thoughts of the room’s
old interior, a display of roses, and the South Downs. The wall performs a similar func-
tion to a page in a book, with the narrator interpreting the mark as a reader examines
the meanings of a word. Jennifer Sorensen likens the wall to a page in her materialist
reading of the text. She explains that Woolf ’s references to book-binding tools, wood,
trees and newspapers encourage “the reader to think about the book-as-object and to
pay attention to the book as a sequence of marks made on walls of pages” (203). The
relationship between the mark and the written word can be taken further by consider-
ing the first and last objects that the mark is thought to be: a nail and snail. While the
narrator is faced with the visual similarity of the two items, the reader is given two
words that are only one letter apart. The progression from nail to snail demonstrates
how a slight alteration in type can entirely change a word’s significance and inspire dif-
ferent meanings.
Since the story is focused on visual marks, it is fitting that it was one of the first
works by Woolf to have been illustrated. Both word and image combine in the pub-
lished text to create two types of markings that can be read in different ways. Dora
Carrington’s first illustration for the piece features a woman sitting in front of a fire-
place. The fire casts a large shadow onto the wall, and the attention of the woman is
focused on a part of the shadow that is beyond the illustration’s frame. Carrington’s
image is reminiscent of Plato’s analogy of the cave, in which Plato argues that the per-
ceived world is akin to shadows projected onto a wall. Such a reference would have
been apt considering Woolf ’s emphasis on the fallibility of perception. It also chimes
with her description of “our learned men” as the “descendants of witches and hermits
who crouched in caves […] writing down the language of the stars” (79). In this ac-
count, even the most educated people are no more than primitive beings engaged in
an impossible task. Carrington’s image thus reinforces Woolf ’s representation of the
wall as a sounding board for the mind, and as a space that is used to make sense of the
incomprehensible.
Carrington’s second illustration features the snail. The snail is only mentioned
briefly at the end of the story, and Woolf does not describe it in detail or explain how
it got there. This is in keeping with the narrator’s conviction that knowledge is flawed;
if “nothing is proved [or] known” (81) then the mark has no real identity and the snail
is unimportant. In his article on the story, Marc D. Cyr suggests that the snail is in-
troduced to create more questions rather than answers. He explains that “the mark
on the wall might be a snail, but […] it might not, and this doubt breaks the expected
sequence” (204). The result is a conclusion that “offers not closure, but [an] opening”
(204). Carrington’s decision to illustrate the snail demonstrates its role at the heart of
the story, but it can also be seen as an attempt to finally fix the mark in a definite form.
Her image appears to provide the closure that the story does not, showing the snail up
close and clearly, leaving no doubt as to the mark’s identity. Carrington had to fill in
a number of gaps left by the text, and decide whether to depict the snail in or out of
its shell, dead or alive, moving or still. She chose to show it as though it were stretch-
ing forward, with its body filling the entire frame. Rather than depicting it as an inert
object, Carrington gave the snail an agency and autonomy that is in keeping with the
effect that it has on the narrator.
That the mark on the wall is a snail is fitting on several levels. In the first instance,
it reflects on the representation of the wall as both a barrier and gateway. The snail is
an aspect of the world outdoors that has found its way indoors. Furthermore, the snail
is half-contained by its shell, and so it exists within a boundary that it also eludes. Ac-
cording to Gaston Bachelard, shells embody the “dialectics of what is hidden and what
is manifest” (112). They inspire “fear and curiosity,” since “we want to see and yet we
are afraid to see. This is the perceptible threshold of all knowledge” (111). Bachelard’s
reference to the threshold of knowledge perfectly encapsulates Woolf ’s presentation of
the mark as both seen and unseen. The snail’s shell means that even when the mark is
supposedly identified, it is still partly concealed from view.
The fact that the snail is a living being also elaborates on Woolf ’s presentation of
objects as active entities over which “we have very little control” (78). The suitability
of the snail is further emphasised when compared to the nail that the narrator first
imagines. Nails pin down and fix, while a snail moves, evolves and grows. While a
nail is something that we act upon, the snail acts of its own accord. The key difference
between the nail and snail is similar to the perceived difference between a wall and a
page—one limits and secures, the other is imaginative and expressive. Considering
this, it is fitting that the mark itself should be capable of making marks. Snails leave
trails in their wake, and this mirrors the way that the mark leaves a series of impres-
sions in the narrator’s mind.
Like “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” also features a snail, but there are no
walls to speak of in this story. In fact, Woolf ’s narrative style suggests the illusion of
boundaries. Like the blue butterflies that make “zig-zag flights from bed to bed,” the
narrative passes from one subject to another in a seemingly random pattern. Notably,
the narrative moves between the external space of the garden and the internal thoughts
of the characters. As a result, Woolf ’s narrative style succeeds in making the inner con-
sciousness of the characters a part of the wider, physical landscape. As Edward Bishop
argues:
Woolf displays what would become the defining characteristic of the later
prose: a flexible narrative style which allows her to move without obvious
transition from an external point of view to one within the mind of the char-
acter, and back again, thus fusing the physical setting with the perceiving
consciousness. (272)
By passing fluidly between inner and outer spheres, Woolf erodes the spatial dis-
tinctions that exist in traditional narratives, creating an overall environment where
thoughts and setting are “fused” together.
Whereas “The Mark on the Wall” consists of one physical boundary that is trans-
formed by the thoughts of the narrator, in “Kew Gardens” there are a series of distinct
spaces that the narrator passes between. The limits within the garden serve as perme-
able boundaries that hold, but do not contain. These are areas that are demarcated, that
appear to be distinct from one another, and yet are passable. The garden itself acts as
the limits of this environment, and within this broader space there are a number of
smaller containing spaces, spiralling or nesting within one another. Kew is divided into
“inner” and “outer” dimensions, the nature of which is changed or inverted depending
on Woolf ’s use of perspective. The most obvious example of this is the flowerbed, which
(like the garden itself) is delineated from its surrounding environment. The flowerbed
reflects on the larger space of the garden itself, acting as a garden within a garden. It
has inhabitants, and these (much like their human counterparts) are shown moving,
thinking and problem solving. Woolf ’s representation of the flowerbed is momentarily
isolated through the limited perspective of the snail, and then opened back up again
to include the larger “picture” of the narrative. The internal sphere of the flowerbed is
supplanted by the external gardens, which then become internal in relation to the sur-
rounding city. The process of establishing and then inverting spatial dynamics results
in a narrative that both highlights the presence of inner and outer spheres, while also
imbuing them with a certain permeability.
The structure of “Kew Gardens” is best explained by the image of boxes that Woolf
uses in the final paragraph of the text:
There was no silence; all the time motor omnibuses were turning their wheels
and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel
turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on top of which
the voices cried aloud and the petals and myriads of flowers flashed their co-
lours into the air (89).
Woolf ’s imagery suggests an extended, even infinite series of enclosed spaces. The nest-
ed Chinese boxes and the gears in the gear box combine to describe the city as a series
of layers and containers. The image of Chinese boxes is particularly relevant to the way
that Woolf “stacks” or “nests” each frame of reference within another. The Chinese box
can be read as an evolution of the dynamic wall in her earlier story. It demarcates space
but can be opened, and as each layer is opened another box is found within. With every
layer, internal and external dimensions are inverted, and the dynamics of containing
and revealing are repeated.
The narrative style of “Kew Gardens” is mirrored in the physical presentation of
the text. The binding was produced by Roger Fry in his Omega workshops, and features
a mottled, marbled design that was painted by hand (Rhein 15). The colours of the
paint reflect the flowers in the work, which are said to be red, blue and yellow, and mir-
ror the moment when they “flash” their colours into the air. Most interesting of all are
Vanessa Bell’s illustrations, which create a strong visual counterpart to the text itself.
They highlight the amorphous imagery in the story, create a sense of movement, and
depict indeterminate boundaries within the ultimate boundaries of the book. Instead
of privileging a particular aspect of the composition, the woodcuts blend the fore-
ground and background into one continuous image. This is evident in the first image
of two women, which Bell based on her painting “A Conversation,” completed in 1916.
The original painting featured three women talking by an open window, their faces
clustered within the frame of the curtains on either side of them. The faces and the
flowers provide an image within an image, and combine to create a point of focus in the
composition. In the woodcut, the figures merge into one another, and similarly blend
into the landscape behind. The figures visually link with the flowers above their heads,
and it becomes difficult to determine where the women end and the flowers begin. As
Sorensen writes, “Bell’s image frames and prefaces Woolf ’s text and underscores the
complex navigation of the space between the human and the natural, the people and
the flowers” (215). Just as Woolf interlinks character with setting, Bell refrains from
privileging one aspect of a scene over another.
The other image that Bell made for the text is of a caterpillar and a small butterfly
or moth, positioned as though they were in the undergrowth. Bell references the insect
world in this illustration, and it acts as a counterpart to the human sphere as represent-
ed by her other image. It is worth noting however, that caterpillars do not feature in the
text, and the butterflies in the story fly above the flowerbed, not inside it. It is possible
that her choice of insect stems from the concept of metamorphosis. This hypothesis
is supported by the illustration, where the butterfly stands next to the caterpillar with
its antennae merging into a part of the caterpillar’s back. Much like the two women in
the first illustration, one being becomes the other. Whether or not this was intentional,
the result evokes the narrative’s seamless movement from one subject to another and
implies that each entity is a part of one cohesive whole.
Bell’s artistic interpretation of “Kew Gardens” continued when she was asked to
illustrate a new edition of the text, published in 1927. In this case she goes even further
in rejecting the boundaries between individual shapes, going as far as to include the
entire text in her artistic scheme. This edition of “Kew Gardens” reads as a text-image,
with the illustrations forming an integral part of the text. In one case the entire pas-
sage is penetrated by the stem of a flower, which appears to grow between the words
and divide them into two columns. This coactivity between reading and viewing enters
into the fluidity of Woolf ’s narrative. Even as the illustrations gesture to the concept
of barriers by providing borders for each page, they also experiment with the idea of
breaking barriers and causing them to deviate. This presentation of “Kew Gardens”
draws on the very premise of the work, that of the interaction between interior and
exterior, public and private.
When she published Jacob’s Room in 1922, Woolf succeeded in writing a novel that
combined elements of “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens.” The text features
the organic style that emerges in these two stories, and thus has the “looseness and
lightness” she initially wanted. As in “Kew Gardens” where the garden provides the
context for the narrative, Jacob’s life serves as the frame of reference that unites the
contents of the work; it is the “room” that provides a metaphorical environment rather
than a barrier. When Woolf expressed her desire to “enclose everything” with “scarcely
a brick to be seen,” she was articulating the same ideas that would later appear in “Mod-
ern Fiction,” where she claims that life should be represented as a “semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (9). She was
fortunate that her early publications with the Hogarth Press gave a visual dimension
to her ideas, and reinforced the aesthetic that would come to define her literary style.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Bishop, Edward. “Pursuing “It” Through Kew Gardens.” Studies in Short Fiction (Summer 1982): 269–75.
Cyr, Marc D. “A Conflict of Closure in Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Mark on the Wall.’” Studies in Short Fiction
(Spring 1996): 197–205.
Rhein, Donna E. The Handprinted Books of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1917–1932.
Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Sorensen, Jennifer. Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture. London: Rout-
ledge, 2017.
Woolf, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Two Stories. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1917.
Woolf, Virginia. Kew Gardens. London: Hogarth Press, 1919.
——. Kew Gardens. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, 1920–1924, ed. by Anne Oliver Bell. London, The Hogarth Press,
1978.
——. “Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick.
London: Harcourt Brace, 1985.
——. “Modern Fiction.” Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Virginia Woolf’s Arts and Craftsmanship
by Alexandra Peat
V
irginia Woolf begins her 1937 radio broadcast, “Craftsmanship”1 with a curi-
ous sleight of hand, seeming to reject the title which was allotted to her by the
BBC even as she draws attention to it. “There is something,” she says, “incon-
gruous, unfitting, about the term ‘craftsmanship’ when applied to words” (CDML 137).
Woolf proposes changing the title to “A Ramble round Words, perhaps” (137) but in
this she equivocates, so ultimately the talk is both rendered title-less, or, in her words
“decapitated,” and haunted by multiple possible titles. Woolf thus begins the essay by
strategically engaging with and distancing herself from “craftsmanship” in ways that set
the stage for and shape a playful argument about the usefulness of language.
In an essay about the associative, suggestive, and communal function of language,
“craftsmanship” is the first word of which Woolf considers the etymology and sig-
nificance. With reference to the English Dictionary, she tells us that “craft” has two
meanings: “in the first place making useful objects out of solid matter—for example,
a pot, a chair, a table.” And “in the second place…cajolery, cunning, deceit” (137).
While Woolf seems to dismiss “craftsmanship” as irrelevant to her argument about
words, noting with ambiguous irony that “words never make anything that is useful;
and words are the only things that tell the truth,” she then uses them to conjure up two
strikingly visceral images—words “mate” to become a “monster fit for a glass cage” and
words become a headless hen running “round in a circle til it drops dead” (137). It is
thus curiously fitting to Woolf ’s argument about language that craft evokes both the
material (“a pot, a chair, a table”) and the immaterial (“cajolery, cunning, deceit”). De-
spite seeming to dismiss “craftsmanship” as insignificant to her argument about words,
Woolf considers the word judiciously and playfully (or we might even say, “craftily”).
Craft, in both noun and verb forms, becomes a nexus point for an entanglement of
ideas around making, creating, and producing.
In his 1968 book, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye asserts that
craftsmanship is “a word to start an argument with” (341). It was certainly a debated
and controversial term at the time that Woolf wrote her essay, as it remains today. Craft
could be the authentically human “other” to industrial modernity or something automo-
tive and mechanical; it could be a skilled profession or work done by an amateur with
a sense of vocation; it could be the opposite to art or elevated to an art form; it could
designate the material or it could carry a spiritual resonance. It was, as Glenn Adamson
has shown in his writings on the topic, a particular problem of modernity, “an issue that
was widely considered to be worth worrying about” (5). Adamson’s work refutes the re-
ceived narrative that craft was in decline after the industrial revolution and then rescued
by the Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth century, suggesting instead that
craft is an invention of modernity, an idea that took shape in response to the pressures
of industrialization and professionalization. By the mid-1930s, he suggests, the funda-
mentally nostalgic concepts of craft predominant in the Arts and Crafts movement were
Virginia Woolf ’s Arts and Craftsmanship 63
themselves coming under pressure, as on the one hand, craft was co-opted by fascist,
anti-women, or imperial ideology and, on the other hand, more positive ideas about the
possibilities of combining craft and modern technology emerged.
Woolf would have been aware of contemporary debates around craft through her
work with the Hogarth Press, her connection with the Omega Workshop (itself un-
easily influenced by Morris and Arts and Crafts), and her friendship with Roger Fry.
Important also is the timing of the essay “Craftsmanship,” written as she was worrying
about the critical reception of The Years, finishing up Three Guineas, and considering
her biography of Roger Fry. The Years and Three Guineas both emerged from The Par-
giters—her imagined essay-novel about professions. As Amber Regis suggests, Woolf
made increasing and self-conscious use of craft metaphors as she wrote her life of Rog-
er Fry, for example, describing the book in a letter to Ethyl Smyth as “a piece of cabinet
making” (L6 381). Regis productively places Woolf ’s ambivalent adoption of the craft
metaphor in the context of Fry’s own inconsistent attitude towards craft. As Evelyn
Chan similarly notes, Fry at times used “craft” to dismiss “unimaginative, mechanical
art” (Chan 81), but he also saw something redemptive in artistic craft, advocating in his
essay “Art and Socialism” that if art could be “purified…by a prolonged contact with
the crafts, society would gain a new confidence in its collective artistic judgment” (Fry
193). Fry’s ambivalence suggests craft’s uneasy connection to larger questions of artistic
production in modernity. For Woolf, the troublesome word “craft” leads to, associates
with, and intersects with concepts central to her life and work, including art, imagina-
tion, inspiration, production, process, amateurism, professionalism, education, skill,
and vocation. There are also significant gender associations with the word “craft,” not
only in terms of ways in which work and art are gendered (and the value judgments
implied therein) but also because it tends to be women, and perhaps foxes, who are
described as “crafty.”
The first place to which we might turn when thinking about Woolf ’s engagement
with craft ideology and practice is her work in the Hogarth Press, which has been de-
scribed by Laura Marcus as “artisanal” labor (278), by John Mepham as a “small craft
production organised on a workshop basis” (21), and by Tony Bradshaw as a sign of
Woolf ’s “enthusiasm for the craft” (280). While I am most interested in Woolf ’s use of
craft as a metaphor for writing, it’s worth noting that her identification with craft even
in what might seem the “craftiest” of arenas was itself complicated and ambivalent. The
Hogarth Press was at first, as Leonard Woolf describes it in Beginning Again, a “man-
ual occupation” (233): according to a publicity flyer for the Hogarth Press the Woolfs
aimed to do “the whole process of printing and production…by ourselves,” and be-
tween 1917 and 1932, they hand-printed 34 texts (Leonard and Virginia Woolf). This
hands-on approach was intrinsically connected to a valorization of craft, and Laura
Marcus notes the significance of hand-printing as “an activity in which the embodied
work of the compositor becomes part of the printing process, thus mitigating against
the idea that printing is pure mechanism” (265). Yet, it is also true, as Helen South-
worth and others have noted, that the Woolfs resisted establishing the Press purely
as a craft printing workshop in the mold of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press or C. R.
Ashbee’s “book beautiful” movement (Southworth 4). They did use commercial print-
ers and they were not nostalgic for a lost tradition of book making. Leonard Woolf said
that while they “wanted [their] books to ‘look nice,’” they were more interested in “the
immaterial inside of a book, what the author had to say and how he said it” (Downhill
80). Furthermore, as Claire Battershill notes, the early Hogarth Press books weren’t
particularly well-crafted items. Battershill describes their aesthetic as “scruffy,” saying
of Monday or Tuesday that “it was so unevenly printed. You could hardly read Woolf ’s
stories through the thick black ink of woodcut illustrations” (Battershill et al 31). In-
deed, Vanessa Bell was apparently so angry about the poor quality of the woodcuts for
Kew Gardens that she expressed doubts as to the value of the press (Mepham 54). All
of this suggests an ambivalent and uneven engagement with and distancing from craft
practices and ideologies which celebrate craft as a sacred art. Elizabeth Willson Gordon
sums up the press’s ambiguous adoption of the positions of “commercial/artistic, pro-
fessional/amateur, traditional/avant garde, elitist/democratic” as a “sophisticated and
productive” negotiation as well as a useful marketing strategy (108).
This strategic use of “craft” suggests Woolf ’s nuanced awareness of what it means
to make a book (in multiple senses of the word). Woolf ’s “craft work” at the Hogarth
Press is talked about in at least three distinct and sometimes contradictory ways. In
one vein, the hands-on “making” is a therapeutic, physical hobby which allows her a
break from the cognitive and emotional labor of writing (Lee 362; Selborne 96). Or,
the craft of printing creates a liberating space within which she could write and pub-
lish what she wanted, free from the pressures of the marketplace (Chan 84). Finally,
in another vein, the physical act of making books can be seen as intimately related to
the imaginative act of making books. For example, Jennifer Sorenson and Laura Mar-
cus argue that Woolf ’s experience working as a printer and a publisher influenced
her experimental fiction, by shaping her awareness of “the structure of writing,” in-
cluding such things as “the shapes words form on the page,” the use of white space,
and “the ways in which the reader’s experience is shaped by the structure of printed
words” (Marcus 270). All these different constructions intersect with Woolf ’s own
ideas about the art, practice, and profession of writing. They also lead us back to the
question: is writing a craft?
In her 2007 essay, “Fail Better,”2 Zadie Smith imagines a writer called Clive who desires,
and thus trains hard, to write the perfect novel. “If writing is a craft,” we read “he has all
the skills, every tool.” However, training and tools alone do not a great writer make, and
so, for Smith, “writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship.” She says, “a skilled cab-
inet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but
skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There
is a rogue element somewhere—for convenience’s sake we’ll call it the self, although,
in less metaphysically challenged times, the ‘soul’ would have done just as well.” This
ineffable “rogue element,” the self, the soul or perhaps inspiration elevates writing from
mere mechanical or technical skill to an art form.
Smith echoes Woolf assertion in “Craftsmanship” that “if you could teach, if
you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the
truth, would create beauty” (CDML 141). In a review of Gilbert Cannan’s Mummery,
Woolf expressed a distaste for what she called “well-made” novels (qtd. in McLaurin
64-5), and in “Modern Fiction,” she excorticates Arnold Bennett for being a good
“workman.” She writes damningly, “he can make a book so well constructed and sol-
id in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through
what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draft between
the frame of the windows, or a crack in the boards. And yet—if life should refuse to
live there?” (CDML 8). Woolf ’s “life” resembles Smith’s “self.” Here the well-crafted
book is connected to a lack of imagination, a solid mechanical know-how, and a
dull and expert professionalism. It is also tied to crass commercialism, for words—
Woolf asserts in “Craftsmanship”—“hate making money” (CDML 143). However, as
Evelyn Chan demonstrates throughout her monograph on Virginia Woolf and the
Professions, the status of writing as a profession was a consistently vexed question for
Woolf, who was keenly aware of both the potential loss of imaginative freedom that
came from tying writing to earning a living, and the connection between financial
security and imaginative autonomy. In an April 1929 diary entry, for example, she
expresses “pride that 7 people depend, largely, upon my hand writing on a sheet of
paper…Its not scribbling; its keeping 7 people fed & housed” (D3 221). Significantly,
she here emphasizes the physical labor of writing—a hand moving across a sheet of
paper—as an act of making. Furthermore, Woolf did not consistently disavow the
need for writers to have education and training. She wrote in her diary about how
she had “learnt” “her craft” writing essays and book reviews for editors, discovering
“how to compress; how to enliven” (D5 145), and in A Room of One’s Own, she la-
ments that Judith Shakespeare, “could get no training in her craft” (40). Elsewhere,
she writes that the “story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his
story craftily…or we shall swallow it whole and jumble the parts together” (CR 12).
And when, in “On Re-Reading Novels” she singles out the way that Henry James’
Ambassadors “surmounts…problems which baffled Richardson,” she gives as reason
that James is “endowed not with greater genius but with greater…craftsmanship” (E3
343, emphasis added). It seems clear that here the word is being used as a com-
pliment to denote a skill and an attention to aesthetics that is built on knowledge
and practice which, combined with creativity, can push art to greater achievements.
When Woolf describes Pater as “the writer who from words made blue and gold and
green” (E3 172–73), she seems close to what Richard Sennett suggests in The Crafts-
man, that “there is no art without craft.” As Sennett explains, “the idea for a painting
is not a painting” (65). Or, as Woolf describes art in her diary “the sentence in itself
beautiful” (D4 126).
Those two incompatible meanings of the word “craft” that Woolf sets alongside one
another at the beginning of “Craftsmanship” remain irreconcilable. Is craft something
material or immaterial, useful or deceptive? Or, to put it another way, paraphrasing
another famous phrase of Woolf ’s, something “very solid or very shifting” (D3 218)?
Ultimately, though, the incompatible meanings of the word are less a problem than a
reflection of the nature of language itself, for, Woolf states, “when words are pinned
down they fold their wings and die” (CDML 143). In the end, that “rogue element” that
Zadie Smith spoke of might well be guile and cunning that makes a book “well-crafted”
in both senses of the word, and, there is a third sense of the word “craft” that Woolf
alludes to but does not spell out—the association of craft with witchcraft, magic, and
transformation.
Despite Woolf ’s criticism of workmen-like writers, she remains aware that
words do make things, they make not “one simple statement but a thousand pos-
sibilities,” and they make worlds that we live in longer than any building (CDML
138). Woolf ’s sense in “Craftsmanship” of language as associative and submerged in
a rich and noisy history has been connected with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (Al-
len 29–30), who asserts that words do not exist in dictionaries but rather “in other
people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts” (Bakhtin 291). We might think, too, of
Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (which was published in 1936, one year
before Woolf ’s “Craftsmanship,” and which similarly explores the affinities between
storytelling and craft skills), as Benjamin suggests that “traces of the storyteller cling
to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (91). Woolf ’s
essay, therefore, is part of a larger modernist conversation about language as craft,
written at a time when craft was a word under pressure from different legacies and
multiple conflicting associations. It was a word that lay at the nexus point of a com-
plex and, for Woolf, irresolvable argument about the nature of writing as a pleasure,
privilege, profit, art, or escape, and about the nature of work in an age of increasing
mechanization, marketization, and professionalization. From the Hogarth Press to
her essays written for profit to her fiction, Woolf was consistently ambivalent about
what it means to labor and to craft with words.
We are currently living in what Susan Luckman has called a “making renaissance”
(1)—from knitting circles to craft beer and artisanal socks sold on Etsy, craft is being
validated, dismissed, and marketed in multiple ways. As it is also becoming a word
that we risk being careless about, it is then worth remembering the complex history
of this word which has been “out and about, in the streets and on people’s lips for
centuries” (CDML 140). Furthermore, even with the current mania for all things craft,
the word predominantly remains reserved for the material, the tactile. Woolf prompts
us to consider what we might gain if we were to position writing in this conversation
(either imagining writing as craft or constructing it in opposition to craft, or better yet
in ambivalent tension with it). At this particular conference on the world of the book,
and in our present book history/material culture moment, Woolf ’s “Craftsmanship”
is a reminder to keep the material and immaterial sitting alongside one another. After
all, as Woolf declares in “Craftsmanship,” it is “our business to see what we can do
with the English language as it is,” and to ask “how [we can] combine the old words in
new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?”
(CDML 141)
Notes
1. Later published as a slightly different essay with the same title in the Listener.
2. While the essay is no longer available on The Guardian’s website, “Fail Better” can be read at http://
faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/failbetter.htm
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The Hogarth Press
“obscure, indecent and brilliant” Female sexuality,
the Hogarth Press, and Hope Mirrlees
by Megan Beech
P
ublished by the Hogarth Press in May 1920, Hope Mirrlees’s dazzlingly modern
and (until very recently) criminally disregarded Paris: A Poem presented a consid-
erable challenge to its editor and typesetter, Virginia Woolf. The poem, described
by Woolf as “obscure, indecent and brilliant,” with its complex topography and varied
fonts and fragments, was only the fifth text that Woolf typeset herself (L2 384). Whilst
Mirrlees’s masterwork has received a resurgent critical interest, thanks largely to the edi-
torial work of Sandeep Parmar and other scholars, including Julia Briggs, there is still
much to be explored as to how Woolf ’s work can be read in dialogue with a text like Paris.
Woolf ’s work as a typesetter influenced her views on form within her own composition.
As Helen Southworth argues, learning the skills of arranging text for print “represented
an apprenticeship in the relationship of word to textual space that critics see as having
had a profound effect on Woolf ’s own Modernist form” (Southworth 146). Traces of
Woolf ’s developing modernist form can be seen in her handling of Mirrlees’s poem. Paris
offers a kind of primer on the playful possibilities offered by experimenting with formal
conventions and traditional models of femininity.
The poem itself, set across the span of a single day in post-First World War Paris,
charts the wanderings of an explicitly female narrative voice. The geography of Paris
“ZIGZAG[S]” from Nord to Sud, right to Left Bank, ending after the hour of “Alchemy,
Abysnthe and Algerian tobacco” in Montmartre (Mirrlees 3, 16). The revolutionary
uses of and experimentations in form present in Mirrlees’s poem and its Sapphic ex-
plorations of female sexuality are mapped onto the city. The poem shares in some of
Woolf ’s own project in examining space, sexuality, and secrecy through her formal
innovations as a writer. This paper explores the rich and radical ways in which Mir-
rlees’s poem engages in new kinds of modernist form (similarly explored later by T. S
Eliot in The Waste Land) and gestures towards Woolf ’s dialogue with them in her own
works. Paris is such a dizzingly complex and layered poem, that here I merely endeavor
to chart some of the impressions it offers up to its reader and consider how these may
have registered for its typesetter, Virginia Woolf.
When Leonard and Virginia Woolf acquired the printing press for Hogarth House
both writers had been published but neither were overly familiar with the processes of
typesetting or book production itself. Woolf had received lessons in bookbinding as a teen-
ager under the tutelage of Sylvia Stebbing and Annie Power (Southworth 146). Though
these lessons appear to have been largely informal, Woolf developed a level of competence
and with an “industrious and creative” zeal set about binding volumes within her library
(Southworth 147). In May 1920, aged twenty, Woolf wrote to her brother, Thoby: “I am
really rather a good binder” (L1 56). As Tony Bradshaw has suggested it is likely that this
formative foray into book production guided the initial work of the Hogarth Press:
“obscure, indecent and brilliant” 71
these early experiments with covering materials had significant bearing on

the first books which she was to create when she came to start publishing
(Bradshaw 281).
During the early months of the Hogarth Press, Virginia and Leonard Woolf devel-
oped the necessary skills in setting type, inking and printing and by the time Mirrlees’s
long form poem was published, Woolf had typeset volumes of poetry by Cecil Woolf
and T. S Eliot, the latter just a year earlier in May 1919. Moreover, as Leslie Kathleen
Hankins has chronicled, the Woolfs had printed a version of Katherine Mansfield’s
Prelude taking from October 1917 to June 1918 to complete the work (Hankins 216). It
was through this long process of production that Woolf began her work as a typesetter,
learning the process of setting a page.
Despite these gains in technical experience, when Woolf began to tackle Mirrlees’s
poem it is clear she faced some teething problems. Woolf made a great number of er-
rors in typesetting the poem as she recorded in her diary on 24 April 1920: “Half blind
with writing notices, & corrections in 160 copies of Paris, a Poem, by Hope Mirrlees”
(D2 33). The alterations of that long April afternoon included adding words and punc-
tuation missed in print. One example of this editing can be seen on the poem’s opening
page, where Mirrlees’s John of Patmos is stripped of his sainthood in the printed text,
before Woolf ’s hand-written ‘ST.’ was added in front of the phrase (Briggs 113). Whilst
certain elements of correction could take place on the poem under the ken of Woolf ’s
“half blind” pen on 24 April, such as the addition of missing words, other elements
were not as easy to fix to the satisfaction of the poet herself. Whilst little of the cor-
respondence between Mirrlees and Woolf survives, three pages of proofs corrected by
Mirrlees do. Within these proofs Mirrlees requests “slightly larger spaces between the
words” not only throughout the poem but also for more specific sections such as the
striking imagist representation of the Tuileries gardens (Briggs 83):
The Tuileries are in a trance

because the painters have
stared at them so long (Mirrlees 3)
Here we see one of Mirrlees’s very purposeful acts of creating topography from typog-
raphy, mapping the city onto the page. The layout of her description mimics the gaps
in the layout of the gardens themselves. It is in moments like this when Mirrlees seeks
to make page space reflect real space. Yet, given the confines of the printed page, not
to mention the excess labor that would have been required to do this, Mirrlees’s vision
was not fulfilled in this way.
These were the kinds of tensions in play for Woolf in the process of typesetting
Paris. The confines of print had to wrest with a poem that gestures beyond any kind of
confinement. Paris is a poem which invites its reader to walk alongside its female pro-
tagonist in movement characterized by an ability to transgress boundaries and become
fluid and un-mappable. The poem spans many environs of the city, various planes of
reality, and types of recorded experience. We are encouraged to “scorn the laws of
solid geometry” and “step boldly into the wall of the Salle Caillebotte” (Mirrlees 4).
Gustave Caillebotte, the Impressionist painter, perhaps most well-known for Jouer de
pluie à Paris (1877), captured Parisian street scenes in this hyperreal exaggerated style
which scorned conventional perspective and incorporated more and different planes
of geometry than was conventional at the time. Allusions to art and artists, politicians,
musicians, dancing girls, Freud, and other cultural figures—past, present, real, and fic-
titious—litter the pages and the streets of Paris. As Julia Briggs also notes, this feature
of the poem is an extension of Mirrlees’s radical commitment to far-reaching form and
ideas, never resting in one mode or historical moment:
Paris overthrows traditional boundaries, not only between different languages

and literatures, but also between different kinds of discourse and different
levels of culture, so that it segues from metro posters to the paintings in the
Louvre. (Briggs 86)
The complex network of allusions, techniques and transgressions alive in Mirrlees’s

poem show that the challenges in typesetting Paris went beyond logistics to involve
Woolf confronting Mirrlees’s radical commitment to form in composition.
Through her “different kinds of discourse and different levels of culture,” Mirrlees
is constantly probing what it means to stretch threads of form and meaning and en-
twine them cartographically across the length of a Sapphic city. Paris asks how one
might map the metropolis (and its frenetic energy) through poetic form. The typo-
graphic layout of the poem emulates and creates the multi-sensory nature of urban
experience and perception. There is a kind of visual and oral onslaught of impressions
of city life and these are explicitly gendered and queered. For instance, taking in the
sight of statues in the street, Mirrlees’s narrator proclaims:
These nymphs are harmless

Fear not their soft mouths (Mirrlees 4)
Here the architecture of the city is infused with explicit and more veiled allusions to
female sexuality. The nymphs not only represent the elegant and beautiful maidens of
Greek mythology but also suggest the nymphae—the inner folds of the labia minora,
an allusion to Sapphic desire further reinforced by the far less subtle focus on their ‘soft
mouths’, clearly referring to lips, both facial and vaginal.
These kinds of allusion are coupled with Mirrlees’s narrator’s chosen locale. The
sauntering flâneuse is drawn to the arrondissements frequented by the women of the
Left Bank: the largely queer, expatriate community led by cultural figures including
Natalie Barney. They venture across the river to the nightlife of Montmartre where the
American tourists “dont like the gurls of the night-club—they love women” (Mirrlees
21). Lauren Elkins in her exploration of the figure of the flâneuse touches on the kinds
of transgressive new spaces in which Mirrlees’s female narrator appears to be involved
as she saunters through the city:
A female flânerie—a flâneurserie—not only changes the way we move through

space, but intervenes in the organisation of space itself. (Elkins 288)
The imaginative geographies we encounter within Mirrlees’s poem intervene, like the
female flâneuse, in the organisation of the city. The narrator in this rearranged metro-
politan landscape is able to “scorn[s] the laws of solid geometry” and boldly intervene
in the city, much like the flâneurserie within the female-dominated environs of the Left
Bank (Mirrlees 4).
During the early decades of the twentieth century, the Left Bank, as Shari Benstock
illustrates, reorganized itself around evolving creative and sexual identities for women:
[women made] literary contributions—which include major works of prose,

poetry, drama, critical and journalistic essays, autobiographies pensées, and
memoirs […And] in addition to their own writing activities, several of these
women set up bookshops, publishing houses, hand presses, little magazines,
and artistic salons through which they advertised and marketed the products
of literary Paris. (Benstock 3)
The kinds of creative lives and loves that women could have on the Left Bank are found
too within Mirrlees’s poem. These pursuits are not covert or hidden within the poem
but boldly articulated in wild typography, in explicit images of sexuality and femininity
strewn in fragmented fashion across the landscape of the city over the course of a 24-
hour narrative. What we find in Woolf ’s use of typography in her own work to convey
some of this Sapphic desire is something more muted, yet still powerful. This occurs
evocatively in A Room of One’s Own in the famous utterance: “Chloe liked Olivia…”
(AROO 106). Here, the ellipsis holds a great deal of meaning. Through three singular
dots, Woolf suffuses the imagined narrative between Chloe and Olivia with sexual ten-
sion and complexity. It is noted within the text how “immense a change” this sentence
brings about. The dimensions of queer relations between the two women are elaborated
when it is stated:
Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that
these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. (AROO
106)
This a more explicit affirmation of lesbian or queer identity: “sometimes women do like
women.” Yet, the intriguing ambiguity of the initial iteration of queerness (“Chloe liked
Olivia…”) shows Woolf marrying form and theme. The ellipsis is charged with a Sapphic
energy, standing in place for explicitly exploring the relationship between the women.
A more protracted version of this episode occurs in Orlando, where private female
conversation is interrupted by male presence:
for it cannot be denied that when women get together—but hist—they are
always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into
print. All they desire is—but hist again—is that not a man’s step on the stair?
(O 140)
Here Woolf enacts male intrusion on the text, thus restricting the freedom in the kinds of
desire that happens “when women get together.” Sapphic space is not only interrupted by
the “man’s step on the stair” but also by the dashes which punctuate (and puncture) this
moment of female intimacy. The repeated interpolation, “but hist,” emphasizes the inter-
ruption of text and the moment of same-sex intimacy on the back stairs.
This is in stark contrast to Mirrlees’s poem. What Woolf whispers, Mirrlees shouts.
Whilst Sapphic spaces are enclosed and intruded upon in these examples from Woolf ’s
texts, the stuff of hushed tones and ellipses, Mirrlees addresses them more explicitly.
For Mirrlees, city space is Sapphic space and these dimensions of Paris are opened up
through her typographical decisions. She creates the space to “scorn the laws of solid
geometry,” as well as the laws of conventional roles for women and attitudes towards
sexuality (Mirrlees 4). Mirrlees’s poem is loud and unapologetic, a cacophony of radi-
cal female voices. Noisy women are a prominent feature of the city, from its grieving
mourners to its billboards, as Mirrlees notes:
The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening

St. John at Patmos (Mirrlees 3)
“The Scarlet Woman” in question featured on the poster for the fortified wine BYRRH
and the contrast between this overtly sexualized, noisy “Scarlet Woman” and the
“defean[ed]” St. John shows the shifting gender roles within the cities. Whilst wom-
en are aligned with capitalist culture, masculinity lies in the background, silent. Set
against the back-drop of the Paris peace negotiations of 1919, male figures in the poem
are demoted to minor roles. The City is left noticeably barren of male influence in the
aftermath of the war, the key players in its peace deal literally demoted to dogs: “Presi-
dent Wilson grins like a dog and runs about the city” sniffing urine (Mirrlees 7). What
dominates the metropolitan landscape and soundscape of Mirrlees’s Paris are female
voices.
This kind of rendering of metropolitan sound, and understanding of it as the blend-
ing of a multitude of voices, noises and experiences, was an idea Mirrlees (like Woolf)
turned to at many points in her creative practice. In the essay “Listening to the Past”
(1926), Mirrlees envisions a future in which we can listen to the voices of long lost his-
tory through what she terms “an aural kaleidoscope.” Mirrlees details the intersecting
fragments of historical utterance that would be heard, as one would catch “disparate frag-
ments of Cockney, Egyptian, Babylonian, Provençal, ever forming into new patterns for
the ear” (Mirrlees 85). This multi-sensory, multi-lingual understanding of the patching
together of disparate voices and sounds resonates with the project at the heart of Paris.
The poem takes the Sapphic city and merges images, sounds and senses, distorting these
impressions into many different shapes of print and form. Mirrlees reiterates her love of
kaleidoscopic vision throughout the essay: “it surprises me that this taste is not universal,
for a kaleidoscope is the prettiest toy ever invented” (Mirrlees 85).
It is exactly this commitment to an often mind-bending modernist aesthetic with-
in Mirrlees’s writing that made Woolf ’s work as a typesetter on this difficult poem
such a challenge. Yet within the poem Woolf also found something so “obscure, in-
decent and brilliant” which influenced her creative practice (L2 384). Hankins states
that a “typesetter absorbs the language and images [of a text] through the fingertips”
(Hankins 220). Woolf ’s work setting the type for Mirrlees’s complex poem gave her an
intimate relationship with the text and thorough understanding of its formal originali-
ties. It is not a coincidence that Woolf ’s first literary outputs following her experience
typesetting Paris were the increasingly formally innovative Monday or Tuesday (1921)
and Jacob’s Room (1922). Having new radical forms at her fingertips through typeset-
ting at the Hogarth Press promoted more experimentation in Woolf ’s own writing.
Though Paris presented a significant challenge to Woolf, through a commitment to ex-
perimental typography Mirrlees was able to create a visionary poem. Mirrlees’s formal
innovations and Woolf ’s typesetting hand allow the city of Paris emerge upon the page
through a glorious kaleidoscopic lens, refracting the light and the life of metropolitan
Sapphic sexuality.
Works Cited
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. London: Virago, 1994.
Bradshaw, Tony. “Virginia Woolf and Book Design.” Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts.
Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 280–91.
Briggs, Julia. “‘Modernism’s Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris.” Reading
Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh, 2006. 80–95.
Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. London: Chatto
& Windus, 2016.
Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “Printing ‘Prelude’: Virginia Woolf ’s Typesetting Apprenticeship and Katherine
Mansfield on ‘Other People’s Presses.’” Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader. Ed. Helen Wus-
sow, Mary Ann Gillies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.
Mirrlees, Hope. Collected Poems. Ed. Sandeep Parmar. Manchester: Carcanet, 2011.
Southworth, Helen. “The Bloomsbury Group and the Book Arts.” Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury
Group. Ed. Victoria Rosner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf 1920–1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Andrew McNeillie. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1912–1922. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1976.
——. Orlando. London: Hogarth Press, 1992.
——. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
After the Deluge, The Waves
by Sangam MacDuff
O
ctober 1931 saw two landmark Hogarth Press publications: Leonard Woolf ’s
After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology and Virginia Woolf ’s The
Waves. Woolf ’s novel sold out almost immediately, despite an initial run of
over 7000, with a second impression of 5000 the same month, whereas the sales and
reception of Leonard’s Study of Communal Psychology seem to have disappointed. Vir-
ginia records in her diary how she has
been made miserable—damped & disheartened […] because the Lit Sup. only
gave half a column of belittlement to After the Deluge. […] L. says—& hon-
estly believes—that this puts an end to the book […] He says his ten years
work are wasted, & that he sees no use in going on. (?23 October 1931, D4 51)
To make matters worse, the following day, the Guardian lauded The Waves in an ex-
tended review entitled “The Rhythm of Life”:
When I say this morning incautiously, “I’m reviewed in the M[ancheste]r

Guardian” L. says “Is it a long review?” And I say, feeling like a mother to a
hurt & miserable little boy, Yes. Lord what human beings are! (?23 October
1931, D4 51)
Yet, as Victoria Glendinning notes, After the Deluge received many positive notices,
notably Harold Laski’s in the New Statesman & Nation, L. B. Namier’s in the Observer,
and a review in the Melbourne Age which “praised the book as ‘an outstanding contri-
bution to social psychology, […] as exciting to read as a novel’” (qtd in Glendinning
262). Indeed, Virginia refers to plaudits from “Laski & the experts” in her diary, for
Harold Laski, a Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, had
praised it as “a masterpiece” (D4 50). A fortnight earlier, Virginia noted how she was
“trembling with pleasure […] because Harold Nicolson ha[d] rung up to say The Waves
is a masterpiece” (D4 47), echoing Leonard’s judgment when he read the novel in July.
However, she was soon reflecting that the reviews “don’t stir me very much” (ibid.), for
“[w]e makers of masterpieces remain very calm, very well content” (D4 50).
Whether masterpieces or not, it is surprising that the simultaneous publication of
these works has not received more attention. Woolmer, Glendinning and Cohen men-
tion their sales and reception, but there has been little in the way of critical comparison.
This may be explained by the fact that, on the surface at least, the two books appear
very different. Leonard’s “big book” is a vast history of ideas, A Study of Communal
Psychology between 1789 and 1914 which attempts to analyze “the relation between
the communal beliefs and desires regarding liberty, equality, and fraternity and com-
munal action” between the French revolution and the First World War (L. Woolf 1967,
203). The Waves evolved from an abstract “play-poem idea,” a “continuous stream” of
After the Deluge, The Waves 77
thinking that might be called autobiography, into “a series of dramatic soliloquies” re-
counting the lives of seven friends interspersed by a sequence of lucid vignettes that
traverse the globe from first light to last (D3 139, 229, 312). Leonard’s Study, begun
in 1920, ran to three volumes, so that the final installment, Principia Politica, printed
almost forty years after the first deluge—the Great War—could no longer be published
under its original title, whereas, by Woolf ’s reckoning, serious work on The Waves be-
gan on 10 September 1929, with the final draft completed less than two years later.
Despite these differences, however, there are also important similarities. The im-
pulse for After the Deluge originated in 1920 or 1921, but much of the first volume was
written in the late 1920s. The first sketch for The Waves occurred in November 1926,
while Woolf was typing To the Lighthouse. Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s letters and di-
aries indicate that they were working on these books at the same time, and they clearly
shared some of the same ideas. Less an elegy than Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse,
The Waves is nonetheless written in the wake of war, reflecting on the social conditions
that led to conflict. For instance, Neville’s historical reflections en route to Hampton
Court sound very much like one of Leonard Woolf ’s conclusions: “I am beginning to
be convinced […] that the fate of Europe is of immense importance, and, ridiculous as
it seems, that all depends upon the battle of Blenheim” (174–75). In a notebook for The
Waves, Virginia notes that this battle, when the Duke of Marlborough defeated Louis
XIV in 1704, was “immensely important, because without Marlborough we should
have been […] vassals of the French King” (TW n.237). Likewise, in After the Deluge,
Leonard Woolf describes how “Louis XIV. by his ruinous wars began to pave a road
which led Louis XVI to the guillotine” (118). In Leonard’s account, the violent social
upheavals that ensued led inexorably to the First World War.
After the Deluge is not only concerned with the causes of war: it also seeks to ana-
lyze changes in “communal psychology,” by which Woolf means “the psychology of
man as a social animal” (v). In volume 1, he considers how the revolutionary principles
of liberty, equality and fraternity led to the rise of democracy as a collective ideal. Un-
derpinning this analysis is the belief that:
If you took any individual out of any epoch or place […] you would find cer-
tain characteristics in him which were simply personal and individual, and a
mass of others which he had received from this mould or matrix of the com-
munity in which he lived. (53)
This interest in the psychological “mould or matrix of the community” has several pos-
sible sources. Allen McLaurin notes that in January 1916 Leonard Woolf recognized a
“huge upsurge of interest […] in the study of group psychology […] since the outbreak
of the war” (36), and after reading Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and
War (1916), he began to conceive of crowd behavior in terms of instinctual or irratio-
nal motivation (McLaurin 1984, 36–37). Likewise, in November 1917, Virginia Woolf
detects “the influence of Trotter & the herd” in Roger Fry. Leonard’s views may also
have been shaped by Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, published by
the Hogarth Press in 1922. Freud’s work also influenced Virginia Woolf, although she
seems to have read it later (Lee 218; see McLaurin 1984, 38).
A third point of similarity, and perhaps the most important, is Leonard and Vir-
ginia Woolf ’s shared interest in Jules Romains’s “Unanimism,” a name derived from
Romains’s 1908 poetry collection, La Vie Unanime. As Rosenbaum has shown, there
are many points of contact between the Bloomsbury Group and the Unanimists: Des-
mond MacCarthy and Sydney Waterlow translated Romains’s 1911 novel, Mort de
Quelqu’un; E. M. Forster found The Voyage Out steeped in the atmosphere of Romains’s
novel; and Allen McLaurin traces intriguing parallels between The Death of a Nobody
and Mrs Dalloway (1984, 34–35). Moreover, the Woolfs reviewed Romains’s next novel,
Les Copains (1913) for the TLS in August 1913, remarking that
What really interests [Romains] is the feelings of persons, not as individual

characters, but as members of groups; what he delights and excels in doing is
to trace the mysterious growth, where two or three are gathered together, of
a kind of consciousness of the group in addition to that of each individual of
the group. (TLS 7)
It is telling that McLaurin attributes this review to Virginia Woolf, while Rosenbaum
and the TLS cite Leonard as author, for this interest in “group consciousness” is equally
central to The Waves and After the Deluge (Rosenbaum 2003, 32). In “Virginia Woolf
and Unanimism,” McLaurin amply demonstrates the connection, pointing to Bernard’s
sense of “communion with his fellow-passengers in the train,” united by “one desire”
into “a splendid unanimity” (TW 83), and Neville imagining “people pouring profusely
out of the Tube when the day’s work is done, unanimous, indiscriminate, uncounted”
(TW 150). More generally, the litany of speakers circling around Percival’s unifying
silence invites us to imagine a world without or beyond the self, six detached voices
“who, like waves, are part of a single medium” (Naremore 173). For Naremore, they
form “one observant spirit” (175), merging into Bernard. But at times they also merge
into Louis, Rhoda and Neville, so that it would be more accurate to say that they form
an intersubjective manifold, whereby each character contains characteristics of the
group. As J. W. Graham shows in his analysis of the drafts, there is a shift from the
omniscient narrator of the first version to the intersubjective voice of the published
novel, representing not a single life, but many lives together, an “image of experience”
refracted “through a narrating consciousness into the prismatic facets of the individual
speakers” (Graham 208). However, I would argue that despite this apparent unity, the
voices are also differentiated, forming a composite whole, or “mosaic” (TW 20, 190),
which is both unified and discrete. And beyond the subjective unity we may find in any
of the speakers, Makiko Minow-Pinkney points out that it is the silent figure of Percival
who “generates ‘common feeling’ or ‘communion’” (175).
Nevertheless, what all these studies show is the profound sense of “group con-
sciousness” or “unanimism” in The Waves, and as Rosenbaum points out, “unanimism
may also have encouraged Leonard Woolf ’s […] studies of communal psychology in
After the Deluge” (32). It is difficult to demonstrate a specific textual link between the
works, but Woolf certainly read Romains, possible reviewing Les Copains, and his no-
tion of communal psychology is compatible with unanimism.
Irrespective of whether they share a common source, there are striking similarities
between the psychic manifolds Leonard and Virginia Woolf present in After the Deluge
and The Waves. Indeed, Leonard Woolf invites the comparison when he asserts that
the same course and oscillations of communal psychology can be traced in

politics and in literature. Thus the change in the psychology of personality or
individuality, which in literature helped to produce the novel […], in politics
helped to produce democracy. (248)
For Leonard, “[t]he popularisation of the novel in the nineteenth century was made
possible by the change in communal psychology, the consciousness of individuality,”
although “[e]ven to-day the purely psychological and highly introspective type of novel
is never popular” (247–48). Here, Leonard seems to place modernist writers at the van-
guard of broader socio-cultural changes, offering an interesting perspective on Woolf ’s
“highly introspective” novels, like The Waves.
Demonstrating the same relationship, albeit inversely, Leonard adopts figures of
speech from Virginia’s fiction, such as rippling waves of consciousness and the pond-like
depths of the mind, to provide a vivid image of the shift from aristocracy to democracy,
or hierarchical group consciousness to the modern sense of individual equality:
Like a rough stone into the smooth and polished mirror of a pond, this idea
that all men have an equal right to happiness fell into the minds of a few Eng-
lishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, and immediately out went
the ripples, up and down, criss-crossing, agitating the surface of men’s minds
and of society, revealing the commotion down in the depths. (197)
These images are prevalent in The Waves, perhaps most clearly in “those silences” Ber-
nard thinks of “which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the
wastes of silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths, spreading
round it a little ripple of satisfaction” (210). Of course, this passage echoes Bernard’s note,
“Fin in a waste of waters,” and before that, the earliest recorded impulse for The Waves,
Virginia’s diary entry for 30 September 1926: “One sees a fin passing far out” (D3 113).
It would be easy to multiply examples, but in addition to their shared propensity
for aqueous figures of thought, there are also thematic parallels between After the Del-
uge and The Waves. For instance, Virginia Woolf may have drawn on Leonard’s account
of public school for section two of her novel:
the communal psychology of the public school is generically the same as that
of a regiment. The boy, as a unit in his school, must be animated with the
right feeling of esprit de corps, a feeling which belongs to the psychology of
the herd rather than to the psychology of the individual. Within the school
the boy is always a member of a group, grade, or rank, his behaviour must
always conform to the traditional behaviour of the group or grade to which he
belongs. In such a system there is no place or tolerance for individuality or the
consciousness of individuality. And here again the natural accompaniment of
this psychology is a system of privilege […] from that of wearing a particular

kind of collar to that of flogging or being flogged. (250)
One has only to recall the boys marching “two by two” to chapel, Percival, whose “mag-
nificence” is that of a “medieval commander” (24, 26), or Louis’s description of the
“boasting boys” to see the similarity:
‘The boasting boys,’ said Louis, ‘have gone now in a vast team to play cricket.
They have driven off in their great brake, singing in chorus. All their heads
turn simultaneously […] They are the volunteers; they are the cricketers; they
are the officers of the Natural History Society. They are always forming into
fours and marching in troops with badges on their caps; they salute simulta-
neously passing the figure of their general. How majestic is their order, how
beautiful is their obedience!’ (TW 33–34)
Leonard is often regarded as a model for Louis (Glendinning 261), so it is striking

that both he and Neville remark on the hierarchical nature of public school and the
cruelty and brutality it breeds, even amongst amiable boys like Percival, whilst Bernard
recalls the conjunction of games and armies in his summation:
a whole brakeful of boys is swept up and goes cricketing, footballing. An army

marches across Europe. (189)
Virginia’s account is quite different from Leonard’s, for she gives equal weight to
girls. Whilst their education seems intellectually uninspiring—we hear about Queen
Alexandra and the Prayer Book from Susan, Rhoda and Jinny, whilst Neville reads Vir-
gil, Lucretius and Catullus—it is nevertheless significant that Virginia devotes as much
space to the girls’ school as the boys’. Indeed, the disparity between their educational
regimes may even be part of the point, supplementing her argument about the paucity
of women’s education in A Room of One’s Own by showing that even when girls were
sent to school, the education they received was in no way comparable to boys.
Conversely, while Leonard Woolf ’s description of Hannah More in After the Deluge
bears some resemblance to A Room of One’s Own, Leonard’s focus is characteristically
on class, not gender. “No one to-day would dare to lecture starving working women
and tell them that they have no right to be saved from starvation,” he writes.
The reason why Hannah More, the friend of Burke, Johnson, and Walpole, could
think and say these things in 1801, while Lady X and Mrs. Y cannot say or even
think these things in 1929, is not that Hannah More was more stupid or more
wicked than Lady X and Mrs. Y are, but that the matrix of communal psychology
had moulded her mind in one way, while it has moulded theirs in another. (194)
In some ways, the opinions Lady X and Mrs. Y find unacceptable in 1929 recall the
outrageous pronouncements of Professor von X in the British Museum, which the
narrator finds equally unacceptable in A Room of One’s Own (published the same year),
but the contrast between them points up the difference between Leonard and Virginia’s
political concerns. Leonard is acutely aware of the importance of the 1832 Reform Act
and the gradual extension of the franchise to working class men in After the Deluge, but
pays no heed to women’s suffrage, nor the patriarchal ideology underpinning his no-
tion of democratic psychology. On the other hand, whilst the mysterious figure of the
lady writing in the house provides a counterpart to Percival’s silence in the The Waves,
balancing masculine and feminine aspects of the unifying voice, just as the six speak-
ers pair and coalesce through the dialogue, Woolf ’s representations of class have been
widely criticized. It is well known that Virginia Woolf abandoned her plans to include
working class voices in The Waves, and it is striking that she juxtaposes the “splendid
unanimity” Bernard experiences in the train carriage with Neville’s inability to read
Catullus “in the presence of horse-dealers and plumbers” “in a third-class railway car-
riage” (52). Neville is quite candid about his prejudices: “I do not admire that man;
he does not admire me,” and denounces “this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world” in
all its “mediocrity.” His desire to “consume” the poor “maggots” entirely, “make them
twist in their seats,” and “drive them howling before me” may be a product of his upper
class upbringing (52), but the snobbery he espouses is as oppressive as Professor von
X’s misogyny. That said, the passage is laced with irony (and humor), distancing Woolf
from Neville’s condescension.
In conclusion, there are many similarities between After the Deluge and The
Waves: both works were conceived in the aftermath of the First World War; they were
composed concurrently; and they were published in the same month, October 1931.
Leonard and Virginia’s shared interest in group psychology and Unanimism may have
contributed to their analogous representations of individual and communal psychol-
ogy, including their shared imagery of surface and depths, ripples and pools. But even
when they seem to have borrowed from each other—for the portrayal of public school,
or the social roles of noblewomen, for instance—there are significant differences in
their treatment of class and gender. Whatever cross-fertilisation there may have been,
The Waves did not come After the Deluge, nor the Deluge after The Waves; Leonard and
Virginia’s great works were produced and published together.
Works Cited
Anon. “Les Copains.” The Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1913. 330. Web. 12 March 2017.
Cohen, Rachel. “Village Scribe.” The New Yorker, 13 November 2006. Web. 14 January 2017.
Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Graham, J. W. “Point of View in The Waves: Some Services of the Style.” University of Toronto Quarterly 39.3
(2015): 193–211. Web. 2 November 2016.
Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. London: Methuen, 1977.
McLaurin, Allen. “Virginia Woolf and Unanimism.” Journal of Modern Literature 9.1 (1981–82): 115–22.
Web. August 25 2016.
——. “Consciousness and Group Consciousness in Virginia Woolf.” Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective.
Ed. Eric Warner. London: Macmillan Press, 1984. 28–40.
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987.
Naremore, James. The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1973.
Romains, Jules. The Death of a Nobody. Trans. Desmond McCarthy and Sydney Waterlow. London: Howard
Latimer, 1914.
Rosenbaum, S. P. Georgian Bloomsbury. London: Palgrave, 2003.
Woolf, Leonard. After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology. London: The Hogarth Press, 1931.
——. After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology. Vol. 2. London: The Hogarth Press, 1939.
——. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939. London: The Hogarth Press, 1967.
——. Principia Politica: A Study of Communal Psychology. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: The Hogarth Press, 1929.
——. Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.
——. The Waves. Ed. Kate Flint. London: Penguin, 1992.
——. The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts Transcribed and Edited by J. W. Graham. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1976.
——. To the Lighthouse. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Woolmer, J. Howard. A Checklist of The Hogarth Press, 1917–1946. Revere, PA: Woolmer/Brotherson, 1986.
Alternative Histories: Hogarth Press’s
World-Makers and World-Shakers Series
by Eleanor McNees
C
onfronting the rising Nazi threat in Europe and Britain in July 1937, the Hog-
arth Press published four short biographies under the series title World-Makers
and World-Shakers. The choice of subjects appeared random, ranging over
centuries, disciplines and nationalities from Socrates and Joan of Arc to Darwin and
Italian Risorgimento figures—Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour. Perusal in the Hogarth
Press archive of Leonard Woolf ’s initial solicitations to prospective writers reveals that
the final biographers (not Woolf ’s first choices) were either friends of Leonard and Vir-
ginia Woolf, previously published Hogarth authors, or popular writers likely to appeal
to a broadly middlebrow public. In retrospect, both the subjects and their biographers
suggest the Woolfs’ commitment to a new genre with a pedagogical purpose, one par-
ticularly pertinent given the imminent threat of Fascism. Juvenile biography with its
target audience of twelve-to-sixteen year-olds offered humane historical models to
counter the ominous contemporary political movers and shakers in Germany and Italy
as well as the patriarchal and dictatorial figures Woolf would deride in Three Guineas.
Closer to home, the series provided counter-examples to Oswald Mosley and his Brit-
ish Union of Fascists’ advocacy of a “masculinist ethic” in elementary and secondary
education.1 In keeping with the anti-Fascist premise, Leonard Woolf asked artist and
radical political activist John Banting to design the dust jacket for the four biographies.
Louisa Buck described the illustration as “a tree transforming itself into a linear clas-
sical nude on the four volumes…,” and she and J. H. Willis concur that the covers
strongly suggested a surrealist influence.2
In a 23 April 1936 letter to Commander Stephen King-Hall, Leonard Woolf elabo-
rates on the original prospectus for the series, expressing his preference for teaching
history through biography instead of by rote through the “source method”:
I suggest that the subject of these biographies should be people who influ-
enced the course of history, either through what they did, or through what
they were: for this purpose they may be admirable, or the reverse; they may
have been the active innovators of change, or the passive resisters to it. They
should be people whose lives were sufficiently eventful to make a good story.
Their names should be familiar enough to young people to make them want
to read about them, but not so familiar through school histories and text-
books as to seem too much like lessons. (HPA MS 2750/579)
In his notes on possible biographical subjects, Leonard Woolf listed largely “admi-
rable” figures from across centuries and professions of whom eighteen are men and
four are women.3 Woolf included two more ambiguously “admirable” figures when
he first approached Scottish novelist Naomi Mitchison in April 1936 about Augustus
Caesar (“or any other Greek or Roman who you feel should have a place in such a
series”) (HPA MS 2750/283) and when he asked Time and Tide editor Phoebe Gen-
wich-Gaye in June 1936 to write Cromwell’s life. Neither subject appeared in the
series, Mitchison preferring to work on Socrates and (at first) Plato, and Genwich-
Gaye pleading lack of time.
Leonard Woolf ’s invitations to and negotiations with the final biographers
reflects a certain bias as well as an editor’s necessary consideration of prospective
sales. The biographies were to target young boys and girls in elementary and sec-
ondary schools and not the paying students in the public day and boarding schools,
partly because Woolf hoped for general adoption by the Local Education Authori-
ties (LEAs) and, perhaps also because many of the non-fee-paying pupils would be
less likely to continue to university and thus might benefit from selected historical
models whose behavior encouraged emulation. The target of the juvenile audience
suggests a certain avuncular impulse to impose historical examples on the greater
mass of youth who would be consigned to follow leaders drawn largely from Britain’s
elite—from Oxford and Cambridge via prestigious public schools. Woolf insisted
that the biographies “…should be written not so much by experts on any particular
period or subject, as by people who understand young people and can write simply,
and vividly, without writing down to their supposed readers” (HPA MS 2750/579).
As he cautioned the author of the Darwin biography, Reginald Snell (pseud. L. B.
Pekin), the language had to be kept simple, and Woolf asked Pekin to revise par-
ticular phrases to accommodate a young readership. Comparing his own experience
lecturing to working women and men with the juvenile biographers’ task, Woolf ex-
poses the patronizing liberalism of a public school education: “I have practically no
experience of teaching children, but I have had a good deal of experience in lecturing
and writing for Co-operative women and Labour people, and I found…that with
the women of the Co-operative Guild there was practically nothing that you could
not say to them and make them understand, provided that you kept the language
absolutely simple” (LW to Snell, December 1936, HPA MS 2750/334). Thus the goal
of the World-Makers and World-Shakers series was to present historical models cho-
sen by a Cambridge-educated editor with a liberal Labour anti-Fascist agenda. The
five biographers who agreed to Woolf ’s terms were outspokenly liberal and largely
pacifist.4 Likewise, their subjects—Socrates, Joan of Arc, Mazzini, Garibaldi and even
Cavour—were all resistors of oppressive rulers and defenders of individual freedom
against tyrannous regimes. Only Darwin avoided politics and explicit preaching of
his own philosophy though his critics cast him as a disruptor of religion and conven-
tional science.
The World-Makers and World Shakers series has received scant attention from
both early reviewers (only the TLS provided a review beyond brief synopses and no-
tices) and contemporary critics and historians. Only one scholar, Claire Battershill,
examines the series in the context of genre studies and the new biography in particular.
She is principally concerned with how the biographies departed in method and style
from their Victorian predecessors. Though she acknowledges the potentially political
agenda of the series—“a kind of predominantly leftist revolutionary tone congruent
with many of the philosophical pamphlets that the Press was producing at around the
Alternative Histories 85
same time” (151), she doesn’t elaborate on the education debates or on the means by
which the biographies convey a revolutionary tone to challenge rising crises of nation-
alism and Fascism.
In what follows, I suggest that Leonard Woolf ’s principal motive in launching the
series was to raise the Hogarth Press’s stakes in the education debates that had rocked
Britain since the establishment of the Board of Education in 1900 and the commence-
ment of a history curriculum in secondary schools in 1906. Instruction in history,
however, depended on the Local Education Authorities; no national curriculum ex-
isted until after World War II. In the interwar years the method of teaching history
remained generally static and prescriptive: “…oral lesson followed by dictated notes,”
and “stories and biographies” in elementary school followed by “periodic studies” in
middle school with a “review of the whole course of English history in the higher
class”(Batho 277). But the Great War had proven the need for broader understanding
of a world beyond Britain.
Some of the most significant efforts at educational reform during and just after
World War I were instituted by Virginia Woolf ’s cousin, Herbert Fisher, who was first
Minister for Education under Lloyd George’s coalition government and later Minis-
ter for the Board of Trade. Though Virginia Woolf sketches an ambivalent portrait
of Fisher in two lengthy diary entries of 1919 and 1921, Fisher worked to improve
the teaching of history in secondary schools and to increase and standardize teachers’
salaries.5 His goal—using history to help students appreciate the development of hu-
man civilization—was, if loftier and more general than Leonard Woolf ’s purpose, an
indication of Fisher’s commitment to a liberal arts curriculum. Under the Education
Act of 1918 (often called Fisher’s reform act), Fisher advocated increased government
contribution to teachers’ salaries and a state-funded pension scheme. Importantly, he
also raised the school-leaving age to fourteen (from twelve years old) and encouraged
the establishment of more schools for fourteen to sixteen-year-olds. At the start of his
term as Minister of Education, he simplified the examination system and helped initi-
ate both School Certificates and Higher School Certificates. Though many of Fisher’s
progressive reforms failed due to post-war governmental cuts, successive Ministers of
Education’s efforts also stalled until after World War II when the leaving-age was finally
raised to fifteen.6
In 1937 concurrent with the publication of the World-Makers and World-Shakers
series, the Board of Education issued a report suggesting that history be taught through
biography “so that the pupil shall leave school with at least some knowledge of those
outstanding characters in our national story whose names are commonplaces of our
daily life and thought” (Cannadine et. al. 73). Leonard Woolf ’s series aimed to move
beyond this exclusively “national story” to include at least figures from classical Greece
and western Europe.
Of the four biographies and the extant correspondence between the biographers,
Leonard Woolf and his assistant, Margaret West, the lengthiest (and most interest-
ing) negotiations were with people Woolf did not know personally—prolific Scottish
novelist Dorothy Mitchison and her co-author Richard Crossman—and a little-
known progressive school German teacher, Reginald Snell. Under his pseudonym, L.
B. Pekin, Snell published five other works on pedagogy with Hogarth, one in the Day
to Day Pamphlet series, and two others condemning public school exclusivity and
teaching methods. Of his 1939 book on co-education published by Hogarth, Pekin
claims that had Hitler been in a co-educational school, “the times would be a good
deal pleasanter” (HPA MS 2750/333). Amongst the other biographers Pekin stands
out as most sensitive to the juvenile audience (as teacher in the progressive St. Chris-
topher’s, Letchworth, he could better gauge the appropriate tone) yet most anxious
about his own abilities. When he finally agreed to write the biography, he promised
Leonard Woolf: “I will do my best with Darwin, and try not to be too grown-up
about it” (HPA MS 2750/33).
Figure 1: L. B. Pekin, Darwin (London: Hogarth Press, 1937). Dust

jacket by John Banting. Copyright Banting estate.
The Darwin biography strikes an admirable balance between summarizing Dar-

win’s life and character and describing his principal theories about evolution and
the struggle for existence. Of the goal of the series in general, Battershill notes, “The
subjects’ carefully calibrated levels of fame combine with the series’ cautiously peda-
gogical aim, that the books should not “seem too much like lessons” [HPA 579, n.d],
but should still communicate the significance of these figures and should teach young
people about history” (Battershill 152). Pekin avoids sermonizing or delving too deeply
into Darwin’s theories. He supports his chronological account of Darwin’s life with
carefully placed quotations from Darwin’s letters and autobiography to make Darwin
more accessible to a young audience. Above all, he emphasizes Darwin’s modesty and
his persistence. In the final pages Pekin proffers Darwin as an example of humane and
ethical behavior and, perhaps covertly, suggests his own pro-Socialist stance in a com-
parison of Darwin to Karl Marx:
[H]is theories were widely read and discussed all over the world during his
lifetime, he was very highly prized in Russia, while in Germany Karl Marx—
as important a world-shaker as Darwin himself, the man whose criticisms of
the ‘capitalist’ system of production for profit have converted so many people
to socialist or community-serving ways of thought—wished to dedicate his
great book Das Kapital to him. (77)
A pacifist and fierce hater of Fascism, Pekin transforms a controversial Victorian figure
into a contemporary capable of students’ emulation. Darwin’s lack of egotism—his “un-
conscious influence” and his being the vehicle through which a revolution in human
thought occurred—contrast sharply with the forceful and coercive Fascist dictators at
work in 1930s Europe.
Like Pekin’s, the other three biographies in the series strove to emphasize the hu-
manity of their subjects over heroic larger-than-life qualities. In making famous figures
accessible to common readers, however, the biographers evinced a similar political
agenda to Pekin’s. Socrates, Joan of Arc, and the Italian Risorgimento trio (Mazzini,
Garibaldi and Cavour) are all more intentionally revolutionary than Darwin in their
opinions and actions. In suggesting that Richard Crossman, then an Oxford tutor of
Classics but also a Labour Party liberal, co-author the Socrates biography with her,
Dorothy Mitchison confessed to Leonard Woolf that “Dick Crossman has got a lot of
guts, but may easily take the politically wrong turn, and I think I ought to keep an eye
on him” (HPA MS 2750/283). Crossman glibly responded to Miss West’s request for a
brief blurb to advertise the biography: “Socrates—the story of the man who knew that
he knew nothing,” later elaborating: “Socrates was condemned to death by an Athenian
jury in 399 B.C., for corrupting the youth and believing in strange gods” (HPA MS
2750/283). A crossed-out final sentence at the end states, “They paint a picture of the
‘first conscientious rejection’ upon the background of Athenian glory and collapse.” The
biography, apart from a rather extensive historical context on which Leonard Woolf
insisted, presents Socrates as conscientiously rejecting social and political pressures to
conform. Crossman and Mitchison draw frequent comparisons between the Greece of
Socrates’ time and 1930s England and Europe. They compare Athenian slaves “simply
thought of as inferior mining-machines” to contemporary Africans who slave away in

South African gold mines (14). In an implicit criticism of the British education system,
they show how Socrates radically reversed the distinction between pupil and teacher
since he “never pretended to know anything. He said he was…not a teacher, but a pupil
anxious to learn from anyone the answers to the questions he asked” (36).
If modesty was the hallmark of the Darwin biography, courage and passive resistance
characterize Socrates. The authors draw lessons from Socrates’s refusal to support the ex-
ecution of Athenian generals who had failed to act in time in a sea battle with Sparta:
That shows that Socrates could stand up to an angry crowd, and if ever you are
in a crowd like that—and they happen still—you will see how extremely brave
one has to be to do it. And you will see, too that the only kind of person who
can have that courage is someone like Socrates, who only cares for and believes
in the real truth. If you believe in the same things as the crowd the ghosts and
terrors and follies and unreasonable hates, then you, too will be swept away by
them and will not be able to stand against injustice as Socrates did (60).
The biography ends with a rousing call to its young readers to think for themselves
and to resist tyranny: “Although he has been dead for more than two thousand years…
he can, if our minds are open to him, stir us up to follow him, twisting ourselves free
from power and money and pride on to the dangerous and exciting hunt for our own
time’s truth” (80). When she submitted the manuscript to Hogarth, Mitchison wrote to
Leonard Woolf: “It is a bit tendentious in parts but we pride ourselves on having kept
out the word ‘fascism’!” (HPA MS 2750/283).
Vita Sackville-West’s Joan of Arc, the only biography in the series about a woman,
was essentially a simplified version of a full-length adult biography Vita had published
the previous year with Cobden-Sanderson, marking a departure from her loyalty to the
Hogarth Press. After Miss Waddell had declined to write Joan of Arc, Leonard Woolf
made a late offer in June 1936 to Vita, ingeniously telling her, “I did not say anything
to you about it because I thought you would have had enough of the good woman,
but it has struck me that it is just conceivable that you might be willing to do a short
book like this which would not in any way compete with your great book” (HPA MS
2750/419). Like Socrates, and to a lesser extent Darwin, Joan of Arc becomes a beacon
of independent vision and thinking for a young audience. That her miraculous powers
of persuasion, coupled with her ability to fight like her male counterparts, finally ends
with her execution, sends a similar message about the necessity for extreme courage in
a hostile or repressive society. Joan’s insistence on her own vision and independence in
the face of a church that considers her a heretic, challenge fourteen-year-old readers to
emulate her bravery and to stand up for their own ideals in an increasingly threatened
world. Of the four biographies, Joan’s life appears most appropriate for the juvenile au-
dience since she leads the charge for the relief of Orleans when she is only a few years
older than the intended readership. Sackville-West tries to convey the contradictions
in Joan’s character, stressing her humility which “was no less remarkable than her ge-
nius” (40). The book, written more simply than the three other biographies, aimed to
appeal directly to young readers bored by dry history texts. Sackville-West promises to
avoid the typical “stiff and unreal” description of famous historical figures and to show
Joan as “not wax, but a real living person with her faults as well as her virtues; so real,
that you feel sure a drop of blood would come from her finger if you pricked it, and
she would cry…” (8). In response to Vita’s annoyance about the series being advertised
for both young people and older readers, Leonard Woolf quoted a notice in the Not-
tingham Journal stating that the series “should prove useful also to older readers who
require an outline sketch of the subjects” (HPA MS 2750/419). Several other reviews in
regional British newspapers also suggested that an older audience with little time for ex-
tensive research might find the books informative. In a one-paragraph review of 24 June
1937, The Scotchman stated that “Older readers also who would welcome a short-cut to
knowledge about outstanding historical figures should find this series useful” (15).
Whereas the other four biographers pursue a progressive educational model by
incorporating, though usually subtly, political allusions to the present day, Sackville-
West attacks the old system of teaching and reading history. In a peroration that echoes
Woolf ’s criticism of the Edwardian materialists, she debunks former pedagogical
methods in favor of her livelier approach:
Of course there are the usual dull and dry facts of history which have to be
mastered before we can come to an understanding of her true achievement.
They can be explained in a few pages, after which we can go on to the only re-
ally interesting way of studying history, which is by gaining a vivid knowledge
of the men and women who made it. For history is not only dates and facts,
but Life itself, and it goes on creating itself every day, not as an abstract thing,
but as the natural consequence of the characters and feelings and ambitions of
the people we read about every day in the papers. (8–9)
The dull “material” facts of history were more difficult to ignore in the case of Mar-
jorie Strachey’s biography of the three Italian Risorgimento leaders. Initially in April
1936 Leonard Woolf wrote to Strachey suggesting only Garibaldi and Mazzini or (in-
serted in pen in the margin of the letter) Warren Hastings (HPA MS 2750/474). But the
following December, Strachey pressed her case for including Cavour who appeared to
her “more essential to the business than Mazzini” and who “is unjustly forgotten—or
rather, neglected. He is not a romantic figure, but he is the sort of man who, in these
days, should be called to mind, & the young should be reminded that the Sword &
the Soul without the Brain may lead to undesirable & disastrous results” (HPA MS
2750/474). Anxious to have the completed manuscript on time, Leonard grudgingly
agreed: “…I am sure that you are quite right as to its importance, but I do not share
your admiration for him.” After reading the manuscript, however, he conceded, “I
think too you were probably right about Cavour and I was previously wrong” (HPA MS
2750/474). When she delivered the manuscript, Marjorie confessed to Leonard that
though even a fourteen-year-old audience might struggle with the material, she “could
not leave out the political & diplomatic aspects for the sake of the kiddies” (HPA MS
2750/474). The eighty-page biography works to compress three distinctly different lives
and personalities within a half century of political events. In the process, however, the
three figures jostle each other for prominence, with Mazzini emerging as the principal
subject. Though Cavour receives the least attention, Strachey justifies his inclusion:
“But for this [unification] to be accomplished more was necessary than high ideals and
heroic deeds; to attain success the patriotic party needed, besides Mazzini the prophet,
and Garibaldi the general, a statesman, who should be as great and devoted in his way
as they in theirs” (53).
The subject of the Italian Risorgimento and its “makers and shakers” offered, of
the four biographies, the closest parallel to events of 1930s Europe. Whereas Austria,
France and Spain had vied for control of Italy’s provinces, by the late 1930s Hitler and
Mussolini were menacing their own countries and about to reach beyond to the rest
of Europe and Russia. Though Strachey avoids explicit comparisons with the present,
her final paragraph suggests the failure of ideals for the three men fought: “And their
work? How far has their achievement lasted? To-day Italy is indeed united and inde-
pendent—so far the aspirations of the three great liberators have been fulfilled. But the
constitution for which Cavour toiled, the democracy for which Mazzini suffered, the
freedom for which Garibaldi bled, have vanished from the kingdom of Italy (80).
Marjorie Strachey, younger sister of Lytton and friend of the Woolfs, was both an
educator and an author, having published a novel, The Counterfeits, in 1927, a biog-
raphy of Chopin, and two accounts of early Christian theologians. In her biography
of the Strachey family, Barbara Caine tends to dismiss Marjorie’s achievements, com-
menting that “…her numerous novels, biographies, and essays never succeeded in
gaining any form of critical acclaim” (357). Ironically, Virginia Woolf, though she fre-
quently alludes to Marjorie as “Gumbo” and satirizes her dramatic manner of dressing
and gesturing, gravely considered Marjorie’s opinion when Woolf was struggling with
Roger Fry’s biography. In her diary entry of 7 July 1938, Woolf remarks that “Gumbo…
last night threw cold water on the whole idea of biography of those who have no lives.
Roger had, she says, no life that can be written. I daresay this is true” (D5 155).
The series World-Makers and World-Shakers avoided this dilemma with the choice
of already famous historical figures. Within the eighty-page limit, the biographers were
forced to indicate the essence of their characters by a brief quotation or dramatic action
and to provide just enough historical “fact” to justify Leonard’s hope that the books
would be adopted in history classes. In the end, though few schools purchased the
biographies for the intended pedagogical purpose, Leonard looked back on the ex-
periment as worthwhile. In the final volume of his autobiography, he commented that
World-Makers and World-Shakers
…was a series of biographies for young people which would attempt to ex-
plain history to them through the lives of great men and women, and at the
same time present history from a modern and enlightened point of view. I
had hoped to get the books used in schools. The hope was not fulfilled, and,
though we sold out the edition of the four books which we published, we
never got the sale we wanted and did not go on with the venture. This was
partly due to the fact that we were so soon overwhelmed by the war and the
difficulty of getting paper. But I still think that the idea was a good one, and
our first four books were extremely interesting. (The Journey Not the Arrival
Matters 98–99)
If the series failed to reach a broader public in either Britain or the U.S. (where the bi-
ographies were published the following year by Stackpole and Sons), the books deserve
recognition for their attempts to disrupt the rote teaching of history that Sackville-West
criticized in Joan of Arc, as well as for their covert political agenda—to offer alternative
models to the two dictators then shaking the world.
Notes
1. In their discussion of Fascism in British education in the 1930s, Pamela and Roy Fisher emphasize the
focus by Cecil Courtney Lewis, editor of The Blackshirt Newspaper and advocate of boarding schools
for all, on physical fitness and sports over curriculum to form a “masculinist ethic” (77).
2. Buck notes that Banting designed jackets for eleven Hogarth Press publications at Leonard Woolf ’s
behest. In his history of The Hogarth Press, J. H. Willis states that Banting’s designs for the series “suc-
cessfully combine surrealistic elements with forceful geometric elements” (384).
3. Of these 22 possibilities, only one—Tolstoy—is a novelist, one—Leonardo da Vinci—an artist, one—
Christopher Columbus—an explorer, and one—Socrates—a philosopher. The others are religious
figures who either influenced politics or founded sects—St. Francis, Savonarola, Joan of Arc, Gandhi;
scientists—Darwin, Edison, Faraday, Nansen, Marconi; political scions or monarchs—Catherine the
Great, Marie Antoinette, the “Last Russian Czar,” Lenin, Abraham Lincoln.
4. The Hogarth Press had already published a searing indictment of British education by Mark Starr, Lies
and Hate in Education (1929), in which Starr condemned the “Kipling attitude” of history textbooks for
inculcating an imperialist and class-ridden bias amongst young readers (33).
5. Woolf details two lunches with Fisher, one in 1919 and the other in 1921. In both entries she evinces
her ambivalence between the public professional “Minister of Education” and the private human being.
She struggles between satirical portraiture and grudging tolerance for his public life and refers to Fisher
as “a strange mixture of ascetic & worldling. The lean, secluded man now finds himself dazzled by of-
fice, & with all his learning & culture swept away by men of vitality & affairs” (D1 263). Her 18 April
1921 entry two years later similarly contrasts the public figure with the private relative.
6. In a recent essay in which he details three decades of interactions between Virginia Woolf and H. A. L.
Fisher, David Bradshaw suggests that Fisher may have served as a model for some of Woolf ’s ineffectu-
ally intellectual male characters in several novels. More pertinent here, however, is his comment about
Leonard Woolf ’s refusal to applaud Fisher as an educational reformer (“‘The Very Centre of the Very
Centre’: H. A. L. Fisher, Oxford and ‘That Great Patriarchal Machine’” [16]).
Works Cited
Batho, Gordon. “From a Test of Memory to a Training for Life: The Teaching of History.” The Development of
the Secondary Curriculum. Ed. Michael H. Price. London: Croom Helm, 1986. 214–83.
Battershill, Claire. Biography and Autobiography at the Hogarth Press. Dissertation, University of Toronto,
2012.
Bradshaw, David. “‘The Very Centre of the Very Centre’: H.A.L. Fisher, Oxford and ‘That Great Patriarchal Ma-
chine.’” Virginia Woolf and Heritage: Selected Papers from the Twenty-sixth Annual Conference on Virginia
Woolf. Ed. Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin and Anne Reus. Clemson, SC: Clemson UP, 2017. 10–29.
Buck, Louisa. “John Banting’s Designs for The Hogarth Press.” The Burlington Magazine 127.983 (Feb. 1985):
88–92.
Caine, Barbara. Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Cannadine, David, Jenny Keating, Nicola Sheldon. The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-
Century England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Fisher, Pamela and Roy Fisher. “Tomorrow we live: fascist versions of education in 1930s Britain.” British
Journal of Sociology of Education 30.1 (January 2009): 71–82.
Mitchison, Naomi and R.H.S. Crossman. Socrates. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
——. “Socrates.” University of Reading Special Collections, Hogarth Press Archive, MS 2750/283.
Pekin, L. B. Darwin. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
Pekin, L. B. “Co-education.” University of Reading Special Collections, Hogarth Press Archive, MS 2750/333.
——. “Darwin.” University of Reading Special Collections, Hogarth Press Archive, MS 2750/334.
Review of World-Makers and World-Shakers. The Scotchman, 27 June 1937, 15.
Review of World-Makers and World-Shakers. Citizen (Gloucester, U.K.), 13 July 1937, 8.
——. Joan of Arc. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
Sackville-West, Vita. “Joan of Arc” (World-Makers and World-Shakers Series). University of Reading Special
Collections, Hogarth Press Archive, MS 2750/419.
——. Joan of Arc. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
Stannard, H.M. “Miniature Biography” (Review of World-Makers and World-Shakers) TLS, Issue 1846, 19
June 1937: 460.
Starr, Mark. Lies and Hate in Education. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
Strachey, Marjorie. “Garibaldi, Mazzini and Cavour.” University of Reading Special Collections, Hogarth
Press Archive, MS 2750/474.
——. Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
Willis, J.H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917–1941. Charlottesville: UP of
Virginia, 1992.
Woolf, Leonard. The Journey Not the Arrival Matters. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.
——. World-Makers & World-Shakers Series. University of Reading Special Collections, Hogarth Press Ar-
chive, MS 2750/579.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 5. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1984.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. New York: Harcourt,
1980.
The Hogarth Press, a Singular Art Gallery
by Virginie Podvin
V
irginia Woolf has an ambiguous relationship with painting, as Diane Gillespie
revealed in The Sister’s Arts. At times she seems to be jealous of the painter; at
others, words are the superior art form. Sometimes there is equality between
plume and paintbrush. She was used to comparisons of the merits of each discipline, as
she noted in her diary: “Roger [Fry] compared the poetry with the painting. I like it all
very much” (D1 80). Word may be king, the brush too. Later, Virginia regards painting
with an envious eye: “How I wish I were a painter” (L6 236). Why? Because “Words
are an impure medium” (Walter Sickert 13), as she tells Ethel Smyth: “one’s sentences
are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish;
and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the
sea” (L4 223). Because words are inappropriate: “But words, words! How inadequate
you are!” (E3 166). Because language is a prison—“[words] are so stored with mean-
ings” (CE2 248)—and words can’t all signify. Virginia doesn’t append any word to her
sister’s name when she dedicates Night and Day to her: “To Vanessa Bell but, looking
for a phrase, I found non to stand beside your name” (ND). The painter has authentic
eyesight—“the writer has need of a third eye” (E4 244)—and painting slips out of rou-
tine: “As a painter, I believe you are much less conscious of the drone of daily life than
I am, as a writer” (L1 475). Painting can be less trying than literature—“They are very
large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces
in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories” (D1 69)—and it gets ahead of
literature: “Literature was suffering from a plethora of old clothes. Cézanne and Picasso
had shown the way” (RF 172).
Despite all of these drawbacks, word can be king. It has more ability than the
brush: “Surely you must see the infinite superiority of the language to the paint? Think
how many things are impossible in paint” (L3 493). Literature is a serious art—“Your
art is far more a joke than mine” (L2 131)—so much more serious that Virginia sub-
ordinates art to it: “I went to see the Rodins at the Albert Museum. I didn’t think at all
highly of them, except from the literary point of view” (L2 284).
But sometimes, they can be equal. “Painting and writing have much to tell each
other” (Walter Sickert 22), she writes in 1934, and creations emerge from this dialogue.
Thus, Vanessa Bell produces a painting from Mrs Dalloway’s Party, and A Room of
One’s Own is the literary transposition of Bell’s A Conversation. But finally, wouldn’t
the Hogarth Press be the symbol of this equality? Indeed, as Woolf confides to Fry in
1922, “I think it is now firm on its legs, and might branch out: I think a shop and gallery
combined must come next” (L2 573). If no exhibition area came into being, neverthe-
less, she made this project a reality by making her press a singular art gallery. How? By
creating “painting novels” and by raising books to the rank of pieces of art.
I. Painting Novels
Woolf is a painter and her literary project is identical to the artist’s project: “The novelist
after all wants to make us see” (Walter Sickert 22). She considers writing as a represen-
tative art: “D’you know, Clive, […] all art is representative. You say the word tree, & you
see a tree.” (D1 80). Virginia thinks as a painter. She says to Raverat: “we have the same
language” (L3 155) and she possesses “[a] plastic sense of word” (D1 quoted by Lacou-
rarie 32). She also conceives of her pen as a brush: “I must buy shaded inks—lavenders,
pinks, violets—to shade my meaning” (L6 461).
Virginia transposes in her novels the techniques of a painter: form, colour, light,
contrast and various pictorial genres—composing portraits, landscapes and still lives.
Her palette is the character’s framing, colour, drawing, and borrowing from different
artistic movements. She frames her characters, placing, for instance, Mrs Dalloway in
front of doorways—“She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a
doorway”; in front of windows—“she paused by the open staircase window […] paused
at the window”; in front of French windows—“she had burst open the French windows
[…] standing there at the open window” (MD 85, 35, 5). She borrows from painting
its mediums, colours, and drawing. Mrs Dalloway has “a touch of the bird about her,
of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious,” “grey hair,” “[a] pink face” (MD 6, 191, 42). The
portrait of a young girl in Jacob’s Room combines colours and shapes:
Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and
red, the most prominent was a girl’s face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed
to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark
vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared
at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in
her thus staring […] A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust
on her head the conical white hat of a pierrot. (JR 98–99)
Virginia borrows from different pictorial movements to realise portraits which

pulverise aesthetic boundaries. In Mrs Dalloway, different touches are juxtaposed at
the heart of a single canvas. A Renaissance touch—sfumato painting mode, which can
be defined as vaporous outlines, is taken from Leonardo da Vinci: “the smoke curtsey-
ing, blowing in their faces [Clarissa and Peter]; her little pink face showing through”
(MD 169). A Neoclassical touch: Clarissa is “astonishingly like an eighteenth-century
masterpiece—a Reynolds or a Romney” (VO 47). Impressionist touch: “First on top
of some hill there she would stand, hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out,
pointing, crying to them—she saw the Severn beneath” (MD 169). This portrait of Cla-
rissa by Peter looks like Femme à l’ombrelle tournée vers la droite by Monet. A Cubist
touch:
Clarissa […] collecting the whole of her at one point […] That was her self
when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she
alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world
only into one centre. (MD 42)
The Hogarth Press, A Singular Art Gallery 95
Lastly, there is an expressionist touch. Clarissa has a “narrow pea-stick figure,” she is
“pointed; dartlike; definite.” Septimus has an “angular” profile, his face is “lean, con-
tracted, hostile” (MD 13, 42, 93, 94). It reminds us of Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff,
Kokoschka, and Schiele. By realising portraits, Virginia approaches Fry insofar as she
destroys academism. Indeed, the multiplicity of portraits leads, paradoxically, to a
blurred vision. Peter Walsh declares: “it was difficult to think of her [Clarissa]; except
in starts” (MD 127). Arnold Bennett says it too,
As regards character-drawing, Mrs Woolf (in my opinion) told us ten thou-

sand things about Mrs Dalloway, but did not show us Mrs Dalloway. I got
from the novel no coherent picture of Mrs Dalloway. (Bennett)
The realisation of landscapes links Woolf ’s writing to painting too. In The Years,
the evocation of the sunset leads to the creation of a real painting,
It was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged
with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-
blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended. In the fields the trees stood
majestically caparisoned, with their innumerable leaves gilt. Sheep and cows,
pearl white and parti-coloured, lay recumbent or munched their way through
the half transparent grass. An edge of light surrounded everything. A red-
gold fume rose from the dust on the roads. Even the little red brick villas on
the high roads had become porous, incandescent with light, and the flowers in
cottage gardens, lilac and pink like cotton dresses, shone veined as if lit from
within. Faces of people standing at cottage doors or padding along pavements
showed the same red glow as they fronted the slowly sinking sun. (TY 329)
The production of still life fixes the pictorial dimension of Woolf ’s writing. The de-
scription of the fruit basket in To the Lighthouse echoes paintings by Cézanne as well
as Vanessa, who “admired Virginia’s novels, especially their visual eloquence” (Brad-
shaw 295):
No, she said, she did not want a pear. Indeed she had been keeping guard over
the dish of fruit (without realizing it) jealously, hoping that nobody would
touch it. Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows
of the fruit, among the rich purples of the lowland grapes, then over the horny
ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a
round shape, without knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it,
she felt more and more serene; until, oh, what a pity that they should do it—a
hand reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the whole thing. (TTL 88)
II. From Book to Masterpiece
Before creating masterpieces, the Woolfs made the Hogarth Press a place of aesthetic
reflection by publishing artists’ literary writings. This includes those of Clive Bell—
Poems (1921) and Proust (1928); Roger Fry’s A Sampler of Castile (1923); and Mary
Stella Edward’s Time and Chance Poems (1926). They publish writings on art too: the
critical works of Roger Fry—Living Painters: Duncan Grant (1923); Art and Commerce
(1926); Cézanne (1927); Hubert Waley—The Revival of Aesthetics (1926); Charles Mau-
ron—The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature (1927); Eric Walter White—Walking
Shadows: An Essay on Lotte Reiniger’s Silhouette Films (1931); Raymond Mortimer—
The French Pictures. A Letter to Harriet (1932); and Sir Michael Sadler—Modern Art
and Revolution (1932). In 1924, Virginia asks Raverat for a pamphlet, “why don’t you
and Gwen write us a pamphlet about art?” (L3 93). It’s also by representing the figure
of the painter in her novels or short stories and by publishing her own works about art
(Walter Sickert: A Conversation and Roger Fry: A Biography) that Virginia makes the
Hogarth Press an artistic area.
But it is also a gallery because the Woolfs make books works of art. The title of one
of Virginia’s articles, written in 1927, is eloquent: “Is Fiction an Art?” (E4 457). In 1908,
she declares: “I […] settle what book I am to write—how I shall re-form the novel […]
and shape infinite strange shapes” (L1 356). At the same time as she creates innova-
tive writing, she produces masterpieces. The Times Literary Supplement for instance
compares Kew Gardens to “a work of art” (29 May 1919). Since childhood, Virginia is
fascinated by binding, papers and covers. To Emma Vaughan, she writes in 1902:
I have been making endless experiments and almost smelt my room out this
afternoon trying to do gold lettering. Tomorrow I shall experiment with gold
on cloth. I believe there is an immense field for this kind of thing. There seem
ever so many ways of making covers—of leather—linen—silk—parchment—
vellum—japanese paper etc. etc. etc. which the ordinary lidders never think
of. (L1 56)
To her brother Thoby, in 1897:
Gradually all my presents have arrived—Fathers Lockhart [the Life of Sir

Walter Scott by John Lockhart] came the evening I wrote to you—ten most
exquisite little volumes, half bound in purple leather, with gilt scrolls and
twirls and thistles everywhere, and a most artistic blue and brown mottling
on their other parts. So my blinded eyesight is poring more fervidly than ever
over miserable books—only not even you, my dear brother, could give such
an epithet to these lovely creatures. (L1 4)
How do the Woolfs make books as works of art? On one hand, by performing their
work as craftsmen, precisely, by selecting materials and creating a handmade work. On
the other hand, by giving a prominent place to illustrations.
Firstly, their meticulousness shows through the quality of the press, types and pa-
per chosen. They buy their first press in 1917—a small hand-press. A few months later,
Virginia would like a more efficient one:
We began our printing [Prelude by Mansfield] this afternoon. Our first discov-
ery was the important one that the springs aren’t even, or the balls different in
weight. We—or L.—put this more or less right, & we printed 300 copies of the
first page, but we should be glad of another press. (D1 76)
So they put money into materials of superior quality: “in 1921 they bought another
printing press, a Minerva” and we know that “[b]y 1923 they had invested [a lot] in the
Press for printing presses, type, and materials” (Gaither 15). Virginia pays attention to
the type: “We took a proof of the first page of K.M.’s story, The Prelude. It looks very
nice, set solid in the new type” (D1 56). The paper is carefully selected. The one on
which they print: “We took off a proof of 2 pages [of Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude], on
paper of the right size & liked the look of it immensely. Our paper will be soft & yellow
tinted” (D1 66). For instance, The Legend of Monte della Sibilla or Le Paradis de la Reine
Sibille by Clive Bell is “[p]rinted on Basingwerk parchment paper from Basingwerk
Abbey in Wales” (Bradshaw 292). The one used for binding is particularly important,
as Leonard testifies in 1964:
[W]e gave much time and care to finding beautiful, uncommon, and some-
times cheerful paper for binding our books, and, as the first publishers to do
this, I think we started a fashion which many of the regular, old established
publishers followed. We got papers from all over the place, including some
brilliantly patterned from Czechoslovakia, and we also had some marbled
covers made for us by Roger Fry’s daughter in Paris. (236)
To the Czechoslovakian and marbled papers add Japanese paper, used for Two Stories
by Leonard and Virginia, buff paper used for Poems by Clive Bell, wax paper used
for Talks with Tolstoi by Goldenveizer. They also take care of the colour of paper: “In
cases where a book was printed and bound by the Woolfs paper for the wrappers was
often purchased as needed, so that a variety of colors and patterns was used on the
same title” (Woolmer IX). Bradshaw comments on this colour range: “even before
artists were employed to design book jackets, the earliest publications were notable
for their distinctive and unusual covers” (Bradshaw 285). See Paris by Hope Mirrlees:
“paper wrappers with a gold, blue, and red diamond design; white label printed in red”
(Woolmer 31).
The Woolfs’ meticulous work shows through their publications. From 1917 to
1932, they produce thirty-five hand-printed books. The Woolfs set the type, the Woolfs
stitch, the Woolfs bind, the Woolfs color. Virginia frequently reports her activity in her
diary: “I did a little printing” (D1 66). For the Hogarth’s second publication, Prelude,
“Virginia set most of the type […] while Leonard did all the machining” (Gaither 10).
She sews Two Stories: “Virginia sewed the thirty-two pages and the cover together in
the dining room of Hogarth House” (Bradshaw 284). In regard to the binding, she
considers herself as an expert: “I am really a good binder” (L1 52). Virginia did an
internship with Sylvia Stebbing and Anastasia Power at the age of nineteen. At last,
the Woolfs color themselves some covers, including Kew Gardens and Twelve Origi-
nal Woodcuts by Roger Fry. From year to year, they get better and the book becomes
more and more precious. About The Legend of Monte della Sibilla or Le Paradis de la
Reine Sibille by Clive Bell, Bradshaw declares: “the Woolfs took particular care with this
publication which evidenced the printing and designing ability they had acquired over
some six years of publishing” (Bradshaw 292).
The prominent place they give to illustrations makes the book the equivalent of
artistic work. The beauty of covers distinguishes Hogarth Press books. In the early
stages of the Press, the illustrators are members of the Bloomsbury Group. Only four
covers of Virginia’s books were not made by her sister: Orlando, Flush, A Letter to a
Young Poet and Reviewing. The dust jacket of Jacob’s Room proves that Hogarth can
be considered as a gallery. Indeed, it can be compared to a post-impressionist work as
Leonard said in 1967: “It [the motif] did not represent a desirable female or even Jacob
or his room, and it was what in 1923 many people would have called reproachfully
post-impressionist” (76). Duncan Grant illustrated The Legend of Monte Della Sibilla
by Clive Bell with Vanessa, as well as Roger Fry’s monograph Living Painters: Duncan
Grant, and Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. Carrington designed
the cover of Stories of the East by Leonard, and Fry realised those of his own books:
A Sampler of Castile, and Cézanne. As their production extended and became more
profitable, the Woolfs made wider artistic choices. Among designers who worked for
Hogarth at various times in the 1920s and 1930s were Edward McKnight Kauffer,1 Rob-
ert Medley, Enid Marx, Trekkie Ritchie Parsons, William Nicholson, John Armstrong,
John Banting and Eugene McCown.
Illustrations are also part of the text. Concerning Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
by Julia Strachey (1932), Virginia declares to Dora Carrington:
I’ve read Julia’s story. I think it astonishingly good. We shall publish it I hope
[…] will you do pictures? I’m sure thats what would make it a success—
Couldn’t there be woodcuts in the text? It seems to me full of scenes that want
illustrations. (L5 29)
They may figure on a whole page as for instance the four pictures by Vanessa in Flush.2
Or they may get mixed up in the text. Kew Gardens is an eloquent example:3
In 1927 the Woolfs decided on a reissue of the successful Kew Gardens and
Virginia invited Vanessa to design the cover and to decorate each page of the
short text. This can be regarded as their closest and most complete collabora-
tive enterprise, described by John Lehman as ‘the perfect sisterly accord of
writer and artist sharing the same vision’ […] the third edition [1927], had
a simple but delightful yellow-and-brown cover by Vanessa and each of the
twenty-one pages contains her swirling decorative motifs which allude to the
movement of the story, complementing what has been called the ‘flickering’
quality of Virginia’s piece. (Bradshaw 294)
Thanks to the Woolfs’ craftsmanship and the quality of the illustrations, the book be-
comes a masterpiece. Discussing Poems by T. S Eliot, the famous London bookseller
Rick Gekoski writes in his Tolkien’s Gown:
If this delicate little volume didn’t have a printed label on it, you could mistake
it for a painting. I suppose that’s because it is a painting, and by no less an art-
ist than Roger Fry, who hand-made the marbled paper in which it’s covered.
It’s an exuberant abstract design in swirling yellows, oranges and browns, all
mixed up together, onto which a bright green has been allowed to drip, as in
a painting by Jackson Pollock. It’s gorgeous, ravishing, my second favourite
book of the twentieth century. The printed label though, reveals the object for
what it really is.
He adds:
So attractive is the book that it had a place of honour in a vitrine at the Tate
Gallery exhibition “The Art of Bloomsbury,” 1999. The curator of that show,
the art historian Richard Shone, is a great admirer of the design […] I think
it is one of the prettiest books of the early Hogarths. (quoted by Bradshaw
284–285)
Virginia’s ambiguous relationship with painting became a successful collaboration

which raised the Hogarth Press to the rank of an art gallery. The most eloquent example
of this collaboration is The Legend of Monte Della Sibilla which gathered five members
of the Bloomsbury Group: Clive Bell wrote the poem, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell
realised the illustrations, Leonard and Virginia Woolf printed the masterpiece. As Tony
Bradshaw explains, “The Legend may not be a masterful poem, but the final outcome is
a visual treat of which the five participants must have been proud” (292). This tradition
continued after Virginia’s death, with Vanessa still illustrating her posthumous publica-
tions. To conclude, a checklist to create a singular gallery: primarily consider yourself
as a writer; begin the press as a hobby; print in the living-room; appreciate rejected
literature; like art. It helps to be called Virginia Woolf.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Willson Gordon studies the importance of this artist in “On or about December 1928, the
Hogarth Press Changed” (2010).
2. These were re-drawn because of the demands of the Book Society. See Wilson (2012).
3. In The Sisters’ Art, Diane Gillespie studies the collaboration between Vanessa and Virginia in Kew
Gardens: “Kew Gardens is a good early example of the professional interchange between the two sisters
and their art media.” (118)
Works Cited
Bennett, Arnold. “Another Criticism of the New School.” Evening Standard 2 December 1926.
Bradshaw, Tony. “Virginia Woolf and Book Design.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the
Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 280–97.
Gaither, E. Mary. “The Hogarth Press: 1917–1938.” A Checklist of The Hogarth Press 1917–1938. Ed. J. How-
ard Woolmer. London: The Hogarth Press, 1976. 3–24.
Gillespie, Diane. The Sister’s Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. NY: Syracuse
UP, 1988.
Lacourarie, Chantal. Virginia Woolf: L’Écriture en tableau. Paris, Budapest, Torino: L’Harmattan, 2002.
Willson Gordon, Elizabeth. “On or about December 1928, the Hogarth Press Changed: E.McKnight Kauffer,
Art Markets and the Hogarth Press 1928–1939.” Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the
Networks of Modernism. Ed. Helen Southworth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Wilson, Nicola. “Virginia Woolf, Hugh Walpole, the Hogarth Press, and the Book Society.” ELH 79.1 (2012):
237–60.
Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. 4 Vols. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966–1967.
——. Jacob’s Room. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
——. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
——. Night and Day. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.
——. Roger Fry: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1976.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 Vols. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–1984.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 Vols. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986–2011.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 Vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
——. The Voyage Out. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965.
——. The Years. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965.
——. To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
——. Walter Sickert: A Conversation. London: The Hogarth Press, 1934.
Hours in a Library
Hours in a Library: Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen
by Tom Breckin
V
irginia Woolf ’s body of work contains within it a developing line of scepti-
cal thought on the usefulness of the traditional library for women, marked by
what can be seen as a critical highpoint in her powerful polemical text, A Room
of One’s Own (1929). That text in particular articulates the different problems that such
libraries presented: their suspicion both of women, manifesting in a refusal of entry or
a hostile environment, and of women’s work, leading to a dearth of material written by
women held inside their collections.1
Critics have provided detailed insight into Woolf ’s antipathy towards what Diane
Gillespie terms “institutional libraries”:
Institutional libraries, like those of the great English universities, are tradi-
tional, protected places designed mainly for the sedentary specialists of her
description. A woman may love learning, but her access to such libraries is
limited by her sex…She may need not only her own private space and suf-
ficient income, but also her own library. (Gillespie par. 2)
As Gillespie suggests in her essay, Woolf found libraries such as these (for example
the British Library, featured memorably in Jacob’s Room (1922) and A Room of One’s
Own) inherently male: ruled by men, protected by men, and filled with books by men.
Woolf ’s solution lay in a different type of library, one where books were used rather
than locked up, visitors—women included—were welcomed rather than turned away,
and the collections included titles from both men and women authors.
Despite this negative experience of the institutional library, Woolf also writes of the
positive experience she had of a different library, at the study of 22 Hyde Park Gate. This
paper aims to solve two questions: how are these contrasting representations reconcil-
able, and how is it that her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, is featured in both. In order to
answer these questions, I will be discussing several texts that demonstrate how Woolf ’s
allusions to Stephen and his work take a different tone depending on her purpose.
Starting at that first library in her family home, Woolf ’s formative years spent in
her father’s study have been referred to extensively in Woolf scholarship, and for obvi-
ous reason. Woolf wrote of the importance of having had a “free run of a large and quite
unexpurgated library” (MOB 119) during her youth and adolescence, for those hours
had formed a significant part of her education, as well as cultivating her prodigious
reading skills at an early age. Furthermore, the closeness between Woolf and Stephen
was always at its most apparent during moments discussing books in his study. Woolf
recalled her regular childhood ritual of proudly returning another completed book in
“A Sketch of the Past”: “I remember his pleasure, how he stopped writing and got up
and was very gentle and pleased, when I came into the study with a book I had done;
and asked him for another” (MOB 119). Even after the trauma of Julia’s death and the
Hours in a Library 103
change in their relationship that followed it, Woolf and Stephen would still share the
sanctuary of his study:
Father’s deafness had cut off any ties he would have had, naturally, with the
younger generation of writers. Yet he kept his own attitude perfectly distinct.
No one cared less for convention. No one respected intellect more. Thus I
would go from the drawing room and George’s gossip…to father’s study…
Rising, he would go to the shelves, put the book back and very kindly ask what
I had made of it? Perhaps I was reading Johnson. For some time we would
talk and then, feeling soothed, stimulated, full of love for this unworldly, very
distinguished, lonely man, I would go down to the drawing room again and
hear George’s patter. (MOB 158)
Here Stephen is put forward by Woolf as a like-minded literary companion; the

study an intellectual safe-haven from the hated society engagements George had
planned for her. Woolf associates Stephen with writers and intellect, and as maintain-
ing a complete indifference towards contemporary social convention—closer to herself
than to the Victorian world George epitomised (Woolf wrote of her half-brother, “No
more perfect fossil of Victorian society could exist” (MOB 152)). This version of Ste-
phen as literary guide and faithful supplier of books is evident not only in Woolf ’s
contribution to F. W. Maitland’s biography of Stephen, but also in her early diaries. The
diary entries are filled with references to the books Woolf is currently reading, with a
clear indication of who has guided her choices: she mentions reading, or planning to
read, Boswell, Cowper, Dante, and Hardy, all writers of whom Stephen spoke highly
(Maitland 410). In many ways Woolf ’s first library was her ideal library and Stephen
the ideal custodian. But, as A Room of One’s Own would make clear, for all of its charm
to that younger reader, this was based upon a patriarchal model that had become in-
creasingly abhorrent. As my readings of the following texts show, both points of view
were expressed by Woolf in her work.
Woolf ’s debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915), features a dramatic re-enactment of
the author’s forays to her father’s study in the pursuit of new literature. Woolf ’s part is
played by the Rachel Vinrace character, Stephen’s by Rachel’s uncle, Ridley Ambrose:
Rachel came into her uncle’s room and hailed him twice, “Uncle Ridley,”
before he paid her any attention.
At length he looked over his spectacles.
“Well?” he asked.
“I want a book,” she replied. “Gibbon’s History of the Roman Empire. May
I have it?”
She watched the lines on her uncle’s face gradually rearrange themselves
at her question. It had been smooth as a mask before she spoke. (283)
The scene features an assemblage of real-life moments for Woolf. She had herself
borrowed Gibbon’s History from Stephen as a youth (something she notes in a letter to
Vita Sackville-West (L4 27)), and the description of Ambrose’s study, with him ensconced
in its centre surrounded by a sea of books and papers, puts in mind Woolf ’s depiction
of the study from Hyde Park Gate featuring Stephen sitting at his rocking chair in the
middle of the book-lined room. Woolf wrote of how Stephen would slowly “unwrinkle
his forehead” as he realised his daughter was there, and “a very sweet smile” (MOB 158)
would form at this recognition. Ambrose’s reaction to Rachel’s entrance is described in
similar language, with affection. Ambrose is somewhat curmudgeonly in his manner, in-
cluding some eyebrow-raising at Rachel’s choice of books, but he is nevertheless enthused
by the chance to discuss literature with his niece. But what of their exchange when con-
sidered in the wider context of the full novel? Rachel is bombarded by men—mainly St.
John Hirst and Terence Hewet, but also Mr Dalloway—wishing to control her personal
development, and, more specifically, to determine her reading. But although Ambrose is
as equally ill-equipped as Hirst and Hewet for understanding Rachel’s “voyage,” he is not
intent on trying to manipulate it, and his collection of books is put at her disposal without
condition. The library in The Voyage Out, then, is presented sympathetically by Woolf
and bears an obvious likeness to that first library of her father’s.
Woolf ’s essay, “Hours in a Library” (1916), also recalls Stephen and not simply by
virtue of the borrowed title (Stephen published a three-volume collection of essays un-
der the same name). As Eleanor McNees has observed (136), Woolf ’s description of the
man who reads for the love of reading rather than of learning reminds us of Stephen’s
alpine pursuits:
He is a man of intense curiosity…to whom reading is more of the nature of

brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study; he trudges the high road,
he climbs higher and higher upon the hills until the atmosphere is almost too
fine to breathe in; to him it is not a sedentary pursuit at all. (GR 24)
This distinction Woolf draws between the methodical learned man and the reader, full of
“humane passion for pure and disinterested reading” (GR 24), brings to mind a passage
from Stephen himself, when he writes: “No critic can instil into a reader that spontaneous
sympathy with the thoughts and emotions incarcerated in the great masterpieces without
which all reading is cold and valueless” (“English Literature and Society” 6).
So Stephen is here, in Woolf ’s essay on reading and libraries, in the role of the “true
reader” (24). But do we wonder why? The feelings of sorrow and guilt that had perhaps
caused Woolf to tread delicately on the matter of her father in her piece for Maitland’s
biography had passed sufficiently for her to write a more caustic treatment of him in
her autobiographical work, “Reminiscences.” And rather than it being a touch of sen-
timentality on Woolf ’s part, I would argue that she is in fact showing a glimpse of the
subtle transition that sees her reposition Stephen as a peer. Instead of remaining only
as the patriarchal authority and owner of that original library, Woolf presents him here
as a fellow reader and someone who, like her, would want an inclusive library—where
books would actually be used and read as they were in his study (books were frequent-
ly annotated by Stephen, and he described his collection as a “mangy” lot (Maitland
489)). Whilst Stephen would yet still be faced with his characterisation as Mr Ramsay,
as well as the rejection of his study and his role as its custodian, Woolf is covertly
re-writing Stephen here as a like-minded contemporary, and one who had shared his
knowledge with his daughter.
“A Society,” the satirical short story first published as part of the Monday or Tues-
day (1921) collection, provides an example of Woolf ’s analysis of the institutional
library. The story is built around the premise of one of its characters, Poll, being left an
inheritance by her father that is received only on condition of her having read all the
books in the London Library. Notwithstanding the practical impossibility of the legacy,
a further, more unexpected concern faces Poll: the literature she finds there is bad, the
history untrue (and badly written), and the poetry “sentimental foolery” (MT 15). And
the story makes a wider point quite clear—these are books written exclusively by men:
“Why,” she asked, “if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers
have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?”
We were all silent; and, in the silence, poor Poll could be heard sobbing
out, “Why, why did my father teach me to read?” (MT 15)
Woolf ’s use of the London Library in the story is significant as it carried an im-
portant connection to her father. Her early diaries contain a description of the pair
hurrying across London to it in order to pick up a consignment of books (PA 62),
and an edition of the Hyde Park News delights in reporting Stephen’s appointment as
President of the library, with some mirth over Gladstone being made only his Vice
President (144). With this in mind, it is interesting to consider how far Poll, who had
“always been queer,” represents Woolf in this story, and her father, “a strange man” (MT
13), Stephen. For Woolf had inherited a passion for reading from Stephen, as well as
access to his library when he was alive, and a literal inheritance of many of his books
after his death. What is played out at the beginning of the story as a terrible penance
on Poll turns out to be the start of a quest for knowledge that informs her of the gen-
der inequality found first in literature, but then in all of society. So here, in the story,
Poll’s (figurative) inheritance of a library from her father is the beginning of a journey
that through her relentless reading and research leads to a damning conclusion: men
have not been holding up their end of a bargain which saw women take responsibility
for children in return for men maintaining a high standard of intellectual society and
culture. Poll’s journey parallels Woolf ’s own increasingly sceptical attitude towards pa-
triarchal society, and A Room of One’s Own’s narrator reaches a similar decision on the
dubious achievements of men while women have been producing families. So although
Woolf and her fictional avatar in “A Society” required the patriarchal legacy of a library
not of their own to begin their journeys, the end destination for both lay in the realisa-
tion that those libraries were not the only solution.
Woolf adopted a different tone in A Room of One’s Own. Here she was tackling
the establishment, and whether it was an entirely accurate depiction or not, Stephen
became the embodiment of the academic side of the patriarchy she was railing against.
It is impossible to separate Stephen from the world of academia that Woolf found both
enticing and offensively hostile. His literary representation in To the Lighthouse (1927),
Mr Ramsay, is a philosophy professor, and Woolf would also write of Stephen as hav-
ing been in his true element as a Cambridge academic (MOB 117). In A Room of One’s
Own, Stephen’s presence pervades the university setting of the text. From the “stories
of old deans and old dons” (33), to the university’s library and its chapel, Stephen is in-
extricably linked to this world. Focusing specifically on the university library, Woolf ’s
narrator’s curtailed visit is in order to examine two particular manuscripts: Milton’s
Lycidas (1638), after she thinks of Charles Lamb’s essay on that poem, and Thackeray’s
novel, The History of Henry Esmond (1852). Thackeray was Stephen’s father-in-law by
his first marriage, and Stephen (as Julia Briggs has recorded (224)) bestowed Trinity
Library with a copy of that exact manuscript. Lycidas was a favourite poem of both fa-
ther and daughter (and is referred to in Woolf ’s “Hours in a Library,” as it is in Stephen’s
essays on Pope, Johnson, and Tennyson), and as Woolf recalled that Stephen used to
read his preferred poems to her and her siblings, Milton’s poem would have inevitably
resonated with memories of her father.
Even the reference to Lamb reveals a textual dialogue between Woolf and Stephen.
Lamb had received an infamously savage treatment from Stephen in his essay, “The
Essayists” (1881), described by one critic as foregrounding twentieth-century criticism
of Lamb (Riehl 61). Woolf, on the other hand, is full of praise for Lamb, admiring
his essays “because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in
the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry”
(AROO 31); conversely, Stephen accuses him of affectation and self-consciousness
(“The Essayists” 67). Joseph Riel, in his study of Lamb, suggests that Stephen’s criticism
contained a polite jab at his father-in-law, for Thackeray had been an ardent Lamb en-
thusiast, something Woolf remarks upon in A Room of One’s Own. One is left to muse as
to whether Woolf ’s fulsome praise is in part a jab at Stephen. Perhaps more importantly
something else is revealed by this figurative exchange: Woolf ’s in-depth knowledge of
Lamb, and of Milton and Thackeray. That this knowledge originated from a childhood
education spent sharing books with a fellow reader, at the study at Hyde Park Gate,
causes the image of Stephen as the “ideal reader” to climb back into mind.
Right here in A Room of One’s Own, though, what is evident is that this library is
in secure possession of literature heavily associated with Stephen by Woolf. That her
narrator is unable even to access those manuscripts, whilst Stephen had authority over
them (and even literal ownership of one) in his library, necessitates a change in the
dynamic between Woolf and her father as librarian. Now he and the study constitute a
paradigm of the institutional libraries: books held under the jurisdiction of the patriar-
chal figure, the female visitor only ever just a visitor.
The narrator’s time spent in the British Museum’s reading rooms provides fur-
ther reason for Woolf ’s rejection of the institutional library. Not only are her efforts
quashed by the endless number of volumes about women but written by men, as Gil-
lespie has pointed out, the library itself appears designed for the male students with
their university-taught research skills, one of whom is systematically working through
his research whilst the narrator is left to doodle cartwheels in frustration. The idea of
the common reader versus the academic, a frequent distinction made in Woolf ’s work,
is played out in this scene; and, as in To the Lighthouse, Woolf chooses here that the
divide should split her and her father. She wrote of Stephen as being the archetypal
university intellectual, “spartan, ascetic, puritanical” (MOB 79)—in other words, the
opposite of Woolf and her narrator.
A Room of One’s Own sees Woolf identify Stephen with both the institutional li-
brary and the academic minds who would perpetuate their existence, complicit in the
patriarchal desire to reject outsiders and to see “all its treasures safe—locked within its
breast” (32). Woolf had maintained affection for her father’s study as her first library,
but this regard was not reconcilable with the critical position she assumed in A Room of
One’s Own. The sacrifice of that memory, of that study and of Stephen sharing his books
with her, was made without hesitation.
It is important, however, to acknowledge the complexity of Woolf ’s relationship
with Stephen. As I have stated, she presents him in different ways at different times,
depending upon the narrative. Woolf is thus able to criticise Stephen as patriarchal
library custodian, but yet maintain a textual dialogue with him as a fellow reader. Fur-
thermore, this repositioning of Stephen allows Woolf still to write affectionately of her
first library. At the beginning of this paper I posed the questions as to how Woolf was
able to reconcile her different feelings about libraries, and how Stephen was able to
feature in both her negative and positive representations of them. The answer to both
lies here, with Woolf ’s ability to separate different concepts of library, and different
versions of Stephen. In the context of, for example, The Voyage Out, Stephen’s study
is open and egalitarian, even while in A Room of One’s Own it is representative of the
model of the closed and hierarchal traditional library. And, as “Hours in a Library”
demonstrates, Woolf was only sacrificing one specific version of Stephen in A Room
of One’s Own. Stephen’s continued existence as a fellow reader and writer in Woolf ’s
oeuvre is achieved by the intertextual references to his body of work; when Woolf wrote
“he comes back now more as a contemporary” (D3 208) it is to some large extent by
design. She frequently rejected aspects or interpretations of Stephen, such as the patri-
archal librarian in the discussion here, but approves of him in other ways; primarily as
a writer and a peer, whose work she would allude to in her own.
Note
1. A further debate, led by Margaret Ezell (1990) and continued more recently by Alison Booth (2004),
has explored the historical inaccuracies in Woolf ’s prosopography as it is revealed in A Room of One’s
Own and other works, and queried this absence of female lives from the literary past.
Works Cited
Booth, Alison. How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present.
Chicago: Chicago UP, 2004.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005.
Ezell, Margaret J. M. “The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature Author(s).”
New Literary History 21. 3 (1990): 579–92.
Gillespie, Diane F. “Virginia Woolf and Libraries.” The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-title
Catalog. Ed. Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic. Washington: Washington State UP, 2004. Online
Book Collection <ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu/masc/onlinebooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.htm>.
Web. 21 May 2017.
Maitland, F. W. Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth & Co., 1906.
McNees, Eleanor. “The Stephen Inheritance: Virginia Woolf and the Burden of the Arnoldian Critic.” The
Cambridge Quarterly 44. 2 (2015): 119–45. Project Muse. Web. 30 May 2017.
Riehl, Joseph E. That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and
Brewer, 1996.
Stephen, Leslie. “The Essayists.” Men, Books, and Mountains: Essays by Leslie Stephen. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1956. 45–73.
——. “The Study of English Literature.” The Study of English Literature: Three Essays. Ed. Albert F. Blaisdell.
Boston: Willard Small, Publisher, 1902. 71–118.
Woolf, Virginia. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.
——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2012.
——. “Hours in a Library.” Granite and Rainbow. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958. 24–31.
——. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 1976. London: Triad/
Granada, 1978.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 3. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harvest
Books, 1981.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 1929–1931. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 1978.
London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1981.
——. “The Society.” Monday or Tuesday, 13–35. London: Hogarth Press, 1921.
——. The Voyage Out. 1915. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2012.
Woolf, Virginia, and Vanessa Bell, with Thoby Stephen. Hyde Park Gate News. Ed. Gill Lowe. London: Hes-
perus Press, 2005.
Two Libraries: Reading A Room of One’s Own
and Margaret Oliphant’s “The Library Window”
by Anne Reus
T
he library is a common locus in Virginia Woolf ’s diary, letters and essays. From
the “faded, out-of-date, obsolete” subscription library in which obscure lives lie
buried (CR 1 106) to the private library of the man of letters which encourages
the voracious reading of classics in “Hours in a Library” (E2 55–61), Woolf demon-
strates her awareness of the enormous symbolical potential of this institution. Most
famous of all however is Woolf ’s semi-fictional Oxbridge library in A Room of One’s
Own, which refuses entry to women and thus becomes a symbol of the institutionalized
sexism which prevents women and their works from entering into literary tradition.
In this paper, I would like to consider this famous library alongside a lesser known,
but nevertheless important, one: that of Margaret Oliphant’s ghost story “The Library
Window” (1896). As a prolific writer of over one hundred novels, numerous works
of biography and over three hundred articles for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) at first glance appears an unlikely author to pair with
Woolf. Her biographer Elizabeth Jay notes that “Her death amid the swiftly changing
literary preoccupations of the end of the century made Margaret Oliphant a convenient
symbol for the outdated female romancers of domestic fiction who had too often been
prepared to sacrifice artistic integrity to financial need.” Woolf ’s career as a critic began
five years after Oliphant’s death, and her only recorded opinion on Oliphant’s life and
works is hardly flattering. In Three Guineas, Woolf uses Oliphant as a dire warning for
the dangers of poverty and its impact on the mind and body, deploring “the fact that
Mrs Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and
enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her
children” (TG 217). Clearly, to Woolf, none of Oliphant’s novels, biographies, travel
writing or journalism belong in a well-stocked library. Nevertheless, I intend to follow
in Emily Blair’s footsteps and explore where similarities might exist between these su-
perficially very different writers. Although they were written roughly thirty years apart,
A Room of One’s Own and “The Library Window” ask very similar questions about
women’s place in the literary establishment and their access to writing spaces.
“The Library Window” was written in 1896, a year before Oliphant’s death and
after half a century of literary activity; and it forms part of “the innumerable faded
articles, reviews, sketches of one kind and another which she contributed to literary
papers” (TG 216–17). It is one of a series of loosely related tales of the supernatural,
the Stories of the Seen and Unseen, which, as Penny Fielding has argued, often serve
as a space for Oliphant to reflect on her relationship to the world. Fielding focuses
on Oliphant’s complex modernity, arguing that the stories express her sense that “the
condition of being modern was difficult, beleaguered, fractured—not a clean break
with the past but a sense of tenuous connections or overlapping circles, of other worlds
which collide with the familiar” (201). My reading of “The Library Window” similarly
focuses on Oliphant’s relationship to the world but looks backwards through Oliphant’s
long career as a writer. I want to explore how Oliphant presents the world of literature
as colliding with the familiar in unsettling and inexplicable ways.
Notably, Margaret Oliphant and Virginia Woolf share not only the general experi-
ence of being a women writer in a somewhat hostile society, but also the more specific
one of being a successful journalist in a predominantly male environment. Both wom-
en therefore had to develop their skills of writing under an editor’s radar, against the
grain, so to speak. Woolf reflects on her development of a “surface manner,” as she
called it, in “A Sketch of the Past”: writing for the Times Literary Supplement led her to
cultivate a suave, polite, “side-long” approach which allowed her to “slip in things that
would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud” (MOB 152). Like-
wise, decades of writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine honed Oliphant’s skills in
assuming but also subtly undermining a male point of view in her articles and stories.
“The Library Window” makes use of this skill by offering a detailed analysis of female
alienation within the literary establishment by hiding a critique of women’s exclusion
from literary activities in plain sight in a ghost story.
“The Library Window” is a supernatural story about an anonymous girl who
becomes obsessed with the window of a Scottish university library. The mysterious
window appears to be merely painted onto the building during the day, but becomes
translucent at dawn and dusk to reveal a scholar working in his study. Oliphant’s story
suspends resolution indefinitely and offers multiple contradictory explanations for the
phenomenon, complicated by the girl’s increasing unreliability as a narrator. Super-
ficially, the how and why of the man’s existence is the central mystery, but the story
hinges on the power differential between the scholar and the girl watching him: for
most of the story, her gender precludes the most obvious solution to the mystery, that
of simply visiting the library to confirm his existence.
Women’s exclusion and intellectual marginalization manifests in other ways as
well. The girl has been banished to her aunt’s household and the society of old maids for
unspecific reasons, but at least partly in consequence of her uneasy fit with Victorian
femininity. Spending her days daydreaming and reading in a drawing-room window
seat, she complains that:
Everybody had said, since ever I learned to speak, that I was fantastic and fan-
ciful and dreamy, and all the other words with which a girl who may happen
to like poetry, and to be fond of thinking, is so often made uncomfortable. (2)
The girl’s increasing obsession with the library window therefore appears to
be due to intellectual and social isolation, but it also strongly expresses a long-
ing for a space of her own. Imaginative retreat is her only means of achieving
a spatial separation from the incessant society of her aunt and her friends, and
the room of her own beyond the window appears to be perfectly suited to her
literary tastes. It is furnished with a large old−fashioned escritoire, standing
out into the room: and I knew by the shape of it that it had a great many pi-
geon−holes and little drawers in the back, and a large table for writing. There
was one just like it in my father’s library at home. (8)
Two Libraries 111
Although located in a university library, the room represents the stereotypical space of
the Victorian man of letters. As Victoria Rosner states, “The Study was the architectural
realization of [masculine] privilege” (106).
Gradually, the room in Oliphant’s story acquires stacks of papers, pictures and
piles of solid leather-bound volumes as well as an occupant: naturally, this is a man. The
girl—and the reader through her—are now transformed into “rapt spectators of the act
of authorship” (Heller 23):
I could not take my eyes from him and that little scarcely perceptible move-
ment he made, turning his head. I trembled with impatience to see him turn
the page, or perhaps throw down his finished sheet on the floor…I should not
have been able to help myself, whoever had been present; and gradually I got
into such a state of suspense waiting for it to be done that my head grew hot
and my hands cold. (14)
Her obsessive fascination suggests that she wants to become the scholar and inhabit
the space he occupies: she may not be writing herself, but she is willing his work into
existence, the only possible outlet she can find for her own interest in literature, poetry
and the creation of stories. The girl’s obsession with writing therefore leaves any purely
sexual interpretation of their relationship unsatisfactory. The story offers a tentative
explanation of the scholar’s existence, hinting that generations ago, a particularly flirta-
tious ancestress of the girl tried to seduce the young scholar from his work. Her scheme
failed and the scholar was murdered by her brothers and is now working his ghostly
revenge by inciting unrequited love in her descendants. This rather straightforward
reading is complicated by the dynamics in the girl’s family: her father is a famous and
successful writer, which suggests that her obsession with the scholar has at least some
elements of a Freudian oedipal complex. Most important here, however, is the insight
this provides into the allocation of roles in her family: the girl and her mother are spec-
tators to men’s intellectual labour, providing praise and distraction when necessary,
but never take up the pen themselves. In a slight modification of Woolf ’s words, they
are therefore acting “as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of
reflecting the figure of man [of letters] at twice its natural size” (AROO 32).
Throughout the story, the scholar and his manuscript remain impenetrable to the
girl, suggesting she has thoroughly absorbed the lessons of her home. Although “The
Library Window” is a story about writing and a testimony to her fascination with the
writing process, society—and to a certain extent even her author—seem intent to see
her only as a girl approaching marriageable age, in search of a man. In what is arguably
the climax of the story, the girl does finally visit the library, but only as a guest to an
evening party. She fails to gain access to the study because it does not exist. Her subse-
quent breakdown is met with the warning “Mind that you are in public!” (22) and her
fundamental lack of voice is further emphasized when her mother returns to take her
back home: “But how can a girl say I will not, when her mother has come for her, and
there is no reason, no reason in the world, to resist, and no right! I had to go, whatever
I might wish or any one might say” (29).
Oliphant’s use of liminal spaces to express women’s alienation from the literary
establishment—it is a library window, not a door, after all—suggests that the girl is
granted insight, but not passage. Her future as a writer is questionable, and although
she is the narrator of her own story, and a skilled one at that, this does not guarantee
that it was ever put into writing. “The Library Window” pays considerable attention to
women’s private histories. It is half-forgotten stories and the gossip of old maids, not
the official history written in the university and possibly by the scholar himself, which
suggests the love-and-murder story as the reason behind those inexplicable events; but
this knowledge does not change or improve the girl’s position. All it achieves is to alert
the girl to the fundamental injustice of her position: although men murdered the schol-
ar, he has been taking his revenge on the women of the family, suggesting that Oliphant
had few illusions about women’s power to change this system. The story ends with the
girl, now a woman, returning “a widow from India, very sad, with my little children”
(30), suggesting that marriage, not literature, was her destiny. This image is familiar to
any reader of Oliphant’s Autobiography. It mirrors her own position returning from
Italy after her husband’s death with three small children, “about 1,000 L of debt,…and
my own faculties, such as they were, to make our living and pay off our burdens” (121),
and suggests that the girl may find in her situation a similar rationale for authorship.
A Room of One’s Own states outright much of what Oliphant only hints at in the
margins of her story. The first step in Woolf ’s journey towards her “nugget of pure
truth” (1) about women’s historically disadvantaged position in society and its impact
on a female literary tradition, and the one which sparks subsequent enquiries, is the
fictional Oxbridge library. As the narrator opens the library door,
instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of
black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman,
who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted
to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a
letter of introduction. (7)
Of course, we all know how A Room of One’s Own builds on this discovery: wom-
en’s physical exclusion from university libraries is symbolic of the treatment their
works receive from the literary establishment, and the lack of respect accorded to fe-
male (literary) heritage. The essay clearly shows that this unequal treatment extends
from public institutions into the private house. However, here, I am more interested in
the immediate aftermath of this meeting:
That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete

indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe
locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am con-
cerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for
that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. (7)
Unlike Woolf ’s narrator, the library remains calm and undisturbed, in full possession
of its secret treasures: it strongly resembles the scholar of Oliphant’s ghost story, whose
Two Libraries 113
manuscript also retains its secrets, undisturbed by female desires and demands. Wom-
en’s presence disrupts this calmness: it threatens to seduce the scholar from his text and
disturbs the peaceful slumber of tradition by asking unwelcome questions about wom-
en’s place in literature. Women, reduced to sexual and social distractions, only intrude
into such sacred spheres of learning and literature by male goodwill. Like Oliphant’s
girl, Woolf ’s narrator is only at the university because she is attending a dinner party.
Both narrators experience anger and frustration at their exclusion from this
privileged place of literature and learning—suggesting that they might have much in
common with Charlotte Brontë, after all—although Woolf ’s narrator, of course, directs
her anger into a more useful and active direction than the girl, who can only passively
collapse. The problem of finding one’s voice as a woman writer in a male literary tra-
dition is a central concern in A Room of One’s Own, addressed extensively in Woolf ’s
discussion of Brontë’s anger and Jane Austen’s mastery of the woman’s sentence, but
also implicitly impacts the tone of the essay itself. The charming first person narrative
of a ramble through London, naïve but pointed wonder at patriarchal exclusion as well
as rhetorical questions, all serve to make the undeniably feminist argument more pal-
atable to male readers, and act as safeguard against the “shrill feminine tone” (Writer’s
Diary 148) Woolf feared her friends—male ones, that is—would dislike. This strategy
of covert subversion again links A Room of One’s Own and “The Library Window.”
A further connection between the texts lies in Woolf ’s own experiences as a Victo-
rian daughter, which closely resembled that of the girl of Oliphant’s story. In “A Sketch
of the Past,” Woolf recollects the absolute division of 22 Hyde Park Gate: “Downstairs
there was pure convention; upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection be-
tween them” (MOB 158). Woolf was granted access to her father’s realm of intellect,
borrowing and returning books, but her main impression was that “There was no con-
nection. There were deep divisions” (MOB 159). Oliphant’s own household, in contrast,
is built on and sustained by a fusion of worlds: like many of the women writers Woolf
draws on to shape the argument of A Room of One’s Own, Oliphant wrote in the family
drawing room at a shared table. In her Autobiography, Oliphant reflected that
My study, all the study I have ever attained to, is the little second drawing-
room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don’t think I’ve
ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed)
during my whole literary life. (67)
Woolf ’s narrator, in contrast, has achieved what her predecessors could only aspire to:
she returns from hostile public spaces to her own private library/study, which is well
stocked with women’s works and offers the solitude and independence required for her
writing. However, if acquiring a study firmly asserts the narrator’s identity as a “proper
writer” through the successful appropriation of a previously exclusively male space, it
is not without its own problems. As Rosner points out, this is “a somewhat unsettling
conclusion for a text committed to the construction of a separate female literary tra-
dition, a text that urges women writers to ‘think back through their mothers’” (120).
Oliphant, in contrast to Woolf, continues her discussion of her writing spaces not with
a lamentation for the interruptions and distractions, but with an assertion of pride in
this very female mode of writing: “Miss Austen, I believe, wrote in the same way, and
very much for the same reasons” (Autobiography 67). Requiring privacy and seclusion
to write “would at once have made the work unnatural to [my mother’s] eyes, and also
to mine” (67). This assertion does not remain uncontested: the conflicting demands of
Victorian motherhood and professional authorship provide the keynotes of Oliphant’s
fragmented account of her life, but her ambivalence shows that, like Woolf, she was
wavering between asserting herself as part of a larger female tradition and desiring the
prestige reserved for the male professional writer.
To be able to forget her sex in the study, as Woolf encourages future writers to
do, a woman would have to exorcize the ghost of the Victorian man of letters and
kill the angel in the house: it is an architectural reminder that “everywhere and much
more subtly the difference of value persists” (AROO 67). Woolf, like Oliphant, cannot
resist the desire to inhabit this previously forbidden space, but neither woman can
let go of her heritage of difference: at their best, they unpick Victorian women’s lim-
ited choices with clarity and pride themselves on their different, domestic view on the
world while contributing to a shared canon of women’s writing. Oliphant’s ambivalent
position regarding women’s rights and wrongs is not so different from Woolf ’s com-
plex relationship with her female predecessors, which encompasses pride in women’s
writing but also condescension and rejection. In spite of her own sweeping dismissal, I
would like to assert Oliphant’s importance to Woolf: professional women writers of her
generation prepared the way for Woolf ’s own career and laid the groundwork for the
demands and discoveries of her essays, even if their works found no place in her study.
Works Cited
Fielding, Penny. “Other Worlds: Oliphant’s Spectralization of the Modern.” Women’s Writing 6 (1999): 201–
13.
Heller, Tamar. “Textual Seductions: Women’s Reading and Writing in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Win-
dow.’” Victorian Literature and Culture 25 (1997): 23–37.
Jay, Elisabeth. “Oliphant, Margaret Oliphant Wilson (1828–1897), novelist and biographer.” Oxford Diction-
ary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. Online ed. Sept. 2004. Web. 22 Dec. 2017.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Ed. Elizabeth Jay. Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 2002.
——. “The Library Window: A Story of the Seen and Unseen.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 159.963
(Jan 1896): 1–30.
Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own & Three Guineas. Ed. Michèle Barrett. London: Penguin Books, 1993.
——. A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. by Leonard Woolf. London:
Persephone Books, 2012.
——. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London:
Pimlico, 2002.
——. The Common Reader: First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1984.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 2 (1912–18). Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1987.
Bibliographers, Booksellers,
and Collectors of the Hogarth Press
by Leslie Arthur
C
ollecting objects of any sort is generative. In the case of finite and elusive fine
press treasures, it is also not for the weak of spirit nor of pocket book. While it
is possible to be a modest Hogarth Press collector, your expectations and focus
will, by necessity, place you in a different category to those who have more funds and
opportunities. You suspect you may never have, nor will ever see, outside of a museum
or library special collection, the truly great items—and you would be correct. Many of
the greats are already in the possession of a serious collector or part of a university col-
lection; both are unwilling or unable to clear shelf space to allow the next generation of
collectors to place them on theirs. I have been an antiquarian and rare bookseller for
over a decade. In this relatively short time I have handled remarkable Hogarth Press
books, objects and Bloomsbury-related materials and can say with confidence that al-
though the rarest of treasures may no longer be available to current collectors there
are numerous items still available in the marketplace. Collecting requires patience and
diligence, and an education in your interest area.
When I say the greats of the Hogarth Press in terms of collecting, we think imme-
diately of the rare, limited edition books hand-printed by the Woolfs. The first effort to
roll off the press in July 1917 was Two Stories by Virginia and L. S. Woolf, the individual
copies covered in various wrappers as the paper was bought from a local stationers as
needed. Later the Woolfs would utilize handmade papers from Roger Fry’s Omega
Workshop. They were committed to ideas turned into objects, objects crafted by the
human hand to do justice to the ideas enclosed within their fragile paper wrappers.
The Woolfs were to go on to print and publish a total of thirty-four publications in this
manner, the final title being Dorothy Wellesley’s 1932 Jupiter and the Nun, before turn-
ing the printing entirely over to others while remaining the Hogarth Press publishers.
Beginning in 1919 with John Middleton Murry’s The Critic in Judgment (printed by the
Prompt Press, but bound by the Woolfs), by the close of 1946 the Press had engaged
thirty-four outside printers (Woolmer 225).
Collecting tells a story, providing a focused cultural narrative to the individual
collector. It is also and the desire to become connected to objects that were made by
someone you admire or whose work you derive pleasure from. In acquisition and pos-
session, you become part of the larger story. Sometimes a collector’s story is a familiar
one of stumbling upon something that resonates with them on a visceral level. Other
times the impetus evolves from intellectual curiosity or is motivated by anticipated
future financial gain. Earlier this year, noted Hogarth Press collector William Beekman
told me about his initiation into the world of the Press. As a Harvard undergraduate
in the late 1960s, a classroom discussion turned to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf (1962) and Beekman asked his professor: “Who is Virginia Woolf?” The
professor replied that Woolf was a novelist and literary critic, but no one read her much
anymore, other than perhaps to refer to her criticism. Bill was intrigued, and when he
returned to his home in Manhattan he visited one of the fabled, and largely shuttered,
Fourth Avenue bookstores: The House of Books, Ltd., owned by the famous (at least
to booksellers) Marguerite Cohn.1 Margie, as she was known to her friends, rather off-
handedly gestured toward a shelf of Woolf first editions. For Bill, a stunning collection,
friendship, and the beginnings of an education in the Hogarth Press was born.
Bill Beekman has written about his collection extensively, exhibited major portions
of it at the Grolier Club in New York, and lent it to major international exhibitions. On
my visit to Beekman’s collection earlier this year I held and photographed items I had
salivated over, separated by glass, at London’s National Portrait Gallery’s major 2014 ex-
hibition “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision.” Never would I have imagined I would be
in such close proximity to these treasures. I may have babbled something coherent, but
I do not think so. Bill was exceedingly kind to me throughout my visit, and shared the
contents of his specially-built cabinet of wonders. His walls were resplendent with the
works of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Carrington, to name just a few.
He clearly loves each and every item, whether it is a pristine first edition, personal letters
between Virginia and her many correspondents, or a single leaf excised from Woolf ’s
1923 passport—with a poignantly vulnerable photographic image of “Mrs. A. V. Woolf,”
noted by an official on the leaf. Each item has an attendant story of acquisition. I held a
small 3x4-inch black-and-white photograph of the thirteen-year-old Virginia in mourn-
ing garb as I read a few of the eight letters Leonard Woolf (his in green ink) and Vanessa
Bell wrote to Vita Sackville-West when Virginia went missing, before her body had been
found. The working typescript draft of Sackville-West’s memorial poem to Virginia is
also here. I read the letter the twenty-nine-year-old Virginia wrote on 9 December 1911
to Stanley Waterlow clarifying her rejection of his marriage proposal, “I don’t think I shall
ever feel for you what I must feel for the man I marry.…I hope we shall go on being good
friends anyhow” (Horowitz 16). Beekman came to collect the Press not least because “the
books of the Hogarth Press are interesting objects of the book-maker’s art.…And with
their variegation, the books resonate with my dualistic image of Virginia Woolf herself,
embossed, as it were, on opposite sides of a single coin: heads, the feminist, genius, and
iconoclast; tails, the flower of an imperialist, paternalist, and complacent society which
she herself was determined to change” (Beekman 9).
In the case of the collectors of the Hogarth Press and related Bloomsbury art and
ephemera, you find individuals who are willing to immerse themselves to the point that
they familiarize themselves with the lives of an entire family; a family that stretches and
expands to a particular set of squares in central London, and spills out into the coun-
tryside of East Sussex. It involves lovers, spouses, children, dogs, a marmoset, servants,
friends and lovers of friends, painters and photographers, critics, and the Apostles of
Cambridge. This bees’ nest of activity, snaring all of these varied peoples—contracts of
necessity during times of familial crisis and is once again cast open to draw others in. In
the center of this swirling hive exists the pivotal personality of Adeline Virginia Stephen
Woolf—for none of us would be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Hogarth Press
if it were not for one woman, and her husband Leonard, who thought they might like to
try their hand at printing books. Their declaration to potential subscribers announced:
Bibliographers, Booksellers, and Collectors of the Hogarth Press 117
Dear Sir, Our object in starting the Hogarth Press has been to publish at low
prices short works of merit, in prose or poetry, which could not, because of
their merits, appeal to a very large public. The whole process of printing and
production (except in one instance) is done by ourselves, and the editions are
necessarily small, not exceeding 300 copies. We enclose a list with an order
form (Horwitz 43–44).
Many Hogarth collectors start their collecting life in the shop of a bookseller as
did Bill Beekman; some today start on the internet, or perhaps at an antiquarian book
fair. Occasionally collecting begins in an auction room, but that would be an unusual
beginning and indicates someone who is greater than a neophyte collector. Usually
collectors and booksellers become lifelong friends, “sometimes in harmony and some-
times at loggerheads,” to quote an anonymous bookseller. Booksellers themselves tend
to be collectors. Rarely do collectors begin with a bibliography in hand, that is more
typically the practice of seasoned collectors or of rare or antiquarian booksellers—but
it should not be the case, as bibliographies are the map that keeps you from stepping
off the known universe.
Bookselling is a balance between scholarship and commerce; many booksellers
in the US attend the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer.
Rare Book School has classes scattered through a few US cities, and in London and
California. There is a summer school in Colorado to assist booksellers who are new
to the trade to learn the finer points in the company of booksellers. The associations
we belong to (the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America [ABAA] and the
International League of Antiquarian Booksellers [ILAB]) have strict ethical rules of
conduct, and we are cognizant of, and adhere to, these rules in all our transactions.
The working life of an antiquarian or rare bookseller may appear to be one of ease and
retirement, for, after all, what is there to cataloging a book? Author, title, publisher,
place and date of publication. The presence of illustrations and their artist is noted, as
well as the publishing precedence, i.e., edition, color of cloth or decoration, presence
of a dust jacket and its condition. What is the condition of the text block: good, very
good, fine—or the dreaded, “nice reading copy?” A balanced abstract to give the poten-
tial buyer some information regarding provenance and possible significant association,
relevance to an author’s oeuvre, and their bibliographer’s reference, if one exists. Most
books or ephemera become entries online, either for the various book sale websites and
the seller’s own, or for printed catalogues which rarely are dated.
The late Hogarth Press collector and professed bibliomaniac, Stuart U. Buice, not-
ed in a talk she gave on her collecting experience with her husband, William Buice,
at Washington and Lee University: “Before long (1969) Bill [Buice] spent $37—at
AUCTION—to buy for me a first edition of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own,
published by Hogarth Press in 1929. In contemporary parlance, I think I’d have to
call him an ‘enabler’” (Buice 1). The collection of Stuart Buice, now lovingly preserved
by her husband Bill, is at once beautiful and extensive. She clearly embraced the hive
intellect by accumulating extraordinary association copies, copies of books and ob-
jects that were integral to Bloomsbury friends and families. To contextualize an object
in her collection, I was encouraged by Bill to pull out from under a sofa a carefully
rolled rug—one revealed to be designed by Vanessa Bell and made by Grace Higgens
(1903–1983) under Bell’s supervision and placed in Grace’s room at Bell’s rural farm-
house, Charleston. Grace was the Charleston nursemaid, nurse, cook, and housemaid
for over fifty years. The colors and workmanship are plainly preserved in the 35x69-
inch rug. I stared in amazement, mesmerized by the sheer possibility of seeing a period
Charleston treasure in Greenwich Village. The words of Mrs. Dalloway, “What a lark!
What a plunge!” (MD 3) echoed in my mind as this rug served as the squeak of a hinge
to transport me to a farmhouse I have only read about.
Figure 1: A rug designed by

Vanessa Bell and made by
Grace Higgens. From the
collection of the late Stuart
U. Buice. Image taken by the
author.
Such is the power of the finely wrought collections that Bill Beekman and Stuart
Buice have assembled. Stuart was concerned with provenance, as evidenced by a letter
contained in her extensive files—she kept every receipt that related to her collection.
The letter, which the current owner allows me to quote here, is a beautifully crafted his-
tory of a modest collector. The book in question was a fine copy of The Waves:
As Julian said, the gentleman, Kenneth Harlow, was a hospital porter who col-
lected early and later modern writers such as H. E. Bates, C. P. Snow, Graham
Greene, D. H. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, and of course Virginia Woolf. The col-
lection was offered by his daughter to Julian a short while back.
My colleague, Peter Scott told me that Mr. Harlow would have collected
the Virginia Woolf titles at a time when she was not especially popular. An act
which, whether showing foresight or nothing more than a passion, has given
us latter-day dealers, collectors and book lovers a collection of books that are
Bibliographers, Booksellers, and Collectors of the Hogarth Press 119
simply irresistible. Whatever his reasons, this collection shows his skill at pre-
empting the sways and shifts in literary trends (Bowden).
Stuart’s collection contains an overwhelming number of paintings and art objects from
every Bloomsbury luminary. Suffice it to say that when you have a painting by Vanessa
Bell of a cluster of garlic on your kitchen wall, your collection is extensive.
Sellers and collectors alike depend upon bibliographies to help them identify the
object before them. Sometimes a book is unknown to them, or they have not seen a
copy quite like it before and they are unsure if it is part of the known bibliography or
if they have, in fact, found the unicorn. In the case of the Hogarth Press, the B. J. Kirk-
patrick bibliography is customarily referenced along with those of J. Howard Woolmer.
It is Woolmer’s bibliographies I will address here. Woolmer issued two bibliographies:
A Checklist of The Hogarth Press 1917–1938 in 1976, and a second edition in 1986 that
extends the bibliography to 1946. Howard Woolmer is a highly respected bookseller,
now retired, and on a visit with him in January 2017 and in subsequent conversations,
he told me about his interest in the Hogarth Press and how he went about prepar-
ing his bibliographies. Woolmer had a fascination with fine press printing and bought
everything he wanted related to the Hogarth Press from the Marjorie Tulip Ritchie
“Trekkie” Parsons auction sale in the 1970s. When Leonard Woolf passed away on
14 August 1969, he left Trekkie, with whom he enjoyed a long relationship after the
death of his wife Virginia, his entire estate, along with his manuscripts and publishing
rights. Included in the estate were important copies of the many authors of the Hogarth
Press. The items Woolmer purchased from the auction were consulted to augment the
information he regularly gleaned from booksellers’ catalogues, lists, and from visits to
book fairs—all in anticipation of, and preparation for, his initial biography. Although
Howard sold many of the items he bought from the Parsons collection, he maintains
a private collection of Bloomsbury-related items which adorn the shelves and walls of
his home. In the 1990s he deposited other correspondence, research and photographs
related to his bibliographies in the E. J. Pratt library at the University of Toronto, mak-
ing them part of the publicly-available archival record.2
A question arises as to how the beginner start in this rarefied atmosphere of col-
lecting the Hogarth Press. It can be done, and it can be quite an adventure. To begin you
need three things: a reliable bibliography, some booksellers, and some seed money. You
need to see the really great examples to know what you should look for, and that can
be accomplished by visiting museum collections, antiquarian book fairs or booksellers
themselves. You will find booksellers are very generous with their time and expertise.
Earlier in this essay I mentioned important copies from the Woolf estate left to Trekkie
Parsons. These are something university special collections and booksellers call asso-
ciation copies; books that are inscribed to known individuals by the author where we
are able to track a relationship, either personal or literary. Lovely examples of well-read
copies of Woolf titles from Virginia Woolf to her sister Vanessa Bell, and later Leonard
Woolf to Vanessa, have recently been on the market at B & B Rare Books in Manhattan.
To address the issue of what to collect when the purse is slim but the passion robust,
one need only look to first edition Hogarth Press items which are neither pristine, in
possession of their original Vanessa Bell-designed dust jackets, nor have any particular
provenance or association. These can be found in the $50 to $200 range rather easily on
the internet and in bookseller’s catalogues. One could go this route with a collection of
New York publications, but why not make a try for a London collection? I have a first
Hogarth Press edition of Orlando, and they can be acquired for about $100 in various
places. I have before me a recent catalogue of the Boston bookseller Peter Stern, in
which a 1933 first edition of Flush, in dust jacket, and described as “good,” can be had
for $75. If you want to collect hand-printed, hand-sewn DIY Hogarth Press titles, you
are going to wade into deep water, but the Hogarth Press published so many authors
besides those that became the luminaries of the twentieth century—some so obscure it
is a delight to collect just their names alone, such as Fredegond Shove and Ena Lime-
beer. If you want to stay within a few months of Virginia Woolf ’s lifespan, there are
four hundred and eighty-eight titles, not to mention the editions of “The International
Psycho-Analytical Library,” “The Hogarth Lectures on Literature,” “Hogarth Stories,”
“Hogarth Living Poets,” “Pamphlets,” etc. The author and bookseller, Michael Peck,
wrote this to me recently, “I’ve been in love with the Hogarth Press ever since I ac-
quired Poems by Clive Bell. It was one of those moments when a chill went through
me as I realized, looking at the pink thread used to bind the book, that the little knot
might actually have been tied by Virginia herself.” My advice to you is to have a lark,
take the plunge.
Notes
1. Marguerite Arnold Cohn (1887–1984), along with her husband, Louis Henry Cohn (1888–1953),
opened the House of Books, Ltd. on October 10, 1930. The bookstore specialized in 20th century Brit-
ish and American first editions and brought the Cohns into contact with many of the major literary
figures of the century. Margie was the first New York bookseller to focus on the condition of the books
she sold and the collections she built. Tragically Margie, while on a buying trip to London aged eighty-
six, looked the wrong way while stepping off the curb and was run down by a lorry.
2. See J. Howard Woolmer: Bookseller and Book Collector, Special Collections, E. J. Pratt Library, Univer-
sity of Toronto: http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/f55_j_howard_woolmer.
Works Cited
Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Beekman, William. Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press. New York: Grolier Club, 2004.
Bowden, Miss E., on behalf of Bertram Rota, Ltd., 14 February 2003. In the collection of the late Stuart U.
Buice.
Buice, Stuart U. Two Collectors, One Library—Can This Marriage Be Saved? Unpublished. 2 May 2009.
Funke, Sarah, and William Beekman. This Perpetual Fight: Love and Loss in Virginia Woolf ’s Intimate Circle.
New York: The Grolier Club, 2008.
Horowitz, Glenn. Virginia Woolf. New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919.
——. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981.
——. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
——. Flush. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.
Woolmer, J. Howard. A Checklist of The Hogarth Press 1917–1938. London: Hogarth Press, 1976.
——. A Checklist of The Hogarth Press 1917–1946. Revere, PA: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1986.
The Art of the Book
Ekphrastic Writing, Illusive Illustration:
Vanessa Bell’s Embroideries for
Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”
by Hana Leaper
A
rtist and critic Roger Fry, a close friend and colleague of both Vanessa Bell and
Virginia Woolf, described the relationship between “the Author and the Art-
ist” as “a battle ground, a no man’s land raked by alternate fires from the artist
and the writer” (Fry 9). Yet at the Hogarth Press, Virginia and Leonard Woolf repeat-
edly incorporated images into narrative structures. This paper acknowledges that at
times these efforts re-staged Fry’s vision of embattled antagonism between word and
image; but also investigates how, through experimental design, they sought to create
further discursive spaces within the text.
Using Bell’s images for the different editions of Woolf ’s short story Kew Gardens,
this paper will probe the extent to which the reader can see, read and interpret these
decorated pages of writing as a project which self-consciously tests the limits of the
tripartite relationship between story-telling, illustration and publishing. What are the
effects of these collaborations between artist and writer, image and word on the reader’s
experience of this experimental story? To what extent does Bell’s embellishment of
the third edition of Woolf ’s short story Kew Gardens, published in 1927, significantly
modify the reader’s relationship with the story, in comparison with the previous two
unadorned editions of the same text? Are they merely ornamental, or do they become
an important feature of the text?
Bell was one of the first readers of Kew Gardens. She read the story in manuscript
in July 1918 (it was first published in May 1919) while suffering from morning sickness
four months into her third (full-term) pregnancy, living frugally on war rations, troubled
by servants and vexed by her brother Adrian’s relationship crisis. “It’s a relief to turn to
your story,” she informed her sister, “although some of the conversation—she says, I says,
sugar—I know too well!” (Bell 214). She thought it “fascinating and a great success” and
immediately put forward the idea that she should illustrate it: “I wonder if I could do a
drawing for it.” Woolf had praised Bell’s A Conversation/Three Women of 1913 admitting
to feeling a hint of envy at Bell’s ability to synthesize form and psychological acuity. “I
think you are a most remarkable painter,” she wrote—high praise in itself. “But I main-
tain” she went on, at a time when Bell was at the peak of her modernist formalism—an
aesthetic movement defined in opposition to narrative content in painting:
you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyor or impressions about human life:
a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that
rouses my envy. I wonder if I could write the Three Women in prose. (L2 498–99)
The sisters appreciated one another’s quests for achieving balance between formal con-
cerns and creating work that acutely conveyed “impressions about human life.” Their
Ekphrastic Writing, Illusive Illustration 123
sensitivity to one another’s aesthetic aims lends a pleasurable symmetry to their echo-
ing offers to interpret each other’s works.
The sugar conversation, as it has become known, is situated on the sixth page of
the writing (p. 10) of the 1919 edition of Kew Gardens, and the twelfth page of the writ-
ing of the 1927 edition. In the 1919 version, Bell’s accompanying illustration (Figure
1) is situated on p. 4 of the booklet, facing the story, which begins on p. 5. The illustra-
tion is not included anywhere in the 1927 version. It recounts a conversation between
“two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy
cheeked and nimble” who had been observing the gestures of an elderly man:
After they had scrutinised the old man’s back in silence for a moment and
given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together
their very complicated dialogue:
“Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I
says—”
“My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,
Sugar, flour, kippers, greens,
Sugar, sugar, sugar.”
(page 6/10 in 1919 version; p. 12 in the 1927 version)
The nature of this exchange appealed directly to Bell, and the woodcut entitled The
Sugar Conversation that Bell produced for the first edition of “Kew Gardens” closely
resembles A Conversation (Figure 2). The women’s heads are bent together, the one on
the left gesticulates, the two on the right observe avidly. Through the window, bright
flowers in three colours bloom from a petrol-green field. The curtains frame both the
Figure 1: 1919 1st ed., The Sugar Figure 2: Vanessa Bell, A Conversation
Conversation
women and the flowers; the orange sky and the ground meet at an intercise that defies
the laws of perspective, putting the flowers and women onto the same plane. The flow-
ers then, are not background detail, but a vital part of the scene. This, along with the
careful use of complementary tones, suggests a dialogue between the inside and out-
side. However, the viewer is somewhat cut off from their exchange by the position of
the foregrounded woman’s body; the curves of her shoulder and knee meet with those
of the woman on the left, blocking any attempt to join their conversation.
The woodcut The Sugar Conversation again foregrounds the women with a back-
ground of flowers; however, the perspectives are, again, flattened so that the women
and flowers share the same plain. It is hard to differentiate the women from their sur-
roundings, just as in the writing it is difficult to work out their conversation. The reader
must accept that their conversation is schematically imperfect, fragmentary. It relies
upon the women’s intimate knowledge of one another’s personalities and lives—and
the reader’s intuitive, pre-cognitive recognition of these fundamental relationships
between language and meaning. The perceived and the spoken, the conscious and un-
conscious, exterior and interior worlds, meet and meld within the scene—as people
and environment do within the story.
However, the collaborative experience of working on the first edition of Kew
Gardens does not seem to have been as complementary. Despite what Bell intimates
in letters as their constant correspondence regarding the woodcuts (“I see that these
woodcuts make almost daily letters necessary”; Bell 219), her biographer records that
she was left “infuriated by the uneven printing of the woodcuts” (Spalding 159). Woolf
recorded Bell’s ire in her diary:
Nessa and I quarrelled as nearly as we ever do quarrel now over the get up of
Kew Gardens, both type & woodcuts; & she firmly refused to illustrate any
more stories of mine under those circumstances & went so far as to doubt the
value of the Hogarth Press altogether. (D1 279)
Bell’s dissatisfaction was due to amateurish over-inking and poor positioning.

Fortunately, Bell seems to have changed her mind. In the afore-quoted letter of
1918, when Bell had first started to discuss the possibility of providing illustrations for
Kew Gardens, she had asked Woolf to stipulate what size she would need any images
to be, but warned her that they “might not have very much to do with the text, but that
wouldn’t matter.” This is a policy she carried through to the 1927 edition in which her
designs do not actually illustrate any of the “plot.”
What the additions to the 1927 version do very well is to make clear the scene-
by-scene cinematic structure of the story. The page numbering and layout of the type
is completely redefined between the first and third version. Each scene becomes dis-
tinctly defined by its borders and the pace of the story is re-set as the drawings enclose
or separate, or loop in and out of each scene. This significantly alters the “enclosedness,”
or the “scenic” rather than narrative-driven natures of the episodes. The 1919 edition
is printed in a small sixteen page booklet, not including the jacket, itself a fascinating
visual statement; p. 1 is a title page with the author and illustrators names; its verso, p. 2
contains publishing information; p. 3 is blank; p. 4 is The Sugar Conversation woodcut;
pp. 5–14 contain ten pages of writing. On the final page of writing is The Caterpillar
woodcut. The writing takes up about a third of the page and the woodcut takes up
about the same amount of space underneath it.
However, in the 1927 version the writing takes up twenty-one pages, all divided
carefully into independent units by type-setting choices and accompanying images. An
interesting example of how this restructures the reading experience is on the first page.
The 1919 version’s first page ends, somewhat clumsily with only one sentence left of a
paragraph—we have been being guided through the park by a “summer breeze,” but here
the action of the breeze is truncated. The reader must disrupt the flow in order to turn
the page. In contrast, the first page of the 1927 version consists of only the first sentence.
Bell’s print takes up far more of the page space than this rather long sentence and the
work is insistently visual from the beginning. The flowers and swirling leaves are semi-
abstract, yet from “the throat” of just a couple emerges the “straight bar” Woolf ’s writing
describes. “The sugar conversation” is restructured from sharing a page with two other
scenes in 1919, to being enclosed independently of any other action within one space on
one page in 1927 (Figure 3). Page 6 (p. 10) of the 1919 text begins with a cut-in-half sen-
tence, and also ends with a cut-in-half sentence. In the 1927 version, the page begins with
a new paragraph introducing the two women and ends with their conversation.
Figure 3: 1927 Sugar Conversation

The next page also focuses on the same two women, yet this is a different scene, a
different psychological space. The conversation has ended, as one of the women (the
stout and ponderous one) has entered a different mood; she “looked through the pattern
of falling words” and eventually “ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other wom-
an was saying” as she found herself having a profoundly moving aesthetic experience.
Bell punctuates the text with visuals that guide the reader’s appreciation of this
experience. Simple interlaced curves, consisting of a single line each, form an arch at
the top of the page. The writing does not curve but crosses straight across the page,
leaving a small, blank semi-circle hanging above the action taking place further down
the page—perhaps a space of reflective contemplation. The reader has a space to rest
their eyes as their thoughts bubble up from the page, a space contained within the
page by this arch so that one does not have to leave the confines of the book in order
to contemplate the story. At the edges of the main body of writing, the curves meet up
with small bunches of flowers interlinked by thicker, furry vertical black lines. Every
few lines, one of these smaller flowers impinges on the regular pattern of the writing,
causing a word to become indented—guiding the stresses in the passage. At the centre
of the page, one single, large flower stands “cool, firm and upright,” dividing up the
writing into two columns, one on either side of it. The writing on the page is guided,
centred, as the woman’s experience is by the flowers. At the bottom of the page, in the
final four rows of writing, small single flowers further disrupt the continuous flow of
the writing, suggesting the trance-like pattern of the woman’s state of mind.
These interruptions in the flow of writing cause pauses which further integrate the
visual experience the woman is undergoing into the reader’s imagination—perhaps to a
more fundamental degree than the descriptive language could. The fragmentation sug-
gests that the woman’s focus is weaving between the interior and exterior worlds; the
world of flowers and aesthetic emotions; and the world her friend is anchoring her in,
of tea and conversation. Yet this weaving shows that they are parts of the same world.
Whilst the top four-fifths of the page seems to rise up, growing heliotropically like
its central flower, the design at the bottom suggests root-like growth into a bed. For
me, this again links the exterior and interior—this bed is both soil and the imagina-
tion; the fertile space beneath the surface. Each of the pages has its own “bed.” Most
differ slightly from the designs on the remainder of the page—signalling an end to the
scene—a repository of its ideas, its consciousness, its being.
Fry’s description of the fiery relationship between “The Author and the Artist” in
his July 1926 Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs article was based on painful per-
sonal experience:
Book illustration is a battle-ground, a no man’s land raked by alternate fires

from the artist and the writer, claimed by both, sometimes nearly conquered
by one but only to be half recaptured by the other. (Fry 9)
He had illustrated several books, including C. R. Ashbee’s From Whitechapel to Camelot

(1892) and the title pages for Robert Trevelyan’s 1901 and 1908 collections of poetry;
and publishing four more under the Omega imprint.1 However, despite this alarm-
ing beginning, he went on to propose that although “real illustration in the sense of
reinforcing the author’s verbal expression is quite impossible,” it may be possible to

“embroider” the author’s ideas. Such enriching marginalia, Fry suggested, encourages
deeper discourse between the reader and the text. Using McKnight Kauffer’s illustra-
tions of The Anatomy of Melancholy (published by the Nonsuch Press in 1925) as an
example, he calls McKnight “the most witty of interrupters”; not interpreters, but inter-
rupters. What Fry proposes is that McKnight’s woodcuts speak to the reader ABOUT
the author’s writing “in a voice which the old man cannot overhear.” The “old man” in
this case has been dead for hundreds of years, but this sort of pre-emptive notion of the
death of author, of reader involvement in the interpretation of the text, is as relevant
to Woolf and Bell’s 1927 Kew Gardens as to McKnight’s embroidering of Burton’s text.
Illustration “lures the imagination on…on a loose tether” (12).
Despite the problems with the technical production of the 1919 edition, the vision
of furious struggle between author and illustrator is laid to rest in the rich embroidery
of the 1927 edition of Kew Gardens.
Note
1. Arthur Clutton-Brock’s Simpson’s Choice, with woodcut illustrations by Roald Kristian, published 1916;
Pierre-Jean Jouve’s Men of Europe, with woodcut illustrations by Roald Kristian, published 1916; Ti-
tus Lucretius Carus’ Lucretius on Death, translated by by R.C. Trevelyan, cover design by Roger Fry,
executed by Dora Carrington, published 1917; Original Woodcuts by Various Artists, Fry (4), Bell (2),
Grant (2), McKnight Kauffer (1), Kristian (2), Wolf (2), 75 copies published 1918.
Works Cited
Bell, Vanessa. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Ed. Regina Mahler. London: Moyer Bell, 1998. Print.
Fry, Roger. “The Author and the Artist.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 49, No. 280 (July
1926). Print.
Spalding, Frances. Vanessa Bell. 3rd ed. London: Tempus 2006. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 1, 1915–19. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Penguin,
1977. Print.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume 2, 1912–22. Ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann. London:
Hogarth Press, 1978. Print.
——. “Kew Gardens.” Richmond: The Hogarth Press, 1919. Print.
——. “Kew Gardens.” Richmond: The Hogarth Press, Printed and Engraved by Herbert Reiach Limited,
1927. Print.
“The active and the contemplative”:
Charles Mauron, Virginia Woolf, and Roger Fry
by Claudia Tobin
I
n the following passage, the French aesthetician Charles Mauron (1899–1966) under-
scores the central dialectic in his book Aesthetics and Psychology, which was translated
by Roger Fry and Katherine John and published by the Hogarth Press in 1935:
in life we scarcely look or listen at all, except in view of some future activity.
[…] Now the unreality of the work of art debars us straight off from any ac-
tion of this kind. The first words the artist seems to say to us are: “Look, listen,
but don’t move.”1
The opposition indicated here, between what Mauron goes on to elaborate as “two at-
titudes of mind,” the “active” and the “contemplative,” will be central to my discussion
in this essay (AP 28). I shall propose that Mauron’s theory of art and psychology rep-
resents a nexus between Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, and Bloomsbury aesthetics, which
is rarely examined, yet deserves further attention.2 Reading Mauron’s work alongside
these figures will open up a more nuanced understanding of debates about formalism,
aesthetic purity, and contemplative attention which concerned all three. I will begin
by tracing significant biographical and textual connections; however, my aim is not
so much to uncover channels of direct influence; rather, I’d like to present a collage of
reverberating texts in which metaphors and ideas overlap.
So who was Charles Mauron and what role did he play in shaping the aesthetics
of both Fry and Woolf? One of the few English language critics to examine Mauron’s
work at any length, Linda Hutcheon, defines him as “both a literary critic, intent upon
investigating the forms and structures, as well as the meaning, of literary objects, and
an aesthetician, concerned with the nature of the aesthetic experience” (vii).3 Like Fry,
Mauron had received a scientific training, but he sought to integrate the experimental
methods of science into his investigations in art and literature. Fry was immediately
attracted to the ideas of the Frenchman twenty years his junior when they met in 1919
in Provence, and as Woolf affirms in her biography of Fry; this was one of the most
valued friendships of his life.4 The Maurons’ home in St Remy became a gathering place
for several Bloomsbury generations including E. M. Forster, and Vanessa and Clive
Bell and their children; and by 1931 Fry had bought a farmhouse in the area, which
he shared with the Maurons.5 From the outset, he promoted Mauron’s work in Brit-
ish intellectual and literary circles. He initiated commissions for Mauron’s translation
into French of novels by Woolf and Forster (including Orlando, Flush and A Passage
to India), and the publication of a series of his articles translated by T. S. Eliot for The
Criterion. Fry also worked collaboratively with Mauron on an edition of Mallarmé’s
poetry, which was eventually published by the Hogarth Press in 1936.
“The active and the contemplative” 129
At this juncture it will be useful to elucidate Mauron’s theory in a little more de-
tail. His correspondence with Fry reveals an intense exchange of ideas on aesthetics
and philosophy, which often led the pair to similar conclusions. However, in the third
chapter of Aesthetics and Psychology, he takes Fry’s early formalist theory as a point of
departure and an object of critique. In influential essays such as “Art and Life” (1917),
Fry had distinguished between aesthetic emotions and the emotions of ordinary life,
arguing that the “two rhythms” of life and art remain distinct and often “play against
each other” (9–10). Paraphrasing Fry in his own text, Mauron compares him to a chem-
ist who proceeds “by eliminating […] impurities,” stripping away the associations and
desires of daily life in the attempt “to show that the pure aesthetic pleasure has nothing
to do with the subject of a work” (AP 18). It is worth pointing out, however, that this
account of Fry’s early theoretical position is rather limiting. His theories evolved over
time and he came to recognize a more interdependent relationship between art and
life, and between visual art and literature, as critics including Frances Spalding, Chris-
topher Reed, and Adrienne Rubin have shown.6
For Mauron, the principal question was “where to draw the line between life and
art” (25). Revising and extending Fry’s formulation he proposes “another boundary
[…] which distinguishes two attitudes of mind, the active and contemplative” (28).
According to Mauron, the “contemplative attitude” is the “distinguishing mark of the
artist,” or indeed of the experiential subject of an artwork, who is characterised by his
absorption in the present (AP 28–29). The opposition between contemplation and ac-
tion is of course not a new idea and has a long history in philosophical thought, which
can be traced back to Aristotle’s discussion of the contemplative life in the Ethics.7 It
remained pertinent for Mauron who predicates his argument on a diagnosis of modern
life riddled by the rhythms of distraction and the claims of action. “In Life we scarcely
look or listen at all,” he laments, “except in view of some future activity” (31). This
was the human constant that T. S. Eliot memorably encapsulated as “[d]istracted from
distraction by distraction,” in his poem “Burnt Norton,” composed the same year that
Aesthetics and Psychology was published (174). For Mauron, the ideal contemplative
represents a counter-current to the distracted, future-orientated modern persona, by
cultivating an attentive condition of mind and body that comes to resemble meditative
practice.
We might identify resonances here of the detached, “disinterested” contemplation
advocated by Fry in aesthetic experience. However, for Mauron “the essential character
of the aesthetic attitude” is its “curious mixture of sensation and inhibition—the first
depending on the second for its keenness, richness and duration” (33). While the older
“chemist” sought purified substance, the younger presents us with a “curious mixture,”
implicitly distancing himself from his mentor by recognising the ways in which mem-
ory, sensation and desire permeate and complicate the aesthetic realm. His psychology
of creativity is therefore underpinned by something more complex than a simple para-
dox or set of polarities. He attempts to offer an affective scale which acknowledges
shades of states of being between detachment and absorption even if they are never
concretely defined. He discriminates, for instance, between the “active” yet “cold dis-
interestedness” of the scientist, and the “inactive” yet “almost absolute detachment” of
the artist (49). I shall return to this apparent contradiction or “doubleness” later.
“What are the effects,” Mauron inquires, of the “particular focusing” enabled by
the aesthetic attitude? (40). A sceptical (but perhaps superficial) reading of Aesthetics
and Psychology, might interpret the inaction of the “aesthetic attitude” as anachronistic
and even indulgent in the context of the 1930s in which social and political events put
intensified pressure on the notion of the artist existing apart from everyday life and
exempt from the call to action. However, Mauron evinces a subtle yet urgent sense that
cultivating the contemplative spirit can lead one to engage with the world with ampli-
fied sensitivity: the “more brilliant light” of “attention concentrated on the present”
reveals an “aesthetic universe” made “at once richer and stranger” (40). He illustrates
this process in the following passage:
In ordinary life we sometimes pause in this way before a tree, a landscape, a

piece of furniture, a sentence, or the face of a friend—or at table even, with
a mouthful of wine, our attention concentrated wholly on the delicate black
savour which we are rolling between the palate and the tongue. In such mo-
ments, I think, we are all like artists, because instead of putting an end to the
stimulus by a prompt reaction, we keep it in suspense. (32)
“We are all like artists,” Mauron tells us, and his levelling vision sweeps from landscape
to furniture to human portrait, blurring hierarchies with a democratic spirit that recalls
his mentor Fry, and one imagines, would have appealed to Woolf.8
Woolf ’s writing—to which I now turn—articulates a complex relationship with what
the “ordinary” might mean and questions the purity of aesthetic experience.9 In what
ways might Mauron’s reflections have given stimulus to her own ambivalence regarding
the apparent separation of art and life proposed by Fry? As the publisher of Aesthetics
and Psychology and of Mauron’s first book, The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature
(1927), Woolf would have had an intimate acquaintance with his ideas. She also admired
his translations of her work, which included a version of the “Time Passes” section of To
the Lighthouse in 1926, followed by Orlando and Flush.10 If her early opinion of Mauron
was conveyed in a characteristically barbed comment in a letter of the late 1920s, which
describes him as that “rather obese and almost blind Frenchman” whom “dear old rap-
scalliony Roger” had “dumped” upon Bloomsbury, their relationship strengthened in the
aftermath of Fry’s death in 1934 (L4 49). Sharing a deep sense of loss, she and Mauron
met and corresponded on numerous occasions while she was writing her biography of
Fry.11 By 1940, she found Mauron “so fine a thinker” that she wrote to him: “I feel I could
learn more from you about writing than from any English critic.”12
With this statement in mind, I would like to suggest that the theoretical lexicon and
central dialectic between “inactive” and “active” contemplation offered in Mauron’s Aes-
thetics and Psychology, has particular affinity with and indeed may have informed Woolf ’s
aesthetics of the 1930s. Mauron offers a suggestive framework through which to re-read
the philosophy of “non-being” and “being” presented in Woolf ’s memoir, “A Sketch of
the Past” (1939), and the rhythms of dulled and heightened attention it describes. She
wrote “Sketch” concurrently with her biography of Fry, at a time when her relationship
with Mauron was becoming consolidated. Her much discussed “moments of being” are
by no means homogenous but they are characterised by an acute sensory awareness that
punctures the “nondescript cotton wool” of “unconscious living,” and they are typically
accompanied by conditions of suspension or immobility that are pleasurable or painful
in different contexts (MOB 104). In their negative manifestations they might stimulate
“physical paralysis” or a “trance of horror,” while in their more exhilarating forms they are
remembered as “ecstatic” and “rapturous” (85, 78). In a memory of childhood summers
spent at St Ives in Cornwall, Woolf recalls an example of the latter:
I stopped at the top to look down at the gardens. […] The buzz, the croon, the
smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst
it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped,
smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather
than ecstasy (80).
Woolf invites us to dwell on each of the different sense impressions with each volup-
tuous pause accentuated on the level of syntax. We imagine that Mauron’s contemplative
artist would have affirmed the trajectory of this experience in which there is an echo of
his injunction, “look, listen, but don’t move.” In the following description of “inactive
contemplation,” he describes a pleasurable expansion of being which has affinities with
the sensual, vibratory imagery employed by Woolf in the passage cited above, although
he admits less possibility for disarming or pernicious effects:
Through our very immobility, the excitement is multiplied. From nerve-cen-

tre to nerve-centre it rolls, re-echoing. Thus we learn ourselves to be more
profoundly and subtly sensitive than we had imagined. The artist transforms
us, willy-nilly, into epicures. (AP 38)
Mauron seems to nod here to the spectre of another epicurean, Walter Pater, who had
famously advocated “expanding” the interval of the “quickened, multiplied conscious-
ness” from aesthetic experience into the experience of daily life (“School of Giorgione”
121). Mauron places emphasis on the physiological as well as the psychological trans-
formative potential of “inactive contemplation” throughout Aesthetics and Psychology.
It is partly this emphasis on bodily sensation that distinguishes his theory from the
more disembodied tenor of Fry’s early formalism, and indeed aligns him more closely
with Woolf. His conception of the radiating moment of intense sensation, or what he
describes as “the instant of intense vibration,” simultaneously removes the artist or
experiential subject from the everyday world and reconnects them more intimately
with it (63).
Thus far, I have focused on a period of intertextual exchange during the 1930s, but I
would now like to take us back to the previous decade to suggest that Woolf might be
seen to anticipate a version of Mauron’s theory in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927).
We might even read the novel as offering a fictional enactment of the “contemplative
attitude” later formulated by Mauron.
Firstly, let us recall the refrain “stand still,” which reverberates throughout the
novel. Mrs Ramsay’s early repeated entreaty to her son James to “Stand still” expands
into a metaphysical desire for permanence within flux expressed in her plaintive “Life
stand still here”; and finally, at the end of the novel we read, “Everything in the whole
world seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable” (34, 183, 208). I
would suggest that “standing still” is at the root of the profoundly embodied attention
that underpinned Woolf ’s aesthetics. Furthermore, it resonates with Mauron’s theory
as encapsulated in his aphoristic: “When the whole world is crying Forward, he [the
artist] stands still” (70).
The celebrated supper party scene in “The Window” section of To the Lighthouse
is a suggestive site through which to explore these parallels further. As we encounter
the gustatory metaphors that sensitise Woolf ’s prose, we might recall Mauron’s en-
couragement to relish exquisite sensations: to become “epicures.” At the centre of the
supper party scene, Woolf presents a notional still life, a “yellow and purple dish of
fruit” upon which Mrs Ramsay feasts her eyes, aestheticizing and transforming it into
“a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet” (111–12). As she
contemplates her friends and family, she assumes an attitude of suspended yet finely
tuned receptivity, hovering over the table “like a hawk suspended” (120). The feeling
she experiences “of peace, of rest” becomes entwined with the materiality of domestic
objects: “here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the
heart of things, where one could move or rest; could wait now […] listening” (121).
The correlation between Mrs Ramsay’s meditative suspension and the compound of
physical immobility and alert attentiveness advocated by Mauron becomes even more
compelling when we read a little later in the same scene: “whereas in active life she
would be netting and separating one thing from another […] she would be urging
herself forward; now she said nothing. For the moment she hung suspended” (123).
The model of attention illustrated here seems to exemplify what Mauron would
later describe as “the luminous focus of an attention no longer distracted” (AP 59).
However, if Mrs Ramsay was a forerunner to the “contemplative epicure” then Woolf
makes us all the more aware of the inevitable transience of such acts of attention. Life
intervenes before long and we read, “a hand reached out, took a pear, and spoilt the
whole thing” (125). This irreverent gesture disrupts the still-life arrangement, dissolves
the intensity of Mrs Ramsay’s attention, and brings into play the forward-urging tem-
porality critiqued by Mauron.
These competing modes of attention bring us back to the question of “doubleness,”
which I raised earlier. Mauron offers the following:
the artist must be double-minded; one side of him seethes with echoes, im-
pulses, desires, emotions; the other, unmoved, savours and appreciates. Now
this doubleness is hard to manage; one cannot hold one’s soul at arm’s length
as easily as a piece of china. (AP 61)
If the notion of “double-mindedness” implicitly seeks to elide the tension between

these competing impulses, one nevertheless questions the human capacity to “savour”
and “appreciate” and yet to remain unmoved or disinterested. Mauron is aware of the
demands that such “doubleness” places on the artist and indeed on his audience. It is,
he goes on to say, a “sort of unstable equilibrium, very near a contradiction” (61–62).
It is this charged, near-paradoxical state of creative energy, this “unstable equilib-
rium” that Woolf is attracted to and harnesses in her own writing. As we have seen,
reading her work in the light of Mauron’s theory points to new intertextual relations.
By accommodating the echoing, impulsive, desiring self into his theory of “inactive”
and “active” contemplation,” Mauron adapts Fry’s aesthetic theory in ways that would
seem to answer elements of Woolf ’s own reading of the art critic. In her biography of
Fry she hints at an analogous “doubleness” when she writes of her subject, “there were
two rhythms in his own life […] the hurried and distracted” but also the “still life”
(RF 214). Was she thinking, one wonders, of Mauron’s double-minded artist when she
concludes her chapter on Fry in the War Years? Reading somewhat against the grain of
Fry’s theory, she speculates, “If he survived the war, it was perhaps that he kept the two
rhythms in being simultaneously” (214).
Notes
1. Aesthetics and Psychology, p. 31. Further references are abbreviated to “AP” where necessary in the
body text.
2. Aesthetics and Psychology has been almost entirely overlooked in Woolf studies, with the notable ex-
ception of Kimberly Engdahl Coates’s persuasive reading of Woolf ’s essay “On Being Ill” in relation
to Mauron’s text. Several critics, including Allen McLaurin and Ann Banfield, have examined Mau-
ron’s first book, The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature (1927), as an influence on Woolf ’s To the
Lighthouse, noting in particular Mauron’s concept of “psychological volumes” as an analogy for spatial
volumes in visual art. Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright situate Mauron more broadly in relation
to Bloomsbury, in “The Maurons, E.M. Forster, Julian Bell, and Bloomsbury,” pp. 267–89, but they do
not discuss the book in question.
3. French language scholarship on Mauron has largely focused on his method of psychocritique which he
developed in the 1960s. This is beyond the focus of my concern here.
4. See Frances Spalding on their meeting (229).
5. Mauron also became a friend and correspondent of the Bells” son, Julian, and unsuccessfully attempted
to dissuade him from fighting in the Spanish Civil War in which he was killed. See Mary Ann Caws and
Sarah Bird Wright, pp. 267–89.
6. See Adrianne Rubin; Reed, “Introduction” to A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 1–5; and Spalding.
7. Mauron does not however make reference to Aristotle in his two books on aesthetics.
8. Fry argued that aesthetic sensibility was not defined by social status. See Reed’s discussion of for-
malism’s attempt to “wrest art from the imperatives of capitalist consumerism and the control of the
dominant classes,” pp. 56–57.
9. Recent studies on Woolf and the everyday include Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); and Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience
(Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).
10. In 1926 Mauron translated an early version of the “Times Passes” section of To the Lighthouse into
French for the Parisian magazine Commerce.
11. Woolf ’s letters and diaries of this decade testify to their continuing intellectual exchange. See also, letter
to Julian Bell, 14 November 1936, L6, p. 84; and to E. M. Forster, 19 January [1936], L6, p. 7.
12. Letter to Mauron, 28 April 1940, quoted in Bloomsbury and France, p. 281.
Works Cited
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998.
Caws, Mary Ann, and Sarah Bird Wright. Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Coates, Kimberly Enngdahl. “Exposing the ‘Nerves of Language’: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the
Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness.” Literature and Medicine 21.2 (Fall 2002): 242–63.
Eliot, T. S. “Burnt Norton,” The Four Quartets, The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.
171–98.
Fry, Roger. “Art and Life.” Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus, 1923. 1–15.
——. “Essay in Aesthetics.” Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus, 1923. 16–38.
——. A Roger Fry Reader. ed. Christopher Reed. London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Hutcheon, Linda. Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984.
Mauron, Charles. Aesthetics and Psychology. trans. Roger Fry and Katherine John. London: Hogarth Press,
1935.
——. The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature. trans. Roger Fry. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.
Mclaurin, Allen. Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Pater, Walter. “The School of Giorgione.” Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010. 123–35.
Rubin, Adrianne. Roger Fry’s “Difficult and Uncertain Science”: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Perception.
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013.
Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Woolf, Virginia. The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne
Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80. 6 vols. Letter to Clive Bell. 2 May 1929.
——. Roger Fry: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940.
——. “A Sketch of the Past.” Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being, Autobiographical Writings. ed. Jeanne Schul-
kind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 78–160.
——. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
Vanessa Bell’s “tiny book”:
Woolf, Impressionism, Roger Fry, and Anti-Semitism
by Maggie Humm
I
n “Virginia Woolf and the Jews,” a special issue of Woolf Studies Annual, Beth
Rosenberg argues that “the time has come for critical discussion of Woolf ’s relation
to Jews and Jewishness to turn to the earlier years of Woolf ’s intellectual devel-
opment, the years before her marriage to Leonard” (9). Two of these key years were
1904–5. Although we have Woolf ’s 1939 retrospective view in “A Sketch of the Past,”
an equally significant account is by Vanessa Bell. In “Memories of Roger Fry,” Bell talks
about 1904–5, Impressionism, and the importance of Camille Mauclair’s “tiny book”
The French Impressionists to her in those years (129). Bell was interested in politics, as
her painting The Triple Alliance (referencing war-time treaties), and the naming of her
1913 Omega textile White after Amber Blanco-White, feminist and political activist,
demonstrate. Yet, as I shall argue, in 1904–5 Bell seems to disregard the political sub-
text of Mauclair’s The French Impressionists.
Following the move to Bloomsbury in 1904, Virginia records that so busy were
the sisters “we had only just time to rush off to a Mr Rutter’s lecture on Impressionism
at the Grafton Gallery” (MOB 185). Their interest was triggered by Mauclair’s book,
translated in 1903, which Bell claims was “her chief source of knowledge of all that
was going on in France” (129). Mauclair’s “tiny book” inspired her, as she “poured over
those absurd little reproductions” (129).
I’ll return to Mauclair and Jewishness in a moment, but first to contextualize
Vanessa and Virginia’s interest. Impressionism derives from the title of Monet’s Impres-
sions: soleil levant, scorned when first exhibited in 1874, and the term applied initially
to Monet, Pissaro and Sisley (Flint 14). The three were in England in 1870–71 due
to the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, and from 1887 Impressionist works
were exhibited annually in the UK, culminating in the major exhibition of 1905 by
Durand-Ruel at the Grafton Gallery, referred to by Woolf, which 11,000 people visited.
As Brandon Taylor argues, Impressionism trained spectators to the cognitive pleasures
of art not just to what content they might be seeing (xix).
The term Impressionism initially caused critics problems. Mauclair preferred
“chromatism” and Rutter “luminism” (Flint 12). In spite of Woolf finding Rutter’s lec-
ture “boring,” Rutter, a friend of Roger Fry, was hugely influential (MOB 185). The
lecture the sisters attended on a Sunday evening in February 1905 was packed, with the
audience soaking up Rutter’s argument that “light was the principal person in a paint-
ing,” not—as Post-Impressionists (and Rutter himself later) were to argue—colour and
shape (“The French Impressionist Fund” 4). The Grafton displayed 315 pictures which
transferred to Berlin with acclaim. Lisa Tickner suggests that the cream of English so-
ciety attended Rutter’s lectures, “Lady Muriel Paget, Lady Grosvenor and Lady Lavery”
among them (30). Rutter founded the Allied Arts Association, was Director of Leeds
City Art Gallery, and supported suffragism as treasurer for the Men’s Political Union
for Women’s Enfranchisement. His journal Art and Letters was multidisciplinary, pub-
lishing Katherine Mansfield and Wyndham Lewis, as well as Picasso and Matisse; and
he joined Clive Bell and Fry at Gertrude Stein’s Saturday soirées. In the year the Ste-
phen sisters heard him talk, he had raised money by public subscription for a Monet
for the National Gallery (who refused to accept the painting). Rutter may have inter-
ested Vanessa with his clarity about techniques and his support for women artists. “Has
there ever been a great woman artist?” he asked and answered in the affirmative with
Berthe Morisot (“Round the Galleries” 2).
It is thanks to Bell’s memoirs that we know of the importance of Impressionism to
the Stephen sisters because Woolf mentions it only three times in her writings, twice
about Rutter’s lecture. “Impressions” is her most used term particularly in terms of the vi-
sual. “Visual impressions kept coming and coming before me,” and Woolf refers often to
light, for example the present “is largely composed of visual and sense impressions…then
the sense of light sinking back” (D2 226; L1 3). Her impressions mix light and colour, like
her sisters’ paintings, as in the famous description in “A Sketch of the Past”: “If I were
a painter I should paint the first impressions in pale yellow, silver and green…I should
make a picture that was globular, semi-transparent,” and, in an equally famous quote,
“life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo” (MOB 66,
CR1 150). There is a critical consensus that Woolf ’s prose has an impressionistic quality,
particularly in her descriptions of light at differing times of the day like Monet’s paintings.
In his obituary celebration of the Impressionist painter Renoir, Fry oddly omits
light when characterizing Impressionism in which he claims “the organs of expres-
sion—line, mass, colour—have become so fused together” (The Roger Fry Reader 73).
With his scientific training, Fry’s focus was on the science of Impressionism. “I am
afraid that my attitude to aesthetics is essentially a practical and empirical one…of
the nature of a scientific hypothesis” (61). Fry dismissed Impressionism, as having “no
philosophy of painting, but only a method,” concluding, “as a critic of art I have never
been a pure Impressionist, a mere recoding instrument,” because their work lacked
“structural design,” although later he was to admit that Post-Impressionism had “an
affiliation” with Impressionism (Vision and Design 384, 223, 227). Clive Bell was more
scathing. In 1914 he argued that Impressionists had “a quite unsuccessful pursuit of
scientific truth, created works of art tolerable in design,” but the “venial sin of Impres-
sionism is a grotesque theory” (Flint 218, 240).
So where does this leave Bell with her love of Mauclair’s The French Impression-
ists? She did not suddenly become a modernist artist after Fry’s Post-Impressionist
exhibition, although she claimed “that autumn of 1910 is to me a time when every-
thing seemed springing to new life” (126). Impressionism continued in her work. As
Hana Leaper points out, Bell’s Landscape with Haystack Asheham (1912) “demonstrates
an authoritative synthesis of French modernism, combining a favourite Impression-
ist trope—the ephemeral effects of light on a haystack as depicted serially by Claude
Monet with colours and brush strokes of Post-Impressionist simplifications” (46).
Mauclair’s book then had given Bell much to think about. The French Impression-
ists was published by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth which is perhaps why she
read it, but The French Impressionists was only one of many newly popular pocket edi-
tions of art books at the turn of the twentieth century. Heinemann and other publishers
Vanessa Bell’s “tiny book” 137
were producing these “tiny” books too. In 1904 George Clausen the painter wrote, fol-
lowing the closure of the Magazine of Art, “there was wider interest in artistic matters
than there used to be & it comes as quite a shock to find an old friend retiring…Has it
been crowded out?” (Helmreich 249).
Along with these and Rutter’s work, books Bell could have read instead included
Mrs. C. H. Stranahan’s A History of French Painting, D. S. MacColl’s, (a future good
friend of Bloomsbury) Nineteenth-Century Art, based on the Glasgow exhibition of
1900, and Wynford Dewhurst’s Impressionist Painting of 1904. Dewhurst, the Monet
of Manchester, should have appealed to Bell. He had painted Haystacks in 1895 as Bell
was to do in 1912. He had a chapter on female artists including Mary Cassatt, and, in
his excellent survey, argued strongly that French artists were developing a style initi-
ated by Turner, an artist admired by the Stephen sisters. He was a regular contributor to
journals Bell read—The Artist and Studio. He even pre-empted John Maynard Keynes’s
founding of the Arts Council, with his 1913 book Wanted: A Ministry of Fine Arts.
So what was it about Mauclair’s book that was so appealing? Mauclair, the pseud-
onym of Séverin Faust, was a novelist, poet and critic, a prolific writer with monographs
on Turner, Degas, Watteau, Rodin and Monet, as well as literary criticism about Poe,
Flaubert and Baudelaire. He had Bloomsbury connections. The French Impressionists
is dedicated to the painter and writer Auguste Bréal who, Hilary Spurling suggests, the
Strachey family regarded as “the French end of Bloomsbury” (267). It was Bréal who
had introduced Dorothy Strachey as a pupil to Simon Bussy who became her husband.
In ‘Notes on Bloomsbury’ Bell describes Fry drawing to Bloomsbury, “delightful and
sympathetic visitors. Such were Jacques Copeau [and] Auguste Bréal” (108).
There were several features of Mauclair’s book which may have appealed to Bell:
the inclusion of women artists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt; his anti-establish-
ment views—“Degas, Monet and Pissaro have achieved great fame and fortune without
gaining access to the Salons”; his expert technical analysis of how paintings work, for
example, his focus on Manet’s use of colour (The French Impressionists xix). But Mau-
clair has a very different style from other critics of the period in his preoccupation
with race. This was not a new development in his work. Earlier, in an account of Manet
in the Art Journal September 1895, Mauclair suggests that Manet had “an intellectual
temperament belonging to the grande race” (“Edouard Manet” 274). It is important to
note that the French term “race” refers also to stock or breeding as in bonne race or pure
breed. Manet, Mauclair claims, is a man…of healthy mind,”; an interesting comment
given that Manet died from complications from syphilis (275).
By the time of The French Impressionists this proto-fascistic focus was more clearly
delineated. Impressionists, Mauclair claims, each “has based his art upon some masters
of pure blood” (The French Impressionists 17). Impressionists “reject the foreign ele-
ments, and search, before anything else, for the strict national tradition” (78). It was
the Romantics, Mauclair felt, who had “mixed with foreign elements” (208). “The race
speaks to” Renoir apparently who, with the other Impressionists, dared “freely to pro-
test against a degenerated ideal” (204). Simon Bussy has “retained the best principles of
the Impressionist masters [because he is] an artist of pure blood” (178, 196).
Race and breeding are not the only proto-fascistic tropes used by Mauclair. He
praises the Impressionists for their hostility to other nations’ histories, and Mauclair’s
is an ahistorical approach, a proto-fascistic refusal to see how history works in art. His
attempt to demonstrate an eternal French pure lineage, which will be “felt all over the
world,” has analogies with fascism in its later political guise (209). Mauclair also adopts
an almost Trump-like criteria for the representation of women. He loves Renoir’s wom-
en because they are “luxuriant, firm, healthy [again—almost germaphobic] and naïve
with…a small head…thoughtless, brilliant [not intellectually but in show] and igno-
rant with “blood-red” lips (118). Luckily for the French, Impressionism “renews the
aesthetic code of the country” (203). As Adolf Hitler argued in his speech inaugurating
the “Great Exhibition of Modern Art” 1937, National Socialism “will wage an unrelent-
ing war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture” and its
art “will be of eternal value” (561–62).
How could Bell, and by implication Woolf, who, in 1904–5, must have discussed
art on a daily basis with Bell more than at any other time in her life, possibly skate
over this language; ignore such obviously proto-fascistic tropes and criteria? Woolf
was anti-Semitic in letters to Violet Dickinson in the same year, 1905. Travelling with
her brother Adrian she notes “there were a great many Portuguese Jews on board, and
other repulsive objects,” and from Seville “I am afraid I shall have to sleep with a Por-
tuguese Jew” (L1 184, 86). Michael Whitworth has argued in relation to Woolf that
for her “generation ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘language’ were inextricably confused,” deriving
from a Victorian equation of race with culture (68). But they were anti-Semitic. Vita
Sackville-West, Woolf ’s future lover, writing home to her mother in her very first week
at school, knew who were the Jews, although she was more troubled by the “bedints,”
Sackville code for anyone common or vulgar (Glendinning 5, 27).
Mauclair’s notions of race and nation are not about imagined communities, nor did
they involve a sense of nation as a sign of modernity. What is being constructed by Mau-
clair is what Ernest Laclau calls a chain of equivalents—in Mauclair’s case between pure
blood and art (60). As Kathryn Simpson claims, in relation to Woolf, what might be
happening for Mauclair is that his antipathy to foreign elements reveals a cultural anxiety
about race and nation, a need to approve particular characteristics in art so as not to trou-
ble the boundary between self and Other (112). Scapegoat figures in Woolf ’s writing, like
Mauclair’s foreigners, are also repositories for personal and professional anxieties (113).
But Woolf ’s anti-Semitism in her diaries and letters contrasts with her early “Journal of
Mistress Joan Martyn,” which, far from ahistoricism, reveals both a philosophy of history
and new ways of writing history. As Gretchen Gerzina points out, Woolf constructs race
as a “performance” and her novels reproduce a wide range of assumptions about “non-
white Otherness” distant from Mauclair’s narrow interpretation of race (82).
Bell, Woolf and Mauclair did share one anxiety which was about the changing cul-
ture of the market-place. This appears in Woolf ’s work, according to Lara Trubowitz,
as a constellation of tropes such as rubies and diamonds (290–91). In 1904, as I have
argued elsewhere, books like The French Impressionists contributed to a rapidly shifting
cultural landscape with burgeoning dealerships, new collectors and galleries and a new
proliferation of ‘isms’ like Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (2010). Bell’s deep
dedication to the book might also reveal her dilemma as a woman artist, symptomatic,
as Tim Barringer points out, of “the crisis in representation and artistic practices which
accompanied and indeed which resulted in the emergence of modernism in Britain” (66).
Vanessa Bell’s “tiny book” 139
By the time of Woolf ’s ant-fascist Three Guineas, and Bell’s The Other Room of the
same date, with its confident colours, tribute to abstraction, and absent men, Mauclair
had travelled a different path. As Tobah Joy Aukland argues, Mauclair was incensed by
the success of the Jewish art dealer David-Henri Kahnweiler and declared there was a
Jewish conspiracy in the art market (73). He called for a defence of French art to pre-
vent its export in the national interest; and claimed that it was the Jews who were taking
over French art and must be prevented (73). Mauclair’s suggestion that the government
should impose laws restricting the movement of art works by Jews came to fruition in
an anti-Semitic Vichy law of June 23, 1941.
However much we might want to contextualise Bell’s, and by implication Woolf ’s,
views in 1904–5 in their historical moment, or argue, as Whitworth does, that Woolf ’s
anti-Semitism “was as much to do with class as race,” “tiny” books like Mauclair’s The
French Impressionists are not necessarily tiny in their impact, or in their contribution to
our re-thinking of Woolf and Bloomsbury’s early politics (68). As Bell did state, from
1904–5, the book “was her chief source of knowledge” (129).
Works Cited
Aukland, Tobah Joy. Les juifs et not chefs-d’oeure: French Artistic Patrimony and the Jewish Art Collector 1840–
1945, unpublished thesis, Middletown Connecticut: Wesleyan University, web. 06/08/2017, 2013.
Barringer, Tim. “‘Not a “modern” as the word is now understood’? Byam Shaw, Imperialism and the poetics
of professional society,” English Art:1860–1914. Eds. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000. 64–83.
Bell, Vanessa. “Memories of Roger Fry,” Sketches in Pen and Ink. Ed. Lia Giachero, London: Hogarth Press,
1997. pp. 117–147.
Flint, Kate. ed. Impressionists in England: the Critical Reception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Fry, Roger. The Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
——. Vision and Design. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. “Virginia Woolf, Performing Race,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia
Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 74–87.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
Helmreich, Anne. “The Death of the Victorian Art Periodical,” Visual Resources, 26:3, September, 2010, 242–53.
Hitler, Adolf. “Speech inaugurating the Great Exhibition of Modern Art,” Modernism. Ed. Vassiliki Kolo-
cotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998 (1937). 560–63.
Humm, Maggie. “Virginia Woolf and the Arts,” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed.
Maggie Humm, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 1–16.
Laclau, Ernest. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso, 1990.
Leaper, Hana. “Between London and Paris,” in Vanessa Bell. Eds. Sarah Milroy and Ian A. C. Dujardin, Lon-
don: Philip Wilson, 2017. 41–53.
Mauclair, Camille. “Edouard Manet,” Art Journal, September, 1895. 274–79.
——. The French Impressionists. London: Duckworth & Co, 1904.
Rosenberg, Beth. C. “The Belated History of Woolf and Jews,” Woolf Studies Annual, 19, 2013. 7–9.
Rutter, Frank. “The French Impressionist Fund,” Sunday Times, 29 January, 1905. 4.
——. “Round the Galleries—Morisot,” Sunday Times, 19 February, 1905B. 2.
Simpson, Kathryn.“‘Am I that Jew?’ Woolf ’s 1930s Political and Economic Peregrinations,” in Virginia Woolf:
Twenty-First-Century Approaches. Eds. Jeanne Dubino, Gill Lowe, Vara Neverow and Kathryn Simp-
son, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 111–28.
Spurling, Hilary The Unknown Matisse. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998.
Taylor, Brandon. Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1999.
Tickner, Lisa. “Men’s Work: Masculinity and Modernism,” Differences, 3:1, 1993. 1–36.
Trubowitz, Lara. “Concealing Leonard’s Nose: Virginia Woolf, Modernist anti-Semitism and ‘The Duchess
and the Jeweller.’” Twentieth Century Literature, 54 (3), 2008. 273–306.
Whitworth, Michael. Virginia Woolf, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 2: 1920–24. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew Mc-
Neillie, London: Hogarth Press, 1978.
——. The First Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie, San Diego: Harcourt, 1980.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1 1888–1912. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Lon-
don: Hogarth Press, 1975.
——. Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind, San Diego: Harcourt, 1976.
The Art of Narrative
Woolf as a Model Builder:
Complex Form in the “Ode to Cutbush”
by Adam Hammond
T
his paper is part of a larger project in which I argue that the recent turn in
literary studies toward descriptive, reparative, and post-critical reading should
be seen more broadly as a “turn to complexity.” In this essay, I want to argue
specifically that the “turn to complexity” should be seen as a “re-turn” to the concerns
of the modernist period and the interests of Virginia Woolf. But to get there, I need
to do some setup. So, first, what do I mean by “complexity”? I’m using the term in
its scientific meaning, as in complex systems theory, which holds that systems must
be understood as formed out of small-scale interactions that can’t be fully predicted
in advance. The classic example is a traffic jam, whose large-scale form emerges un-
predictably from the interactions of individual cars and drivers, but any number of
systems can be seen as complex, including our own bodies and consciousness, which
emerge from small-scale interactions between cells, bacteria, and so forth. Now, how
does this connect to literary theory? In my view, works as different as Rita Felski’s The
Limits of Critique and Caroline Levine’s Forms can be read as rallying calls to approach
literary texts and literary production as complex systems. For Felski, the problem with
“critique” is that it limits our ability to see and engage with literary texts in all their
complexity. In deciphering the text as a “symptom, mirror, or index of some larger
social structure” (11), we look past the text to invisible structures of control. Yet if
we simply look at the text itself, we would find it “jammed thick with implications,
connotations, conflicting meaning, and associative echoes that inevitabl[y] exceed any
reader’s immediate grasp” (66). In Forms, Caroline Levine argues against simplifying
formalist criticism that seeks aesthetic unity, insisting instead on the complex interac-
tions and multiplicities of form. She asks, “What if we understood literary texts not as
unified but as inevitably plural in their forms—bringing together multiple ordering
principles […] in ways that do not and cannot repress their differences?” (40).
A concept that both Felski and Levine employ in explaining how complexity op-
erates in literary texts is that of “affordance.” The term has its origin in the ecological
philosophy of James J. Gibson, which defines an affordance as an “action possibility”
latent in the environment which can be activated by an agent such as a human or
an animal. Depending on the agent and the context of the encounter, for instance,
a pond in summertime might afford swimming or drinking, but not skating or slid-
ing—but the same pond, frozen over in winter, would afford the opposite, skating or
sliding but not swimming or drinking. For Felski, the concept of affordance is useful
in foregrounding the unpredictability of the reader/text interaction while also reject-
ing the idea that anything goes in interpretation. It helps us see how “literary works
‘make available’ certain options for moving through them, which are also taken up in
wildly varying ways by empirical readers” (165). Levine’s interest is focused on action:
by “allow[ing] us to grasp […] both the particular constraints and possibilities that
Woolf as a Model Builder 143
different forms afford,” the concept of affordance helps us to see what certain literary
forms are “capable of doing” (6).
Theorists of complexity like Felski and Levine lead us back to modernism in two
ways. First, modernist critics were similarly insistent that literary texts should be seen
as complex and multiple—Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dialogism” and Erich Auerbach’s “multi-
personal representation of consciousness” are just two examples. To make the second
point, which relates directly to Woolf, I need to draw attention to a concept frequently
invoked by theorists of complexity but seldom looked at directly: the concept of mod-
elling. The standard understanding of a model is as a passive instrument that stands
between theory and data, ideas and the world. Think of an architectural model, which
is used to test engineering theories and see whether a building will collapse—or a
macroeconomic model, which employs Keynesian theory to predict the effects of an
increase in public spending. Recent work in philosophy of science has argued against
this passive understanding of models, however. In Models as Mediators, Mary S. Mor-
gan and Margaret Morrison argue that models are “autonomous agents” independent
both of theory and the world (10). They posit two key ideas about models. The first is
iteration: models, they argue, are built iteratively through experiment, improvement,
and testing. This progressive process of construction serves not only to develop a bet-
ter fit between theory and the world, but also to help the model-builders refine both
their theories and their ontologies. Models don’t simply intervene between theory and
the world, then—the process of their creation actually produces new knowledge about
both, new theories and new ontologies. The second key idea about models is interac-
tion. Models, they say, “are not passive instruments [but] must be put to work, used, or
manipulated” (32). They produce new knowledge through the responses they offer to
users asking “What will happen if I do this”—add a little more public spending, remove
a support column—responses that can’t be fully predicted in advanced, and must be
worked out actively, through manipulation of the model.
This brings me around to Woolf, via a crucial distinction. Theorists like Felski and
Levine tell us how to approach literary texts as complex systems, and why we ought to
do so, but they don’t produce the actual apparatuses—the spectacles, kaleidoscopes, or
virtual reality goggles—that will enable this new angle of vision. Woolf, on the other
hand, is a model builder. Working from a theory of complex vision, she seeks not only
to describe its value but also to create an apparatus for instilling it. Her literary works
not only advocate for complex models—they are complex models.
Woolf is a model builder in both senses described by Morrison and Morgan: she
approached model-building iteratively, continuously working to improve and update
her forms; and she worked from an understanding of form as interactive. A few quickly
sketched examples should illuminate this for an audience of Woolfians. In terms of
interactivity, consider the affordance Auerbach calls “multipersonal representation of
consciousness” (536) as employed in the famous skywriting scene in Mrs. Dalloway.
Rather than telling her readers what is being written in the sky, Woolf provides them
with a plurality of impressions. In a process somewhat like the creation of a crowd-
sourced 3D image, readers must expend significant processing power to aggregate lots
of low-resolution images into a complex three-dimensional model—and these impres-
sions just keep coming, making up 15 of the first 28 pages of the novel in the Oxford
Classics edition, so that the reader needs continually to update the image. Interacting
with the affordances of Woolf ’s model, I argue, readers learn something essential not
only about reading modernist literature but also about reading the modern city and
modern democracy: that the complexity of the world requires not only that we build
our impressions of reality from multiple sources, but that these impressions are always
subject to inevitable transformation. Now, in terms of iteration, consider how much
Woolf changes her model even just in the novels of the 1920s, and only in terms of
the narrators they employ. In Mrs. Dalloway, as Auerbach argues, “the writer as nar-
rator of objective facts […] almost completely vanishe[s]”—almost, but not entirely, as
certain dispersed passages of objective narration reveal. Jacob’s Room and Orlando are
the only novels published that decade whose narrators have recognizable personalities.
Both are lively, funny, ironic, and given to definite assertions—as, for instance, when
the narrator of Jacob’s Room tells us “Jacob, of course, was not a woman” (60), or that
of Orlando who speaks of “nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps
unwieldy length of this sentence” (55). In the first and third sections of To the Light-
house, the narrator vanishes just as Auerbach predicts—but in “Time Passes,” nearly
all impressions are rendered by a lyrical, poetic, simile-wielding narrator whose tone
is consistent through all ten chapters. The Waves is the clearest departure of them all:
there is a conventional narrator throughout, but literally all that it says is “said Ber-
nard,” “said Susan,” “said Rhoda,” “said Neville,” “said Jinny,” and “said Louis.” Another
voice narrates the italicized descriptions between sections, but it has nothing in com-
mon with this minimalist “said-x” narrator. Woolf ’s model was interactive, requiring
readers to engage with her work’s open-ended affordances, and these affordances were
constantly changing, were iterative. Woolf had something very definite in mind in im-
proving and updating her models: as I argue, to prompt readers to a way of seeing the
world that stresses its complexity, and thus, in my broadest argument, makes them bet-
ter at “doing democracy.” But she understood that readers’ interactions with her forms
were never entirely predictable or knowable—that while she could create a field of play,
with multiple possible pathways for engagement, the act of reading would always un-
fold differently with each encounter between reader and text, user and model.
I want to dwell now on what is perhaps the most drastic and surprising alteration
that Woolf made to her model of complexity: her decision, in October of 1934, to write
her only poem—the lengthily titled “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name
of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.” This strange prose poem was writ-
ten in 1934, the year that Hitler declared himself Fuhrer, and the last that Auerbach, a
Jewish employee of the Nazi state, spent in Germany. It was a year in which theorists of
genre at the highest levels of power sought to capitalize on the political force of forms.
In the USSR, Stalin declared writers the “Engineers of human souls” (qtd. in Huxley
309) and commissioned a new state-sanctioned aesthetic, “Socialist realism,” to manu-
facture Soviet subjects. In exile in Kazakhstan, Bakhtin wrote “Discourse in the Novel.”
In exile in Paris, Walter Benjamin called for a “mighty recasting of forms” to confront
the rise of Fascism (771).
Woolf had politics on her mind when she wrote the Ode. The week after the “Night
of the Long Knives,” in July 1934, she wrote to Stephen Spender, “Even I am shocked by
the last week in Germany into taking part” (L5 135). She was also preoccupied with more
personal matters. In the weeks leading up to the composition of the Ode, Wyndham
Lewis had attacked her in Men Without Art as “a peeper, not a looker, a fundamental
prude” (D4 251). Responding in her diary, she wrote, “I’ve no doubt I am prudish and
peeping, well then live more boldly” (D4 252). The Ode, which imagines in full the life
of a butcher named John Cutbush, is a clear answer to Lewis’s provocation. But why re-
spond in verse—why write a poem? In the years leading up to 1934, Woolf was closely
involved with the emerging Thirties Poets—publishing them in the Hogarth Press, em-
ploying them, corresponding with them. She was also developing an original theory of
poetry not as a way of writing but as way of reading that in turn becomes a way of seeing
the world. It is articulated again and again in her critical works of the late 20s and early
30s, most fully in A Letter to a Young Poet, published in the Hogarth Essays series in 1932,
where she tells the Thirties Poets that their “task” is to “re-think human life into poetry”
(230). It’s the direction of travel between poetry and the world that is most significant
in this formulation: the poet’s role is not to impose an order on the world, but to bring a
new attitude toward what it presents—not to fit the world into poetic forms but to orient
themselves to the world as if it were a poem. We can see the kind of orientation Woolf has
in mind—alert to correspondences without seeking to enforce them—when she tells the
young poets, “All you need to do now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical
sense open and shut, open, and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts into another,
until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils” (230). After a decade that saw Woolf work-
ing tirelessly to improve her complex literary models, in the 1930s she increasingly saw
that poetry—a way of reading and seeing, not just a way of writing—could be usefully
incorporated into them. And so she responded to the overlapping crises of 1934 not by
abandoning her model, but once again by tweaking it—by producing yet another itera-
tion.
The Ode unfolds in a double plot. The first presents a “speculative biography” of
John Cutbush, a butcher from East London whose name the narrator sees on a sign
while passing by his shop. Here we are told of John’s courtship of a kitchen-maid
named Louie, his reluctant apprenticeship, and his family life in the streets and parks
of Pentonville. This first plot employs many formal devices that afford the sort of po-
etic attention Woolf describes in A Letter to a Young Poet. A neighbourhood feast is
described as follows:
The flares are lit over barrows. The

feathers and blouses blow like flowers. The
meat blazes. (89–91)
The rhythms in the passage are pronounced but loose—the reversing Anglo-Saxon al-
literation of “feathers and blouses blow like flowers,” the way that “feathers” and “flowers”
imperfectly echo “flares”—and “blouses” and “blow” recall but do not repeat “barrow”
and “blazes.” The reader must listen carefully to unpack these complex echoes. But al-
though Woolf adds these traditionally poetic affordances to her model in the Ode, she
does not subtract interactive novelistic affordances. For Caroline Levine, the best re-
sponse to political crisis is not the destruction but the “multiplication” of forms—and
Woolf takes precisely this approach. Consider the scene in which Louie meets John Cut-
bush near a pond:
Lovely are the willows

and lilies sliding and twitching; and
behold the old gentleman trying to disentangle the
child’s boat with his stick from the willows; and John says to Louie,
In summer I swim here; Sure? Yes I swim here.
making believe he is among the great athletes;
like Byron he could swim the Hellespont; John
Cutbush of Pentonville. (19–26)
Aside from three passages of direct quotation—John saying “In summer I swim here,”
Louie replying “Sure?” and John replying “Yes I swim here”—it is as difficult to disen-
tangle the voices in this passage as the child’s boat from the willow. In context, it seems
that the first four lines present Louie’s impressions of the scene. The self-aggrandizing
reference to Byron seems to come from John himself, whom we later learn is a devoted
reader of Don Juan. The line “making believe he is among the great athletes” might be
Louie’s ironic response, delivered through free indirect discourse, to John’s boast, or
perhaps his words filtered through her consciousness. Or, though less likely, it’s pos-
sible these lines belong to the narrator, expressing amusement at John’s boastful pickup
line. The cutting enjambment of the last two lines, which slices John’s heroic nomina-
tion in half, might come from the narrator—although since the narrator imagines John
as a poet, and one who models himself after Byron, no less, the joke may be one he is
making at his own expense. What is most significant here is that while each of these
readings is afforded by the form, none is mandated. And while it doesn’t insist on a
particular interpretation, it does insist that we recognize the multiple participants in
the scene: Louie, John, and the impersonal poetic narrator.
The Ode’s second plot, which becomes explicit only at the end, introduces yet an-
other actor: the poem’s personalized narrator, who up to this point has been waiting
in the wings. After 139 lines of novelistic poetry, characterized by irregular but pro-
nounced poetic rhythms and pervasive mobility of voice, the Ode ends with an abrupt
stylistic shift: a 14 line, first-person, lyrical finale that concludes as follows:
as we
hold the Evening Standard under the lamp how little
we think of the wealth we can gather between the
palms of two hands; how little we can grasp;
how little we can interpret and read aright
the name John Cutbush but only as we pass his
shop on Saturday night, cry out Hail Cutbush
of Pentonville, I salute thee; passing. (147–54)
These lines have been read as an admission of creative failure on the part of the nar-
rator—recognition of the limitation of her view and the difficulty of imagining other
people’s lives, particularly those of different class backgrounds. But if we take seriously
Woolf ’s idea that poetry is not a way of writing but a way of reading and seeing, the lines
register differently. As a lyric finale, they are unusual in beginning in the first person-
al plural. As “we,” the narrator positions herself as a reader, not only of the newspaper,
but also—along with us—of the poem itself. Reflecting on “our” communal reading of
Cutbush, the narrator stresses recognition of the impossibility of ever fully knowing or
understanding John’s life—a recognition entirely in keeping with the notion of complex
vision, which seeks to register complexity but not to reconcile it. The passage then moves
from the communal “we” to the personal “I,” zooming in progressively from a Google
Earth satellite vantage down to Street View. Here, carrying with her the notion of the
“wealth” of Cutbush’s life, the narrating “I” takes a definite action: she “salutes” Cutbush.
To salute, according to the OED, is “to address with words expressive of good wishes,
respect, or homage.” In political and military contexts, salutes are conventionally offered
to superiors like kings and officers. But in this poetic context, Woolf ’s usage echoes Walt
Whitman—a poet she admired—in whom the salute is a gesture of comradeship and
equality. In “Salut au Monde,” Whitman writes, “I see ranks, colours, barbarisms, civiliza-
tions, I go among them, I mix indiscriminately, / And I salute all the inhabitants of the
earth” (302). Finally, by appending “passing” to her salute, preceded by a showy semico-
lon, Woolf ’s narrator emphatically marks the provisionality that attends complex vision.
“Passing” positions the narrator’s salute as an action taken without expectation of final
resolution. “Passing” furthermore places the narrator in the scene as someone observed,
suggestive perhaps of Cutbush’s reverse seeing. Two bodies inhabit a shared space, two
pairs of eyes may be glimpsing each other. For a fleeting moment, the city affords a per-
sonal connection which then slips away as the narrator moves on.
In the first plot, then, Woolf shows what poetry can add to novelistic devices in
conveying complex vision. In the second plot, she shows what complex vision can add
to democracy. When it moves outside the context of literary reading, complex vision
becomes a way of orienting oneself in the world. In The Limits of Critique, Felski asks
us to open ourselves to the affective “enchantments” of texts. Here, Woolf ’s personal
narrator approaches Cutbush with a sense of enchantment and wonder cultivated in
the poem’s first plot, and, oriented thus, discovers the “wealth” of his life, and is led
to the concrete act of “saluting.” It is not a grand, violent gesture—a stormed tower
or a pierced barricade—but it is the sort of action that sustains democratic life. Like
the process of modelling itself, it is built on the humble logic of endless iterations and
interactions, none fully determinate, none fully knowable, yet collectively constituting
the dialogic nature of democratic life.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” 1934. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Selected Writings. Ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005. 768–82.
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Gibson, James J. “The Theory of Affordances.” Eds. Richard Shaw and John Bransford. Perceiving, Acting, and
Knowing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977. 67–82.
Huxley, Aldous. “Soul Builders.” 1934. Aldous Huxley’s Hearst Essays. Ed. James Sexton. London: Routledge,
1994. 309–10.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Morrison, Margaret and Mary S. Morgan. “Models as Mediating Instruments.” Models as Mediators: Per-
spectives on Natural and Social Science. Eds. Mary S. Morgan and Margaret Morrison. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999. 10–37.
Whitman, Walt. “Salut au Monde!” 1891–92. Leaves of Grass: First and “Death-Bed” Editions. Ed. Karen Kar-
biener. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. 294–305.
Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. London: Penguin, 1992.
——. Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
——. A Letter to a Young Poet. 1932. The Hogarth Letters. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. 211–36.
——. “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.”
A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Vintage, 2003. 231–35.
——. Orlando. Ed. Brenda Lyons. London: Penguin, 1993.
——. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Stella McNichol. London: Penguin, 2000.
——. The Waves. Ed. Kate Flint. London: Penguin, 2000.
“Books Were Not in Their Line”:
The Material Book and the Deceptive
Scene of Reading in To the Lighthouse
by Brian Richardson
R
eading—or at least the appearance of reading—is everywhere in To the Light-
house. The essential power and multiform nature of the scene of reading are
evident from the transformations played upon its first appearance in the text:
Mrs Ramsay’s reading a fairy tale to James. As Mr Ramsay strolls up and observes this
tableau, he finds the image iconic and compelling; in short order, he moves over and
stands in front of them, displaying his need of sympathy, jealous of the attention given
to his son. James, in his turn, tries to use the book to divert the man it had just sum-
moned: “By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing
his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily,
wavered instantly his father stopped” (37).
But the scene of reading has more power to attract than to repel. James’ strata-
gem fails, as he suspected it would; Mrs Ramsay ignores him to satisfy her husband’s
needs. The tropes used to depict this interaction are revealing: after listening to his
wife’s words of encouragement, Ramsay is described as being “filled with her words,
as a child who drops off satisfied” (38). For Mrs Ramsay, this is a much more arduous
task than anyone realizes: “the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she
had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion,
along the page of Grimm’s fairy story” (38).
And what is the story being read to James? It is a misogynistic fairy tale, “The
Fisherman and his Wife,” which Jane Marcus has called a sexist parable of “woman’s
insatiable desire for power” (1987: 154). This odd choice of inner text has occasioned
considerable speculation and contradictory responses in the critical literature; it is all
the more curious since Woolf chose it to replace other, less offensive fairy tales (“The
Three Dwarfs” and “The Three Bears”) in her earlier manuscript. Beth Rigel Daugherty
views Mrs Ramsay as one who has been destroyed by the narratives of the patriarchy;
her fate is that which Lily must struggle to avoid: “through her use of the fairy tale and
the Angel of the house, Woolf shows the implication of patriarchal myths for women—
they kill” (1991: 302). Building on this insight, I have argued elsewhere that as she
reads the story, Mrs Ramsay is in fact reciting a version of her own life that cannot be
recognized as such by any of those who hear it (Richardson, forthcoming). She is not,
however, the insatiable wife, as many critics have averred: one must invert the gender
of the central figures to appreciate their identities. She is rather the victim of repeated
demands by males who are never satisfied; she assumes the position of the enchanted
fish, though of course she unfortunately lacks its supernatural powers. It is then not
surprising that she finds comfort in imagining herself drowning and finally finding
“rest on the floor of the sea” (84). The narrative of the life of Mrs Ramsay thus functions
as a critical rewriting of the sexist fairy tale from a feminist perspective.
Mrs. Ramsay, it must be admitted, is not much of a reader. She doesn’t pay at-
tention to the story she is reading to James; at one point, her reading is compared to
sleeping (121). Neither does she peruse the volumes she owns: “She never had time to
read them. Alas! Even the books that had been given her and inscribed by the hand
of the poet himself ” (27). Ramsay “liked to think his wife was not clever, not book-
learned”; he even doubts whether she understands what she is reading (121). Ironically,
he is partially correct in this, though not for the reasons he assumes. Tansley is remem-
bered by Lily as “always carrying a book under his arm—a purple book” (159). For
him, books serve as an escape from people, whose conversation he finds to be inane:
“He was not going to talk the sort of rot these people wanted him to talk.…He had been
reading in his room, and now it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy” (85).
Most of the other characters are inadequate readers. Paul Rayley claims that the
books one read as a boy truly last and praises a novel by Tolstoy he knows he will always
remember, though he cannot recall its name. That subject of conversation does “not
take them very far. Books were not in their line” (108). Minta Doyle carelessly leaves
the last volume of Middlemarch behind in the train and therefore never learns how the
novel ends (98). Even Lily feels ashamed she hadn’t read Carlyle since she was at school
(46). These depictions differ radically from Woolf ’s accounts of her own passionate
experience as a reader, as Hermione Lee has documented (403–05); likewise, though
Woolf advocates a number of acceptable answers to the question, “How Should One
Read a Book?” in her essay of that title, these do not include the forgetful or slovenly
modes displayed by the characters in her novel. Moving on to Mr Ramsay, we may note
that he does indeed read, but he reads Walter Scott, who proves to be a thoroughly dat-
ed and generally unfortunate favorite, since even Ramsay’s disciple Tansley staunchly
affirms that people don’t read Scott any more (118).
In this narrative, books serve many functions other than that of being read, and
Woolf dramatizes several of what recent critical usage would term their multiple af-
fordances; many of these center on the physical volume itself. Books are said to grow
of themselves (27). They may be offered along with stamps and tobacco as a gesture of
politeness (41), banged on the floor to express frustration (116), or considered awk-
ward objects to be “clawed up” from the grass (191). To fetch “up from oblivion all the
Waverley novels” does not mean restoring the prominence of their author but rather
cleaning mold from the spines of several tomes (139). Rather insidiously, books can
produce a material transformation never intended by their authors: in the closed up
room there are “long rows of books, black as ravens once, now white-stained, breed-
ing pale mushrooms and secreting furtive spiders” (140).1 Equally suggestively, a book
may provide a physical medium for the perception that someone has drawn near: “A
shadow was on the page; she looked up” (39).2
The act of being read, that is of one’s sensibility continuing to produce favorable re-
sponses in the minds of others, is a major concern in the novel. It is most clearly present
in the mind of Mr Ramsay, who figuratively measures his intellectual achievement with
the sequence of the letters of the alphabet, and obsessively wonders “how long will he be
read” (107), a query that causes him considerable anguish, since (as he accurately surmis-
es) his works are going out of fashion and are no longer influential. As William Bankes
has determined, “Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are
“Books Were Not in Their Line” 151
forty” (23). Ramsay has had trouble with reception all along. Loudly reciting Tennyson
as he strode outside, he was embarrassed by the unexpected presence of unwilling listen-
ers. Thinking of those whose work will last two thousand years, the name of Shakespeare
presents itself (35). Soon, he grows angry at Shakespeare, without realizing why (43).
At the supper table, a literary dispute breaks out between William Bankes, who
praises the Waverley novels, and Charles Tansley, who denounces them (106–07). This
scene in turn produces characteristic responses from those assembled around the table:
Mrs Ramsay sees Charles’ words merely as another of his transparent acts of self-asser-
tion that really has nothing to do with “poor Sir Walter, or perhaps it was Jane Austen”
(106). Bankes attaches no importance to such changes in fashion (though, as we have
seen, he still laments them), and Minta Doyle says she did not believe anyone really
enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Ramsay, however, can only think of himself during this
conversation: any discussion of the endurance of authors over time makes him irritable
since he realizes, despite the cheery reassurances he demands of his wife, that he is al-
ready ceasing to be read. Later that night, he takes up a volume of Scott’s and goes over
it carefully, critically, to determine whether Tansley’s attack is at all justifiable. He then
proceeds to enact the moving solecism that if he still reads Scott, who is said to be out
of fashion, others will then read his own books, which are equally passé.
If actual reading in the novel is rarer than one might expect, the effects it produces
are commensurately more impressive. At different points in the text, both Mr and Mrs
Ramsay identify reading with a placid sense of relaxed familiarity: “It was like reading a
good book again, for she knew the end to that story” (93; see also 33). The final pages of
the first part of the novel provide both an alternative scene of reading to those we have
encountered up to this point and a kind of coda to the theme of reading. Both Mr and Mrs
Ramsay take up books, different yet characteristic volumes: Ramsay, his favorite novelist,
Scott; and Mrs Ramsay, some lines of poetry by an unnamed author (whom Alice Fox has
identified as William Browne [44]). There are obvious differences in genre, of motivations,
and the way that each begins: Ramsay seeks out a specific passage, while Mrs Ramsay
opens her book at random. Gradually, however, they yield to an experience that is both
parallel and shared. Though each dives into the middle of a book, both are soon reading in
a linear fashion: Ramsay is “tossing the pages over” (118) while Mrs Ramsay is following
successive lines of verse, “Swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to
another as from one branch to another” (119). Sitting apart and reading different works,
both become entirely engrossed in their reading; they now steep themselves in their books,
as Woolf recommended, and begin to merge with the words they hold, fulfilling another
piece of Woolf ’s advice: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him” (CR2 235).3
Ramsay does this almost too well: “He was acting it—perhaps he was thinking himself the
person in the book,” his wife observes (118).4 Both seek a form of completeness, though
Mr Ramsay concludes he will have to read the novel again to regain “the whole shape of
the thing” (120). Mrs Ramsay, however, finds a distilled totality in a poem: “And there it
was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete,
the essence sucked out of life and presented here—the sonnet” (121). Her “evening of
companionable reading results in a revelation,” as Abbie Garrington observes (2013: 135).
Intriguingly, these private acts of identification with others bring the couple closer
together. Ramsay in particular ceases to be so compulsively driven and abandons or
finds a release from the issues that have hounded him earlier. He forgets the perceived
slights, uneasiness, and feeling of boredom; most significantly, he abandons the se-
quential teleology that has so obsessed him during the day: “it didn’t matter a damn
who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach
it—if not he, then another” (120). His vast, noisy, overbearing ego starts to dissolve
as he merges with the book he is absorbed by. This nicely anticipates Lily’s reflections
on the dissolution of the artist in the act of creation: “she lost consciousness of outer
things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmi-
chael was there or not” (159). The self, with all its cumbersome baggage, is temporarily
shed as the reader (or in Lily’s case, the painter) becomes one with the work.
As she reads, Mrs Ramsay feels she is ascending “on to the top, on to the summit.
How satisfying!” (121). This time, Ramsay’s response to seeing his wife reading is more
generous; he stifles his desire to complain about the waning reputation of his books:
“he was determined; he would not bother her again” (121). Instead, he admires her
silently, and goes on to apostrophize her mutely: “Go on reading. You don’t look sad
now” (121). Reading here produces a distinctly ethical effect, and seems to turn some
of the characters into better people. This is the case whether an individual is merging
with an author (even an outdated one), or whether one is simply observing another
person in that act of interpersonal communion.5
This effect is created again much later in the text. Near the end of the book a sym-
metrical scene of reading appears. Cam watches her father onboard the boat to the
lighthouse, thinking that he reads “as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a
large flock of sheep, or pushing his way up a single narrow path; and sometimes he
went fast and straight, and broke his way through a thicket, and sometimes it seemed a
branch struck him, a bramble blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten
by that; on he went, tossing over page after page” (190). Commenting on this passage,
Jane Goldman notes that Ramsay’s “mastery over pastoral imagery seems gradually
to slip”; she concludes that Cam’s admiration for her father’s learning “is mixed with
indications of its decline” (Stevenson and Goldman 1996: 184). We might add that
this perception brings to mind both the depiction of Mrs Ramsay’s brachiating style of
reading and Ramsay’s own blundering through the landscape spouting Tennyson, as
the rough physicality of Ramsay’s “tossing” the pages is repeated. Watching him read,
Cam cannot maintain her compact with James to resist their father’s tyranny. Instead,
she remembers her habit of walking into his study, taking a book from the shelf, and
pretending to read as she as she watched him write (189). For his part, Ramsay was
always pleasant to her in this setting. On the boat, finishing his reading, Mr Ramsay is
unusually muted; he does not declaim aloud the lines of verse his children had come
to expect with loathing. Instead he is relaxed, at peace with himself and those around
him, and even gives his son a rare (though greatly appreciated) word of praise, as the
family’s rough emotional journey comes to a tranquil pause.
The multiple facets of the book come together through parallel and interpenetrat-
ing acts of reading and creation. Lily’s completion of her painting occurs at the same
time as the completion of the trip to the lighthouse, which takes place as Ramsay fin-
ishes reading his book, which presumably involves the merging of the reader with the
“Books Were Not in Their Line” 153
author that Woolf recommended. This act of reading precedes and, once again, would
seem to have produced a positive transformation in the interactions of the family; like-
wise, the entire scene can be assumed to affect those of us who literally hold the book in
our hands. This final identification is made stronger by seeing our own reading experi-
ence reflected back at us in the text. The children watch their father with his book: “Mr
Ramsay had almost done reading.…He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager
to get to the end” (202–03); these descriptions are equally applicable to readers of To
the Lighthouse as well; Woolf playfully enhances our merging with her text by having
us experience the response it depicts. In the end, the author, the protagonists, and the
reader all have our vision.
Notes
1. It is just possible that this line is itself an ironic commentary on Milton’s claim in the Aereogaptica that
books are like dragons’ teeth and can bring forth armed warriors.
2. Leah Price provides a thorough account of the Victorian backgrounds of depictions of books that are
not read in How to Do Things with Books, especially the first chapter.
3. As Jeanne Dubino notes in her analysis of Woolf ’s “common reader”: by the end of “The Patron and
the Crocus,” the relationship “is one of equality…with the reader and the writer becoming increasingly
highly intimate equals: more than mother and child, they are Siamese twins, ‘one dying if the other dies,
one flourishing if the other flourishes,’ and sexual partners” (1995: 133). See also Melba Cuddy-Keane
(2003) on this subject.
4. Kate Flint’s comment on her earlier novel is equally pertinent to To the Lighthouse: “Acknowledgement
of the degree to which the individual can get absorbed by fiction is coupled in The Voyage Out with a
recognition (which the reader is expected to share) that such habits of identification, of slipping into
the skin and mind of a fictional character, can go hand in hand with a self-awareness of the process
which is taking place” (1996: 272).
5. Helen Tyson notes that “there is a movement in Woolf ’s writing from the description of the phe-
nomenological, sensory and perceptual qualities of reading (reading as hallucination, almost) to the
evocation of psychic, emotional and ontological engagement and disturbance” (1451). We see this oc-
curring in the depiction of Mrs Ramsay’s reading.
Works Cited
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “‘There She Sat’: The Power of the Feminist Imagination in To the Lighthouse,” Twen-
tieth Century Literature 37 (1991): 289–308.
Dubino, Jeanne. “Creating ‘the conditions of life’: Virginia Woolf and the Common Reader,” Re: Reading, Re:
Writing, Re: Teaching Virginia Woolf, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (New York: Pace UP,
1995), pp. 129–36.
Flint, Kate, “Reading Uncommonly: Virginia Woolf and the Practice of Reading,” Yearbook of English Studies
26 (1996): 187–98.
Fox, Alice. Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Garrington, Abbie. Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Random, 1999.
Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.
Richardson, Brian. “Dangerous Reading in Mansfield’s Stories and Woolf ’s “The Fisherman and His Wife,”
Katherine Mansfield Studies 10 (2018): forthcoming.
Stevenson, Randall and Jane Goldman, “‘But what? Elegy?’: Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs. Ram-
say,” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 173–86.
Tyson, Helen, “Reading Childishly? Learning to Read Modernism: reading the Child Reader in Modernism
and Psychoanalysis,” Textual Practice 31.7 (2017): 1435–57.
Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. Second Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1932.
——. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace, [1989].
Mrs. Brown and the Trojan Cow:
Deconstructing Aristotle in “An Unwritten Novel”
by Elisa Kay Sparks
L
et’s begin, as a number of modernist texts do, with the cow.1 Of all the unexpect-
ed, apparently random, unexplicated details of Virginia’s Woolf ’s 1919/20 short
story, “An Unwritten Novel,” the one that bothers me the most is the wooden cow
in the meadow. Signaling the transition from the story’s frame to its main narrative, the
cow makes its appearance in the sixth paragraph, just after the train has passed through
Three Rivers Station and crossed the border into Sussex. The woman passenger has
spoken for the first time, and from the fragments of her utterance and the hints offered
by her body language—“she fidgeted as though the skin on her back were as a plucked
fowl’s in a poulterer’s shop window” (CSF 113)—the narrator begins to anticipate a
story with an Aristotelian turn or perepitia which will launch the tragic action: “Ah,
now we approached the catastrophe” (CSF 113). But instead of unfolding the details of
her plot, the woman’s story is rather rudely interrupted by a cow—a “great wooden cow
in the meadow”—which shocks her and saves her from “some indiscretion” or revela-
tion (CSF 113). What are we to make of this blocking anomaly: presumably some form
of advertisement? What invading warriors does the Trojan cow hide?
Thinking metaphorically, I first hypothesized that the cow serves as a variation
on the distinction between life (what Aristotle would call the possible) and the artistic
appearance of life (the probable): there is the real cow and then there is the artificial
scaffolding of a cow, cobbled together according to the conventional rules of writing,
just as there is the real passenger and the one invented by the narrator.
Wanting to expand my thinking visually, I then began to look for images of wood-
en cows on the Internet. And I found…Pasiphae. Do you know who she is? The mother
of the Minotaur. Her husband Minos angered Poseidon by not sacrificing enough, and,
gods being gods, Poseidon decided to get his revenge by humiliating not Minos but
Minos’s wife. So he made Pasiphae totally, madly, and specifically erotically in love with
Minos’s favorite white bull (something of a family proclivity since Minos’s mother was
Europa, but I digress). In fact, Pasiphae had the hots for the bull so badly she called in
Daedelus, handyman to the gods, and asked him to build her a wooden armature in
the shape of a fetching cow, ingeniously contrived so that she could be secretly rogered
by her bovine inamorata. The result was the minotaur, the labyrinth, Ariadne’s thread,
and that whole sequence.
Would Woolf have known of Pasiphae? As wife of Minos, sister of Circe, and
mother of Phaedra, she is a minor but significant figure in both Greek and Roman
sources. Her story is central to Euripides’ The Creatans,2 and she appears in both Vir-
gil’s 6th Ecologue (ll. 45–60) where Silenus sings somewhat sympathetically of her
unfortunate frenzy (Armstrong 174) and in Ovid’s Arts of Love, where—with no men-
tion of the divine source of her compulsion—she serves as an example of the greater
lustfulness of women: Ovid claims, “Pasiphae delighted to become an adulteress with
a bull” (Armstrong 180).3 Robert Graves refers to her in The White Goddess (1948) as
“the Moon-Goddess Pasiphae, cow in heat” (320), a reference which may recall Wyn-
dham Lewis’s “taking the cow by the horns,” and links Pasiphae to the whole web of
bovine associations outlined by Jane Marcus in her brilliant essay “Taking the Bull by
the Udders: Sexual Difference in Virginia Woolf—A Conspiracy Theory.”4
But before I “devote a year or two to cows in literature”—as Woolf recommends
in an essay written the same year as “Modern Fiction”—(Woolf “Outlines,” E4 190
[1925]5) let me rein back and reconnect Pasiphae with Aristotle. References to mir-
rors and imitation and catastrophes and spots and flaws had made me suspect that
elements of the story’s structure and imagery could be explained as parodies of Ar-
istotelian expectations.6 Further corroboration of Woolf ’s critical attitude towards
Aristotle arrived when I came across Jim Stewart’s recent essay, “‘Poetics’…Will Fit
Me for a Reviewer!” which lays out the chronology of Woolf ’s reactions to the Greek
critic. According to Stewart, Virginia Stephen first read Aristotle’s treatise in late
February/early March of 1905, only a few months after the publication of her first
few book reviews in The Guardian. Delighted with how it laid “down so simply &
surely the rudiments both of literature and criticism,” she declared that it would “fit
me for a reviewer!” (Woolf, PA 241, 240; qtd by Stewart 323). However, by the time
Woolf wrote “An Unwritten Novel,” nearly fifteen years later, she had grown restive
at Aristotle’s strictures, and in her 1919 essay “Modern Novels” she decried the “me-
diocrity” such rules produced: “if one were free and could set down what one chose,
there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which
the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyric dissolved
beyond the point of separate recognition” (Woolf, E3 33). By 1925’s revision “Mod-
ern Fiction,” Aristotle (rather like the Hulk) had morphed into “some powerful and
unscrupulous tyrant” whose demands “to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy,
love interest, and an air of probability” metaphorically encase materialist writers in a
“softly padded first-class railway carriage” [E4 160, 159]).
The story of Pasiphae with its ambiguous sexism—is it about the denigration of
women by men, the derogation of female power by the rewriting of myths, the boxing
up of female desire, or can it be re-read as the story of a woman managing to find a
way to access her own pleasure?—made me begin to rethink “An Unwritten Novel” in
terms of the battle between the sexes which not so subtly underlies stories in Monday or
Tuesday such as “A Society.” What if “An Unwritten Novel” uses Aristotle as the essays
use the Georgian realists: as a kind of paradigmatic proponent of patriarchy, the exem-
plar of a masculinist tradition of misogyny? Aristotle’s general denigration of women
was well known, and Woolf could hardly have missed his statement in the chapter on
Character in The Poetics that “Even a woman may be good” though they are in general
“inferior” and it is inappropriate to represent them as having either “valor” or “unscru-
pulous cleverness” (Aristotle Chap XV).7
Once you pull the thread called Aristotle, there are multiple parodic references
to be found throughout “An Unwritten Novel.” It begins, as Aristotle says a story
should, in medias res, immediately announcing itself as concerned with the issue
of mimesis—the imitation or representation of life—the topic with which Aristotle
begins The Poetics and the foundation of his whole aesthetic. The subject of the story
Mrs. Brown and the Trojan Crow 157
is a woman who “looks at life” (CSF 112), a mirror of the narrator who looks at her,
and throughout the story repeated references to mirrors and window panes and plate
glass windows reflect the epistemological complexity of the idea of representation,
how difficult it is actually to see reality clearly, which is of course the central tension
of the whole story.
The effort to see is interestingly connected to another potentially Aristotelian mo-
tif, the itching spot, which I see as a mockery of the clichéd melodrama encouraged by
overdependence on the device of hamartia or a fatal character flaw which The Poetics
introduces as the main driver of the tragic action—what causes the hero to fall from
grace. There are many different interpretations of hamartia; to follow the commentary
of the edition in Woolf ’s library: it is an error or failure in vision, a lack of knowledge,
a defect of character such as pride, or it is a literal spot, a flaw, like the one on Achilles’s
heel? (See Butcher 317–19).8
In Woolf ’s story, the “spot between the shoulders” morphs into several analogues
(CSF 113), spotting the story like a cow’s hide. It is almost immediately externalized
as the elderly woman begins trying to rub out a spot on the window of the train car-
riage. Mysteriously impelled to mimic her companion, the narrator similarly rubs at a
damned spot.9 Neither effort avails: perhaps the spots are on the other side of the glass,
a fitting metaphor for the writer’s inability to get beyond the surface appearance of re-
ality. But the narrator now absorbs the contamination of the internal spots as well; the
passenger has “passed her poison” (CSF 114) and the narrator now tries to scratch the
hard-to-reach spot in the middle of her own back—perhaps a forerunner of that “spot
the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself ” later
mentioned in A Room of One’s Own (89).
The procrustean clichés of plotting produced by the structural insistence on a
peripetia and a catastrophe caused by a hamartia or fatal flaw, and followed by an an-
agnorisis or recognition which produces a resolution become even more obvious in
the next section of the narrative, the attempt to invent a story for the passenger, now
named Minnie Marsh (any echo of a moo cow here?), along the line of one of Arnold
Bennett’s novel’s such as Hilda Lessaways, whose eponymous heroine shares the same
name as Minnie’s invented sister-in-law.10 However, displaying her lack of interest in
representing the material detail of Minnie and Hilda’s lives, the narrator proposes we
skip over the “ornaments, curtains, trefoil china plate, yellow oblongs of cheese” (back
at cows again) and instead follow Minnie upstairs, where she “avoid[s] the looking
glass,” ironically also refusing a representational surface (CSF 114).
The strain of seeing through or into Minnie’s blankness seems to catapult the nar-
rator into the ultimate vacuum of abstraction: she decides the most appropriate thing
for Minnie Marsh to be thinking about at 3:00 o’clock on a rainy December afternoon
is God. But when she tries to visualize Minnie’s idea of the deity, he is as inaccessible
as the spot on the outside of the window. In a move which connects the spots with
masculine rule, the best the narrator can come up with is a patriarchal Nobodaddy: a
figure who looks like President Kruger of South Africa. Sitting on a couple of clouds
holding a punitive truncheon, he is “a brutal old bully,” perhaps an analogue of the ty-
rant Aristotle. Under his aegis, the “damned spot” becomes moralized into an emblem
of “the stain of sin” (CSF 115).
The notion that Minnie’s spotty sin may be linked to romance (the obligatory “love
interest”) but has been repressed next leads the narrator to a brief flirtation with a
Freudian perspective: “They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret—her
sex they’d say” (CSF 115), but the psychoanalytic scenario is also rejected as so much
“flummery.” Instead, the narrator settles on a rather tawdry, melodramatic tale: as a
young girl, Minnie stayed so long in a draper’s shop admiring pretty violet ribbons in
the plate glass window that her neglected baby brother somehow spilled a kettle of boil-
ing water on himself and subsequently died in hospital from the burns.
What follows is a cascade of averted catastrophes. Minnie is almost overcome with
all her sins, which, falling like the hot water on her brother, turn her own spot “red” and
“burning”; however, just as the narrator is “heading her over the waterfall, straight for
madness” (116) there’s a jerk, an intervening interruption, as the inflamed, patriarchal
spot is recuperated and replaced by the holistic, fertile image of an egg. Minnie is “teth-
ered to the shores of the world,” saved from “crimes, sorrows, rhapsodies, or insanities”
by her mundane consciousness of the “cheapness of eggs” (CSF 116). Meanwhile, back on
the train, in a confusing causal reversal—“who was saying that eggs were cheaper? You or
I?” (which came first the chicken or the egg?), the passenger (not/Minnie) actually takes
out an egg and begins to eat it. The scattered fragments fall into the passenger’s lap, and
violating all Aristotelian tenants of proportion, the narrator imagines them as growing
into huge white blocks of marble hurtling down the slopes of the traveller’s knees:
And now you lay across your knees a pocket-handkerchief into which drop
little angular fragments of eggshell—fragments of a map—a puzzle. I wish I
could piece them together! If you would only sit still. She’s moved her knees—
the map’s in bits again. Down the slopes of the Andes the white blocks of
marble go bounding and hurtling, crushing to death a whole troop of Spanish
muleteers, with their convoy—Drake’s booty, gold and silver. (CSF 117)
No longer a stigmatized victim, now almost a gigantic goddess, the passenger takes
up her darning threads (using a darning egg?) and, defying “the encroaching demon of
what called going in holes,” she begins to reknit the world: “spinning a web through which
God himself…” (CSF 120). Here the narrator again breaks off, once more prophesizing
catastrophic disaster—“Niagara’s ahead” (121)—but this time the postponed peripetia is
her own; as the passenger gets off and is greeted by her son (Minnie and the minotaur?),
she realizes her whole narrative was a false invention: “my world’s done for” (CSF 121).
Instead of being cast down and drowned by the unraveling of her story, however,
the narrator reaches a recognition or anagnorisis, a cathartic reaffirmation of the mys-
tery and wonder of what is blooming on the other side of the “plate glass windows”: the
worlds of “carnations; chrysanthemums, Ivy in dark gardens,” and—in a sign that the
cow has become productive—“milk carts at the door” (CSF 121).
What ritual, what “ancient antics” does the narrator at last kneel to perform? (CSF
121) A final affirmation of the productive egg born in the belly of a contrived beast, the
triumph of a feminine wholeness over the artificial constraints of masculine conven-
tion? I don’t have all the answers, but I hope I have left you with an enhanced vision of
the “Unwritten Novel” as a woman creating her own imaginative armature, one which
Mrs. Brown and the Trojan Crow 159
both enacts and deconstructs the Aristotelian scaffolding of story, revealing it to be a

great artificial cow entrapping both the writer and the reader in a moving carriage of
mechanistic constraints, the ultimate deus ex machina.
Notes
1. I am thinking not only of the beginning of Joyce’s Portrait but also of Forster’s The Longest Journey.
2. For a thorough treatment of Pasiphae in Euripides, see Sinah, Chapter 4 on Bovine Imagery, specifically
4.5 on Pasiphae’s Cow.
3. See Rebecca Armstrong’s treatment of Pasiphae in these two texts, pp. 169–84.
4. Quotation from Wyndham Lewis’ Men Without Art (1934) taken from Marcus’s essay, p. 136.
5. Thanks to Derek Ryan for this reference.
6. I also found collaboration for my approach in Laura Maria Lojo Rodriguez’s “Parody and Metafiction
in Woolf ’s An Unwritten Novel” (2001) which suggests that “Ironically, all the situations and back-
ground which make up Minnie’s life draw from worn out realistic conventions and constitute a parody
of them” (75)
7. I quote throughout from S. H. Butcher’s translation of the Poetics, a copy of which is in Leonard and
Virginia’s library. The Woolfs owned three books by Butcher on Greek subjects, at least one of which
was inscribed by Virginia Stephen, in 1905, the very year she was first reading The Poetics. See King
Miletic-Vejzovic
8. Butcher does not include the reference to Achilles.
9. Butcher, by the way, presents Macbeth’s ambition as an example of hamartia (p. 322).
10. Prudente mentions this connection (p. 11).
Works Cited
Armstrong, Rebecca. Cretan Women: Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phadera in Latin Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
Butcher, S. H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics. 4th
ed. Dover Publications Inc., 1951 (1st American edition).
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2103.
King, Julia and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic. The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-title Catalog. Pull-
man, WA: WSU Press, 2003
Lojo Rodríguez, Laura María “Parody and Metafiction: Virginia Woolf ’s ‘An Unwritten Novel.’” Links and
Letters 8 (2001): 71–81.
Marcus, Jane. “Taking the Bull by the Udders: Sexual Difference in Virginia Woolf—a Conspiracy Theory.”
Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: IUP, 1987. 137–62.
Prudente, Teresa. “‘To Slip Easily from One Thing to Another’: Experimentalism and Perception in Woolf ’s
Short Stories.” Journal of the Short Story in English 50 (Spring 2008): 171–83.
Ryan, Derek “‘The Reality of Becoming’: Deleuze, Woolf and the Territory of Cows.” Deleuze Studies 4 (2013):
537–61.
Sinah, Bijorn Kumar. “The Crete and Cretans of Euripides: Perceptions and Representations.” Submit-
ted for the Degree of Philosophy in Classical Studies. Open University. September 2016. <oro.open.
ac.uk/48912>
Stewart, Jim “‘Poetics…Will Fit Me for a Reviewer!’ Aristotle and Woolf ’s Journalism.” pp. 322–31 in Bryony
Randall and Jane Goldman, eds, Virginia Woolf in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP; 2012.
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 2nd edition. New York:
Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke. London: The Hogarth
Press; New York: Harcourt, 1987–2011.
——. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt, 1990.
——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Annot and Intro by Susan Gubar. New York: Harcourt [Harvest], 2005.
Making New Books: Creative Approaches
Queer Woolf: Queer Approaches and
Creative-Critical Research
Queer Woolf: Two Poems and a Preamble
by Jane Goldman
Preamble
A
ccording to the Oxford English Dictionary Arnold Bennett, no less, the famed
pantomime rival of Bloomsbury, is the earliest source in Britain of queer’s
modern “chiefly derogatory” usage. He uses it in a diary entry of 26 March
1915 (published in 1932)—although it is difficult to assess how derogatory, if at all, this
instance is: “An immense reunion of art students, painters, and queer people. Girls in
fancy male costume, queer dancing, etc.” (OED; Bennett 550).
Turning to the source, we discover that the evening in question was a thoroughly
Bloomsbury affair, involving a visit to an exhibition of radical art by the London Group
(“some nice things but all imitative”), and thence to dinner with Lady Ottoline Mor-
rell where Bennett finds “Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, Whitehouse. All these
very much upset by the war, convinced that the war and government both wrong, etc.”
(Bennett 127). Having witnessed the Bloomsbury related art and pacifism that inform
many of the contributions to Queer Bloomsbury, Bennett’s account of his evening with
the Morrells concludes with a glimpse of Bloomsbury masquerade, orientalism and
queer sexualities too:
Afterwards, an immense reunion of Art Students, painters, and queer people.

Girls in fancy male costume, queer dancing etc. A Japanese dancer. We left at
12.15. Pianola. Fine pictures. Glorious drawings by Picasso. Excellent impres-
sion of host and hostess. (Bennett 127)
The “queer people” on this occasion did not include Virginia Woolf whose debut
novel, The Voyage Out, was published the day after this party (i.e. 26 March 1915) and
who was convalescing in a nursing home following a bout of mental illness, but it seems
likely that her sister and other Bloomsbury members were present. Her novel, which
incidentally Vanessa Bell on its publication described as “a queer business” (Spalding
VB 137), “appeared amid a season of unparalleled gaiety,” according to Frances Spald-
ing, when “[a]s if in defiance of the war, Lady Ottoline Morrell was holding parties
every Thursday” (Spalding VB 137). She cites a letter from Vanessa Bell in April 1915:
you might see Bertie Russell dancing a hornpipe with Titi (Hawtrey’s young
woman), Lytton and Oliver and Marjorie Strachey cutting capers to each oth-
er, Duncan [Grant] dancing in much the same way that he paints, [Augustus]
John and Arnold Bennett and all the celebrities of the day looking as beautiful
as they could in clothes seized from Ottoline’s drawers—and Ottoline herself
at the head of the troup of short-haired young ladies from the Slade prancing
about…one can’t describe the queer effect all these people had on each other.
(Spalding VB 137)
Queer Approaches and Creative-Critical Research 163
Clearly, then, the dictionary definition of “queer” rests on a record of what the editors
of Queer Bloomsbury, Helt and Detloff, invoking Sedgwick, call Bloomsbury’s “con-
viviality” and “becoming together,” a concept that “captures both the contingency and
the generativity of inhabiting space beside one another” (QB 2). This certainly supports
the stance that Bloomsbury and queer are synonymous. On the other hand, while it
is satisfying to find these two contemporary accounts of the same Bloomsbury event
and constellation of Bloomsbury people both employing the term “queer,” it is worth
attending to Vanessa Bell’s enigmatic, but certainly not derogatory, summary of the
“queer” scene she has described as indescribable. In saying “one can’t describe the
queer effect all these people had on each other,” she perhaps alerts us to the very real
dangers and legal consequences at the time of making too plain what “queer” might
mean, as well as demonstrating how deploying the word as she does here both signals
and erases (queers) the queerness it seeks to (mis)represent. In a sense, the present
collection Queer Bloomsbury, mindful of queer’s in-built resistance to describability,
is testimony to the multiplicitous explorations made in the last century toward under-
standing and inhabiting the proliferating and complex “queer effect all these people
had on each other” and on the queer generations that have followed.
Kimberly Engdahl Coates’ essay in Queer Bloomsbury, drawing on Sedgwick’s “queer
moments” and Sara Ahmed’s “queer phenomenology,” looks for moments of queering the
straight and straightening the queer, and begins to trace Woolf ’s deployment of the word
“queer” in a sampling of letters and her “war novels” (QB 277) Coates certainly makes us
aware of how very often and how very queerly Woolf repeats the word “queer.”
I composed the following “Queer Woolf ” poems by systematically citing in chron-
ological order every instance of Woolf ’s usage of the word “queer” in her ten novels
and in the six published volumes of her diaries. This methodology, a form of research
by creative practice, which I have employed in two related projects (“Discovery Woolf ”
and “Poetry Woolf ”),1 allows us to trace queer lines of flight, queer trajectories in her
fictional works shaped in the first instance for publication and also in her posthu-
mously published private autobiographical writings. These lines of flight are anchored
neither in poetry’s left hand margin nor in prose’s fluid double margin, but are aligned
vertically through the poems in chronological order of appearance. Attempting to
think through distinctions and continuities in prose and poetry, Woolf distinguishes,
in “Phases of Fiction” (1927), between “the poetry of situation” and that “of language”
(E5 77), itself perhaps poetry per se, speculating on how modern novels might be writ-
ten in the poetry of language, the kind of poetry we “recall […] by the words” (E5 77).
Every instance of queer that I have plucked precisely “by the words” from her novels,
journals and diaries, I made sure to trail with it on each lateral line an enclosing ring of
the immediate ground of Woolf ’s language.
Note
1. Jane Goldman, “Discovery Woolf,” The Voyage Out: An International Anthology of Writing, Art and
Science, ed. Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low (Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2016); Jane Goldman, “‘I grow
more & more poetic’: Virginia Woolf and Prose Poetry” and “Poetry Woolf,” British Prose Poetry: The
Poems Without Lines, ed. Jane Monson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017 [in press]).
Queer Woolf:
A Poem (VO to BA)
1.
A queer card. Married a young
woman out of a tobacconist’s
One does come across queer sorts
as one travels
indescribably
insignificant,
and rather queer in his temper
“Why is it that the women,
in that class, are so much queerer than the men?”
over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression
eyes which wore for a second the queer look of a short-sighted person’s
There was an enchanted
rubbish heap, I remember,
where all kinds of queer things happened.
Rachel, sitting silent, looked so queer and flushed.
had given her lips a queer little pucker
an occasion for queer confidences
Her feeling
about him
was decidedly queer.
She was next overcome
by the unspeakable queerness
the natives
who walked
beside the
donkeys
broke into queer wavering songs
and tossed jokes
from one to the other.
his queer, utterly inexplicable,
but apparently
satisfactory
view of life
“It makes one feel awfully queer,
don’t you find?”
Even the English go a little queer.
2.
she’s going to marry that queer creature Rodney.
Because you’re such a queer mixture, I think.
You’re half poet
and half old maid.
the queer people who
were buying cakes or
imparting their secrets
a shop was the best place
in which to preserve this
queer sense of heightened
existence.
screwing his mouth into a queer little smile
a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph’s
I never saw such queer-looking people.
I’ve just made out such a queer, strange thing about your grandfather.
self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper
His sight of Katharine had put him queerly out of tune for a domestic evening.
He fell into one of his queer silences
William gave a queer snort of exasperation
he gave his queer little chuckle.
he was very nice, though rather queer
thought her family a queer one
— queer, yes, but not dull.
so queerly silent, almost respectful, in her presence
now and then with a queer mixture
of the queer gibberish murmured
in front of the statue
His face wore a queer expression of deliberation
But her agitation flashed the queerest lights upon her past.
His words, and the queer strained voice in which he spoke them
with a queer sense of fellowship in suffering
on her knee. It was a queer collection
the queer look of her blue silk skirt
a queer mixture of distrust and deference.
you’re extraordinarily queer,” she said. “Every

one seems to me a little queer. Perhaps it’s the effect of London.”
“Is William queer too?” Katharine asked.
“Well, I think he is a little,”
Cassandra replied.
“Queer, but very fascinating. I shall read Milton tonight.
marriage is a very queer business.
with a queer alternation
of loudness
and faintness
They looked at each other, queerly, in the light of the lamp.
“How queer, how strange, how
unlike other people,
you are, Katharine,”
Cassandra said, her
whole body and voice
seeming to fall and
collapse together
one of those queer, unnecessary ceremonies
she looked queer, too
She looked at the queer glow of exaltation in Cassandra’s
eyes, through which she was beholding
the true spirit of a human being
“Well, she is queer!” Cassandra exclaimed.
something queer and ominous about it out
of all proportion to its surface strangeness.
Somehow his faith in her stability and sense was queerly shaken.
explain the queer combination which he could perceive in them
3.
The march that the mind keeps
beneath the windows of others is queer enough.
one of those queer movements which are so slight yet so definite
No; there was something queer about it.
and, for a man of his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the park
4.
Both seemed queer, Maisie Johnson thought.
Everything seemed very queer.
the young woman seeming foreign,
the man looking queer
and now how queer it was, this couple
—all seemed, after Edinburgh, so queer.
yet her dresses were never queer.
the same queer look; the same check suit
she’s a queer-looking girl, he thought
They had always had this queer power of communicating without words.
She had some queer power of fiddling on one’s nerves
the voices of birds
and the sounds of wheels
chime and chatter in a queer harmony
But odd unexpected people turned up;
an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere.
she lets in long shafts of dusty light upon deserted, queer-looking arm-chairs
this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.
nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting by-streets
“But I must look so queer!” she cried
spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of a bus
For Professor Brierly was a very queer fish.
he suspected instantly
an atmosphere not
favourable to his queer compound
5.
looking round the room, in a queer half dazed, half desperate way
But this morning everything
seemed so extraordinarily queer
the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow
6.
so many queer tricks
he was so full of queer crafts
the queer element of the human spirit
She had the queerest sensations about the thigh bones.
7.
push through curtains of colour,
red, orange, umber, and queer ambiguous tints
I have a foreboding that
I should touch some queer territory.
8.
extraordinarily pungent and queer.
she had seen all kinds of queer things—revolutions, guardsmen, spirits
9.
there were queer yellow patches
A queer nervous jerk ran through her body
a queer look in her eyes
There was something queer
her queer nasal voice
He gave a queer little chuckle.
It’s awfully queer, she thought, touching
the ink-corroded patch of bristle
on the back of Martin’s walrus
with the point of her pen
a queer comment upon their divisions
something queer about the memory
A queer expression, half frown, half smile
her queer little shuffle as if she were a bird
the queer thrill of some
correspondence between
his own body and the stone
“She’s a queer old bird.”
Baxter gave a queer little bitten-off smile.

There was something queer about him, Eleanor thought; medical, priestly?
then let fall a queer little croak
a fine old prophetess, a queer old bird,
venerable and funny
at one and the same time
It was queer to see cabs turning corners
…What a queer set they are, she thought
this one had a queer face; knit up; nerve-drawn; fixed.
Isn’t that queer?
she had a queer view of people’s feet
said to herself with some queer satisfaction
the queer old man whose face
always made her think
of a hairy gooseberry
he looked at the queer jumble.
through it all ran some queer breath of mockery tinged with affection.
The room was full of a queer pale light.
10.
Queerly, he loved them
Queer Woolf:
Queer Diary
1.
tombstones with queer carvings & angels heads
we found some queer specimens
recipient of a good many queer secrets
& some very queer figures
the queer cries & laments of plovers & curlews
at moments you will have a queer sense that this isn’t all
2.
one of the queer things about the suburbs
a queer article upon a railway smash
a queer thing that both the ladies
with infinite pleasure which is queer
young man just queer enough to look twice at
he saw the queerness & the fun
a queer winter—the worst i ever knew
drab women who are thought queer at home
queer misty day sun not strong enough
to come through
queer to hand over the old things to the new brains
queer how one chooses one figure
low grade was still the queer english humour
average is a very queer study
some queer strachey intrigue is at work
these are queer meetings so impressed on one
the queer impression i had of its being earth life
seen from the moon
poor little gentle weakly creature is stated
to be wild & queer
a queer fate it is—always to be the spectator
her before i arrived at my queer balance
some queer fashion of her own a personality
queer little excursion into the dark
very queer as nessa said we all felt united again
one’s relations are queered from the start
though there was a queer enough sequel
which would be queer enough in themselves
these queer spiritual states they interest me
a queer deep silence seems to lie upon us
all lusty & queer like a writers books
queer feeling—which i will not analyse
the value attached to reviews seems queer
3.
a queer assortment of the usual & the unusual
a queer self-conscious self analytic performance
psychology—rather a queer thing to do
finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm
a queer effect she produces of someone apart
between us—a queer sense of being ‘like’
the queerest sense of echo coming back to me
we rated him one of those born queer
in my head that queer & very pleasant sense
a queer sense of stillness seems already
his words without body & his head cocked at a queer angle
true he was queer about the early xtians
that queer old way of bending her head on one side
such queer specimens come out of it
a queer mixture of the intelligent & the respectable
with that queer antique simplicity
is not “some queer individuality” precisely the quality i respect?
she supplied some very queer facts
lytton has the afterglow
of any passion she has & this queers r’s pitch
gone back all day to her in the queer way it does
as if he were saying “yes i am in love”
at least it made me feel queer
the design is so queer & so masterful
he has a queer swollen eel like look
it is queer to find such places lying unknown in the country
found myself expected heard a very queer story
an odd accent; a queer manner; is provincial; very much a character
a queer thing to come so close to agony
a queer little party here the other day—when the sinister &
pedagogic tom cut a queer figure
better than other people; a queer trait in roger to unearth
4.
tom then told us the queer story
the upshot was a queer sense of his emotion
the same queer brew of human fellowship is brewed
we both almost laughed; she has a queer rib, a large liver & so on
hag ridden as she is by my own queer nervous system
all this time conscious of something queer about him
thinks the queer shifty creature will slip away now
then i am—altogether so queer in some ways
felt rather queer to think how much of this there is
in to the lighthouse
refusing to believe for years—a queer little interview
we had a queer journey home
very forced & queer & humiliating
he smiled in his queer way which is fresh & yet sarcastic a little
it is as i say to myself awfully queer
one will be left alone with this queer being in old age
distinguished people drag up such queer chains of family when they die
i marked a queer change in my feeling when lytton went
that queer painters look, so matching so considering
apart from human intent
queer how instead of drawing apart,
life draws us together
some queer rancor often seems to exacerbate
a queer mood thinking myself very old
a queer trait in vita—her passion for the earnest
down step by step into that queer region
something dark & queer about this young man
too much of a genius too queer & individual
states of soul in creating—are very queer
i propelled into them by some queer force
queer things lodge in people’s souls
thoby’s form looms behind—that queer ghost
i have bought my freedom a queer thought
this book is a very queer business

what queer memories have got themselves mixed
a queer adventure to come back & find lottie
a queer inconclusive but possibly fruitful conversation
a queer cawing of homing rooks this is
imponderable figure who has so queer an existence
a queer little bit of life broken off
what a queer balance is needed
5.
lord lord what a queer thing life is
queer how one regrets the dispersal
a queer feeling spreads round him
we could buy if we wished it’s queer reversal
industrious & has that queer vein in her
how queer it was last night at the party
very queer they looked jolting up the hill
a queer psychological fact in him
queer the pervasiveness of bad writing
still queerer the fact that this emotional unreal badly
written novel is dearer to the writer than a child
& i tasted that queer bitterness
a queer little doll’s face rachel’s to harbor a passion
a queer thing that ott shd come after all
its a queer thing that i write a date
the hotel & the queer air it all has
a great laugh & very queer accents
his queer jerky way said he had very bad news
what a queer naïve vanity all this is
to hastings a queer experience always
a queer thing people who accept conventions
unknown for ever queer sense of the past
the queer impression of sunny impersonality
a queer state of society

i like noting these queer waifs in my mind
a queer genuine though untamed i mean
doing something very queer with their money
rather expanded into queer corners
full of that queer imaginative ardour
queer isolation of deafness
the queer disreputable pleasure in being abused
it ended so soon but a queer thing death
lodgers of girton rather a queer comment
never mind she is a queer ill bred mind
queer what a part wine has played in human life
home again & how queer as we drove up
after the queer interlude at once life
but how queer to have so many selves
a queer book hope’s life so neat discreet
triviality that was queer
at the book show a man who makes queer faces
eternity a queer very happy free feeling
6.
a queer light on my psychology
aidrian though has had another queer seizure
tommie’s death is a queer piece of work
his toes curl up lydia anxious queer
desmond’s queer burst of intimacy
the thought of julian changing so queerly
julian had some queer power over her
social politeness queer rather a very fine day
& savoured the usual queer scent
not that i ever think him as dead which is queer
caused one to think of that queer nasal moan
my usual walk her son died she turned queer
3 gs has queered the pitch

his vein of queer humour
a queer little note to run off in a hurry
queer horror of seeing her exert herself
its queer that diaries now pullulate
queer what a relief—to see the shape
a queer histrionic look in him
how queer the change is from private writing
a queer little eddy just below the surface
bombs falling—oh its a queer sense of suspense
as if she guessed all my private life— queer
but something gone queer—a screw loose
about my dress how queer that wave of agony
her cordiality—& queer little quick voice
queer, when its so tame after all, a book coming out
then a touch queerly incongruously of eddy
what a queer relationship—she so dumb
queer the contraction of life to the village radius
it will be destroyed—& our queer tenancy
these queer little sand castles i was thinking
we live without a future thats whats queer
Charleston Present Tense
by Colin Herd
“What does it mean for sexuality to be lived as orientated?…If orientation is a

matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a mat-
ter of residence, of how we inhabit spaces, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we inhabit
spaces with.” —Sara Ahmed
“What might it mean to say that Charleston, the rural home of artists Vanessa
Bell and Duncan Grant for fifty years, is a queer place?” —Darren Clarke
“The ultimate irony of gay liberation is that it has made it possible for straight
people to create more fluid gender, sexual and social identities, while main-
stream gay people salivate over state-sanctioned Tiffany wedding bands and
participatory patriarchy…Their agenda is cultural erasure.” —Mattilda Bern-
stein Sycamore
“No doubt the act of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it. He
remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-
tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the
sea. As he was choosing which of these things to make it, still working his
fingers in the water, they curled round something hard—a full drop of solid
matter—and gradually dislodged a large irregular lump, and brought it to the
surface.” —Virgina Woolf
“A Queer furnishing might be about making what is in the background, what

is behind us, more available as things, to do things with.” —Sara Ahmed
These poems at this conference
I’m here and

I want to impress you
I want to impress you with my poetry
If you leave here impressed I’ll be happy
I’m employing a technique
I imagine you all sinking into your chairs and tables your chairs and tables
becoming bigger much bigger than all of you are
All your clothes melting into the chairs and all of this engulfing you
Before I’ve even met any of you
This technique helps me to press my fingers on the keys of my phone
If you want to enjoy these poems better you
Should imagine the same thing
The purple plastic the orange plastic
Or the splintery wood

The oozy neoclassical leather
The worn fabric
Whatever the chairs are made of or you want them to be made of it is swallowing
you whole
You can’t hear a pin drop because the sound is muffled by the chair
Which has taken on the texture of yoghurt
Of Skyr
The floor is one with the chair and it is all reaching over you
Suck everything in
the edge of a bath

as it drains
allometric
mouldy and unscrubbed
half curtain or no curtain
dish and jug
I wish they made duvets out of this stuff
not even a fabric
nor warm
little shrimp and fish
expanding foam filler
a gap taking up space
a tour
swim through or swipe surface
more whales on the shower curtain
more whispered things
more revenge not really right
more snacks
more plankton maybe
the bathtub whips up
cream for a pavlova
dissolves
there’s the pre-bath era
there’s the bath era
then there’s the multi-bath era
but what comes next
cast iron but isn’t footed
has a cavity and a cavity shield
wobbles
the bathtub needs you in it
makes its business its business
the bathtub groans
too big to fail
plastic grapes ffs plastic grapes
I was hoping to take photographs inside the house

Laura Ashley own the copyright!
The first question anybody asked was if they had a lot of money
I wondered if there was any way to give a sense of the rooms
in flux
Never stable
Décor changing constantly
A person leaves a hat on the table top
Laura Ashley own the copyright!
and it’s almost like there’s a sweat ring
but it quickly fades
I want to get the word “Opussyquinusque”
in somewhere
Masochism
The decorated gramophone
The plastic grapes
The busts and levitations
I guess my issue isn’t the quiche so much
I would turn the whole thing into a mall
If I was in charge and I’m not even kidding
It would be a terrible terrible decision
To put me in charge
Pots of flowers and marbled circles
Pots of flowers and marbled circles
The day absorbed itself
And the one photograph I got has me in it
In the window!
And now you’re all thinking

Who said anything about enjoyment?
The contours of this space

Focusing on the contours of the space
disorienting
I don’t know if it still exists—
the queer leaning restaurant
Dalloway in New York
I don’t know if queer-leaning is brushing up against the walls
Or sitting on the visitor chair
Or taking pictures
I bought a scarf (for Jane for her birthday)
Queer is after all a spatial term
Every lifeworld
Buzzes teems fleets and flirts slanted

All your furniture
You are all treating me like furniture
I’ve always thought that needed context—Sara Ahmed
You treat me like a lampshade with holes in it
The levitating woman by the pond is a reorientation
The fact I can’t take photographs is a reorientation
The map of the garden is a reorientation
The old discarded sign in the woods
The yellow hose
The queer world is a space of entrances,
exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance
projecting horizons, typifying examples,
alternate routes, blockages,
incommensurate geographies—Lauren Berlant
The airport this morning
Had laminated signs all over it:
“Security is our priority”
And I think that the decorations in Charleston
serve a similar purpose:
Queerness is our priority
Queernesses are our priorities
I’ve always thought design did kind of mean to de-sign
Like people devein shrimp
But maybe a laminated sign would do the job just as well
On my tour someone in the group said “it seems like Clive bell really became the
man of the house”
Please please, it seemed like
The staircase creaked
The floor creaked
A laminated sign is wipe clean at least
For today’s writing exercise you are a badly
damaged painting and you are writing the
instructions for restoration
Someone else inspected the wiring and
wasn’t impressed, in their professional perspective
For today’s exercise you are a museum writing its funding application
for a re-enactment called:
The Pond Aflame
One idea I had for these

poems was I divide the room up into different rooms
little groups
a collective: awwwwwwwww
a flurry of embarrassment
I love embarrassment
It’s the untransportability of embarrassment
The un-re-representability of shame
That keeps this pond aflame
So all of you in your groups I’d
keep constantly asking you to change your function
be a studio / be a bedroom / be a study
get into character
be a firework display
now be a kiln
now be a crib
now be a swimming pool, from pond overflow
now be a Pither stove
You’d have loved this I swear
It’d be so much fun
I’m almost changing my mind about not doing it
Maybe it’s a little late
In “Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others,”
Ahmed writes that she’s interested in bringing what’s
behind to the front…her example is the writing
table
what is background here?
now be a colander lamp shade
now be a pottery head
now all please be a pond
and the fish in the water
Angelica—on the wall it looked like cooked lobster but it later paled to salmon
So please be a pond this minute
your mouths opening and closing
breathless in wonder
Male Nude, 1934, Duncan Grant
Reuben notices the damage to the paint

He has a keen eye
I notice the pecs
The pattern of the painty flesh
My plan for redecoration includes an ombre staircase
And silver glitter all over that table with the sweat ring
This is not to say that you have to leave home for things
To be disoriented or reoriented, homes too can be giddy places,
where things are not always held in place, and homes
can move, as we do.
Before we go in a big song and dance is made about how
The artists (air quotes) never owned this house,

Always rented always leased
I love air quotes
A kind of yoga in miniature
Song and dance was figurative there but
I just watched the Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, etc Les
Miserables so for today’s writing exercise I want you all to write a review
Of the “song and dance” about how they never owned the house.
You have until the end of the panel.
Answers on a postcard
The nudes in the last room
The studio
Orientations are about the intimacy of bodies and their places
The paint that seems to create the body is also where the atmosphere
Creates an impression
Just think of goosebumps
Think of shape and pattern
Radiator Cover, circa 1928, wool, glass beads, linen upper frieze, velcro, designed
by Humphrey Slater, made by Vanessa Bell
I went to the Highland Show
And there was a bird of prey display
Including an eagle
And the falconer described one time
When the eagle grabbed him by the head in its tallons
And shook him like a 14 stone fish
Is Charleston a field of queer objects?
Like Judith Butler describes a field of heterosexual objects?

Cushion cover, fragment, date unknown, printed cotton, maker unknown, 65 cm
x 58 cm
The idea, not to read any poems but instead just redecoration ideas
A scheme, a catalogue of the things I’d keep and the things I’d lose
Curtain, circa 1932, ‘Clouds’ design by Duncan Grant, printed on to rayon between
quilted top and bottom with Indian cotton lining, printed by Alan Walton
Ltd., 18 cm x 116 cm.
You gaze at me
I gaze at you sinking into your seats, which have tufts of grass growing over them
The fish pop up at intervals
Curtain, one of a pair, removed from Dining room in 1994, date unknown, fabric,
maker unknown, 36 cm x 97 cm.
Lampshade, 1987, cotton chintz, Olivier Bell, 1987, 19 cm x 36 cm.
Cushion, 1932, canvas, wool, designed by Vanessa Bell, worked by Ethel Grant,
64 cm x 53 cm
Flannel, date unknown, cotton, commercially manufactured, 30 cm x 30 cm.
Folder, desk folder, 1920–60, cotton canvas, cross-stitch, wool embroidery, cotton
support, designed by Vanessa Bell, maker unknown, 3 cm x 29 cm x 32 cm.
Textile, St. Therese de Lisieux, “La Petite Fleur,” circa 1920, printed cotton, maker
unknown, France, 107 cm x 99 cm.
You can get all this information from the website
I have this idea [Click here to see more information]
Bottle, one of three, Harveys Nut Brown Ale, circa 1980, glass, Harveys Brewery,
Lewes, East Sussex, 26 cm x 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm.
You are all so brilliant
You are
All your papers and publications
I’m saying this in part to flatter you but I mean it too
It sends me wild
Thinking about publications
About amassing publications
I’d love to paper my walls with your publications
And just read all day long all night long six words at a time
Where are you in your homes?
How are you and your homes together?
What objects do you tend towards?
Do you take a conference like this personally?
Is it an intimate space for you?
Arianna Reines writes how can you read so much while you are writing and not
become seduced in every direction and betray the thing you are writing?
Are your domestic spaces arranged the way you would like them to be?
Mine is atrocious at the moment
My floor is being fixed next week
Steven will fix my floor
It’s been a long time getting it fixed
Somebody on the tour kept saying
I’d move in here in a heartbeat
I loved that I’d move in here in a heartbeat
Where would you move in a heartbeat?
How would you move in a heartbeat?
Catherine Clement’s idea of syncope: I’d move there in a heartbeat
Jane and Calum’s poems: I’d move there in a heartbeat
My domestic situation is a domestic situation
My floor is not even the half of it
If it only was papered with your writings!
Or tiled like the Grace Higgens Aga tiles
Paint is something I could barely attempt
Lines are traces of other lines
The general effect of lines being out of line
Alignment extension space

Bodily and social actions
Vertical and horizontal axes misaligned on the Charleston door frames
I thought I’d lost it for a second that Charleston magic
That Charleston trust
As brilliant as all of you are
You could all maybe work on your posture
Your postures are causing you to sink into your chairs
My final idea instead of reading poems was to have an individual consultation with
each of you
And then redesign your living spaces as a result
What art is there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into
those secret chambers?
For today’s writing exercise you write as though you’re sunk in your chair, one arm
the only thing above the foamy plastic and you are writing a paper for this
conference and when you finish it
Only then can you resurface
I’ll just wait here until you’re done.
well or badly but never correctly

a poem after Queer Bloomsbury
by Calum Gardner
i.
i don’t redress my dress

don’t cringe return
richmondwise
der tod of toad morden
mordant in the salt marsh
since life’s uprooting
and they who never
correctly
civil yawp with barbarous mouth unclear
it can be done with song lengths

in e.g. blysthwood hill
happy accountancy practice
ink as chrysanthemum, encoding
a class of international civil servants (devils)
keynes as mustard
berries bloom on the beach

rotten indexical crystals
psychic her aphrodite in the sand,
silver and gold
a blushing oresteia can’t imagine sociality

prynne chippy a ethic,
a folly of crowds.
we have never had an alternate modernity,
a sea-salt- & history-braced one?
ii.
can one really say it?

modernism and
its extremities:
i would do my best
to put myself
between them.
the international
civil devil,
a morsel
of wool
from his patron’s
coat,
queer rethinking
of capitalism:
the philosophy
of a voluptuary,
flagellation,
a thoroughgoing
teacup, intact
and unwashed
gender prescriptions
born on his
father’s yacht,
temporally exact
by the chimes
of its many
clocks
odd couplings of
queer moments
increasingly take
precedence,
bashing at the
hands of
academics:
shall i apply
for a post?
new clothes
tone and style
the submerging
of the body
at queer angles
to the new ethics
that would bend
but would
not break
iii.
But let other pens treat of sex

and sexuality; we quit such odi-
ous subjects as soon as we can.
Orlando had now washed, and
dressed herself in those Turkish
coats and trousers which can be
worn indifferently by either sex;
and was forced to consider her
position. —Woolf, Orlando (128)
other pens and indifferent trousers are

well enough formed to create a void.
even if you choose not to write about it
and can avoid difficult questions, the po-
sition still bears down on you, still owns
you. catullan clue: ‘odious’ subjects are
subjects i hate, odi-ous, but they are for
this reason also necessarily amo-rous
subjects, that is, the kind of subjectivity
that you only experience if you are in
love and feel passionately. the argument
is that position is a shape, like those art-
works that lounge themselves around the
minuscule charlestons of the mind—un-
museummed, uncapitalised. bathers,
they are that rich queer utopia which ap-
plies for no position but forms them all.
Commentary
Let us begin with a comment supposedly made by Woolf which has provided the title
and impetus for this poem. Carolyn Heilbrun paraphrases it in the essay “The Blooms-
bury Group” as follows: “an intellectual should dress well or badly but never correctly.”
(30). Woolf, Heilbrun implies, means Bloomsbury intellectual here, and their personal
aesthetic—their dress—comes to stand in for their artistic and social aesthetics as well.
However, like all of the most quotable and memorable quotes of the most prominent
Bloomsbury authors, this comment has a more awkward history than its presentation
here suggests. It comes from Woolf ’s unsent letter to the editor of the New Statesman
on the “Middlebrow,” later published as an essay of that title in The Death of the Moth
(181), much of which is relatively tongue in cheek, with Woolf mocking her own self-
concept as a “highbrow.” The original wording there is: “I like people to dress either
very well, or very badly; I dislike the correct thing in clothes.” This situates the three
positions as the extremes and middle of a spectrum, respectively, quite different to
Heilbrun’s formulation, which is enticing because of the overlap of meanings it seems
to create between the adverbs “well” and “correctly.”
I enjoy this slippage between the actual text and what its significance as a part
of Bloomsburiana has come to be, and this multifaceted nature is part of what has
inspired this text. I have to disagree with Gertrude Stein that remarks are not litera-
ture—ironically, that remark too has become literature, as just like Woolf ’s there is now
a history and tradition to it—in the same way as adheres to a Sappho fragment or a
Martial epigram. It is so generative, I have found, because of the abnegation it enacts:
when we know the right way to behave but don’t do it, we deny ourselves this benefit,
albeit one that’s generally unearned and is just the product of education and class. An
apparently flippant remark (too flippant for the New Statesman, ultimately) on analysis
reveals an ideological motivation, as do all worthwhile witticisms and lines of poetry.
A creative engagement with literary criticism and history can make and estab-
lish connections that would not be possible in a critical response alone. I would feel
bound in a queer formalist criticism to make reference to the queer structurations in the
space and time of Bloomsbury text (albeit broadly defined) we find throughout Queer
Bloomsbury—a politics of perception that privileges disorientation and seeing “slant-
wise” (Coates 285). So, I sought to approach that formalism in another way, namely
by creating a form of my own. The phrase “queer formalism” has been deployed in a
variety of ways, with critic William J. Simmons insisting that it is “not the queering of
formalism or the formalism of queers.” Queer Bloomsbury, on the other hand, takes on
both the queering of Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury of queers, and I want to suggest
a formalism with a similar kind of openness. What happens in Queer Bloomsbury is that
life and work are intermingled in a manner that some criticism has rejected—the New
Criticism, under which much of queer Bloomsbury was quietly and homophobically
sidelined. We could be forgiven for extending that to Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the
Author,” but la formule est banale—actually Barthes, as self-abnegating arch-queer, un-
derstands queer formalism all too well. “A little formalism turns one away from history
but a lot brings us back to it,” he says in his Mythologies (111). The better you understand
the shape of a system, the better you understand its history, and vice versa.
As such: the poetics of this poem is reliant on its queering its queer models—a
new shape for a new point in history, but with related substances. My poem is in three
parts. In the first part I play with three distances from the margin in a way I hope in-
vokes the “gay triangles” in various queer-evoking pastels and tricolors that are spread
around the margin of the cover of Queer Bloomsbury. There’s also an intentional over-
reliance on the pun form; puns are done well or badly but never correctly. In semiotic
terms, the pun is a “scandal” in flouting the arbitrariness of the sign, so it is predisposed
to queerness and a natural companion to Bloomsbury wit. The second part is a slim
poem based formally and syntactically on the work of Eileen Myles, and in some ways
is a writing through of her poem “Maxfield Parrish,” whose precise relationship to its
queer artist namesake has always partly eluded and fascinated me. This section is made
up entirely of brief quotations from Queer Bloomsbury, sometimes quotations within
a quotation. The third part is a prose paragraph which gives a perverse and pedantic
reading of a brief excerpt from Orlando. Shortly after Orlando’s transformation the
narration dwells briefly on what might have happened but moves on; Orlando gets on
with her life (for a while anyway) by sporting a new gender-neutral look.
So the question arises, when we draw literary inspiration from Woolf and the
queer Bloomsbury tradition, what does this mean for the formal and aesthetic qualities
of the work? I’m not doing Woolf, Forster, or Wittgenstein impressions, not at the level
of form anyway, but at the level of formal-ism. Eric Savoy writes that
queer formalism traces the textual itinerary of the catalogue of tropes—meta-

phor, synecdoche [and so on]—to their origin or culmination in catachresis
[which is to say, wrongness, even ‘scandal’ pace Saussure], and in so doing
restrains the queer-political project to what strict anti-formalists call the
“merely” literary (Savoy 79)
One argument being voiced here is that the queer political project (which is to say,
the project of queer liberation) is made into something literary and hence unreal by
locating the queer in texts, as if texts were separate from the “real world.” If by “real” we
mean “material,” then this is manifestly untrue because our access to texts is mediated
by material forces, as is explored through the work on queer materialism which both
effectively complements queer formalism and is gestured towards throughout Queer
Bloomsbury with its focus on the material conditions which allowed texts and practices
to come into being. If this is yet to flower into a full queer materialist analysis then it
is a wider issue within the discipline of modernist and literary studies. So how do we
address it?
In his book on Saint-Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre entitles a late chapter “Prière pour
le bon usage de Saint-Genet,” which in the popular English translation has become
the pleading “Please use Saint-Genet properly.” Sartre remonstrates with his audience
(1950s France), telling them that they are not so different from Saint-Genet, the queer,
the criminal, the transgressor. He admonishes their use of him as an outsider, or as
an extreme point; they have instead to acknowledge the social breach inside them-
selves (584–99). Most readers of Queer Bloomsbury do not need to be told this: Queer
Bloomsbury is not telling us that we are more like Virginia Woolf or Lytton Strachey
than we think. Indeed, reading the book, we wish in some ways that our lives were
more like theirs—we would like to be drawing nudes in country houses or perfecting
the fine art of the love triangle. However, the book is a plea for the good, queer usage
of Bloomsbury, and so in turn I want to close this discussion with a plea for a certain
usage of Queer Bloomsbury. The project of a queer literary history can never be only
literary-historical. It has to be also formalistic, which is a queer way of saying ana-
lytic; queer analysis is the breaking down at odd angles (as I say, ventriloquising Queer
Bloomsbury, in Part II of the poem) of the text.
But Bloomsbury lives are not the lives of many or most queer people, who are
disproportionately poor, homeless, and vulnerable to the ongoing neoliberal war on
public life. What I am trying to say in Part III is that it is not always possible to put
on one’s indifferent trousers and casually consider your position (an impossibility, of
course, which eventually reaches Orlando, too). The “Bloomsberries” (Helt and Detloff
7) were revolutionary in their public queerness, but it was a public queerness backed by
remnants of capital, economic and cultural. That capital has since been evacuated from
some of the wider successive projects of queer self-constitution and self-identification,
or else those projects have been instrumentalised by the culture industry.
As such, I hope we can continue to use the queerness of Bloomsbury not simply as
evidence in the historical case for a worthwhile and culturally expedient queerness—
never trust an expediency—but as a poem does: “well or badly, but never correctly.”
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1972. Print.
Coates, Kimberley Engdahl. “Virginia Woolf ’s Queer Time and Place: Wartime London and a World Aslant.”
Queer Bloomsbury. Ed. Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2016. 276–93. Print.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. “The Bloomsbury Group.” Queer Bloomsbury. Ed. Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 23–35. Print.
Helt, Brenda and Detloff, Madelyn. “Introduction.” Queer Bloomsbury. Ed. Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 1–12. Print.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint-Genet: Actor and Martyr. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York : George Braziller,
1963. Print.
Savoy, Eric. “Restraining Order.” English Studies in Canada 29.1–2 (March/June 2003): 77–84. Web. 1 June
2017.
Simmons, William J. “Notes on Queer Formalism: Amy Sillman, Nicole Eisenman, Leidy Churchman, and
Elise Adibi.” Big, Red, and Shiny 2.15 (2013). Web. 1 June 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Print.
——. Orlando. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.
Following Virginia Woolf’s Call
for a Press of One’s Own:
Making Waves Press Launches Judith’s Room
by Leslie Kathleen Hankins
V
irginia Woolf ’s life and work demonstrate what a press of one’s own provides: au-
tonomy, subversive potential to evade censors, and the sheer delight of creation
and communication. Such a press brings the camaraderie that comes from shar-
ing one’s words with like-minded peers—and publishing theirs. If we imagine it tweaked
a bit with technological updates, a passage in Three Guineas rings true today:
Still, Madam, the private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the
reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and
even cheaper. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you
can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors. They
will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your
own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of
“intellectual liberty.”…Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls;
trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away.
Find out new ways of approaching “the public.” (TG 116–17)
Much, of course, has changed since the early twentieth century when she and Leon-
ard launched their press. What is involved in launching a press of one’s own for the
21st century? The technological choices are quite different; one can publish on-line,
or design publications digitally for print publication, for example. Reviving technolo-
gies such as letterpress printing, or combining digital and retro technologies in hybrid
forms can broaden the scope as well. More visual options are available for illustrations
or visual annotations of a text. For all the changes, however, the essence of a press of
one’s own is the same: autonomy and freedom from censors.
Virginia Woolf is the muse, mentor and role model for my forays into letterpress
and the book arts as I establish my own press, Making Waves Press. Making Waves Press
has printed letterpress broadsides of Woolf ’s phrases, a letterpress chapbook of the
poems of Septimus Warren Smith, Revelations in Vision & Song (2013) and my first
full-length book digitally designed for print, Judith’s Room, which had its debut at the
Virginia Woolf and the World of Books conference. An homage to Woolf and the Hog-
arth Press, this publication takes Jacob’s Room by Woolf and transforms it slightly but
significantly. My idea came while brainstorming about the possibilities of a press of one’s
own. I mused “Why not do something wildly different? No Duckworth brothers threat-
en to edit.” I heard Virginia Woolf murmuring, “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard
to come by what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister
called Judith, let us say” (AROO 46) and was inspired to change Jacob Flanders into Ju-
dith Flanders. This transformation—on the surface a mere change of name from Jacob
to Judith with shifts in pronouns and a very few minor edits for clarification—seems
simple enough. But the simplicity is deceptive; this alteration of the text results in signif-
icant after-shocks. What began as a playful experiment turns out to be more intriguing
and revealing than anticipated. The free arc of Judith’s life experiences clashes with our
knowledge of the historical actualities for a woman in the time period—or even today.
The resulting double-takes, though jarring at first, trigger fresh awareness and insight.
I wanted readers to encounter those jarring double-takes afresh, so I debated
about whether or not to provide an Introduction to the book, one that would dis-
cuss the theoretical and actual complexities around gender and performance and
queering and embodiment. Frankly, however, I have always resented introductions
that take away the breathless wonder of a first reading of one’s own, so, reminding
myself that this was my press and I could do as I wished, I decided against such an
introduction. The absence of a theoretical introduction still left the question: how
should one read Judith’s Room? Virginia Woolf answers that question in her essay
“How Should One Read a Book,” so I quoted her response in the opening pages of
the edition: “Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been
legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may show you how not to read, or to
stimulate you to think out better methods of your own” (Woolf, “How Should One
Read a Book?” 389).
I offer some strategies and questions that this reader found helpful along the way.
For starters, reading Judith’s Room against the background of Jacob’s Room and A Room
of One’s Own creates a fascinating echo-chamber effect. After reading A Room of One’s
Own, doesn’t Jacob’s Room seem a Baedeker guide to the planet of male privilege? And
to what planet does Judith take us? What is it like to be there? Perhaps the most com-
pelling reading would be to simply pay attention to where Judith takes you.
This is a “what if?” book along the lines of Woolf ’s passage inventing Shakespeare’s
sister in A Room of One’s Own. But, you may ask, what is the “why” behind the “what
if?” The book grew from the curiosity to see what would happen—to the text, to the
reader—when the gender/sex of the main character was “troubled” in Judith Butler’s
way. The text is an experiment with the fantastical: changing Jacob into Judith without
changing anything else, including Jacob/Judith’s consciousness. So, who is Judith? That
question is complicated, to say the least. Like Woolf ’s Orlando, she is an anomaly:
male (gender) switched into a woman’s body without any experience of those aspects
of the body that are unique to women: periods, breasts, sex experience. And she is
also a woman (sexed) who has missed out on the unique adventure of female gender
conditioning—she has had no training in female gender performance. Of course, her
situation is even more complicated, because, trapped in the text as she is and oblivious
to the editorial manipulations that produced the sex change, unlike Orlando, Judith is
oblivious to all this. She is a woman who does not know she is a woman, who has the
consciousness of a conditioned gender male, but who is, to the reader, a woman. Is
Judith a woman? I cannot help thinking of Woolf ’s comments in her Speech of January
21, 1931: “I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I don’t know; I do not believe that
you know; I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all
the arts and professions open to human skill” (xxxiii). But, you tell me what you think
after you have read Judith’s Room.
Following Woolf ’s Call for a Press of One’s Own 191
The quirky character of Judith Flanders can be transformative for readers; she
makes us wonder, holds the looking glass up to internalized gender norms, disrupts.
Certainly, Judith made me think twice, and more than twice, leading me back to
Woolf ’s description of self-censorship in the fascinating draft of her Speech of January
21, 1931 later polished into “Professions for Women.” One passage has always intrigued
me and so I include it in an opening page of the edition:
The novelist is sitting on the shores of the lake, holding the little line of
reason…in her hands.…Suddenly there is a violent jerk; she feels the line race
through her fingers.
The imagination [darts away]…has rushed away; it has taken to the
depths; it has sunk—heaven knows where—into what dark pool of extraordi-
nary experience. The reason has to cry “Stop!” The novelist has to pull on the
line and haul the imagination to the surface. The imagination comes to the
top in a state of fury. Good heavens she cries—how dare you interfere with me
[and pull me to the top] {how dare you pull me out}with your wretched little
fishing line…And I—that is the reason—have to reply, “My dear you were go-
ing altogether too far. Men would be shocked.” Calm yourself, I say, as she sits
panting on the bank—panting with rage and disappointment. We have only
got to wait fifty years or so. In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer
knowledge that you are ready to bring me.…(xxxviii–xxxix)
It has been over fifty years; I hope that Judith’s Room begins to break that taboo by
its portrayal of Judith’s unselfconscious body. My undergraduates loved witnessing
Judith striding confidently through the deep night college campus, or across London
in the wee hours of the morning, without rounding up the usual suspects of fear
or stalkers or worse and witnessing Judith at ease with her powerfully built naked
body un-self-consciously reading Shakespeare in the sailboat—and awkwardly div-
ing and thrashing about in her off-boat frolics. Judith’s Room may become, through
our readings, a re-imagining in jolts, winks, and nudges the life of an empowered
woman, strongly built, full of herself, universally admired, “distinguished-looking”
and adventurous. Through Judith readers can experience a woman joyfully and
unselfconsciously embodied: skinny dipping in bright sunlight in mixed company
with utter abandon, for example. Striding through the night of a deserted campus,
or across London in the wee hours of the morning—accompanied only by her own
thoughts—and those thoughts are not the fear and concerns that are the daily—and
especially nightly—chaperones of women. By reminding us of privilege we lack, Ju-
dith may make readers yearn for a transformed world and a wider range of beings
to exist freely within it. But it is up to you, dear readers, to think of all the ways you
can read this text and how to conceive of it: Gender Outlaw/Bending/Text Bending
Trans-Formative Chaos—a call for a Gender Outlaw/Outsider Society?! Is the text
lesbian? queer? transsexual? Transgender? Or something else entirely? I hope your
reading leads you to ask questions—of the text and of your reading: startling revela-
tions came from my close reading of my reading: paying attention to how differently
I read the same words in this new context. The simple change led to some seismic
shifts within my mind—but I will save those insights for a later conversation once
you have had the free-fall of a reading of your own.…
From Vision to Design
From envisioning and transforming Woolf ’s text to actually designing and making the
physical book of Judith’s Room proved quite an adventure: tackling Adobe Indesign and
a course on digitally designing books for print at the University of Iowa Center for the
Book, agonizing over typeface, I finally chose two typefaces: Adobe Caslon Pro as a
gesture to Hogarth Press’s first typeface and because the digital Caslon was designed by
a woman, Carol Trombley, and Bernhard Fashion Pro as a gesture to Vogue magazine
of the 1920s, the British version of which was edited by Dorothy Todd and Madge Gar-
land. These issues of Vogue have been a wondrous resource for various Woolf scholars.
The size of the book is in homage to Robert Bringhurst’s canonical book on typogra-
phy, The Elements of Typographic Style, and because that size enabled me to choose a
textblock size that highlights Woolf ’s unique textual spacing in Jacob’s Room.
One of the most exciting and exacting challenges for the edition was to create
and compile the visual accompaniments for the text; it was a process of compiling
and inventing. Those quirky visuals offer an immersion in archival, eclectic, expres-
sive annotation. Learning en route about graphic design, I daily remind myself that
Leonard and Virginia Woolf entered printing and publishing when they launched
Hogarth Press with more enthusiasm than expertise, and thus take perverse comfort in
the printing “howlers” (a word borrowed from Woolf) they made in one of their first
efforts, Monday or Tuesday. As an enthusiast riding a steep learning curve, no doubt
I have made my share of “howlers,” but can at least attest that no clip art died to make
this experimental extravaganza. Rather, the project is made up of a mélange of my
photographs, hoardings of vintage letterpress blocks (printed on an old Washington
Press and scanned to be rendered here digitally), a collection of vintage postcards from
1900–1930, a selection of lesbian erotica from the 1920s, old Ward Lock & Co and
Baedeker’s travel guides from the turn of last century, and tweaked and transformed
combinations of blocks and photographs and sketches. Serendipity added happy acci-
dents; one morning a rainbow from a window prism fell upon a photographic collage I
was re-working and I reached for my camera to capture that unexpected contribution
to the visual cacophony.
One quest was to find images of powerfully built women. Sculptors, such as Aristide
Maillol, offered promising prototype images, so a resident artist worked on sketches that
had some qualities of Thoby Stephen (one model for Jacob) and yet was a powerfully built
woman more akin to the sculptures of Maillol. The sketches then joined a hoard of visual
raw materials collected for the edition: copper blocks, photographs, vintage postcards,
erotica and guidebooks. Collecting hundreds of copper blocks from EBay, Etsy and Brit-
ish sources provided the opportunity to print, invert, digitize and play with letterpress
images. Photographs I took from 1985–2017 on research trips to Cambridge, St Ives,
Scarborough, and the ocean, formed part of the raw material. Vintage postcards from
1900–1930, gathered from shops and Ebay not only provided images of Scarborough, St.
Ives and London but also fit with the omnipresent theme of letters, postcards, and writing
Following Woolf ’s Call for a Press of One’s Own 193
in Jacob’s Room/Judith’s Room. Baedeker guidebooks of Italy, Greece and Paris, plus Ward
Lock guidebooks of London, St Ives and Cambridge offered sketches and descriptions
and fit well with the theme of guidebooks in the Scarborough and “grand tour” sections
of the novel. Choosing vintage erotica from the 1920s that would prove gentle and ro-
mantic to suit the infatuation, sensuality and vulnerability in the Florinda sections was a
challenge met by a delightful Etsy shop.
After the collecting phase, I began the inventive work of transforming and combin-
ing the materials. I hoped to tie together such a diverse assortment of visuals through
an overarching aesthetic of inversion, erasure, and transformation that connected with
the text on the thematic level. The inversion tool in Photoshop let me tweak images,
such as postcards and photographs, to give them an uncanny appearance. Inversion,
too, fit the gender inversion theme of Judith’s Room. I used transformation as an aes-
thetic choice with thematic resonance, combining sketches with photographs and
composing montage transformations of the room (originally a simple copper letter-
press block of a room advertising furniture) using erasure, addition and experimental
play that complicated the visuals. The various incarnations of the letterpress block of
the room demonstrate some of the ways one manipulated image could be used to sug-
gest transformation at different places in the text.
Designing the book led me to Bookmobile in Minneapolis, MN, where the small
initial run of fifty using color on every page meant the cost per book of printing was
high: $40 each. But at last, Making Waves Press had its first full-length book, with an
ISBN number. Now that the edition is launched, I am eager to see if the text works well
in classrooms. A few undergraduate classes at Cornell College test drove Judith’s Room
and their readings were bedazzling. Over the summer, for the Cornell College Summer
Institute, I supervised three student researchers who worked with the text to proof-
read and consider editing choices. They crafted a booklet on their responses, indicating
that the edition opened up new ways to genderthink. The trio also produced several
broadsides that were given to conference attendees. Many thanks to Maureen Sullivan,
Jessica Halter, and Emma Jean Meyer.
I was delighted to share Judith’s Room with attendees of the Virginia Woolf and
The World of Books conference. At the conference, seated at the banquet next to a
book designer, letterpress colleague from Norway, Ane Thon Knutsen, we shared Ju-
dith’s Room and her letterpress booklet, printed in Oslo in 2017, “A Printing Press of
One’s Own” with linocuts by Ylve Thon. We quote the same passages and are clearly on
the same wavelength; the essay explores with elegant prose her odyssey towards Woolf
and book arts, through reading rooms and encounters with Hogarth Press editions.
As my serendipitous encounter with Ane testifies, Woolf inspires us to a new century
of innovative independent presses—an outsider’s society of publishing outreach. I am
glad to be a part of it.
So, what is next on the agenda for Making Waves Press? I am happily immersed in
my next project: a flip turnaround edition that has Judith’s Room going one direction,
and Jacob’s Room going the other; this will be a more economical edition for classroom
use, because it contains fewer color illustrations. For updates or orders, please contact
me at lhankins@cornellcollege.edu.
Works Cited
Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Vancouver: Hartlet
and Marks, Publishers, 2012.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, Routledge, 1990.
Halter, Jessica. “The Miracle of Female Confidence in Judith’s Room.” “I am What I am”: Collected Commen-
tary on Judith’s Room.” Pamphlet published for the Virginia Woolf and the World of Books Conference,
June 2017.
Halter, Jessica, Emma Jean Meyer, and Maureen Sullivan, “’I am What I am’: Collected Commentary on
Judith’s Room.” Pamphlet published for the Virginia Woolf and the World of Books Conference, June
2017.
Knutsen, Ane Thon, “A Printing Press of One’s Own” with linocuts by Ylve Thon. Oslo, 2017.
Meyer, Emma Jean. “From Phallic to Fallible: How Judith Flanders Embodies Jacob’s Greek Idea of Women.”
“I am What I am”: Collected Commentary on Judith’s Room. Pamphlet published for the Virginia Woolf
and the World of Books Conference, June 2017.
Sullivan, Maureen. “Identity, Intersex, and Gender in Judith’s Room.” “I am What I am”: Collected Commen-
tary on Judith’s Room.” Pamphlet published for the Virginia Woolf and the World of Books Conference,
June 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. “How Should One Read a Book?” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, Vol-
ume 4, 1925–1928: 388–400.
——. Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth Press, 1922.
——. A Room of One’s Own, Harcourt, 2005.
——. Speech Before the London/National Society for Women’s Service, January 21, 1931, The Pargiters, ed.
Mitchell A Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1978: xxvii–xxliv.
——. Three Guineas. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006.
Thinking Is Our Fighting:
How to Read and Write Like Woolf
in the Age of Trump
by Paula Maggio
D
iscussions of Virginia Woolf ’s contradictory nature are nothing new. In his 1972
biography of his aunt, Quentin Bell portrays Virginia as a fragile, apolitical figure
“terrified of the world,” despite the fact that she wrote two major political works
and participated in both the Labour Party and the Women’s Co-operative Guild (126). In
his 1967 autobiography, Leonard Woolf calls Virginia “the least political animal that has
lived since Aristotle invented the definition.” But in the very next sentence he describes
another, contradictory side of Virginia. She was, he writes, “intensely interested in things,
people, and events, and, as her new books show, highly sensitive to the atmosphere which
surrounded her, whether it was personal, social, or historical. She was therefore the last
person who could ignore the political menaces under which we all lived” during the in-
terwar period (27). As Leonard knew and as we have learned, Virginia Woolf was firmly
planted in the real world, in both deed and word. It is her engagement with the everyday
realities of the world around her—in her writing as well as in her life—that has lent her
iconic status as a writer, a thinker, and an agent for change. In Virginia Woolf: Public and
Private Negotiations (2000), Anna Snaith points out that Woolf ’s writing did not serve to
lock her away “within some internal realm” but “is proof of her constant engagement with
public debates” (3). This commitment, along with her complex sense of how historical
and societal forces work together to influence individual behavior, heightened Woolf ’s
awareness of the connections between the personal and the political and strengthened her
own resolve to resist the norms. In “Moments of Being,” Woolf called these forces “invis-
ible presences,” realizing their power over our thinking and our actions (80). These forces,
which include groups, public opinion, and what other individuals say and think, attract us
or repel us. They sometimes influence us to be what we are not and other times influence
us to act in ways that do not reflect our genuine beliefs or values. Woolf, however, resisted
such influences. In her work and in her life, she questioned society’s expectations and re-
fused to be compelled to act and write in accordance with its presumptions.
Woolf ’s ability to effectively question and resist the norms—whether literary or so-
cietal—is one reason she remains an iconic figure today. As Brenda R. Silver documented
in her 1999 book Virginia Woolf: Icon, Woolf ’s real-world status took hold in the early
1970s when the women’s movement in the United States appropriated her physical image
for T-shirts and other commodities (126). Woolf, she argued, had “taken to the streets”
(127). I would argue that Woolf has never left them. And today, in the face of a rising
tide of autocratic populism—from the election of Donald Trump in the United States,
to the candidacy of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in France, to the exit of Britain
from the European Union—Woolf is more relevant than ever. As Todd Avery explains
in “Operation Equal Good: Woolf, Chantal Mouffe, and the Ethics of Democracy in a
Time of War” (2003), it is Woolf ’s marriage of aesthetic experimentation and engagement
with social and political critique that have lodged her work firmly within a tradition of
creative resistance (22). Woolf ’s twentieth-century writing about nationalism, militarism,
pacifism, and feminism ensure her status as an iconic activist thinker, reader, and writer
in the twenty-first century and beyond. Current evidence of this includes the exponential
growth of Woolf ’s Web presence during the last ten years—from 2.4 million hits on her
name in 2007 to 14.9 million hits in 2017, a 520-percent increase. It also includes the polit-
ical articles quoting or referencing Woolf that have appeared online since the 7 November
2016 United States election in such publications as The Times Literary Supplement, Inside
Higher Education, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Global Research, e-flux, and Quartz.
In the current political climate, rife with the overt nationalism that lies behind the
Brexit vote and Trump’s rise to power, Woolf ’s topics—from war and peace to patri-
archy and feminism—remain timely. What’s more, her methods of thinking, reading,
and writing, as both critic and creator, remain effective fighting tools for us today and
into the future. The example she sets encourages us to enter the present public debate
against whatever “obvious horror [is] in our midst” (L6 250), whether we are common
readers or scholars of her work. So today I propose that we learn how to think, read,
and write like Woolf to combat the Age of Trump.
To think like Woolf in the Age of Trump, we must use our thinking to resist the
horrors we confront in the news each day, as Woolf did in the face of grave threats. We
find the famous quote inspiring us to do so in a diary entry dated 15 May 1940—as
the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries and she and Leonard contem-
plated ending their lives “if Hitler lands.” Her entry is dated one day after the British
government launched a popular effort to enlist volunteers for what would come to be
known as the Home Guard, with the result that 250,000 men signed up within the first
twenty-four hours. She sees the outward display of militarism on the home front—the
guns and uniforms—“slightly ridiculous,” and she arrives at her own idea of defense.
She writes: “This idea struck me: the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my
fighting” (D5 285). Woolf uses her independent mind to process the news of the day,
along with popular opinion regarding it, and arrives at her own interpretations. For
her, an unthinking patriotic response to current events is not laudable but laughable.
Like Woolf, we must resist such automatic responses. Instead, we must think things
through and come up with solutions that reflect our values and priorities.
Woolf also advises that we do our thinking in public, as well as in private. Although
she says that women are accustomed to doing their thinking while they go about their
daily business in the home—while stirring the pot, while rocking the cradle—thinking
against the grain could—and should—be done everywhere and about everything (TG
62). Thinking must take place in the public and the private realm. In Three Guineas
Woolf advises:
Think we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing

in the crowd watching Coronations and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think as
we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Com-
mons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals.
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find
ourselves? (62–63)
Thinking Is Our Fighting 197
According to Woolf we must gaze critically at what we see each day—both inside and
outside of the home—using our own minds to question both the worlds in which we
live and the connections between them.
In order to develop that critical gaze, we must read. And to read like Woolf in the
Age of Trump, we must read newspapers, we must read several, and we must read them
analytically. Unlike the trend away from newspaper readership that we are experienc-
ing today, Woolf, like her compatriots, was an avid and regular newspaper reader. By
the late 1930s, newspapers were prevalent and prominent in the national conscious-
ness. The British were reading more newspapers than ever. In 1939, the British people
purchased 19.4 million newspapers a day, and 69 percent of the population over the
age of 16 read a national daily paper.1 But much like today, when just six companies
own more than eighty percent of local newspapers and eighty-five percent of newspa-
per revenue in Britain, the British papers of the 1930s did not provide a plurality of
voices. By that time, Britain’s press empires had eliminated many national and regional
newspapers. Ownership of those that remained was consolidated among a handful of
owners, with five leading companies controlling 43 percent of all newspapers in Britain
by 1937.2 So Woolf read widely. According to Silver in Virginia Woolf ’s Reading Note-
books (1983), Woolf clipped and read at least seven daily papers: The Times, The Daily
Telegraph, The Daily Herald, The Observer, the Evening Standard, The New Statesman
and Nation, and The Listener. Her clippings for Three Guineas alone are carefully ar-
ranged in a collage-like format that fills three large bound volumes (22–23). Woolf read
these newspapers with a skeptical eye, knowing, as she writes in Three Guineas, “each
paper is financed by a board [and] each board has a policy” that writers must follow to
ensure that they keep their jobs (95).
So it is no wonder that Woolf advocates reading a wide-ranging selection of news-
papers with an open, critical mind. Following her advice allows us to avoid hearing only
one media outlet’s—one “board’s”—view. It also helps us avoid confirmation bias, the
tendency to accept evidence that confirms our beliefs and to reject evidence that contra-
dicts them. This problem, which was unnamed in Woolf ’s time, is a serious issue today
due to the popularity of social media as a news source, one that disseminates information
curated by filters and algorithms, thus preventing us from seeing other points of view.
These filters and algorithms populate the individual Facebook user’s news feed, based on
a number of factors. These include whether anyone has paid Facebook to promote the
post, how the user has interacted with similar posts (by liking, commenting, or sharing
them), and the number of interactions by other users. Today, with filtered online news so
prevalent, we have a better chance of getting a broader array of political perspectives if we
follow Woolf ’s advice. She writes: “Therefore if you want to know any fact about politics
you must read at least three different papers, compare at least three different versions of
the same fact, and come in the end to your own conclusion” (95).
To read like Woolf in the Age of Trump, we must also read books, and we must
read them freely, for as Woolf writes in her 1931 essay “The Love of Reading,” it is read-
ing that “has changed the world and continues to change it.” It is reading, she writes,
that enables civilization, allowing us to grow from apes to men, as we have “left our
caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given
to the poor and helped the sick” (E5 274). Woolf ’s wide-ranging reading habit, the
habit responsible for much of her own growth, began in her father’s extensive library,
where she had unlimited access. In fact, the library of approximately 6,000 books that
she later shared with Leonard was built around those inherited from her father, Leslie
Stephen.3 Her reading throughout her lifetime ranged freely through genres, periods,
and subjects—from history to criticism to science to anthropology (Silver 4). In “How
Should One Read a Book” (1925), Woolf elaborates on the importance of reading with-
out restriction. She writes: “To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned,
into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place
upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanc-
tuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have
none” (CR2 258). Woolf says this freedom gives us the right to follow our instincts, use
our reason, and come to our own conclusions about the books we read, a practice she
inherited from her father along with his books (258). For Woolf, such freedom also
means placing what we read—from current events to works of literature—in their his-
torical, biographical, cultural, and societal contexts. Woolf ’s uncanny ability to connect
the dots between historical events and current affairs, between cultural heritage and
the present day, allowed her to make the brilliant critical analysis that is Three Guineas.
It allowed her to read with an eye for detail that revealed the truth behind the fiction,
the lie behind the fact, the “fake news” from the real news. We must do the same.
Woolf is well-known for her disapproval of the didactic in fiction (D4 145) and for
her advice shared in Three Guineas that we form an Outsiders’ Society that will “main-
tain an attitude of complete indifference” to war (107). However, in her customarily
contradictory way, in both Three Guineas and in her essay “Professions for Women”
(1931), she tells us that our writing should do just the opposite. In both works, she
instructs us to cultivate minds of our own and to boldly express what we find there,
“agitat[ing] these humble pens” (TG 61). Woolf provides us with further instruction
on how to do that. First, she says, we must replace the acquiescence of the Angel of
the House with the honesty of the professional woman who has escaped the confines
of the private home (DM 238). For the Angel of the House is dead; she no longer rules
our speech or our actions. We must express what we “think to be the truth about hu-
man relations, morality, sex” (236). Woolf charges us to use our writing to tell the truth
about our own experiences and opinions. When we put pen to paper, she says, we
should defy conventionality, declare our “genuine likes and dislikes,” and criticize the
things of which we disapprove (TG 17). As she advises, “speak your own mind, in your
own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding” (98). She also
instructs us to be clear about our message. According to Woolf, we must not assume
that we know the aims for which we are fighting. We must perpetually examine, ques-
tion, and define them (DM 241–42).
If we are to write like Woolf, we must also “[f]ind out new ways of approaching
‘the public,’” she says in Three Guineas (98). We must engage our audiences where they
are, using all methods at our disposal. Woolf advocates seizing the equipment of her
time—typewriters and duplicators—to avoid “the pressure of boards, policies and edi-
tors” (116). Today, we have the immediacy and worldwide access of the Internet at our
disposal. We must seize the equipment and platforms they provide, for they give us
unfiltered access to a broad global audience. We can publish from our laptops, tablets,
Thinking Is Our Fighting 199
or cell phones using websites, blogs, and social media accounts of our own. We can
publish in already established online venues with a feminist focus, such as Feministing,
Everyday Feminism and The Feminist Wire, along with print publications with online
components, such as Ms. magazine, Bitch, Bust, and Jezebel. These are the equipment
and methods of production we must seize and use if we are to share our own truths
about politics and history, art and culture, and society at large, as Woolf advises.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Loretta Stec argued that Three Guineas was
useful because it models resistance to “commonsense response to a complex political
reality” in a post-September 11 world (4). Such resistance is even more important today.
For in the Age of Trump—when language is used recklessly, when truth is held in con-
tempt, and when difference is disrespected, we must—as did Woolf—find new words and
create new methods to communicate (TG 143). Like Woolf, we must use our thinking
and our reading to recognize and analyze the nationalism in the news and in our neigh-
borhoods, the patriarchy in our governments and in our homes, and the militarism that
surrounds us. Like Woolf, we must use our writing to speak out and speak up—as we
refuse to be “passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience” (142). Like Woolf, we
must recognize that “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected…the
tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” In the
spirit of Woolf, the iconic activist thinker, reader, and writer, we will fight with our think-
ing, our reading, and our writing to resist the Age of Trump. We will use all the methods
at our disposal to “assert the rights of all” (143) because we know that a “common interest
unites us; it is one world, one life” (142). For just as Woolf feared that women could easily
lose their newly found freedoms when she wrote Three Guineas in 1938, we face the same
jeopardy today. As twenty-first-century women, we have minds, rooms, incomes, and
professions of our own. We will not give them up. We will not go back. We will continue
to dream Woolf ’s dream, “the dream of peace, the dream of freedom,” as we replace the
lying, strident voice of the autocrat with the honest voice of the poet (143).
Notes
1. That compares to a British domestic newspaper readership of 63 million people today, according to
“Who Owns UK Media,” a 2015 report by Media Reform Coalition. In 2006, 45 percent of adults in the
UK read one or more daily newspapers, according to figures from a National Readership Survey com-
missioned by the House of Lords communications committee. In 2013, 55 percent of adults in the UK
accessed news content online, according to an 8 August 2013 Guardian article by Mark Sweney.
2. By 1937 five leading companies controlled 43 percent of all newspapers in Britain. See Westman.
3. Washington State University Library acquired 4,000 of these and they are now housed in its Manu-
scripts, Archives and Special Collections.
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Sweney, Mark. “More Than Half of Britons Access News Online.” The Guardian, 8 Aug. 2013. Web. 11 Jan.
2018.
Westman, Karen E. “‘For her generation the newspaper was a book’: Media, Mediation, and Oscillation in
Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts.” Journal of Modern Literature 29.2 (2006): 1–18.
“Who Owns the UK Media?” Media Reform Coalition, October 2015. Web. 29 Aug. 2017.
Wood, Jane. “Who’s Afraid That Feminism is Finished? Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Commodifica-
tion.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 73 (2008): 22–24.
Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. New York: Harcourt,
1967.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. IV: 1931–1935. Florida: Harcourt,
1982. 5 vols.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. V: 1936–1941. Florida: Harcourt, 1984. 5 vols.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vol. IV: 1931–1935. Florida: Harcourt, 1982. 5 vols.
——. “How Should One Read a Book.” The Second Common Reader. 1932. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Reprint.
New York: Harcourt, 1986. 258–70.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. VI: 1936–1941. New
York: Harcourt, 1980.
——. “The Love of Reading.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Vol. V: 1929–1932. 271–75.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
——. “Professions for Women.” Death of the Moth and Other Essays. 1942. Major Authors on CD-Rom: Vir-
ginia Woolf. 235–42. CD-ROM.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. Reprint. New York, Harcourt, 1966.
The Book in the World:
Woolf ’s Global Reception
The Woolf Behind the Iron Curtain: The Reception
of Virginia Woolf’s Works in Romania, 1947–1989
by Adriana Varga
I
began researching the reception of Virginia Woolf ’s works in Romania after WWII
with several questions in mind and also with one or two pre-conceived ideas. I
knew that some of the issues I had to address would have to do with censorship in
Romania after it became part of the Soviet Bloc in 1945. My main expectation was that
I would find heavily censored translations into which I could sink my teeth and cri-
tique in order to tear up the veil in which, I imagined, Woolf must have been shrouded
by translators during this period. Instead, I found translations that were quite faithful
to the originals, and that, with few exceptions, did not generally omit or alter passages
from the originals. I also found that, instead of being able to tear up any veil, and
present the truth about how the Woolfian text should have been translated, the more
I studied these translations and the circumstances which they appeared, the more I
found myself engulfed in a maze of veils, or, rather, levels of understanding that should
not be torn and discarded, but considered, studied carefully, and somehow preserved.
They are revealing because they help us raise questions about and better understand
not only the translations and the contexts in which they were created, but also the
originals. We should perhaps also remember that modernism itself, both in Great Brit-
ain and on the Continent, developed in a strange dialogue with censors and censorship.
Whereas before 1945 Woolf was relatively well-known in Romania, especially in
literary circles (critics often reviewed her books and wrote articles about her, although
she was read more often in French translation than in the original), between 1945
and 1968 there is hardly any information about her in Romanian periodicals, and her
works are not translated. Strangely enough, translations of Woolf ’s works begin to ap-
pear in 1968 and to flourish afterwards. Therefore, the first questions to consider had to
do exactly with this change: what made it possible for Woolf ’s works to be translated in
and after 1968 and not before (between 1945–1968), and were the translations faithful
(keeping in mind that “faithfulness” is a highly debatable concept in translation theory)
to the originals, or were they heavily censored?
Romanian history and literary history suggest answers to both of these ques-
tions. After the death of the first Romanian communist party and state leader, Gh.
Gheorghiu-Dej on March 19, 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu became Secretary General of
the Communist Party of Romania. On one hand, Ceaușescu proceeded to consolidate
his power internally, and in 1967 he became Secretary General of the State Council,
which meant that he was now also head of state. On the other hand, he pursued an
external policy of distancing Romania from Soviet influence, an independent foreign
policy that made him popular both at home and abroad. Ceaușescu not only refused to
participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but, in a speech given on August
21 that year, he openly condemned the Soviet-instigated Warsaw Pact invasion. For
a period of time, the West saw in him an anti-Soviet maverick who could be used to
Woolf Behind the Iron Curtain 203
create dissension within the Warsaw Pact. Western U.S., British, and French leaders in-
vited Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena to visit their countries and, in return, they
visited Romania. Ceaușescu was able to close deals on foreign loans and, after Nixon’s
visit to Romania in 1969, and Ceaușescu’s visit to the United States in 1970, Romania
received the Most Favored Nation Clause.
It is exactly against this background of liberalization that Virginia Woolf ’s novels
are translated and published for the first time in Romania, alongside many other Brit-
ish, American, and Western-European canonical and contemporary authors. Orlando
and Mrs Dalloway are translated by Vera Călin and Petru Creția, respectively, and they
are both published in 1968, at the Universal Literature Publishing House (Editura Pen-
tru Literatură Universală). They are followed by To the Lighthouse in 1972, translated
by Antoaneta Ralian with a preface by Vera Călin; and The Waves in 1973, translated
by Petru Creția. Between the Acts is translated in 1978 by Frieda Papadache, The Years
in 1983, also by Frieda Papadache, and Night and Day in 1987 by Veronica Focșeneanu,
with an excellent preface by Ștefan Stoenescu. Jacob’s Room appeared just after the col-
lapse of Ceaușescu’s government, in 1990, translated by Mihai Miroiu. Parts of Woolf ’s
diaries (a small selection) were also published in 1980 with Leonard Woolf ’s 1953 pref-
ace. A Room of One’s Own was translated in 1999 by Radu Paraschivescu. After 1990,
Woolf ’s novels are published more and more often. Most of the time the same transla-
tions are republished, with only Mrs Dalloway and Orlando in brand new translations
by Mihai Miroiu and Antoaneta Ralian, respectively.
Although the reception of Virginia Woolf after 1989 is a very different story
that deserves its own, future study, it is possible to observe, briefly, that interest in
Woolf ’s works and in drawing connections between Woolf and modernist Romanian
authors increased dramatically after 1989. When researching the communist period
(1947–1989) I found a wealth of extensive critical essays published in various Roma-
nian periodicals on James Joyce, but only very few on Virginia Woolf. After 1989, the
situation has reversed. Woolf ’s novels have been re-published more and more often,
sometimes the older translation appearing shortly before a new translation. Michael
Cunningham’s 1998 novel, The Hours, was translated into Romanian in 2011 (Editura
Polirom) and, just this summer, the translation of Priya Parmar’s 2015 novel, Vanessa
and Her Sister, was launched by the Polirom Publishing house. Several studies and dis-
sertations have been published, which compare Woolf ’s works with those of various
Romanian interwar authors. There seems to be a strong, genuine interest in Woolf ’s
works and in finding connections between Woolf, Bloomsbury and Romanian mod-
ernist interwar literature and culture.
This renewed interest in Woolf ’s works today is, arguably, the continuation of a
process that began in 1968 with the publication of the translations of Orlando and Mrs
Dalloway after twenty years of silence. However, Ceaușescu’s pursuit of openness and
liberalization did not last long and it did not apply to his domestic policies. In 1972,
the Ceaușescus visited North Korea and China, countries they greatly admired. After
these visits, the Romanian leader began to adopt and implement his own cult of per-
sonality modeled on the one he observed in North Korea. Internally, Ceaușescu was
also passing decrees and laws that limited and violated human rights, women’s rights
in particular. Two blatant examples are the Decree 770, which was signed into law in
1966, and which criminalized abortion,1 and Article 200 of the Penal Code adopted in
1968, which criminalized homosexual relationships, an article that remained in force
until 2001, when it was finally repealed by the Adrian Năstase government under pres-
sure from the Council of Europe. It is also this context that we must keep in mind when
looking at the 1968 translations.
Considering Ceaușescu’s domestic policies, it may be surprising that Woolf ’s
works were being translated at all at this time. Furthermore, the translators could
have chosen some of Woolf ’s other works, such as The Years or Night and Day (both
of which were published later, in the 1970s). The translators chose, instead, Orlando
and Mrs Dalloway—works that are both ambiguous and subversive. Generally, they
produced faithful, integral texts that did not show signs of censorship “mutilation,”
with a few revealing exceptions. Some passages were indeed omitted from Orlando,
but not the parts one would necessarily expect. Ironically, the text opens without any
translator’s note or preface, and without Woolf ’s own Preface to her mock biography.
It would be difficult to believe that the translator herself found the author’s Preface
beside the point. The censors, however, may have seen some kind of threat in the long
list of names Woolf showered with lavish and ironic praise and thanks. It may surprise
Western audiences that Woolf ’s metafictional exercise in sarcastic thanksgiving was
unacceptable in a culture whose citizens were supposed to unequivocally worship Ro-
mania’s totalitarian communist leader and his wife.
Also missing from Vera Călin’s translation are the photographs that accompanied
the first edition of Orlando and later editions published in the West. Whatever else the
purpose of these photographs, they form a dialogue with the text of Woolf ’s mock bi-
ography, a dialogue that is lost when the photographs are removed. Surprisingly, these
photographs are also missing from the post-1989 editions of Orlando. One photograph
is of particular interest in this context because it relates to another fragment missing
from Călin’s Romanian translation. This is the photograph of The Archduchess Har-
riet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scandop-Boom, whose appearance provokes such
lust in Orlando that he flees England for Constantinople. This character, who is actually
a man disguised as a woman, presents herself as the Archduchess “in the Roumanian
territory.” The reference to Romania, which I discussed elsewhere,2 is strange, especial-
ly since the real person that inspired this character is not a Romanian figure, but Henry
George Charles Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood (1882–1947)—and one of the suitors
Vita mockingly rejected. The detail that this is an Archduchess “in the Roumanian ter-
ritory” must have had to be left out of the Vera Călin translation.
Călin’s translation is otherwise beautifully done and, with a few (but revealing)
exceptions, quite faithful to the original. Keeping in mind that translators often argue
that faithfulness in translation is impossible, what I mean here is that, with a few very
interesting exceptions and omissions, Călin’s translation does not show blatant signs
of censorship distortions. Besides Woolf ’s preface, no other parts are missing from the
translation, not even the crucial moment when Orlando undergoes his famous trans-
formation. However, Vera Călin’s 1968 translation also contains small discrepancies,
which are more difficult to detect, but which may show the hand of a censor at work—
a censor or perhaps the translator herself, practicing a kind of self-censorship. Since
Călin died in 2013 and the manuscript proofs or archival documents are nowhere to be
found, it is impossible to know with certainty. However, when asked how the Commu-
nist censorship affected authors and texts in a post-1989 interview, Călin clearly stated:
[Censorship] prevented the publication of anything that was not considered

“useful” to the regime. It eliminated anything which could have been inter-
preted as hostile or alien to communism and Marxist ideology, and especially
anything which could have been taken as irreverent to the person of the dic-
tator. Furthermore, it affected authors and texts by adding a word here and
there or a sentence intended to neutralize something that might have sounded
ambiguous or could have been interpreted “the wrong way,” or to emphasize
something that did not sound explicit enough. The obsession with “the cor-
rect line”—be it political, national, aesthetic,—was a reality every writer had
to live with.” (Vianu 25)
Călin goes on to discuss self-censorship as a mechanism of self-protection she con-

sidered far more devastating for a writer’s creative process than official censorship
itself (Vianu 25). Călin’s statements shed some light upon her own translation of one
of Orlando’s most important moments, the protagonist’s change of sex, which Woolf
describes in the following way:
Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is
against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always
been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and
psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando
was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained
so ever since (Woolf 103, my italics).
In Romanian, the text becomes:
Plecînd de la aceste fapte, mulți oameni au socotit asemenea metamorfoză

împotriva naturii și și-au dat mare osteneală să dovedească: 1. că Orlando
fusese întotdeauna femeie și 2. că Orlando este încă și acum bărbat. Nouă însă
ne ajung faptele; anume că Orlando a fost bărbat pîna la vîrsta de treizeci de
ani cînd a devenit femeie, ceea ce a rămas pînă-n ziua de azi. (Călin 134, my
italics)
[Starting from these facts, many people have considered such a metamorpho-
sis against nature and they put great of effort into proving it: 1. That Orlando
had always been a woman and 2. That Orlando is even now still a man. Facts,
however, are enough for us; namely that Orlando was a man till the age of
thirty when he became a woman, which he has remained until today.]3
In her translation, Călin omits “Let biologists and psychologists determine” and, more
importantly, she translates “such a change of sex is against nature” as “such a metamor-
phosis is against nature.” I would argue that these changes are important and revealing.
Woolf ’s simple but direct words “change of sex” may have been too queer to print. And
because Woolf does not mean a metaphorical change, but a very literal, physical one
that could be scientifically determined, “let biologists and psychologists determine”
also had to be left out of the translation. When Orlando was translated again in 2013
by Antoaneta Ralian, it received its author’s “Preface” back, and the lines above were
rendered almost literally as in English. The original photographs have continued to be
left out.
The use of the word “metamorphosis” introduced by Călin in the Woolfian text
is not unimportant and did not go unnoticed. In 1969, a year after the novel’s trans-
lation appeared, the literary critic Valeriu Cristea published an article entitled “The
Experiences of Orlando” (“Experiențele lui Orlando”) in the journal Literary Romania
[România Literară], that centered precisely on the word metamorphosis. Relying on
this word, Cristea builds his entire interpretation of the novel by drawing a comparison
between Orlando and Kafka’s 1915 short story, “Metamorphosis.” Cristea concludes
that “beyond the impression of an amorphous reality the hero gives us, there is an es-
sence so profound and unalterable, that not even such a radical modification such as
that of sex can change it” (România Literară). The use of the word “metamorphosis” in
Călin’s translation seems to aid an interpretation according to which Orlando’s essence
remains “profound and unalterable,” not even by his sexual transformation.
The question remains: how was it possible to even publish Woolf ’s works in a
communist, totalitarian dictatorship? As Vladimir Tismaneanu has argued recently
(Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism), censorship
in Romania after 1968 was no longer an actual institution, nor an impenetrable ide-
ological wall. After Ceaușescu came to power, Marxism began to dilute itself as the
communist leader attempted to gain legitimacy through a more and more nationalistic
discourse. The publication of what was considered the Western 20th-century classics
by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, among others,
served as a way to present Romanian literature as one that could resonate, even com-
pete with the great Western tradition. In this sense, we can think of Woolf ’s texts, on
one hand, as having been coopted by a system fighting to maintain legitimacy. On the
other hand, Woolf ’s translations also represented a form of undeniable, if subtle, ques-
tioning, even protest against Ceaușescu’s repressive policies. The cover of Orlando (a
book published the same year in which Ceaușescu criminalized homosexuality) publi-
cized, in Romanian, the story of a character who is not bound by history and political
power, who changes sex, and who does nothing to bring praise to the leader of the
Romanian Communist party:
Orlando is an adolescent in the Elizabethan period, loves in the frenetic and

licentious age of the Stuarts, changes from a man into a woman during a
Constantinople ambush, roams through the lively 18th century, marries dur-
ing the puritanical Victorian age, and is 36 years old in 1928. The historical
ages crossed by this hero-heroine are just as many situations, represent just as
many possibilities [potentialities/alternatives] of his own conscience, whose
flexibility accords him passion in Elizabeth’s century, frivolity under James I,
matrimonial characteristics during the Victorian age.
Perhaps even more interesting than changing from a man into a woman in a Constan-
tinople ambush is the courageous assertion made on the translation’s back cover that
consciousness is not fixed but has many possibilities.
Notes
1. Abortion had been legalized in Romania in 1957, and this—the communist government believed—led
to a sharp birthrate decline. Of course, the reality was much more complicated. There were other fac-
tors at work, such as an increasing participation of women in the labor market and a very low standard
of living. The decrease in population growth was blamed, however, on the 1957 law. As a result, in 1966,
Ceaușescu passed Decree 770, attempting to reverse this population decrease by criminalizing abor-
tion and contraception. Whereas before 1966 Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies
in Europe, after 1966 it adopted one of the most stringent laws, which was strictly enforced. The strict
monitoring and control of all aspects of private and public life were applied to women’s reproductive
systems in particular.
2. “‘A shadow crossed the tail of his eye”: The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Romania—Heritage Trans-
formed.” Virginia Woolf and Heritage.
3. All translations are mine unless otherwise specified.
Works Cited
Cristea, Valeriu. “Experiențele lui Orlando.” România Literară Anul II. 22 (39), July 1969, 23.
Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley: U
of California P, 2003.
Varga, Adriana. “‘A shadow crossed the tail of his eye”: The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Romania—
Heritage Transformed.” Virginia Woolf and Heritage. Ed. Jane de Gay, Tom Breckin, and Anne Reus.
Clemson, SC: Clemson UP, 2017.
Vianu, Lidia. Censorship in Romania. Budapest: Central European UP, 1998.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando A Biography. Ed. Maria DiBattista. Gen. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York: Harcourt,
2006.
——. Orlando. O biografie. Tr. Vera Călin. București: Editura Pentru Literatură Universală, 1968.
Virginia Woolf:
Translation, Reception and Impact in Brazil
by Maria Oliveria
F
our moments define Woolf ’s reception in Brazil. First, by the time of the first
translation in 1944, she was read by a small number of well-educated people.
Second, Woolf ’s reception increased with the introduction of English Studies
in Brazilian universities in the 1960s, when her works were included in the curricu-
lum. The third great moment of her reception was when her popularity increased
dramatically with the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1970s. The last
moment was in 2003 after the movie The Hours, when the novel Mrs Dalloway be-
came the best-seller at that time in Brazil. Here I want to consider how Woolf has
been read and translated transatlantically and how the translations reflect the po-
litical, historical and gendered debates of modernism. As Nicola Luckhurst (2002)
pointed out, if there is a European Woolf, if there is an Anglo-American Woolf, what
are the transnational preconditions of Woolf ’s existence beyond the boundaries of
continental Europe?
In order to analyse Woolf ’s reception in Brazil, I searched in the journals, maga-
zines and newspapers of the National Library of Rio de Janeiro from 1930 to 2017.
The following graph depicts the number of times her name was mentioned:
Woolf's Entries in the National Library - Rio de Janeiro

1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s
Figure 1: Database searches for Virginia Woolf across all journals and newspapers held by the
National Library of Rio de Janeiro, 1930–2017.
Figure 1.
Translation, Reception and Impact in Brazil 209
The first timeWoolf's Entries

her name wasinmentioned
the National
wasLibrary
in 1929- in
Riothe
de magazine
Janeiro Movimento
Brasileiro
1600 [Brazilian Movement], in an article entitled “The Modern Novel in Eng-
land” which discusses the French translations of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway. During
1400
the ’30s, her name was mentioned 47 times. In the ’40s, there are 281 entries for
Woolf.
1200 In the ’50s, this number goes up to 311 and in the ’60s the number dramati-
cally rises to 1339. From the ’70s to 2000s the number then stabilises in the high 500s.
1000 2010 to January 2017, there were only 12 references to Woolf ’s name. This sug-
From
gests
800
that as the number of newspapers as a printed media decreased, the number
of entries for Woolf also diminished; but it does not mean that her popularity has
decreased—quite
600 the opposite.
In these articles Woolf is most often related to her aesthetic and marked,
400
along with other modernist writers, as a representative of the revolution on the
novel.
200 The second most common use of her name is through comparison to other
women writers, such as Katherine Mansfield, Sinodie-Gabrielle Colette, Dorothy
Richardson,
0 and Rosamond Lehmann among others. Thirdly, her name is referred
1930s 1940s
to her political ideas on 1950s 1960s
feminism. 1970s
In the ’60s, 1980s 1990s
as Brenda 2000s
R. Silver 2010s
mentioned in
Virginia Woolf Icon, Woolf became a household name and that is partly due to
the play by Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Silver suggests that the
play
Figurealso
1. created a double image of Virginia Woolf, as a threatening feminist and
as a difficult writer. In what follows, I will describe Woolf ’s translations in Brazil,
starting with her short stories, then her essays, and finally the translations of the
novels. Figure 2 (below) illustrates three great periods of Woolf ’s translations in
Brazil.
Woolf's Translations in Brazil

9
0
1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Novels Short stories Essays Diary
Figure 2: Quantitative survey of the publication of Woolf ’s works by genre, based on the
Figure 2.
bibliographical work of Denise Bottmann and her blog <naogostodeplagio.blogspot.com.br>
Woolf’s Translations in Brazil: Short Stories
Denise Bottmann (2013), a famous translator of Woolf in Brazil, has an extremely im-
portant role in recording Woolf ’s translations. Bottmann—a former historian, lecturer
and campaigner—keeps a blog in which she tracks Brazilian translations over the years
in an attempt to prevent publishers’ from re-using translators’ work without offering
credit. According to Bottmann, Woolf ’s first translation happened in 1944. The short
story “Solid Objects” was translated by Dias da Costa in a collection “World Short
Stories,” under the title The British: The ancient and the modern, organized by Rubem
Braga and published by Leitura. In 1955, “The Legacy” and “Three Pictures” were pub-
lished in the collection Short Stories and Novels in Foreign Language, translations of
Nádia Santos and Yolanda L. dos Santos, by Logos. In 1959, “Lapine and Lapinova”
came out in the collection Wonders of the Love Short Story, published by Cultrix, but
with no credits for the translator.
In a collection for children, there are two short stories, “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”
and “The Widow and the Parrot,” in 1983, organized by Ruth Rocha, published by
Ática. In 1984, the collection A Haunted House was translated by José Antônio Arantes
for Nova Fronteira. In 1992, a collection of short stories Solid Objects was translated
by Hélio Pólvora, by Siciliano, and Kew Gardens and other feminist essays appeared in
1996, translated by Patricia de Freitas Camargo and José Arlindo de Castro, published
by Paz e Terra. Again, “The Legacy” appears in a collection called The Jungle of Love,
organized by Roberto Muggiati, but the translator is not revealed, published by Record
in 2003. And finally, in 2005, The Complete Shorter Fiction was translated by Leonardo
Fróes, published by Cosac Naify, in a very elegant and distinguished edition.
Essays
“The Niece of an Earl” was published in Revista Joaquim in 1947, but there is no in-
formation on the translator. “Beau Brummel” appears in the collection Bedside Book
of a Woman in 1968 by Civilização Brasileira, the translator’s name is not mentioned.
In 1985, Moments of Being was translated by Paula Maria Rosas for Nova Fronteira.
In the same year A Room of One’s Own came out by Nova Fronteira, translated by
Vera Ribeiro. After a period of almost twenty years, Carlyle’s House and other sketches
was published also by Nova Fronteira, translated by Carlos Tadeu Galvão. The Lon-
don Scene, translated by Myriam Campelo, was published in 2006, by José Olympio.
In 2007, The Common Reader came out translated by Luciana Viégas. Professions for
Women and Other Essays was translated by Denise Bottmann in 2012, by LP&M.
In 2014, Leonardo Fróes translated a collection of essays entitled The Laughter
and Tears—O valor do Riso—by Cosac Naify. One year later, The Sun and the Fish was
translated by Tomaz Tadeu in 2015, by Autêntica. A different translation of A Room
of One’s Own came out in 2017, translated by Bia Souza Nunes. Unfortunately, Three
Guineas has not been translated yet in Brazil, although it was translated in Portugal just
after the Revolution in 1978.
Novels
Mrs Dalloway and The Waves were translated in 1946, followed by Orlando in 1948 and
To the Lighthouse in 1968. Mrs Dalloway was first translated in 1946, by the famous
poet Mário Quintana. That was the only translation until 2012 when the copyrights
expired. As Quintana was a poet, the poetic rhythm of Woolf ’s style can be seen in the
text. The opening passage, for instance, demonstrates his choices in terms of allitera-
tion, repetitions and rhymes:
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning;
like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did standing there at the open
window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at
the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising,
falling; standing and looking… (MD 1992 3)
Que fresco, que calmo, mais que o de hoje, não era então o ar da manhãzinha;
como o tapa de uma onda; como o beijo de uma onda; frio, fino, e ainda (para
a menina de dezoito anos que ela era em Bourton) solene, sentindo como sen-
tia, parada ali ante a janela aberta, que alguma coisa de terrível ia acontecer;
olhando para as flôres, para os troncos, de onde se desprendia a névoa, para as
gralhas, que se alçavam e abatiam; parada e olhando… (MD 1972 11)
Although Quintana was critical about his own translation, it was a consecrated text.
Denise Bottmann believes that this translation has great merit and is remarkable in
many aspects, but she realized that Quintana’s text tends to soften Woolf ’s peculiar syn-
tax and experimental writing. Woolf, who is known by her literary innovations, arrives
in Brazil in a little more conventional language. 66 years after the first translation, there
was need for another one which could more fully contemplate Woolf ’s style.
Franciele Graebin (2016) in her Master’s dissertation analyses the four translations
of Mrs Dalloway in Brazil. I will concentrate my analysis on two translations, the first
one by Quintana and the second by Denise Bottmann. Graebin (2016) perceives that
Quintana alters the structure of the text when he decided to divide Woolf ’s long peri-
ods into smaller ones, adding paragraphs to the text. His translation adds about twenty
paragraphs, which affects the rhythm of the text. However, Graebin concludes that
Woolf ’s stream of consciousness is not entirely lost by the translator, the reader can still
feel it. Quintana’s language is more conventional, as can be noticed in the vocabulary
chosen, which represents the language of the classics, obeying the erudite standards
norm of the language and avoiding the translation of dialects. Denise Bottman’s trans-
lation is more connected with readers of this century. Not only is her language more
up-to-date, but she also kept a constant dialogue with readers through her blog, where
people contributed with suggestions. Bottmann’s translation respects the structure of
the paragraphs and the external and internal structure of the text. Quintana’s transla-
tion tends to keep a distance from Woolf ’s text in an attempt to turn it into something
more familiar to the Brazilian reader.
In the 1980s the publisher Nova Fronteira asked writers Lya Luft and Raul de Sá
Barbosa to translate Woolf ’s novels. The audience would receive a new version of The
Waves, and the novels which were not translated before now came out, such as Night
and Day, Jacob’s Room, The Years and Between the Acts. In the ’90s, two of Woolf ’s
novels were translated: The Voyage Out for the first time, translated by Lya Luft, by
the publisher Siciliano, and Orlando in a second version, translated by Laura Alves, by
Edioro in 1994.
In 2012 Woolf ’s copyright expired and new translations came out which would
contemplate Woolf ’s experimental language and her innovations. During 2012 and
2013 there were three different translations of Mrs Dalloway. One by Tomaz Tadeu
came in a beautiful box made by Autêntica, packaged with the book and a diary, where
the reader can also make comments and become a writer. This edition is the most ex-
pensive. The second, by L&PM, is cheaper, a pocket version, but it does not mean its
quality is not good: translated by Denise Bottman, it won the prize for best translation.
The third translation was undertaken by Claudio Marcondes and the publisher is Co-
sac Naif, famous for winning prizes (unfortunately it is now closed). To the Lighthouse
also had three translations in 2013, one by Tomaz Tadeu with Autêntica, another by
Denise Bottmann and L&PM, and a third by Doris Goettems, Landmark. In 2014, Or-
lando came out, translated by Jorio Dauster, Penguin. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
and Orlando turned out to be the most popular of her novels. Flush was translated in
2003, by Ann Ban, L&PM, showing that most of Woolf ’s novels are translated in Brazil.
Although the numbers in Figure 27.1 show a decline in references to her name, her
popularity has increased. There are some reasons for this, first the transformation of
the newspaper as printed material to a virtual one; second, work at the databases is still
taking place, so the numbers are constantly growing.
Woolf’s reception through Brazilian Women Writers
Since Clarice Lispector (1920–77), or even before, Woolf has impacted upon Bra-
zilian women writers. In 1937 the Brazilian writer Tetrá de Teffé wrote an article
entitled “To see in abstract” [“Ver em Abstracto”] in which she talks about the dif-
ferences between men and women’s writing. In this article she states that “in this
feminist century, male writers pretend to ignore the wonderful blooming of wom-
en writers such as Woolf, whose characters would deserve the Nobel Prize” (139).
Another important writer, Lúcia Miguel Pereira wrote several articles on Woolf for
Correio da Manhã, the daily newspaper, published in 1944. In “The duality of Vir-
ginia Woolf ” she compares Woolf ’s language in her novels and her essays; “The Big
Ben” discusses time in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse; “The haunted” analyses
Woolf ’s short stories; and “Criticism and Feminism” starts from Woolf ’s The Com-
mon Reader, observing Woolf ’s position as a reader, someone who has a great sense
of humor and who reads for pleasure.
The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector has always been compared to Virginia
Woolf, especially concerning modernist language and techniques, yet she denied that
she had read Woolf when she published her first novel in 1944. During the 1960s, she
certainly was familiar with Woolf ’s novels. In 1952, she lived in England and published
Judith Shakespeare’s story, “A Irmã de Shakespeare” in Comício; it was published again

in 1977. In an interview with Helena Collett Solberg she was asked about what she
thought of Virginia Woolf, she confessed great admiration for her work and that she
felt influenced by her novels, especially Mrs Dalloway.
Ana Cristina César, a poet who studied and translated Katherine Mansfield, Em-
ily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, in one of her texts of Escritos no Rio, 1988 [Written
in Rio], defends the idea of woman writing as a woman, not as the androgynous one
Virginia Woolf idealized in A Room of One’s Own. Lygia Fagundes Telles in her text
“In the turn of the century” [“Na Viragem do Século”], writes thinking back on Woolf,
but reflecting on our process of colonization. In another interview to Jornal do Brasil
(29/11/1980) she admits her admiration for Woolf, declaring they are part of the same
family of writers who influence one another. This reminds us of Woolf ’s quote: “For
masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of
thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of
the mass is behind the single voice” (AROO 69).
Hilda Hilst takes inspiration from Woolf in Com Meus Olhos de Cão [With My
Dog’s Eyes], written through a dog’s perspective. Lygia Fagundes Telles, in As Horas
Nuas [The naked hours] also uses an animal’s perspective, but in her case, part of the
story is narrated through the eyes of Raul, a cat.
While Ana Cristina César questions Woolf ’s androgynous view, in O Jogo de Ifá,
Sônia Coutinho embraces Woolf ’s androgyny to create her character Renata/Renato.
Bringing African traditions to the narrative, Ifá like Orlando has many lives. Adriana
Lunardi in her book Vésperas [The Day Before] mixes fiction and biographies to depict
the death of nine women writers: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mans-
field, Colette, Sylvia Plath, Clarice Lispector, Ana Cristina César, Zelda Fitzgerald and
Júlia da Costa.
Final Considerations
During my research on Woolf ’s impact on Brazilian women writers, I also found many
men who admire Woolf and who have declared her influence in their writings. One
of them is Antonio Bivar, who wrote on the Bloomsbury Group and joined The In-
ternational Virginia Woolf Association and participated in early conferences. Woolf
has been read from most diverse approaches: philosophical, psychological, feminist,
phenomenological, post-structuralist, etc. Nowadays, Orlando has become a model for
talking about the trans-gendered body, opening new areas of interpretations of her
work. In academia Woolf has always been popular and every year new studies come
out about her work.
In relation to Woolf ’s translations, we can perceive two crucial moments: 1)
a more conservative mode at the beginning, which would normalize her innova-
tive language; 2) another which tries to capture Woolf ’s revolutionary language and
which involves a constant dialogue with the contemporary reader. The translations
reflect the political, historical, and gender debates of their times. In 1946, Mrs Dal-
loway was translated as a classic of world literature, the translation had to follow the
norms of the bello escrivere. The translations of this time reflect the political context
of that moment, which demonstrates a very conservative position of the publishers,

consequently of the translators. Only after the 70s, Haroldo and Augusto Campos
would assume an Avant Gard position, revolutionizing the way translations were
considered in Brazil.
Woolf has been more and more translated and has been read by a wider audience,
which proves her palpable existence in our hemisphere. Not only does she exist, but she
also has been recreated and reinvented in many different artistic modes—in theater,
dance, in the gastronomical world and even in the fashion world. In search of a South
American Woolf, I found many possibilities for a writer who could not be labeled or
categorized as in one literary movement. When her writing crosses the boundaries of
Europe and America she assumes also a multidimensional aspect, kaleidoscopic as her
writing is.
Appendix I
1. Short Stories
“Solid Objects”—“Objetos Sólidos”

Year: 1944
Translator: Dias da Costa
Publisher: Leitura
“Three Pictures” and “The Legacy”—“Três Figuras” e “O Legado”

Year: 1955
Translators: Yolanda L. dos Santos and Nádia Santos
Publisher: Logos
“Lapine and Lapinova”

Year: 1959
Translators: -
Publisher: Cultrix
“Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”—“A Cortina da tia Bá”

Year: Ática
Translator: Ruth Rocha
Publisher: 1983
AHH—Uma Casa Assombrada

Year: 1984
Translator: José Antônio Arantes
Publisher: Nova Fronteira
Solid Objects—Solid Objects

Year: 1992
Translator: Hélio Pólvora
Publisher: Siciliano
Kew Gardens and other essays—Kew Gardens e outros ensaios

Year: 1996
Translator: Patricia de Freitas Camargo e José Arlindo de Castro
Publisher: Paz e Terra
“The Legacy”—“O Legado”

Year: 2003
Translator: Roberto Muggiati
Publisher: Record
CSF—Contos Completos
Year: 2005
Translator: Leonardo Fróes
Publisher: Cosac Naify
Leituras do Escritor—The writer’s readings

“The Duchess and the Jeweller”—“A Duquesa e o Joalheiro”
Year: 2008
Organizer: Ana Maria Machado
Publisher: SM Edições
Leituras do Escritor—The writer’s readings

“Solid Objects”—Objetos Sólidos
Year: 2008
Organizer: Luiz Ruffato
Publisher: SM Edições
“O tempo passa”—“Time Passes”

Year: 2013
Translator: Tomaz Tadeu
Publisher: Autêntica
2. Essays
“The Niece of an Earl”—“A sobrinha do conde”

Year: 1947
Translator:
Publisher: Revista Joaquim
“Beau Brummel”
Year: 1968
Translator:
Publisher: Civilização Brasileira
M—Momentos de Vida
Year: 1985
Translator: Paula Maria Rosas
AROO—Um teto todo seu

Year: 1985
Translator: Vera Ribeiro
Carlyle’s House and other sketches—A casa de Carlyle e outros ensaios

Year: 2003
Translator: Carlos Tadeu Galvão
The London Scene—Cenas Londrinas

Year: 2006
Translator: Myriam Campelo
Publisher: José Olympio
CR 1—O leitor comum

Year: 2007
Translator: Luciana Viégas
Publisher: Graphia
Professions for women and other essays—Profissões para mulheres e outros ensaios
Year: 2012
Translator: Denise Bottman
Publisher: L&PM
AROO—Um Teto Todo Seu

Year: 2014
Translator: Bia Souza Nunes
Publisher: Tordesilhas
Essays—O valor do riso e outros ensaios

Year: 2014
Translator: Leonardo Fróes
The Sun and the Fish—O Sol e o Peixe—Prosas Poéticas

Year: 2015
Diary
A Writer’s Diary—Os Diários de Virginia Woolf
Year: 1989
Translator: José Antônio Arantes
Publisher: Companhia das Letras
3. Novels
MD—MD
Year: 1946
Translator: Mário Quintana
Publisher: Globo
TW—As Ondas
Year: 1946
Translator: Sylvia Valladão Azevedo
Publisher: Revista dos Tribunais
O—Orlando
Year: 1948
Translator: Cecília Meireles
Publisher: Globo
TTL—O farol
Year: 1968
Translator: Luiza Lobo
Publisher: Gráfica Record
TTL—Um passeio ao farol

Year: 1976
Translator: Oscar Mendes
Publisher: Labor do Brasil
ND—Noite e Dia
Year: 1979
Translator: Raul de Sá Barbosa
TW—As Ondas
Year: 1980
Translator: Lya Luft
JR—O Quarto de Jacob

Year: 1980
Between the Acts—Entre os Atos

Year: 1981
TY—Os Anos
Year: 1982
Translator: Raul de Sá Barbosa
VO—A Viagem
Year: 1993
Publisher: Siciliano
O—Orlando
Year: 1994
Translator: Laura Alves
Publisher: Ediouro
F—Flush: Memórias de um cão

Year: 2003
Translator: Anna Ban
Publisher: L&PM
MD—MD
Year: 2012
MD—MD
Year: 2012
Translator: Claudio Marcondes
MD—MD
Year: 2013
Translator: Denise Bottmann
Publisher: L&PM
TTL—Ao Farol
Year: 2013
TTL—Ao Farol
Year: 2013
Translator: Doris Goettems
Publisher: Landmark
TTL—Ao Farol
Year: 2013
Translator: Denise Bottmann
Publisher: L&PM
O—Orlando
Year: 2014
Translator: Jorio Dauster
Publisher: Penguin&Companhia
Works Cited
Bottmann, Denise. “As traduções de Virginia Woolf no Brasil” <naogostodeplagio.blogspot.com.br>. Access:

10 Jan 2013. Web
——. http://traduzindomrsdalloway.blogspot.com.br. Access: 10 March 2013. Web
——. Interview with Denise Bottmann. São Paulo. 10 April 2013.
Cesar, Ana Cristina. “Escritos no Rio.” Crítica e Tradução. São Paulo: Ática, 1999.
Coutinho, Sonia. O jogo de Ifá. São Paulo: Ática, 1980.
Graebin, Franciele. As quatro traduções de Mrs. Dalloway de Virginia Woolf para o português do Brasil. As-
pectos estilísticos. Brasília: Department of Foreign Languages and Translation, Universidade de Brasília,
2016. Master’s Dissertation.
Hilst, Hilda. “Obscena Senhora.” Nicolau. Paraná. 19 Sept 1995.
——. Com meus olhos de cão. Rio de Janeiro: Globo, 2006.
Lispector, Clarice. “Os dois mundos de Clarice: Livros e filhos.” Mundo Ilustrado. Rio de Janeiro, p. 40, 1960.
——. “A Irmã de Shakespeare.” Comício. Rio de Janeiro. 22 May 1952.
Lunardi, Adriana. Vésperas. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002.
Luckhurst, Nicola and Mary Ann Caws, eds. The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe. London: Continuum,
2002.
Marcus, Laura. “The European Dimensions of the Hogarth Press.” The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe.
Eds. Nicola Luckhurst, and Mary Ann Caws. London: Continuum, 2002.
Nunes, Maria Aparecida. Correio Feminino/Clarice Lispector. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2006.
Pereira, Lúcia Miguel. Dualidade de Virginia Woolf. Correio da Manhã. Rio de Janeiro. 21 May 1944.
——. Crítica e Feminismo. Correio da Manhã. Rio de Janeiro. 4 Jun 1944.
——. Assombração. Correio da Manhã. Rio de Janeiro. 16 Jul 1944.
——. O Big Ben e o Carrilhão Fantasista. Correio da Manhã. Rio de Janeiro. 18 Jul 1944.
Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.
Teffé, Tetra. “Ver em Abstrato.” Aspectos. Rio de Janeiro. 30 Oct 1937
Telles, Lygia Fagundes. “Na Viragem do Século.” Nicolau. Paraná. 1991.
——. A Literatura é Disciplina. Jornal do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, 29 Nov. 1980.
——. As Horas Nuas. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010. Print
Woolf, V. Mrs. Dalloway. Trans. Denise Bottmann. Porto Alegre: LP&M, 2012.
——. Mrs. Dalloway. Introd. Elaine Showalter. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
——. Mrs. Dalloway. Trans. Mario Quintana. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1972.
——. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Introd. Michele Barrett. London: Penguin Books, 1993.
Zines, Polyvocality, and Sound: How Modernist
First-Wave Feminism Inspired Riot Grrrl
by Riley Wilson
V
irginia Woolf was a zinester. Saying so seems almost sacrilegious, as the larger
cultural conception of Woolf seems to place her firmly in the literary canon
and with a brand of feminism considered far more serious than Riot Grrrl,
her 1990s, teen-girl counterparts who essentially instigated third-wave feminism with
their collective zine-making, punk-centric movement. But that isn’t fair to Woolf or
Riot Grrrl; both were radical, both spread their respective feminisms through inde-
pendent publishing, and both used “noise” to do so. For teen zinesters, this was visual
noise and collage; for Woolf, as I will argue, auditory allusions such as the violin and
airplane in Mrs Dalloway; and for both, a diaristic, rambling stream of consciousness.
What I’m about to present is a part of a larger research project in which I explore Riot
Grrrl’s ties to modernist literature, but in this paper I’m going to focus on a few points
that are especially relevant to Woolf and her influence on Riot Grrrl. Recognizing the
similarities between the two has major benefits for Woolfian and third-wave feminist
scholarship. In interpreting third-wave zines as building on Woolfian narratives, Riot
Grrrl is rightly recognized as being an informed political and literary movement, coun-
tering the reductive popular perception of these women as uninformed girls rebelling
against their second-wave mothers. And in examining the way in which Woolf ’s writ-
ing was foundational in developing third-wave theory, her work is viewed through a
radical lens that emphasizes the subversion of the novel and an intersectional class
consciousness not often associated with the author.
To start, it’s helpful to have an understanding of what a zine is. By definition the
medium defies labels, but in general we can understand it as any small-circulation, self-
made publication. If that sounds broad, it is. Aside from this simple specification, zines
range in topic, format, and content. For example, in San Diego State University’s Special
Collections Library, one can find 1930s fanzines such as Vanations, which discusses the
history of the word “gosh” (Browne 11); La Teoria de Genero, a Spanish-language zine
about gender studies and anarchism, with a mention of Emma Goldman (8); SKEW,
a feminist zine exploring religion with a fantastic article titled “Why Eve Was a Punk”
(Neubacher 5); and over 1500 others, many of which are equally niche. This is also a
major feature and function of zines, which exist to share ideas that cannot be shared
elsewhere. This is certainly the case with Riot Grrrl, whose emphasis on body image,
politics, and female sexuality—especially teenage girl sexuality and childhood sexual
abuse—had no other outlet in larger commercial publications or the mainstream me-
dia. However, a drawback of such an economical and independent publishing tactic is
that zines are often not taken seriously. Riot Grrrl was eviscerated in the media, called
“a sassy new breed of feminists for the MTV age” in Newsweek in 1992 (Chideya and
Rossi). Such a reduction is unsurprisingly sexist and also completely inaccurate. My ar-
gument is that riot grrrls were not stumbling upon an accidental revolution or writing
Zines, Polyvocality, and Sound 221
out their thoughts with little concern or attention to style or form, but emulating and
re-creating the type of writing they had already seen in more canonical literature, espe-
cially in modernist and feminist literature such as Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway and A Room
of One’s Own.
The traces of their modernist inheritance are seen in their own texts, whether in
stream of consciousness style or more overt references. For example, in SPARKLYKIT-
TYSTICKERS, a 1993 personal, Riot Grrrl zine made by Jen Sbragia, guest contributor
Anna C. writes a list of her top female inspirations and cites the likes of Kathy Acker,
Emma Goldman and—my personal favorite—Margaret C. Anderson, founder and
longtime editor of seminal modernist little magazine The Little Review, who Anna
describes as “radical magazine editor and dyke—in the 1920s!” (Sbragia 9). Anna’s
admiration centers around radicalism and a “do-it-yourself ” publication format, sug-
gesting that riot grrrls acknowledged and admired independent publishing techniques
employed by early feminists like Anderson. In addition to in-zine citations such as this,
I’ve had correspondence with a number of riot grrrls about their 1990s’ bookshelves.
Tobi Vail, who essentially founded the movement in 1989 with her zine Jigsaw, revealed
via Twitter that she was reading constantly while making zines and performing in Bi-
kini Kill. She gave a long list, but some of the authors she mentioned include Djuna
Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and Jane Bowles—she named Two Serious Ladies
specifically—noting that she and fellow bandmate Kathleen Hanna were “obsessed”
(Vail). However, Woolf was particularly influential on the riot grrrls, and it’s easy to
understand why. In a sociological paper on Riot Grrrl, Caroline Kaltefleiter points out
that a common theme in early riot grrrl zines was the need for a woman-friendly space,
and even compares Sara Marcus’s Out of the Vortex zine to Woolf ’s A Room of One’s
Own for its insistence that “girls/women need a place where our pronouns are used un-
abashedly […] We need a place where we are in charge; where we are valued, listened
to, and accepted, our lives are validated” (817).
Kelli Williams-Korbel also cited Woolf as a major influence in an email correspon-
dence I initiated after stumbling across a reference to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in
Williams-Korbel’s early-’90s zine That Girl. Unlike Tobi Vail or Anna C., Williams-
Korbel’s response focused solely on Woolf, despite my asking her to list any and all
literary inspirations. What follows is the majority of her email:
Yes, I got involved in Riot Grrrl and zines my first year in college in 1992. I
was also introduced to a lot of modernist feminist writers like Virginia Woolf,
Kate Chopin, and Rebecca West by my Junior Seminar teacher Loretta Stec.…
I was definitely drawn to Virginia Woolf and her stream-of-consciousness
style which I can see in a lot of Riot Grrrl rhetoric where we let our hearts talk
out our feelings without regard to proper punctuation, traditional syntax, struc-
ture, etc. I also loved Mrs Dalloway as Clarissa saw herself as a million different
people into one—as a wife, as a woman, etc. and this has definitely been my ex-
perience as a woman over the years. A Room of One’s Own also resonated with
me as I began to see myself as a serious writer worthy of respect, even though
right now I’m typing to you from a corner in our dining room that I’ve carved
out for myself! I also think Three Guineas and her anti-war stance reminded me
a lot of the early 90s anti-Gulf War movement. And of course the gender fluidity
of Orlando was so cool and ahead of her time.
While I’d like to eventually explore Riot Grrrl’s ties to gender and Orlando as well
as war and Three Guineas, at the moment I’m going to focus on Williams-Korbel’s state-
ment that Clarissa sees herself as a multi-faceted woman. I have always felt that what
makes Mrs Dalloway so compelling is that Clarissa is mostly oblivious to her com-
plexity, while the readers are exposed to it with the help of sound, both in references
to a sound and in the stream-of-consciousness writing style that Williams-Korbel
was also drawn to. Throughout Mrs Dalloway, audio acts as a catalyst for developing
several characters’ multi-layered identities. For instance, the second paragraph of the
novel gives readers immediate insight into Clarissa’s past and personality in a stream-
of-consciousness rambling because of a sound: “For so it had always seemed to her,
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open
the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air” (3). From the onset
of the narrative, it is evident that the novel will be about sound and that Clarissa is
suggestible, as she is “plunged” into her past at the slightest noise. The reader’s first
impression of Clarissa is that her identity is formed by both the past and the present
and is ever-shifting—a hinge can alter her entire perception, change her perspective.
As Williams-Korbel points out, a similar style exists in Riot Grrrl with what she calls
“diaristic” writing.
Although I feel that Williams-Korbel misspoke by saying Clarissa is self-reflective,
in identifying with Clarissa, she and other riot grrrls created personas for themselves
that reflect a multi-faceted, self-aware, and wonderfully flawed identity. Moreover,
because Riot Grrrl zines were often written from a first-person point of view, the en-
gagement with noise as stream of consciousness is self-reflexive and claimed. Take
Abigail Johns’s zine Crème Brûlée, for example, which employs long, monologue-like
sentences to mimic the author’s anxious thoughts about identity and the concept of
home. Although not as traditionally literary as Woolf, Johns’s mirroring is still pres-
ent in a section titled “an agoraphobic tale,” a snippet of which reads: “my home is my
castle my fortress my womb home people stare people make comments there’s lots of
crime it stinks people stink i don’t look right my coat isn’t heavy enough my home’s not
safe w/o me…” (Johns 7). It’s rambling but honest, diaristic, and subtly political, spe-
cifically with her references to how she’s being perceived by others, which demonstrates
an awareness of her murky status within society (perhaps as a result of her forced place-
ment in the domestic sphere). And, as Williams-Korbel argues, it’s a form that parallels
Clarissa’s thoughts in Mrs Dalloway. Furthermore, Johns’s “tale” reads as something
morphing, alive, impossible to pin down. Her subject matter is both broad and per-
sonal with “people stink” vs. “i don’t look right,” and we are unable to categorize her or
understand her as any one thing or being. We are forced to wonder: why she is protec-
tive of her home; is it because she truly values it? Or is it because she knows that people
view her through it (“my womb”)? And why is her home “not safe without” her? This
ambiguity is vital in third-wave politics and forces readers to contemplate the multiple
factors that play a role in shaping women’s identity, in much the same way that Clarissa
is at once a housewife and a young woman at Bourton. Additionally, Woolf operates
similarly in her novel when jumping from focalizer to focalizer in order to comment
on the various ways in which society influences identity. However, in abandoning the
free-indirect, third-person omniscient, “literary” narration present in Woolf, riot grrrls
offer a corrective re-telling in which the female protagonist knows she’s flawed, knows
she’s ever-changing, and knows she’s in control. If the narrative chaos and sound of
Mrs Dalloway’s London provides clarity—albeit, through a multi-vocal cacophony that
requires the reader to decipher it—Riot Grrrl’s loudness is a celebration of failure, a
triumph over the patriarchy and themselves. Importantly, the stream of consciousness
in Riot Grrrl is fundamentally disruptive. Instead of a more common conception of
the narrative device as being something unspoken or silent, the zinesters’ rambling
thoughts serve to upset pre-existing conceptions of women and societal institutions.
Re-centering Woolf and Mrs Dalloway through this lens shifts the focus onto the ways
in which identity is unbound, in the same way that sound is, with its ability to take up
space and transcend physical barriers in the way that visual stimuli cannot.
It’s important to think about literal sound in the traditional, auditory sense when
exploring Riot Grrrl, and Kaltefleiter’s social science analysis of Riot Grrrl is also invalu-
able for providing examples of and a vocabulary for describing the feminist rhetoric of
the movement’s writing and music. For example, Kaltefleiter describes a series of con-
certs that took place before a large anti-abortion rally in Washington D.C. during 1992,
and notes an auditory phenomenon that took place within one of the performance
spaces: “The voice on the microphone oscillated back and forth with girls screaming
from the back to the front of the hall, creating a girl feedback loop” (818). A similar
rhetoric exists in written zines, with collaborators discussing similar topics or including
reader responses, almost like traditional magazines’ “letter to the editor” sections. It’s
worth considering whether Woolf was aiming for a similar idea with the relationship
between Clarissa and Miss Kilman in Mrs Dalloway. Although she sets the women up
as enemies throughout the novel, she gives them remarkably similar experiences with
the violin. For Clarissa, the violin serves as a catalyst for her attraction towards women
and, contemplating these feelings, we read: “And whether it was pity, or their beauty, or
that she was older, or some accident—like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange
is the power of sounds at certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men
felt” (32). Miss Kilman also ponders the source of her feelings in a passage constructed
with the violin and a remarkably similar narrative style when reflecting on how she
came to faith, focalizing: “…and whether it was the music, or the voices (she herself
when alone in the evening found comfort in a violin; but the sound was excruciating;
she had no ear), the hot and turbulent feelings which boiled and surged in her had been
assuaged as she sat there, and she had wept copiously…” (136). The two passages are
nearly identical in structure, both containing asyndetonic examples of auditory stimuli
that serve to move each woman to some type of realization. Specifically, it’s the power
of sound, which is able to reverberate and transcend both physical and social barriers,
that empowers each woman. It’s not unlike the “girl feedback loop” or the Riot Grrrl
rally. Just as the women on opposite sides of the room created a discursive space with
the help of a microphone, so too do Clarissa and Kilman “speak” through the narrative,
even if only to the readers, in much the same way that Clarissa’s identity must be pieced
together from the various noises and memories revealed throughout the plot. In the
instance of Clarissa and Kilman and the Riot Grrrl rally, the sounds’ point of origin is
paramount in developing feminist theory and starting a discussion about privilege. At
the rally, the women at the front of the hall yelled into a microphone, with the women
in the back simply screaming. A similar dynamic occurs in Mrs Dalloway. For Kilman,
the violin is something in which she takes personal solace, producing the “music” her-
self, by her own ability (or lack thereof). For Clarissa, the sound is something she hears
from a distance, something diffused from next door. She doesn’t bear the burden of
forcing herself an exposure to such a stimulus; it is something simply handed to her.
This is representative of her status and privilege, just as Kilman’s self-sufficiency is in-
dicative of her own. The realizations that the sound produces for each woman is equally
telling: for Kilman, listening is something deeply individualized, as she goes to the
church alone, listens to the voices and the music in silence, and plays her violin alone
when no one will hear her or chastise her for doing so. Listening leaves her devout yet
still in solitude, whereas Clarissa has a vastly different experience: she is in her home
and with another woman—perhaps one lovely, young, and pitiful. Unlike Kilman, Cla-
rissa’s experience doesn’t truly leave her with more insight into her identity. Even in
an intimate moment with another woman, she focuses on men in a very narrow and
heteropatriarchal way. Conversely, Kilman is alone, far less privileged, and centers her
experience on her own subjective interpretation of a music she created herself. The jux-
taposition of the two women must therefore be understood as a comment on the ways
in which society has led to the formation of identity for each woman. Both instances
serve to highlight the power dynamics inherent in industrial, capitalist society and
deconstruct them. The “girl feedback loop” allows the lives of these women to link, and
link through sound. Although Woolf may not have been literally collaborating in the
same way that riot grrrls were, I contend that her use of sound, individual subjectiv-
ity in shared experiences, and noise as a linking mechanism is meant to mimic such
a collaboration and intersectional polyvocality, expressly because she uses sounds to
provide insight into marginalized characters’ thoughts. And, because of riot grrrl testi-
mony and literary techniques, I argue that they learned these techniques from writers
and self-publishers such as Woolf.
This research is largely preliminary, and many of the questions it poses thus re-
main to be explored. Still, these questions need to be probed further, as they can serve
to challenge our more orthodox notions about modernism—especially the canoniza-
tion and perhaps subsequent dilution of Woolf ’s radicalism. The larger implications of
these findings are that zines and riot grrrl feminist theory was indeed “serious,” indeed
theoretical and political, and coming from a place of intention—one informed by ca-
nonical modernist literature, no less. Riot grrrls were not making zines for rebellion’s
sake, but engaging in and with thought theorized by first-wave feminist authors such
as Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. Acknowledging this challenges what we
consider literature and why: if teen zinesters were employing the same stylistic tech-
niques, publication tactics, and narratives as a number of highly-revered authors, then
why are zines not studied more? Why was a group of punk teenage girls so obsessed
with British authors active decades before their birth? What can this teach us about
Virginia Woolf and her legacy? The critical implications of these questions and the
ways in which we can view modernist feminism in a new way have so much potential.
Works Cited
Browne, Norman G. Vanations. Edmonton, AB: self-published, 1953. Print.

Chideya, Farai, and Melissa Rossi. “Revolution, Girl Style: Meet the Riot Grrrls—a sassy new breed of femi-
nists for the MTV age,” Newsweek, 23 November 1992. Quoted in Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front. New
York: Harper Perennial, 2010.
Kaltefleiter, Caroline K. “Start Your Own Revolution: Agency and Action of the Riot Grrrl Network.” The
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 36.11/12 (2016): 808–23. Web. 26 June 2017.
Johns, Abigail. Crème Brûlée, no. 2. Seattle, WA: self-published, 1993.
Neubacher, Britton. SKEW. San Diego, CA: self-published, n.d. Print.
La Teoría de Género. N.p., n.d. Print.
Sbragia, Jen. SPARKLYKITTYSTICKERS. Alpine, CA: self-published, 1993. Print.
Vail, Tobi (mstobivail). “@RileyEleanor96 I think Kathi got me into Trinh T Minh-Ha and also Laura Mul-
vey. We were obsessed w/ Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles.” 13 April 2016, 11:23 p.m. Tweet.
Williams-Korbel, Kelli. Personal interview. 2 October 2016.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990. Print.
Virginia Woolf and South America: Border-reading
by Lindsey Cordery
“[…] America—O my America! My new-found-land— […] not merely a

land on the map but symbolized in unknown territories of the soul” (E4 56)
I
n 1996, Virginia Woolf ’s nephew Quentin Bell was interviewed by Antonio Bivar
for the Folha de São Paulo. Among other things, they spoke about the possible
geographical location of The Voyage Out in South America. Quentin Bell stated
quite flatly, that “Virginia’s notions of South America were grotesque” (Bivar). It was
the Argentine Victoria Ocampo, who, through the influential Sur journal and the pub-
lishing house she had founded, introduced Woolf ’s work to the Spanish speaking world
in translations by Borges, and who, according to Bell, explained that Argentina was
not full of butterflies the size of vultures nor was it a jungle full of crocodiles (Bivar).
But Bell misrepresents Woolf ’s “notions” in a particularly unsubtle way; many people
in England at the time probably would have had vague if not “grotesque” “notions” of
South America, and Virginia Woolf ’s South American “notions”—even before becom-
ing acquainted with Victoria Ocampo—were comparatively well-informed.
Long before the meeting with Ocampo (in 1929, through their correspondence,
and 1936, in person), when writing The Voyage Out, Woolf was exploring a territory
well-known to her from her reading. Several texts underpin the geographical loca-
tion of the novel and also engage with what Maria DiBattista suggests is Woolf ’s own
metaphorical voyage out of realism and into modernism. Woolf ’s is a “textured” South
American location, a written space, already inscribed by other writers and other works
of English literature, indicating that the choice of destination for her characters was not
at all random. Santa Marina in its textured environs engages with The Discovery of the
Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, by Sir Walter Raleigh (1596); Oroonoko by
Aphra Behn (1688) and Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (1904), the geographies of which
more or less coincide with the colony of Santa Marina; as well as, also, with sections
of The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard
Hakluyt (1589–1600), all of which Woolf had read, reviewed and written about in es-
says or in her diaries. In addition, Woolf did have some firsthand knowledge of South
America provided directly by South Americans: through W. H. Hudson’s writings, and,
later, through her correspondence with Ocampo.
Because VO—like all of Woolf ’s work—is alive with topical political and social
subjects (see, for e.g. essays in Sellers), I shall introduce two further texts. Written at the
time of composition of Woolf ’s novel, and so a “dialectical surrounding” (to use Jona-
than Culler’s term) I bring in two non-fiction texts: an article published in 1909 in the
London-based journal Truth by Sidney Paternoster, “The Devil’s Paradise,” and Roger
Casement’s 1911 “Putumayo Report.” These texts dialogue with VO in a more or less
intrusive manner, but by making them part of this multi-textual landscape, they will
underscore Woolf ’s highly politicized awareness of controversial contemporary issues.1
Virginia Woolf and South America 227
Transatlantic
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean, like the Elizabethans “discovering” America, and like later
Victorian travelers, the characters in VO journey from what was then considered ultra-
civilizationinto semi-barbarity, a journey that William Henry Hudson had undertaken,
in reverse, from Buenos Aires to Southampton. Hudson also reversed and challenged
the ideas of civilization and barbarity in The Purple Land that England Lost (1885), its
unpopular title later revised to the more successful The Purple Land (1904), his novel of
Englishmen and locals in Uruguay.2 This and his other South American writings, with
his 1904 novel Green Mansions (subtitled “A Romance of the Tropical Forrest”) located
in what might be identified as Santa Marina-land, also confirm the web of textual rela-
tions and radiations; the complex, “intertextual nature of meaning” (cf. Culler) in VO.
Furthermore, the transatlantic link deliberately forged by Woolf both literally and met-
aphorically, together with the voyage located within South America, up the river to the
village in the jungle, suggest an early presentation—or an anticipation—of what Walter
Mignolo defines as “border thinking” (for the study of transatlantic encounters). This
means neither thinking from the center nor the periphery, instead “thinking from het-
erogeneous and multiple borders,” thinking “from dichotomous concepts rather than
ordering the world in dichotomies” (67): a very Woolfian stance.
No wonder VO took Woolf so long to write, for in this, her first novel, she stakes
out the matters that she will engage with throughout her work as a modernist and
border-thinking novelist: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, issues that are the con-
sequences of the patriarchal capitalist system she would denounce so explicitly and
eloquently in her radical, pacifist manifesto Three Guineas, but which, with subtlety,
and with irony, she engages with in multiple ways in all her novels.
Geopolitical literary landscapes
“At lunch I compared you with a South American forest, with panthers sleeping beneath
the trees,” Virginia wrote to Vanessa on 21 July 1911 (LI 471), immersed in the South
American world of VO, no doubt, but also in her reading of a new edition of Hakluyt,
passages from which, as Anne Fernald has shown, Woolf incorporates, at times word
for word in her novel. This literary landscape is recognized by Terence Hewett: “That’s
where the Elizabethans got their style” he says looking at a clearing in the jungle (272).
Woolf herself states that “to most of us, the world of Shakespeare is the world Hakluyt
and Raleigh; on that map Guiana and the River Plate are not far distant […] from the
Forest of Arden or Elsinore” (E2 91). The Guiana area (or Suriname) is the location
of Aphra Behn’s novel denouncing slavery and the Europeans involved in the slave-
trade. Oroonoko is a key-text for Woolf (see AROO) and another of VO’s constellatory
intertexts. In the light of Behn’s novel, Willoughby Vinrace, Rachel’s father, comes to
represent a rather sinister type. Vinrace is a rich man with a possible future career in
politics whose money comes from his shipping company covering the Britain-River
Plate route, as well as from his cargo ships, one of which is the Euphrosyne whose
mission it is to “carry dry goods to the Amazons, and rubber home again” (36). In TG
Woolf underscores the importance of knowing the origin of wealth, the three guineas
of the title referring to “race and the history of slavery on which Britain’s wealth was
built,” as “the guinea itself came into existence in 1633, the same year in which King
Charles II bought stock in the Royal Adventurers into Africa” company (Marcus 24):
this is the context of Oroonoko, and the layers of connectivity with VO become ap-
parent when one realizes that the quoted phrase “carry dry goods to the Amazons, and
rubber home again” is not at all innocent. In 1909 Sidney Paternoster’s article in Truth,
“The Devil’s Paradise” denounced the inhuman treatment of “natives” by the Peruvian
Amazon Company which was registered in Britain in 1908 with a British board of
directors and numerous British stockholders and managed by Julio César Arana. As a
result of the uproar caused by the article, the British consul in Brazil, Roger Casement,
investigated the matter of the enslaved and abused Amazon people, publishing the “Pu-
tumayo Report” in 1911, to tremendous public outrage in Britain. In VO, Willoughby
Vinrace, an honorable man by all accounts, a possible future politician and therefore
sure to be involved in decisions regarding Great Britain and its Empire, writes to his
sister-in-law Helen telling her how he triumphed over “wretched little natives who
went on strike […] until he roared English oaths at them” (194). These “natives,” forced
into submission by Vinrace, recall the indigenous people working as slaves in the Ama-
zon rubber plantations. Behn’s African slaves have been replaced by “native” slaves in
the early twentieth century, not in a British colony, but within what came to be known
as Britain’s “informal empire”—South America.3
From “Indian” superstitious wonder to “native”

indifference. The gaze-as-border
There are two key scenes in VO where the indigenous South American population fig-
ure in ways which subtly challenge or confront simplistic notions of European, and in
particular English, superiority, notably present in the discourse of empire. One scene
necessarily reflects and refracts the other, although they are separated by 300 years,
and several chapters in the book. To my mind, these scenes show Woolf ’s potential as
a post-colonial political writer and anticipate TG by many years.
The first scene is clearly based on Woolf ’s reading of Raleigh’s The Discovery and
hearkens back to the first encounter between Europeans and indigenous Americans,
while the second takes place when members of the English group in Santa Marina
take a tourist sight-seeing trip up river to look at real “natives.” That the two scenes
are meant to inform one another is clear from the description regarding the English
tourists:
Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and nothing
had been done to change its appearance from what it was to the eyes of Eliza-
bethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only distant from the present time
by a moment of space compared with the ages which had passed since the
water had run between those banks […]. (268)
The earlier scene takes place when the Euphrosyne enters the great bay and ap-
proaches Santa Marina. This is in fact a non-scene, one of the great “silences” in the
novel which Woolf reveals to her readers, though not to her characters: Mr. Pepper,
whose thoughts we are witnesses of, does not find anyone ready, or willing, to listen to
his reflections. Mr. Pepper would have liked to refer (but does not, or cannot, so it is
left to the narrator to inform us) to a historical episode, and to the fact that these lands
were inhabited and owned before the Europeans arrived:
The piece of information that died within him was to the effect that three
hundred years ago five Elizabethan barques had anchored where the Euphro-
syne now floated. Half drawn up upon the beach lay an equal number of
Spanish galleons, unmanned, for the country was still a virgin land behind
a veil. Slipping across the water the English sailors bore away bars of silver,
bales of linen, timbers of cedar wood, golden crucifix knobbed with emeralds.
When the Spaniards came down from their drinking a fight ensued […]. The
Spaniards, bloated with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land,
fell in heaps; but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for
lack of razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers
itching for gold, dispatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and
soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment. (86–87,
emphasis added)
The description is an ironic rendering of Raleigh, for whom Guiana, in the let-
ter he wrote to Elizabeth I in 1596 was “a Countrey that hath yet her Mayden head,
never sacked […]” (196). Present-day Santa Marinans—Woolf ’s colony—are never-
theless part of the empire which, in the 16th century, Elizabeth I was not interested in:
the 19th century informal, commerce-and-politics-controlling British empire in South
America—“they get their ploughs from Manchester” (87), Woolf ’s narrator tells us, as
well as, no doubt other “material interests” identified by Conrad in Nostromo. Mr. Pep-
per’s thoughts thus allude to the imperial nations of the past, Spain and Portugal, and
Britain in the present day. Very appropriately, later on in the novel, Terence Hewett says
he will write a novel titled “Silence,” which will refer to the many things unsaid in and
about society: certainly one of the most glaringly loud of the silences is Mr. Pepper’s
unvoiced depiction of the origins of Santa Marina, the significance of which no-one in
the novel will meditate on.
The second journey in VO is in fact a tourist boat-trip up river taken by six char-
acters, to have the chance of inspecting a real “native village in the jungle.” The narrator
here acts as a privileged spectator, looking on at the juxtaposition of two cultures.
Woolf ’s “natives” are nothing like Conrad’s savages, or gaunt Indians or even Hud-
son’s romanticized Rima, his girl-spirit of the jungle in Green Mansions. Rather, we
might group them with the working men oppressed by patriarchy of TG and other
texts. Woolf ’s indigenes are ordinary people; the English, she shows, are in this case,
voyeurs. When the leader of the English group, Mr. Flushing, approaches a man in the
village who from his bearing appears to be important (the villagers are all naked), the
narrator tells us that the Englishman’s body looked “ugly and unnatural” (288). As they
walk around the village where the people are getting on with their everyday lives, peer-
ing into their huts and other such tourist-prerogatives, these new invaders, the English
tourists, begin to feel uncomfortable and perturbed, feeling the “otherness” tradition-
ally assigned to “natives,” themselves. They feel clumsy in their tight clothes, as tight as
military uniforms:
Mr. Flushing […] was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man, whose bones
and hollows at once made the shapes of the Englishman’s body appear ugly
and unnatural. […] they [the English tourists] put out great red hands […],
and felt themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among
these soft instinctive people. (288–89)
The reference to the military reminds us of the soldiers who forged the empire,
and of the Elizabethans of the first encounter. The “natives,” the villagers of the present
time do not regard these new intruders with “superstitious wonder” as the earlier ones
had; on the contrary, they return the gaze, and in gazing, pursue them: “the motionless
inexpressive gaze […] the stare continued […] it followed […] curiously not without
hostility” (289).
The English are disturbed by the nude women; these women return their embar-
rassed, repressed, gaze full-on, and fix it on the strange, absurd, covered bodies. In
doing so, this singular role reversal makes a spectacle of the English party. And soon
the English cease to be of interest to them, as if swallowed by the village, in an ironic
act of anthropophagus-like assimilation (And the irony is even greater if we read Santa
Marina as indeed located in Brazil, where the metaphor of modernism is anthropoph-
agy). Feeling their roles as tourist-voyeurs destabilized, Terence and Rachel head back
to the boat. Terence says: “It makes us seem insignificant, doesn’t it?” She agrees and
answers thoughtfully: “So it would go on for ever and ever, those women sitting under
the trees, the trees and the river” (289).
However, in spite of the impact the village had on the little tourist party, once
back in Santa Marina their experiences there, too, are relegated to another “silence.”
The unintimidated “natives” “reduced” the English group who are representatives of
a class whose jobs involve “giving judgment, civilizing natives, making laws, writing
books, dressing up” (AROO 36). In Woolf ’s worldview, already in 1912, the paradigms
of patriarchy are untenable, and from a 21st century vantage point of trans-amazon
highways, deforestation and indigenous vindications, Rachel’s comment seems a typi-
cal case of ironically depicted, naïve wishful thinking.
South American finale-as-border
Virginia Woolf renewed her interest in South America through her acquaintance, both
in person and through their correspondence, with Argentine Victoria Ocampo. In a
letter of 1934 to Vita Sackville-West she provocatively adds a post-script, à propos of
nothing, “I am in love with Victoria Okampo” (L5 355) In another letter she considers,
though declines, an invitation to address the P.E.N. club meeting in Buenos Aires in
1935, writing rather intriguingly: “I cant talk about literature, thats not my line […] All
the same, one of these days I shall come” (L5 439).
In the pre-war days of 1938 Woolf published her feminist pacifist manifesto TG.
However, only one year later the world was at war again and her disillusion and sense
of hopelessness increased with the news about the war having spread out to distant
South America. The sinister, rapacious-looking ships near the beginning of VO which
Richard Dalloway proudly, solemnly, identifies as the Mediterranean Fleet while Clar-
issa “squeezed Rachel’s hand convulsively” saying “Aren’t you glad to be English?” (65,
66), become nightmarishly alive on 13 December 1939 when the HMS Ajax, Exeter
and Achilles engage in the first naval battle of the war with the German Graf Spee in the
Battle of the River Plate. In some way like the “natives” who are made into a spectacle
in VO, so, too, war, which Woolf denounced from her first writings, has also been,
tragically, transformed into the spectacle which she notes in her diary. To her a clear
consequence of the patriarchal system, Woolf appears to be implying that war has be-
come one more thing among many in a routine existence, a realistic dead end which
she is no longer able to face. In her diary entry for 17 December 1939 she notes:
[…] the Graf Spee is going to steam out of Montevideo today into the jaws of
death. And journalists and rich people are hiring aeroplanes from which to
see the sight. […] Anyhow the eyes of the whole world are on the game; and
several people will lie dead tonight or in agony. And we shall have it served up
for us […] and the British captain has been given a KCB. (D5 251)
Notes
1. For detailed information and discussion of the reports, see Jordan Goodman, The Devil and Mr. Case-
ment: One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America (Especially Part Two: 2010, web).
2. See DiBattista for some interesting comments.
3. Helen Carr in part refers to this subject (203–204). Although Carr does not use the term “native,” she
calls the indigenous people “Indians”—an inaccurate term, also, inappropriate.
Works Cited
Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Bivar, Antonio. “O caçula de Bloomsbury.” Folha de São Paulo, 20 Oct. 1996 (web).
Carr, Helen. “Virginia Woolf, Empire and Race.” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan
Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 197–214.
Culler, Jonathan. “Comparative Literature, at Last.” Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Ed.
Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. 237–48.
Fernald, Anne. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
DiBattista, Maria. “Virginia Woolf and the Landscapes of Fantasy.” Virginia Woolf en América Latina. Ed.
Lindsay Cordery et al. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2013. 27–46.
Marcus, Jane. Introduction and notes to Three Guineas. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006.
Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Raleigh, Sir Walter. The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. 1596. Ed. Neil L. White-
head. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.
Sellers, Susan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
Woolf, Leonard. The Village in the Jungle. 1913. Memphis, Tennessee: General Books, 2010.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 5 1936–1941. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew Mc-
Neillie. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume One 1904–1912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Orlando: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich Publishers, 1986.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume Two 1912–1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Orlando: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich Publishers, 1987.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume One 1888–1912. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1977.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume Five: 1932–1935. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. Lon-
don: Chatto and Windus, 1982.
——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Ed. Susan Gubar. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2005.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. Ed. Jane Marcus. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006.
——. The Voyage Out. 1915. Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 1970.
Editing and Teaching Woolf
Learning Through the (Digital) Archive:
Notes on Undergraduate Research
Introduction by Elizabeth Willson Gordon
W
hat follows are reflections from three Research Assistants who worked with
the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) for more than two
years. Before that they were students in a senior modernism class at King’s
University (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) which used MAPP as a classroom resource.
They have been part of a team that consisted of Research Assistants from various in-
stitutions including the University of Reading, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver),
the University of Oregon, and Stanford University with whom they shared questions,
insights, and resources. These students have also worked alongside the six faculty mem-
bers of the MAPP team—both virtually and face to face—researching biographies,
writing new content for the site, seeking out Hogarth Press first editions or images of
obscure figures, inputting data, and writing bibliographies.
The students were trained on MAPP’s Drupal interface and engaged with the data
model that underpins MAPP and to which they were contributing. Even inputting data
into the system required an understanding, for example, that a “Work” is the abstract
concept of the literary text, as distinct from specific editions of that work, each of which
is made up of individual copies (in MAPP terminology called “Primary Objects”), each
with their own provenance. The networks of modernism became visible in new ways as
students entered this information into the digital system, as did the complexity of book
production. Helping to build this resource has given them a sense of the team approach
that such a project requires, and it has also helped them to see the impact of research,
to more directly imagine the readers and users who might seek out and benefit from
the work they have done.
1. Tyler Johansson
I would like in this short piece to describe some of the lessons I learned while researching
an obscure modernist figure and to explain how this experience changed how I viewed
researching, being a student, and collaborating. One of the most exciting and challenging
tasks we have done as research assistants has been writing biographies of literary figures
who have been associated in some way with the Hogarth Press. These figures have ranged
from the obscure (like Frank Prewett and C. J. M. Hubback) to household names (like
Sigmund Freud and T. S. Eliot). There are distinct challenges when it comes to both ends
of the fame spectrum and I am going to begin with the obscure and move on to how this
experience of being a research assistant for The Modernist Archives Publishing Project
(MAPP) influenced my experience in a modernist classroom.
I was first assigned to write on C. J. M. Hubback. I was given those three initials
and a last name, and that’s it. When I did my first Google search as a fresh-faced under-
graduate I came up with absolutely nothing—not even his first name—which as I’m sure
Learning Through the (Digital) Archive 235
you can imagine was a little disheartening. This became my first lesson that would assist
me in my future writing: you’re not always going to find what you are looking for. After
weeks of searching all I had found was an editorial note from Ernst Jones which men-
tioned a MISS Hubback in the preface of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Jones
remarks that he “revised this translation, so carefully made by Miss Hubback, several
times.” While I had found that I was wrong in assuming she was a he I still did not have
a lot to go on and was forced to email Dr. Willson Gordon informing her of my failure
and asking if a two-sentence biography was even possible. She was kind enough to as-
sure me that whatever I could find would be enough, even if it was only two sentences. I
wasn’t satisfied. To be frank, I was determined to find at least Miss Hubback’s full name.
This brings me to lesson two: be creative. Google had failed me, Virginia Woolf
never mentioned Hubback in her diaries or letters, and I could find no further refer-
ence to her. So I went to a unlikely source: ancestry.ca and searched for any Hubbacks
with the first initial C born from 1850 to 1920 hoping to come across something. Over
an hour later I had a name: Caroline Jane Mary Hubback. Elated, I was quick to email
Dr. Willson Gordon to check if this could be a viable source and if there was any way
to verify that this was the right Hubback.
From here I learned perhaps my greatest lesson from being a research assistant: the
key is collaboration. We were all so unbelievably fortunate to work in an environment
where collaboration was encouraged. Had I gone it alone I would have missed out on
the greatest discovery about Hubback: she was a descendant of Austen…as Dr. Batter-
shill said in her email to us, “yes, that Austen.”
We learned from the combination of the birth announcement found by Dr. Batter-
shill at the British Library and my own digging through the Internet that Caroline Jane
Mary Hubback was born on August 17, 1871 in Cheshire, England to John Henry Hub-
back and Mary Page Hubback (née Ingram). Caroline was the eldest child of the seven
Hubback children and one of five girls. The children are fourth generation descendants
of the Austen family and it is through this connection that much of the current infor-
mation came to light. For interest’s sake I would like to clarify that the Hubback family
is descended from Jane Austen’s brother Francis and (what I find really interesting) is
that Caroline’s sister Edith and her father actually wrote a book on the Austen broth-
ers entitled Jane Austen’s sailor brothers: being the adventures of Sir Francis Austen and
Charles Austen (1905).
So, from the Austen find I had a new approach; because of this new angle I found
a childhood picture and interviews of Hubback in an unpublished manuscript that
tracked Jane Austen’s genealogy. Once again thanks to the suggestion of Dr. Battershill
I was able to find archival materials from Hubback at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in
London. I also found original writing done by Hubback under C. J. Hubback; and from
the suggestion of an archivist I found a book of correspondence between Ernest Jones
and Freud in which Hubback was discussed.
I went from having a sentence to having a name to having a biography. At any
point I could have stopped researching but I pushed past the difficulty and kept look-
ing. Now, I have written the story of a person who had been an anonymous translator
for the most famous psychologist in history. That story is now part of MAPP, online at
https://www.modernistarchives.com/person/caroline-jane-mary-hubback.
2. Sara Grimm
Collaboration has been at the heart of the MAPP project and so I wish to reflect on
it from the perspective of an undergraduate student. In my experience and the expe-
rience of my fellow classmates, as far as I have gleaned from my conversations with
them over the course of my degree, collaboration in the humanities is something which
rarely, if ever, enters students’ minds. In fact, the only time I have heard collaboration
mentioned or implied, with the exception of the typical end-of-term study practice of
reviewing notes together, is in relation to group projects; most specifically “thank god
we don’t have to do them!” In short, group efforts are not viewed as critical to English
literature students if they are even considered at all. Studies in English, and I’m assum-
ing most of the humanities, are widely understood at the undergraduate level and to
the general public as solitary pursuits. One observes such an idea in the stereotypical
image of the frumpy, absent-minded and naïve professor who spends her or his life se-
questered in a study or library with their books, forsaking any sort of modern or social
connection with the world in favour of “higher pursuits.”
What does this have to do with MAPP or pedagogy? Let me explain. One of the
first projects assigned to me after Dr. Willson Gordon hired me was to research the life
and works of Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology. Seeing as how Freud is
a household name, I expected that this job wouldn’t take much more than a simple trip
to the library or two. Writing Freud’s biography did prove to be this straightforward, as
even Wikipedia has a comprehensive overview of Freud’s life. However, I encountered
problems when attempting to compile a comprehensive bibliography of his works. At
first, it was quite simple. Woolmer, for example, had already published a complete list
of all of Freud’s works published by the Hogarth Press. In fact, finding the majority of
all English-language editions and compilations was not difficult at all. Now, some of
you may have recognized it already, but the problem with all this is that Freud did not
work in English. His mother tongue was German, and this was the language he worked
in over the course of his career.
Of course, Freud’s major works were translated and subsequently published in
English. But what about his earlier works such as those written when he was just be-
ginning his career and publishing in almost-forgotten medical journals? As it turns
out, some of Freud’s earliest works had never been deemed important enough to be
officially translated and published in English.
To trace Freud’s publishing history was therefore no simple task for me. I do not
speak German and yet I found myself wading through pages and pages of German
websites and databases. Eventually, through the use of keyword searches and Google
Translate, I was able to piece together a (hopefully) complete bibliography of Freud’s
published works, including several journal reviews which do not immediately appear
translated into English to this day.
But how does this relate to pedagogy? As an undergraduate who grew up using
various library systems and had access to websites such as Wikipedia from a very
young age, I had already assumed that compilations of information such as the entirety
of Freud’s published works already existed. In my mind, databases and archives which
hold this type of information just are—after all, these people have been around for a
century. In a world where we’re actively entering the age of quantum computing how
could we not have clear, easily accessible records of something so well-known such as
the published works of Freud, even if they are minor early works unrelated to the major
theses that he is lauded for?
The upending of my assumptions about how much information is already easily ac-
cessible has led me to ruminate on the necessity of access to information. For instance,
because English is my first language, I’ve often taken for granted how straightforward
researching is for me. Typically, if I want to know something I can just Google it, look
it up in an encyclopedia or poke around in a database and find what I want. But obvi-
ously, this hasn’t always been true and still isn’t true for everyone. I couldn’t find some
information held in obscure medical journals. But what about people who want to find
information originally created in a language that isn’t translated into a language that
they speak fluently? Such thoughts have made me realize just how utterly crucial access
to knowledge is, whether in a certain language or in an archive. Not to have this access
is a significant detriment, not just to undergraduate students but also to society itself,
assuming that the authorities who have loudly proclaimed that lack of access to educa-
tion and knowledge severely limits individuals, their families, communities and thus
societies as a whole are correct.
Therefore, if you take the same view that I do, that the humanities are one of the
cores of society that reflects our history, beliefs and values, it is incredibly urgent that
the collaborative nature of the humanities is recognized. Every society has beliefs and
values, but continuing to value our histories and beliefs in a world of fast information
and flashing lights takes work and dedication from people in various parts of society;
that is, it takes collaboration. If humanities are inadvertently teaching their students
that their studies and work are primarily individual pursuits, we are limiting students’
access to crucial knowledge about collaboration in the context of text creation. We are
perpetuating the myth of the solitary “I.” Thus, we risk losing crucially valuable parts of
the humanities which are based on collaboration and thus we risk losing some of those
values which construct society.
The Modernist Archives Publishing Project is, in my mind, an antidote to anti-
collaborative thinking. How so? One way in which MAPP appears to be making a mark
is in bringing forward stories of illustrating the significance of collaboration in creating
works that are typically credited to only one individual. This is exemplified clearly in
the figure of Canadian war poet Frank Prewett.
Frank Prewett was born in the late 19th century in Mt. Forest, ON, Canada, where
he spent his early childhood. He later moved to Toronto, which is where he was resid-
ing when the First World War broke out. Prewett joined the Canadian Officer Training
Corps and ten weeks later deployed to Europe, where he fought in the battles at Pass-
chendale, Ypres, the Somme and the Vimy campaign. Eventually he was injured after
being buried alive in a dug out and was subsequently sent to a hospital in Scotland
where he was diagnosed with shell-shock. It was during this period that Prewett met
Siegfried Sassoon. They quickly became friends which resulted in Prewett’s introduc-
tion to the Garsington group. Soon Prewett was associating with the likes of Leonard
and Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Dorothy Brett, T. E. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Thomas
Hardy and Wilfred Owen. Prewett was accepted by this group at least on a professional
level. For example, Virginia Woolf wrote to Lytton Strachey during this period, com-
menting that “the Literary Superintendent, by the way, says that Prewett is a poet;
perhaps a great one” (L2 479).
When the war ended, Prewett briefly returned to Canada before returning to Eu-
rope to complete a degree at Oxford. Upon the completion of this degree, Prewett was
employed on the Garsington Estate by Lady Ottoline Morrell, with whom it was ru-
mored he was having an affair. However, Prewett’s place in the circle ended abruptly.
Prewett was accused of stealing milk from the estate and dismissed, which essentially
exiled him from any connections he had made. Prewett faded into relative obscurity,
his writing career now confined to agricultural reports.
It is not unreasonable to hypothesize, therefore, that Prewett’s relative obscurity
and exclusion from the lists of the well-known Bloomsbury writers was not merely
due to his work being of an inferior quality. Rather, it is due to a myriad of factors,
including the loss of the writing community, and by extension, collaboration. Writing,
English literature, the humanities, are not solitary pursuits. They require a community
of collaboration.
This is the strength of MAPP. Through the organization of data in a digital criti-
cal archive, the massive web of collaborators involved in the production of modernist
literature is illuminated. Thus, tools such as MAPP are clearly invaluable resources for
combating the rampant individualism which plagues the humanities, at least at the
undergraduate level. The value of MAPP, and projects like it, lies not only in its uses
for informational learning, but also in demonstrating the truly communal nature of
the humanities.
3. Rynnelle Wiebe
Whereas Tyler and Sara’s biography subjects were at opposite ends of the spectrum in
terms of the volume of information that was readily available for researching and writ-
ing, I was given the task of writing a biography of C. N. S. Woolf, who falls somewhere
in the middle of that spectrum. At first, I had no idea who this was, but after some
brief searching I learned that this was Leonard Woolf ’s brother, Cecil Nathan Sidney
Woolf. It was interesting to research C. N. S. Woolf because he is a minor character in
the modernist movement as he is only associated with three published works, but he is
adjacent to some very significant individuals in modernism.
While researching for my first biography assignment, I learned that we cannot al-
ways research the individual directly. Though there was definitely more information
readily available about Woolf than Hubback, there was still definitely not as much in-
formation as there was about Freud! I found most information about Woolf ’s childhood
and upbringing in biographies about Leonard, and even looked through Virginia Woolf ’s
diaries in order to find her impressions about her brother-in-law. For example, in one of
her diaries, Virginia describes his poems as “not very good; they show the Woolf ten-
dency to denunciation, without the vigour of my particular Woolf ” (D1 124). One reason
why there is so little information about Woolf could be because of his early death. He
was killed in the war at the age of thirty, having only published an expanded version of
his college dissertation, as well as a translation of Stendhal’s On Love completed with
his younger brother Philip. After Cecil’s death, Leonard and Virginia, along with Philip,
published a commemorative volume of fifteen of Cecil’s poems, which he wrote between
1909 and 1911 while at Cambridge (Chapman 77). This four inch by three inch, white,
nineteen page booklet simply titled Poems, was the second publication of the Hogarth
Press. Although the Hogarth Press was not intended for private publications, Poems was
distributed privately rather than sold, as a memoir of Cecil’s life (Levenback 34), and is
now one of the rarest publications of the Press. It was interesting to discover and come
to care for this individual who many people have probably read about while researching
his more famous family members. For example, after learning about Cecil and Philip’s
friendship, translation projects, and time together during the war, Philip’s dedication at
the beginning of Poems is even more meaningful. Philip wrote: “Had he lived longer,
some of these poems, revised and re-polished, might have appeared one day in a vol-
ume under both our names. Now that he is gone, I dedicate them, as they were left, to
the memory of the dearest and bravest brother that a man was ever loved by—animae
dimidium meae [i.e., half my soul]” (Spater and Parsons 102).
As the topic of this roundtable is pedagogy, I wanted to focus on how our research
contributes to learning about modernism. We had the unique experience of joining
MAPP as research assistants in the spring of 2015, before participating as students
in the modernism class at our university that fall. To be honest, prior to becoming a
research assistant, my only exposure to modernism was a brief study of it, including
Virginia Woolf ’s “A Mark on the Wall” in a literary survey course, so I did not know
what I was getting into when I became a research assistant.
As I researched, I learned that an important characteristic of the modernist period
was the connection and collaboration between modernist figures. While researching
one individual, I might read about his or her interactions with, or knowledge of, other
modernist writers, such as Sara’s discussion of Prewett’s literary society, or Tyler’s dis-
cussion of Hubback’s connections. In this way, authors pushed each other forward in
their work or worked together, which was an important aspect of the Hogarth Press.
As I mentioned earlier, this research also helped me to gain an appreciation for the
humanity of each of these modernist individuals and come to care for them. These
were not just writers or translators, these were individuals with interesting lives and
unique experiences, something that I do not typically appreciate when studying an in-
dividual during regular coursework. For example, I learned that Virginia and Leonard
put their publication of Mansfield’s Prelude on hold in order to publish the small col-
lection of C. N. S. Woolf ’s poetry. I understand this much differently having researched
C. N. S than if I were to be studying Mansfield’s writing and noting when each work
was published. In this way, the MAPP critical digital archive, with its emphasis on the
lives of various authors and translators, and their relationships with each other, allows
researchers to appreciate the atmosphere and society of the modernist time period in
a unique way. I found that as I continued to research and study for the modernism
course, what intrigued me most about modernism was the people. As I learned more
about the people and their social situation, their friends, and collaborators, I desired
to learn more about their works. The modernism course gave insight as to the back-
ground situations of what society was like and what these modernists were responding
to. When learning about modernism, it was these two aspects that made the material
engaging: the social circles and lives of individuals I had glimpsed while researching,
and the position in history that informed their concerns.
Not only did we as research assistants learn effective and efficient research strategies,
but we also learned about what goes on behind the scenes in order to create learning and
research tools. We did data entry, searching partner library catalogues for first editions
of Hogarth Press publications and recording call numbers for these books. We became
very familiar with spreadsheets of data, which, though not as interesting as researching
unique individuals who contributed to modernism, taught me about the meticulous and
repetitive processes that are essential to research projects of this magnitude.
Prior to this project, most of my research had been for university courses and,
as such, was very individualistic; however, being a part of MAPP taught me the value
of working with a research team. Tyler described the collaboration necessary to find
information on Hubback, and even though I did not directly communicate with oth-
er researches to find specific information in the same way, being a research assistant
helped me see the collaboration we do every time we research: we read and learn from
various researchers who have done work before us. As such, it is as though I collabo-
rated with the authors of the Woolf biographies that I read, as well as our professors
who gave us tips and guidance for further research when it felt as though we had hit
a wall. Further, working with other research assistants resulted in a sense of group
support. When we were first assigned our biography subjects, a few of us went to the
library together, grabbed a stack of books about Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press,
and started searching. We could scan through these books much more efficiently to-
gether than we could on our own. We also brainstormed ideas for ways to approach our
research and writing, as well as peer edited our biography drafts. The diversity of the
research assistant team at King’s was also helpful in that it was composed of students of
various years of study; those who had more research experience acted as motivators to
improve my own level of research, and as examples of how good research can be done.
As I reflect on what I learned about modernism from this research and what I
learned about research itself from this experience, it is interesting that a common
theme is collaboration: the early modernists were not separate entities, but collabo-
rated or reacted to each other, and even cared for each other and their literary works.
Similarly, I learned the value of collaboration in my own experience with the research
assistant team as we pushed each other forward when research was discouraging, and
celebrated with each other over new discoveries.
Works Cited
Chapman, Wayne K. and Janet M. Manson. “Carte and Tierce: Leonard, Virginia Woolf, and War for Peace.”
Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Ed. Mark Hussey. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1991. 58–78.
Levenback, Karen L. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.
Spater, George, and Ian Parsons. A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia
Woolf. London: Jonathon Cape, 1977.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1915–1919. Eds. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew Mc-
Nelle. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1981.
Editing Woolf
1. Considering Companions
by Jessica Berman
I
will put my cards on the table—I never wanted to edit a Companion—to Virginia
Woolf or any other writer. In fact, companions scare me. They create the appear-
ance of coverage or the definitive word on any particular topic or subject. The very
notion of a “companion” presumes familiarity, comradery, or friendship—or at least the
prospect of these relations. Handbooks, even at their most perspicacious, invite us to
think the topic can be made ready “to hand,” and often must find ways to make that
possible—excising the unfamiliar, the far flown, or the foreign. The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Modernism, admittedly, a 1999 volume updated more than five years ago, barely
ventures outside Anglo-American writing, except by reference to Picasso, Freud, Marx,
et al., and rarely moves outside of the period between the last decade of the 19th century
and WWII. I wonder, what happens to a writer like Gustave Flaubert in these models—
or that painter of modern life, Charles Baudelaire? What happens to the writers in the
colonies, whose lack of access to cultural and economic power often means they don’t
“do” modernism or modernity until the second half of the century? In an effort to make
these volumes less about traditional categories of coverage, Cambridge has begun to
issue companions that look more like conventional essay collections, such as The Cam-
bridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, or a recent one I’ve contributed to:
The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. This is a good impulse,
but it is hard to know why these should still be called “companions,” when those are,
by their own definition, “a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, of-
fering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and
periods.” Not to pick on Cambridge—Wiley Blackwell has also started to make more
topical and less generic companions, like the Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, now
in its second edition. This looks like a terrific book, with a whole section on “Race and
Colonialism,” and another on “Performing Sexuality.” But I fear that companions are
crowding out other work in the field, making it harder to publish groundbreaking mono-
graphs or other adventurous work that doesn’t purport to provide a general overview.
And beyond that, as Michael Levenson remarks in that Cambridge Companion to
Modernism, “A Companion cannot be a friend to everyone…it must perform resolute
acts of exclusion before speaking at all” (7). This point must, in some way, apply to
nearly every companion, since its purpose is to make the topic accessible and its mode
is usually to create a relationship of familiarity with those it reaches or represents. In
other words, the assumption is that the editor of the volume will be the friend or guide
of the reader in introducing a new topic or gathering key ideas, information or per-
spectives about it. But not every reader can become such a friend, or be invited into
the sphere of reading called into being by the volume. Levenson defends his point,
arguing that “this act of attention aims to be a focus, not a prison” and that the volume
will ultimately “free the reader to recognize the extraordinary profusion” of modern-
ism (7). I need to smile at this way of thinking: by focusing and excluding we are being
freed. Yet, I often feel quite the opposite, imprisoned within the boundaries set by the
table of contents. Companions lay out a perimeter or border past which they will not
venture (Eastern Europe anyone?). They often practice a habit of exclusion even before
they begin, which builds upon and perpetuates the selective canon of books that ap-
pear on university syllabi and in secondary education curricula. Despite Levenson’s
admirable efforts to create a more inclusive model of modernism, that volume pretty
much relegates black writers to Sara Blair’s chapter on “Modernism and the Politics of
Culture” and non-Euro American writers to Elleke Boehmer’s chapter on “Modernism
and Colonialism.” Though these chapters are meant to reach out to include a wider
variety of modernisms, they do so by inserting those writers within an “imprisoning,”
exclusionary problematic. Certain authors never get to be the focus of the chapter on
modernist fiction or modernist poetry, tout court. Unfortunately, this serves more as
the rule than as the exception in contemporary publishing, which holds significant
power to determine the shape of our scholarly lives.
So, then, why did I edit the Companion to Virginia Woolf for Wiley-Blackwell?
What was I hoping to accomplish? Whose companion would this be and for what pur-
pose? And how should we think about the affordances and limitations of these sorts
of volumes? As I argued when I proposed the volume, we are still in need of scholarly
resources for Woolf studies. The materials lag behind those of other major canonical
authors, like Joyce and Faulkner, who long ago had their Blackwell companions. We
have only one Norton edition of Woolf, no Bedford edition—which makes those from
Cambridge, Shakespeare Head, and Harcourt even more important! Still, I’d argue, we
need resources for the classroom, especially. New instructors picking up an author for
the first time, those being assigned a course that includes that author or those advising
students outside their area of expertise need these sorts of resources. And colleagues
have told me that the Companion to Virginia Woolf is very helpful for teaching. Second,
as you all know, and my co-panelists’ work demonstrates, companions can promote
smart, creative even provocative scholarship. We need, among many others, essays
like, Laura Marcus’s on “Woolf ’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf,” in Susan Sellers
and Sue Roe’s Cambridge Companion, and Jane Goldman’s on “Woolf and Modernist
Aesthetics” in Maggie Humm’s Companion to Woolf and the Arts, and Madelyn Detl-
off ’s essay on “Woolf and Lesbian Culture” in Goldman and Bryony Randall’s Virginia
Woolf in Context. I could go on listing the brilliant essays in all of these volumes. In
my Companion, I purposefully refrained from writing a summative introduction, that
might be taken mistakenly as some kind of final word on Woolf or handed out to
undergraduates as a quick entrée to her study. I commissioned essays on each of her
works that took up perspectives rather than tried to be summary or definitive. I was
also consciously trying to add to transnational dimensions of Woolf scholarship with
the “Woolf and the World” section: an essay on “Woolf and Translation,” another on
“Reading Woolf in India,” and one on “Woolf in Hispanic Countries.” But this doesn’t
come close to Woolf and the World! How much of the world can fit into two or three
essays? At this conference, there was a gorgeous paper by Paulina Pajak about The Well
Editing Woolf 243
of Loneliness in Polish translation and the echoing text of A Room of One’s Own. How
many of us have thought about Woolf and Poland?
So this is why I still hesitate. I’m worried about all the lists that appear in compan-
ions and handbooks of “Woolf and…”: “Woolf and Aesthetics,” “Woolf and Politics,”
“Woolf and Postcolonialism,” or “Woolf and Translation.” The exercise of coming up
with these lists of topics for companions is worthy of some kind of parlor game. We can
never end the list and the list will never be exhaustive. But once put between boards, in
hard covers, at the front of a book—the list looks like it is complete. There for all to see:
“Woolf and the City” (but maybe not “Woolf and the Country”); “Woolf, Race, Empire,
and Ireland” (but maybe not “Woolf, Race, Empire, and India”); “Woolf and Lesbian
Culture” (but maybe not “Queer” or “Trans Woolf ”—or maybe…I hope there is, now).
The problem of the too-simple taxonomy, the easy companionship, or world in a
handbook model of Woolf studies is less one for us as scholars who know that the field
keeps growing and the categories keep changing, and who might welcome a new col-
lection of interesting essays. But it is a serious one for our students, who come fresh to
those volumes looking for a definitive Woolf. Who or what are we creating? Who or
what are we excluding? I remember when there was no history, no feminism, no race
in modernist studies. We need to ask: what are the missing categories today? Maybe it
is time we ask ourselves, how do we resist producing and policing borders with these
volumes? How do we value the opportunity to create these resources and to welcome
the wonderful essays they often contain without misusing the privilege?
Works Cited
Berman, Jessica, ed. A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.

“Cambridge Companions.” Cambridge Core. Cambridge University Press. Web. Accessed June 1, 2017.
Humm, Maggie, ed. Edinburgh Companion to Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010.
Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999, 2011.
Randall, Bryony and Jane Goldman, eds. Virginia Woolf in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012.
Roe, Sue and Susan Sellers, eds. Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
2. Editing and Companions to Woolf
by Bryony Randall
My contribution focusses on editing Woolf in the context of the many other new
editions of modernist texts currently underway, drawing on discussions held at the
three meetings of the New Modernist Editing Network in 2016 and 2017 (https://
newmodernistediting.wordpress.com/). This Network, funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (UK) arose from my own involvement with editing
modernism, as co-General Editor and volume editor of the Cambridge University
Press Edition of the works of Virginia Woolf, and as a volume editor of the forthcoming
Oxford University Press Edition of the works of Dorothy Richardson. The Network was
proposed as a response to the increasing numbers of new editions of modernist authors
underway, not least as these authors come out of copyright, and the pressing need for
those engaged with editing modernist texts to come together to share their experience.
The Network discussions were of course wide-ranging, but in this particular context—
for an audience of Woolf scholars—key questions that emerge from the concerns of the
Network include: how can sharing practice and principles with colleagues working on
other modernist authors help inform, sharpen, and refine our editorial work on Woolf?
Which needs might modernist editions share, and where might they need distinct and
bespoke attention?
My contribution, then, offers a few key insights and observations which emerged
from the Network which speak in some way to these questions. Firstly: it was striking
how many of the editors currently engaged in producing new editions of modernist
texts have been “learning on the job.” The current generation of mid-career modernist
scholars seems to have had very little teaching and/or training in textual scholarship,
presumably in part because up until quite recently there were few modernist editions
underway, and therefore there was no perceived need for such training as a key as-
pect of modernist scholarship—as might be assumed for, for example, Shakespeare
scholars—partly based on an incorrect assumption that textual issues are less signifi-
cant for later texts (i.e. the existence of a range of folio or quarto manuscript versions
of a text requires more attention than, say, multiple machine-printed impressions or
editions). This has meant that many modernist scholars approach editorial practice
in an inductive rather than deductive way, working from specific examples in front
of us in order to form our own general principles, rather than necessarily following
established principles. There are of course both risks and opportunities to this ap-
proach, and both sides of this debate were covered in the New Modernist Editing
discussions. But I have found this question as put by one Network participant par-
ticularly striking: if the sine qua non of modernist writing is its experimentalism, is
it legitimate—indeed, perhaps necessary—therefore to have “experimental” editing?
This of course relates to what was perhaps the primary question underpinning the
Network’s activities and one which resurfaced repeatedly at our meetings: namely,
what is distinct (if anything) about editing a modernist text (a question raised by
critics such as George Bornstein, Dirk Van Hulle, and Hannah Sullivan)? And there-
fore, in this context: what’s distinct about editing a text by Woolf?
The Network provided no easy answers. This was perhaps entirely predictable,
though I did, before we began, wonder whether anyone was going to come in and of-
fer us the “correct” way of approaching a particular problem (indeed there are times
at which some of us might wish they had). There were very strong differences of
opinion on how one might approach elements of editing—annotation in particu-
lar—and discussion of the implications of these choices, but if there was consensus
on anything, it was that different kinds of editions, and different kinds of authors,
enable, allow for, or require, different approaches. Of course, what this does is em-
phasise both the demands made of, and the opportunities open to, the editor of the
modernist text.
Editing Woolf 245
Two specific examples will provide a little more detail on what I, as a practis-
ing editor of Woolf (and Richardson), got from the Network discussions—which, it
should be emphasised, were structured very much as conversations rather than as
providing bearers of knowledge with a platform from which to impart their insights
to the uninitiated. Firstly, a number of editors shared their struggles with dealing
with typescript—not a problem, of course, for that Shakespearean scholar or indeed
anyone editing a text from before the late nineteenth century. Even those individuals
who had received some training in textual editing—such as Martin Stannard, edi-
tor of Evelyn Waugh—reported that dealing with typescripts had not featured at all.
It seems clear that there are few established protocols for handling manuscripts in
typescript, and that while this can be exhausting or even alarming for the editor, it
also provides an opportunity for genuine innovation in approaches to textual editing;
particularly, in a modernist context, in relation to the question of supposed “error”
but also in terms of how one pays attention to the specific material and technological
production of a text.
Secondly, one particular Network member expressed the position of the reader of
the scholarly annotation in a way which suddenly clarified for me what our aim should
be in writing an explanatory note. Philip Horne, editor of Henry James, observed that
it was not necessarily a question of always providing information that was completely
new to the reader—although this might frequently be the case; in some instances, the
reader may once have known what was being explained, but had at the moment of
reading the text, forgotten. It is therefore our job as scholarly editors to remind, as
much as to impart new knowledge. This took away for me much of the anxiety in-
volved in navigating the potentially very wide readership of a major scholarly edition.
While such editions will be used by the most eminent scholars, they may also be key
reference works for, say, undergraduates in Taiwan; and as such also of the scholars of
Woolf of twenty years hence. The editor must tread a fine line, in tone just as much as
in content, avoiding either patronising the informed reader or alienating the relatively
uninformed. In this way, the key to a successful edition can be established: namely,
trust between editor and reader.
Works Cited
Bornstein, George, Material Modernism: the politics of the page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Van Hulle, Dirk, Modern Manuscripts: the extended mind and creative undoing from Darwin to Beckett and
beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Sullivan, Hannah, The Work of Revision. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Editions Cited
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf

The Dorothy Richardson Editions Project (Oxford University Press)
The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (Oxford University Press)
The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James
3. Authority and the Cambridge Woolf: An Edition of Record
by Jane Goldman
“One of our recurrent topics,” writes a recent enquirer to Susan Sellers and myself (and
now Bryony Randall too), General Editors of the Cambridge University Press Edition of
the Works of Virginia Woolf, “is why more ongoing editions don’t seek the CSE’s seal of
approval.” John Young, Executive Director, Society for Textual Scholarship, and co-chair
of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, seems rightly
concerned that a new generation of scholarly editions and editors are not taking advan-
tage of the expert approval of the CSE or STS, as some more long established scholarly
editions have done: “The committee tends to get the bulk of its submissions from ongoing
editorial projects that have looked for the seal for previous volumes and so want to con-
tinue in that vein, but we are always trying to think of other ways to make the committee’s
work seem more accessible/noteworthy to a broader community of editors and scholars.
In the event that you have any thoughts on this topic as it would relate to the Cambridge
Woolf, I would appreciate hearing them.”
Certainly, the Cambridge Woolf is aware of and has benefitted from the good
work of the STS, “an international organization of scholars working in textual stud-
ies, editing and editorial theory, electronic textualities, and issues of textual culture
across a wide variety of disciplines,” which as its website declares, “welcomes all those
whose work explores the ideological structures and material processes that shape the
transmission, reception, production, and interpretation of texts” (“Textual Cultures”
par. 1). And certainly, in our capacity as General Editors, we have participated in and
addressed (and continue frequently to do so) numerous conferences and symposia and
panels and networks dedicated to textual editing, and sometimes more specifically to
editing modernist texts, including one major international four day conference dedi-
cated to editing Woolf. When Susan Sellers and I were commissioned by Cambridge
University Press to take on the General Editorship of Woolf, furthermore, we followed
the press’s standard, rigorous procedures, set up our editorial board, and took advice at
every step from the considerable expertise made available to us by senior editors and
officers of this august and historic publisher. Approval of all our volumes is arrived at
through the many stages of scholarly scrutiny, including that of our editorial board as
well as anonymous peer review and ultimately, the syndics. Although contributors to
one Cambridge University Press scholarly edition, I now understand, have sought the
CSE’s seal of approval, it was certainly not something we were given, or made aware
of, as a precedent to follow. Every volume of the Woolf edition seeks and is rigorously
tested by and before the prestigious imprimatur of Cambridge University Press itself.
But these were not, I confess, my first thoughts on reading this perfectly reasonable
enquiry from a professor-director of a textual editing society and co-chair of an ap-
proval committee for scholarly editions keen to promulgate its seal. Setting aside vivid
memories of the pair of huge brown eyes atop a shiny damp snout bobbing before me
in the icy waters of the Hebrides during a thrilling swim last summer, my first thoughts
were: “Have you read any Woolf? Have you read our General Editors’ Preface?” For in
Editing Woolf 247
the latter we attend to Woolf ’s documented ambivalence regarding scholarly editions,

and to the challenges to textual editing presented by a sophisticated, experimental writer
who is also a seasoned editor and publisher herself. This is a writer who has intimate ex-
perience of preparing for publication texts of every kind, whether formal and scholarly
or avant-garde and creative, and in the role of typesetter as well as editor. Her avant-garde
writing is shaped as much by that experience and knowledge as by her extensive read-
ing in every genre including the scholarly edition. Woolf, we point out, “understands
the reader to be the ‘fellow-worker and accomplice’ of the writer,” and is “scornful too
of institutionalized academic literary authority: ‘To admit authorities, however heavily
furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what
value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath
of those sanctuaries.’” (“How Should One Read a Book” 234). In preparing an edition to
do justice to this Woolfian ethos, we have devised “a form that provides […] the fullest
means possible” for the reader to follow Woolf ’s advice, which is “to take no advice, to
follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions”
(234). Acknowledging “the fact that the act of editing is always and already bound up
with reading precisely as an interpretative act,” and “cherishing our differences as crit-
ics,” as General Editors, Susan Sellers and I and now Bryony Randall too
also cherish the opportunity to engage as closely with the processes of Woolf ’s
writing as any active reader could wish, and to make these processes available
to fellow readers as fully and transparently as possible. Transparency, not fur
and gowns is our editorial ideal, and we are guided as Woolf has been, by
King Lear: ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear: / Robes and furred
gowns hide all’ (Lear 4.5.156–7)
Of course, my interlocutor has indeed been reading our Cambridge Woolf ’s Gener-
al Editors’ Preface, I may assume, since he is also reviewing, he informs me, one of
our volumes for a journal: “(I’m reviewing Anne Fernald’s edition of Mrs. Dalloway
for WSA). I’m writing in my current capacity as co-chair of the MLA’s Committee on
Scholarly Editions.” Reading these two sentences, and glancing poetically at Professor
Young’s institutional address (Marshall University), on the one hand I felt (and feel)
my collar felt by a badged officer of the law in a flutter of black gown as a stray dog or
a vagrant human might feel, an audacious trespasser on a kempt turf outside a famous
library whose thoughts are “of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors
of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how
it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the
one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and
of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer” (AROO 24). On the other hand, is
it possible I also felt (and feel) the extended hand of genuine intellectual fellowship, a
friendly bark from a fellow textual editor?
Yet the dark bar of the CSE’s “seal” lay between us: “One began dodging this way
and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it.” (AROO 99) And it was not “a
tree or a woman walking” that I thought I glimpsed in its shadows, but, feeling my col-
lar felt, a mixed and somewhat ill-tempered review of the Cambridge University Press
Edition of The Waves and Between the Acts which appeared some time ago (its isolated
sting all the more memorable among the numerous most enthusiastic accolades gar-
nered by these and subsequent volumes of the Cambridge Woolf): “One would wish
the editors rather more aware of the practices drawn upon in modernist editing, and
in scholarly editing generally; and it would scarcely be amiss for them to submit their
work to scrutiny by the Committee on Scholarly Editing of the Modern Language As-
sociation for a cold, steely-eyed view of their policies and practices and an informed
critique.” The reviewer, clearly now in my mind deputy to the seal’s marshall, had cross-
ly questioned “what notion of authority is in operation” in our edition and yearned for
“more judgment, and less fetishism” and “for a clearer, stronger handling,” pointing up
as deficient what we had conceived as advantageous as well as democratic and feminist:
transparency, mapping, and open-endedness.
For, as our General Editors Preface makes clear, along with our published rejoin-
der to the seal’s marshall’s deputy, the Cambridge Woolf seeks
to put before its readers a thorough account of the states of each text by
mapping out published and extant proof variants from the first British edi-
tion (normally) as copy text, with minimal interference on the page where
possible, and with no silent emendation. In annotation we aim to be more
thorough than in any previous edition, with regard to historical, factual, cul-
tural and literary allusions, in long overdue homage to the remarkable density
and breadth of reference in Woolf ’s work. We would emphasise the open-
endedness of all such annotation, and we have conceived ours in dialogue
with the work of past and present readers and scholars of Woolf, with the
hope of enabling and continuing the dialogues of the future. In our role as
editors, general and volume specific, then, we conceive of ourselves as readers
in need of access to a transparent record of textual process, and to a conscien-
tious engagement with the richly allusive texture of Woolf ’s modernist prose,
rather than as readers who arrive at interpretative conclusions or indeed as
authorities who know better than our fellow readers or than Woolf herself.
4. On Outreach and Impact
by Susan Sellers
My contribution to this round table follows on from Jane’s comments about the Cam-
bridge Woolf edition (of which I’m also both a general editor and a volume editor),
though focusses on my experience of taking Woolf outside the academy to non-spe-
cialist readers.
Personally, I take great pride in the fact that the Cambridge Woolf edition is such
a collaborative affair. We’re privileged in being able to consult widely, and this wide
net pays dividends—doing justice to the astonishing range of references and allusions
in Woolf ’s writing. But collaboration also makes the process at times conflictual—the
Editing Woolf 249
more cooks there are, the more arguments there’ll be about what should go into the
stew—though actually this is also something I feel proud of. The absence of a strict
hierarchy means plenty of argument!
Alongside the Woolf edition (which has been running now since the early 2000s),
I’ve been involved in a number of outreach activities and it’s these I’d like to reflect
on—in part because they reveal one of the many things wrong with the way the UK
currently measures academic research through what it terms “impact.” For those lucky
Woolf colleagues who are not subject to the UK’s “REF” as it is known, “impact” oc-
curs where there is proof that a piece of academic research has had a discernible effect.
The cartoon adopted to explain this is of Charlie Brown teaching Snoopy to whistle.
Charlie Brown (to quote the lingo) is “transferring his knowledge” through teaching,
but “impact” only occurs once Snoopy starts whistling too.
One of these outreach activities was an initiative to persuade local reading groups
registered with public libraries in a given area to read Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, instead
of their more usual fare of popular best-sellers. As is the case for most regional arts
projects in the UK there was only a shoe-string budget, but again through the gener-
osity of Woolf scholars and many others, the initiative grew into a two-week “To the
Lighthouse Festival” where (to cite just two of the events) Dame Gillian Beer talked to a
rapt audience about reading To the Lighthouse over several decades, and a local cinema
dug up a copy of the 1983 BBC film of To the Lighthouse (starring a very young Ken-
neth Branagh as Charles Tansley!) and invited the director to talk. In order to measure
any “impact” this festival might have had we were urged to badger those attending for
proof that they now, for example, understood To the Lighthouse in ways they had not
done before. What happened of course was that a few were persuaded to write the nec-
essary statements—often under our dictation, so they all sounded the same.
What was not measured were the slow, percolating benefits of such an undertak-
ing. For example, I recently met someone who had taken part in the festival who told
me, rather shamefacedly, that she had not finished To the Lighthouse at the time (the
festival was in 2011), and that it was only after her mother died that she remembered
something Gillian had said and picked the book back off her shelf. At that point, as she
put it, To the Lighthouse not only made fresh sense to her, but became important in her
grieving for her mother.
But there’s a second element at work which is not recorded at all. It’s an element I like
to think Woolf had in mind when she borrowed Johnson’s phrase “the common reader”
and redefined it in her own terms: for me foregrounding the fact that reading is never
a one-way hierarchy between writer and reader but a two-way and egalitarian process.
I mention this because the various outreach activities I have experience of (all of
which involved “disseminating knowledge” about Woolf) often produced unexpected
returns.
Take Louis’s snake belt in The Waves. While it’s easy to turn up an image of one
on Google, it was only when an elderly audience member described snake belts at his
boy’s boarding school in the 1930s that I realised just what a commonplace—and hence
hugely significant—item of clothing this was, thereby altering my annotation of the belt
for the Cambridge edition.1
Another, more recent, example: at a study day organised by ACE (a charitable

arts and music foundation near Cambridge) which again had the aim of encouraging
new readers to tackle To The Lighthouse, someone asked whether Woolf knew morse
code. This audience member did, and to him Woolf is indicating the letter R in her
description of the lighthouse flash—which is fascinating if set alongside Mr Ramsay’s
endeavour to think his way through the alphabet to R.
One final thought. In all the outreach activities I’ve been involved in, what draws
audiences are not so much academic lectures and study days as artistic celebrations.
Frances Spalding’s marvelous 2014 Virginia Woolf exhibition at the National Portrait
Gallery in London, for example, attracted 62,000 visitors, while the BBC’s 2015 (and far
less marvelous) Bloomsbury adaptation “Life in Squares” was watched by 1.9 million
UK viewers. How many of those visitors and viewers went on to read—or reread—
Woolf is not documented, though there was a considerable spike in Amazon sales of
Woolf the day after the first episode of “Life in Squares” was broadcast.
This leads me to a final question for this round table, or perhaps more accurately
a plea to the next generation of Woolf editors, who will have the challenge but also
the transformative opportunities of digital editing to consider. To Jane’s and my per-
petual chagrin, the volumes in our Cambridge edition are hardback, cost around £80
each, and are consequently destined for university libraries only. But I wonder if in the
future there might be ways of transmitting all the exciting and important evolutions
in Woolf scholarship as we are attempting to do, while at the same time producing a
resource that could draw in new common readers? It would require a radical—and
creative—rethink of how we structure editions, but as passionate Woolf readers this is
not something that should put us off.
Note
1. The Waves, edited by Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and
New York, 2011, p 250, endnote 7, lines 24–25.
5. “How should one [Write for] a book?”

Contradictions between the material realities of
academic publishing and the needs of readers
by Madelyn Detloff
Because there are other tables besides officer tables and conference tables.
—“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”
I speak from a sincere commitment to exploring what literature, literary criticism, and
humanities scholarship in general can do to expose, analyze, facilitate when helpful and
resist when necessary cultural formations that make our world more just and livable, more
toxic and unlivable, or both, depending on where one fits in a hornets’ nest of social hi-
erarchies. To value this type of cultural criticism unapologetically is not to claim that this
Editing Woolf 251
is the best or the only kind of criticism one must undertake. That said, I personally am
with Woolf when she exclaims, “Thinking is my fighting” (D5 15 May 1940). In a cultural
environment where people are massacred in apartment fires because of greed1—shot
down, shut out, locked up, driven to suicide because of racist xenophobic and transpho-
bic state-supported public discourse—thinking, writing, and teaching in order to reshape
that culture is a form of fighting. Or, to put it less pugilistically, scholarship and criticism
of the sort that is gathered in the volumes edited by my fellow panelists (Jane Goldman,
Bryony Randall, Jessica Berman, and Susan Sellers) performs necessary cultural work.
I’d like to illuminate that cultural work with a few Woolf-inspired aphorisms:
I. “Anon” Lives!2
The immense toil of editors, along with a community of readers, reviewers, re-
visers and copy editors—is largely invisible. We still work under the shadow of the
individual—the single author, the person of genius, as if knowledge were not always
already a matter of social interactions and learning from each other, whether we ac-
knowledge it or not. These volumes—these companions and editions—“are the work
of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health (and
health insurance!) and money, and the houses (or cars—if we are adjuncts commuting
between two or three poorly paid teaching gigs) we live in” (AROO 42).
II. The Beadle has moved from the library lawn to the bookseller’s cash register3
These texts are communal resources, but they are not exactly accessible to common
readers or even academics who don’t have £500 and a research stipend of one’s own. We
know Woolf was a supporter of the public library and affordable education (see Anna
Snaith, Melba Cuddy Keane, and Beth Rigel Daugherty) but the material realities of
academic presses, which are now treated as “cost centers” rather than resources to be
publically supported by the university and state, mean that scholarly books are (to put it
bluntly) too damn expensive. And many university libraries, which are now “cost centers”
too, don’t have the funds to purchase books. Or if they do—those books are not accessible
to common readers without university affiliation, which brings me to my final aphorism.
III. The Angel in the House is now the Devil in the Marketplace!4
I need merely repeat Susheila Nasta’s anecdote here about being asked to write
about “E.M. Forester’s Indian Friends” to illustrate this aphorism.5 There are a number
of nested vicious cycles operating: in order to make money, publishers must anticipate
what will sell and pitch their wares to the market. The market’s tastes are shaped by cul-
tural values. To change cultural values, we need to bring new, discourse-shifting ideas
into the public sphere, but if one challenges cultural consensus too much, there will not
necessarily be a huge, ready market for one’s ideas.
This vicious cycle of the literary marketplace encircles the wickedly vicious cycle of the
academic marketplace, which is still largely structured around the individual genius myth.
In order to keep one’s job (if one is lucky enough to have one) one has to publish works that
are new and highly specialized. These are not necessarily what readers need or want. This
specialization makes audiences smaller and therefore prices higher, further diminishing
potential audiences who cannot afford to purchase $90 books. A dwindling market means
that publishers cannot afford to take many risks on new authors, which makes garnering
a publishing contract even more difficult. To echo Three Guineas—there we go, round and
round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree of hiring, P, and T (TG 80–81).
On the other hand, the pressure to provide something new and original does act as
an intense creative crucible. Gems are the result of this kind of intensity. I want to end on
that note: these volumes are gems; they are highly valuable. What I’ve said here is meant
not as criticism of the labor-intensive, barely-remunerated, often-invisible work of put-
ting together such valuable cultural resources for our communities. Rather I wish to open
up a discussion here of the conundrums we face as Woolfian scholars with commitments
to justice and access in a landscape filled with inescapable mulberry trees.
Notes
1. This paper was originally delivered a few weeks after the June 14, 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower. For more
information see: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-40272168.
2. “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a
woman” (AROO 49).
3. “Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me….His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct
rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the
path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me” (AROO 6).
4. Woolf describes the metaphorical “Angel in the House” as the embodiment of gender conventions
“who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her” (“Professions for
Women” 236–37).
5. Anecdote from Susheila Nasta’s keynote lecture the previous day, June 30, 2017. For those who could
not attend the lecture, Nasta conveyed a conversation with a prospective publisher about her project
on Bloomsbury’s Indian writers, artists, and cultural workers. The prospective publisher suggested a
supposedly more marketable title, “E.M. Forster’s Indian Friends.”
Works Cited
Berman, Jessica, ed. A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2003.
Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “Morley College, Virginia Woolf and Us: How Should One Read Class?” Laura Davis,
Jeanette McVicker, and Jeanne Dubino, eds. Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the
Seventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. 125–39. New York: Pace University Press, 1998.
Goldman, Jane, Bryony Randall, and Susan Sellers, General Editors, The Cambridge Edition of Virginia
Woolf. (Series) New York: Cambridge University Press.
Nasta, Susheila. “The Bloomsbury Indians.” Keynote Lecture. Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, 27th
Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Reading, UK, June 30, 2017.
Virginia Woolf in Context. Ed. Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010.
Sellers, Susan. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge, 2010.
Snaith, Anna. Virginia Woolf, Public and Private Negotiations. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. New York:
Harcourt, 1984.
——. “How Should one Read a Book?” The Second Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986.
——. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1981.
——. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” New Republic Oct. 21, 1940. https://newrepublic.com/article/
113653/thoughts-peace-air-raid.
——. Three Guineas. Annotated and Introduced by Jane Marcus. New York: Harcourt, 2006. (TG)
Intertextuality
Virginia Woolf’s Appreciation
for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
Book Making/Reading, Intimacy, Collectivity
by Joyce E. Kelley
I
n The Waves (1931), likely Virginia Woolf ’s most poetic work, some phrases seem
to echo not only Walt Whitman’s language but also his sense of collective identity
expressed in poems such as “Song of Myself.” Terence Hewet also reads aloud from
Whitman in The Voyage Out (1915), leading the inquisitive reader to wonder about
Woolf ’s interest in the poet. While Woolf ’s diaries and letters offer very few clues, her
essays reveal that Woolf upheld Whitman as a model of a truly great and pioneering
author. In three essays written in the years following The Voyage Out, Woolf references
Whitman. In “Mr Symons’s Essays” (1916), she presents Whitman as a cure-all for writ-
ers intent only on producing “fine words with the semblance of beauty on them” (E2
69). In “Melodious Meditations” (1917), she writes of American literature that “there
is nothing to blush at in the whole of it, except perhaps Walt Whitman” (80) and later
continues, in surprisingly unreserved praise:
if any one is sceptical as to the future of American art let him read Walt Whit-
man’s preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As a piece of writing it
rivals anything we have done for a hundred years, and as a statement of the
American spirit no finer banner was ever unfurled for the young of a great
country to march under… (81–82)
In 1918, Woolf ’s enthusiasm for the poet continues in her review of Johnston and Wal-
lace’s Visits to Walt Whitman. Here she seems charmed by the authors’ descriptions
of Whitman appearing like a “retired farmer” and “at pains to bring his common hu-
manity to the forefront” (206). She is also captivated by the “flame of the spirit” of
Whitman’s circle of readers (205). Melba Cuddy-Keane has written that these Whitman
scholars likely seemed to Woolf, especially during wartime, “a model of community”
(42).1 Woolf ’s own admiration for the poet shines through when she adds: “In Whit-
man the capacity for pleasure seemed never to diminish, and the power to include grew
greater and greater” (207).
These direct allusions to Whitman, all from 1915–1918, cluster around Woolf ’s first
published novel and the founding of the Hogarth Press. It makes sense that at this mo-
ment in her career Woolf might look to Whitman as a fearless groundbreaker not afraid
of articulating the body or his democratic ideals. Whitman is, too, a model of self-pub-
lishing and bookmaking; he learned typesetting at the age of twelve and he paid for the
printing of his first edition, setting some of the type himself. In this paper I would like to
examine what attracted Woolf to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass early in her career and what
brought her back to it later on, for when it comes to printing, reading, and contemplating
the nature of identity, Woolf and Whitman champion very similar ideas.
Woolf ’s Appreciation for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass 255
In her well-known diary entry from 25 January 1915, Virginia’s thirty-third birth-
day, she first mentions her excitement at the prospect of buying a press: “Sitting at tea
we decided three things: in the first to take Hogarth, if we can get it; in the second,
to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am
very much excited at the idea of all three—particularly the press” (D1 28). While it
took two years for the Woolfs to acquire the press,2 Virginia’s excitement in it did not
readily abate. J. H. Willis remarks that Virginia had been interested in bookbinding
since her teenage years (5). Although Virginia’s style championed the practical over the
decorative, in 1902 she told her cousin Emma Vaughan that she was “making endless
experiments” including gold lettering and playing around with different kinds of cover
fabrics (qtd. in Willis 6). Willis also traces Virginia’s descriptions of volumes given to
her, where she reveals her interest in decorative book covers and typeface.
Of course, Woolf ’s craftsman eye was not the only reason she and Leonard wanted
a handpress. The press was to give them something to occupy their time beyond their
writing (Beginning Again 233). It also had a secondary purpose: as Leonard describes,
to print “poems or other short works which the commercial publisher would not look
at” (235). Their first venture was Two Stories, a printing of Leonard’s story “Three Jews”
and Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall,” and they sold all 134 copies (235–36). Being
able to print what they liked was both aesthetically and emotionally liberating. Virginia
wrote to David Garnett in July 1917 that she felt it was “the greatest mercy to be able
to do what one likes—no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or
less like that sort of thing” (L2 167). The press also allowed her to bypass publishers like
Duckworth, with whom Virginia had published her first two novels. As Willis remarks,
although Woolf ’s next seven novels were not done on the handpress, which would have
been too labor-intensive, they were published “under the Hogarth Press imprint” (44).
Willis adds, “What began as a recreation became a necessity. Virginia Woolf ’s genius…
developed as it did in the novels and essays because she was free from editorial pres-
sures, real or imagined, and needed to please only herself ” (44). As a case in point,
Jacob’s Room, Woolf ’s initial publication with Hogarth, is the novel showing her first
real forays into modernist experimentation.
Both Whitman and Woolf discovered in their mid-thirties the incredible power of
an independent press. Whitman, who was born in 1819, sixty-three years before Woolf,
has been described by Ed Folsom as “the only major American poet of the nineteenth
century to have an intimate association with the art of bookmaking.” Whitman learned
typesetting at an early age. He left school at eleven to support his family, and by age
twelve was working as a newspaper apprentice in Brooklyn. At thirteen he became a
compositor for the Long Island Star and undertook a similar position in Manhattan
three years later (Reynolds 6). He saw his first work appear in print at age fifteen in the
Mirror, and soon became “a full-fledged journeyman printer” around sixteen (Stouten-
burg and Baker 11). As David Reynolds writes, “These printing jobs instilled in him a
lifelong appreciation for the physical process of making books” (6).
Whitman, like Woolf, realized the importance of publishing something oneself,
especially when crafting a literary experiment. In the early 1850s, Whitman had writ-
ten in his notebook the aspiration, “Write a book of new things” (qtd. in Perry 69). The
poems he revealed to the public in 1855 were remarkably new, entirely different from
the then-popular works of Longfellow and Whittier. As Reynolds writes, because of

Leaves of Grass, Whitman became “Generally recognized as the father of free verse,”
having “liberated poetry from rhyme and meter, opening it up to the flexible rhythms
of feeling and voice” (ix). Among the themes he explored was simply “the miraculous
nature of everyday life” (ix), perhaps reminding us of Woolf ’s later explorations. Whit-
man, likely drawing from the aims of the Romantics, wrote that he wanted “to write in
the gush, the throb, the flood of the moment—to put things down without delibera-
tion.…By writing at the instant the very heart-beat of life is caught” (qtd. in Traubel 2:
25–26). He fashioned a volume of twelve untitled poems plus a hastily written intro-
duction and sought a way to bring his creation into print.
Gay Wilson Allen hypothesizes that “Whitman probably attempted to secure a
commercial publisher for his book, but…it is not surprising that no commercial house
would consider it” (147). The first poem alone (“Song of Myself ”) was a challenge in
itself—its long lines, lack of numbered sections, and little formal punctuation ran for
dozens of pages and included descriptions of the joys of the male body shockingly sensu-
al to the average nineteenth-century reader.3 Fortunately, a friend of Whitman’s, Andrew
Rome, agreed to print the book in his shop on a handpress. Rome let Whitman “super-
vise the work, even set some of the type himself—and he did set about ten pages” (Allen
147). As Stoutenburg and Baker describe: “He had always enjoyed…tucking the small
pieces of type into their metal frames. Now…almost every morning he settled into a spe-
cial chair at the print shop and hunched over his work.” For months Whitman supervised
“his book’s layout, choosing a photograph for the front,” and “fussing over the binding,
engraving, size, and shape” (43). It was a labor of love, and for the next forty years Leaves
of Grass would remain “the center of his life” (Kaplan 198) as he revised his poems and
wrote new ones for the subsequent volumes bearing the same title.4 Whitman relished
the personal expression of such a process: he later remarked, “My theory is that the au-
thor might be the maker even of the body of his book—set the type, print the book on a
press, put a cover on it, all with his own hands” (qtd. in Traubel 2: 480).
Thus both Woolf and Whitman enjoyed making books in a tactile sense and took
pleasure in printing literary material profoundly different than the standard popular
fare. In the earlier quote from “Melodious Meditations” Woolf praises Whitman’s pref-
ace, which celebrates a particularly free-form, modern style and showcases his belief
in needing a new “American” voice. In the preface, which Justin Kaplan has called “a
balloon of random penseés” punctuated with “ellipses that seem intended to indicate
simultaneous and continuous acts of perception” (197), Whitman calls for a kind of
poetry that can speak for a diverse nation: “for all degrees and complexions…and for
a woman as much as a man” (Preface 24). Above all, Whitman demands a radically
new poetic style: “The poems distilled from other poems shall probably pass away.
The coward will surely pass away,” he writes (26). It was only two years after lauding
this preface that Woolf published her own manifesto, “Modern Novels” (1919), where
she tries to articulate what the “stuff ” of fiction should be and realizes that the answer
is “life” uncensored and unshaped by those who want to tell an author what and how
to write. Woolf continues, “the problem before the novelist…is to contrive a means of
being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer ‘this’ but ‘that’; out of ‘that’ alone must he construct his work”
(E3 34–35). Both authors note specifically the courage it takes to attempt something
new; for the writer brave enough to experiment, this is what the power of self-printing
is for. As Whitman once confided, “I like to supervise the production of my own books:
I have suffered a good deal from publishers, printers” (qtd. in Traubel 1: 194).
Woolf and Whitman also share similar sentiments about the role of the reader
in the literary process. In The Voyage Out, the lines Terence Hewet attempts to read
aloud5 as the South American expedition party steams upriver are the opening lines
of “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand.” Originally part of Whitman’s “Live
Oak with Moss” and published in the Calamus section of the 1860 Leaves of Grass, the
poem is one of Whitman’s most intriguing meditations on reading. It opens with an
image seeming to evoke handholding lovers—until we realize that Whitman’s book is
speaking to the reader directly about our relationship with it
Whoever you are holding me now in hand,

Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different. (lines 1–4)
Whitman requests an intimacy where the reader will “have to give up all else” (8)
and commit to a relationship that could prove “uncertain” or even “destructive” (7).
Without the reader, the book lies unanimated, for in “a house I emerge not” (15) and
“in libraries I lie as one dumb…unborn, or dead” (16). Even as the reader attempts to
read the book, it will “elude” the reader at first (29), and the book wants to be put down
unless the reader can commit to this “one thing”—what we can assume to be a kind of
marriage between reader and book: “For I am the new husband and I am the comrade”
(21). In the context of The Voyage Out, the use of the poem is beautifully illustrative
of the relationship between Terence and Rachel Vinrace. When Terence attempts to
read these lines, while thinking of Rachel and himself “drawn on together,” falling in
love, moving toward an imminent engagement, “his words flickered and went out” (VO
267). Although Rachel and Terence share a closeness, Terence struggles because he
cannot fully possess her; in the next chapter, he tells Rachel, “There’s something I can’t
get hold of in you. You don’t want me as I want you” (302). As he fails in reading the
poem the disconnect between reader and text seems to foreshadow his inability to ever
fully “hold” Rachel, and she dies before the two can ever be married.
Woolf ’s own feelings about the intimacy between reader and text are expressed in
“How Should One Read a Book?” written for a 1926 talk at Hayes Court School. Here
Woolf bestows life on the text by saying that “few people ask from books what books can
give us” (2). She imagines a relationship between the reader and the author, saying, “Do
not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If
you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting
the fullest possible value from what you read” (2). She speaks of the kind of conjoining
of reader and writer Whitman desired when she writes, “But if you open your mind as
widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness…will bring you
into the presence of a human being unlike any other” (2). She continues that “receiving
impressions…is only half the process of reading” and that to complete the process the
reader must provide his own formulation of the book (8). She calls “our relation with the
poets and novelists…so intimate” (9, my italics) and says that reading “calls for the rarest
qualities of imagination” (10). Both she and Whitman seek a new kind of reading, desir-
ing the reader to learn to immerse himself or herself wholly in the process.
Though Woolf seems briefly to have let go of Whitman once she found her mod-
ernist voice, she returns to his vision in crafting one of her most experimental novels.
In The Waves her poetic lines sometimes echo Whitman’s style6 and she explores Whit-
man’s sense of collective identity.7 In “Song of Myself ” Whitman attempts to speak for all
Americans and sees himself embodying a collective spirit through poetry. “I am of old
and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, /…/ Maternal as well as paternal, a child
as well as a man, /…/ Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion” (lines 330,
332, 346), he writes, noting that he is “Absorbing all to myself and for this song” (234),
“And of these one and all I weave the song of myself ” (329).8 The speaker questions what
it means to be a single entity in the midst of a world of ever-shifting communities: “What
is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?” he asks. “In all people I see myself ” (391,
401). He calls himself “a kosmos” (497) and writes, “I am large, I contain multitudes”
(1326). Given this power of collectivity he can speak anew: “Through me many long
dumb voices,” he writes. “Through me forbidden voices” (508, 516). The Waves, which
concerns seven close friends who have both their individual personalities and share a
collective identity (like “a seven-sided flower” (TW 127)), takes up these ideas. Bernard
claims, “I do not believe in separation. We are not single” (67) and continues, “I am not
one and simple, but complex and many” (76). In his final soliloquy, he reiterates, “it is not
one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people” (276). Neal Buck
has similarly noted in The Waves both a sense of “rhetorical inclusion” (Buck 308) and
“psychological inclusion” (310) that echoes Whitman; he even reads Bernard as a failed
version of Whitman who cannot ultimately embody the “democratic ideal” Woolf ac-
claims in Whitman (310). But the use of a Whitmanesque politics of inclusiveness in The
Waves goes beyond Bernard. Neville comments on the way two people meeting become
part of each other, asking Bernard, “Who am I?” (TW 83); Louis similarly asks, “Who are
you? Who am I?” (232). Susan remarks, “I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees” and
continues, “I cannot be divided, or kept apart” (97). Louis adds, “I am not a single and
passing being.…My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together” (202,
my italics). Neville remarks, “I am merely ‘Neville’ to you,” then adds, sounding much like
Whitman, “But to myself I am immeasurable” (214). Bernard may be the key storyteller
of the text, but each voice is privileged and becomes part of the text’s “song.”
In 1925 Woolf published the essay “American Fiction” where she asserts: “the one
American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman.…In
the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his—among all our
poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass” (E4 269). She never seemed to
tire of him: in 1936, Woolf mentions purchasing Leaves of Grass (D5 73) and in 1938
she was contemplating writing an essay on Whitman (D5 137). It is perhaps time that
we look more closely at Whitman as an influence on Woolf. Virginia Woolf became
Whitman’s ideal reader, prepared for a lifelong and intimate commitment to his work.
When Whitman writes to the reader, at the end of “Song of Myself,” “I stop somewhere
waiting for you,” he was truly waiting for someone like Woolf to come along.
Notes
1. Cuddy-Keane writes, “Whitman, the self-styled poet of democracy, is, both here and elsewhere, a dem-
ocratic touchstone for Woolf ” (41).
2. See D1 77.
3. Most contemporary readers were not ready for Whitman’s poetry, and it took years to become revered.
Thomas notes that Whitman’s early followers in Britain generally represented pockets of “social, po-
litical, and cultural reform” (13). Not until 1881 (the year before Virginia’s birth) did Leaves of Grass
appear in Britain “complete and uncensored” (13).
4. Folsom calls it “a shifting series of quite different texts” and notes the time and care Whitman took over
each printing, often with markedly different design choices.
5. Terence slightly misquotes the poem, though reading it.
6. Woolf saw The Waves as “prose yet poetry” (D3 128). Because it contains only monologues, this lends
itself to a Whitmanesque style of asking questions and speaking to “you.”
7. In writing this essay I discovered I was not alone in thinking this; see Buck.
8. I quote the final 1881–82 edition.
Works Cited
Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer. New York: NYU Press, 1967.
Buck, Neal E. “Whitman in The Waves.” Literary Imagination 15.3: 300–314.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Folsom, Ed. “Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman.” Walt Whitman Archive. Whitmanarchive.
org, 2005.
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.
Perry, Bliss. Walt Whitman: His Life and Work. New York: AMS Press, 1969.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Stoutenburg, Adrian and Laura Nelson Baker. Listen America: A Life of Walt Whitman. New York: Scribner,
1968.
Thomas, M. Wynn. “Whitman in the British Isles.” Walt Whitman & the World. Ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Ed
Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995. 11–20.
Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 3 vols. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.
Whitman, Walt. Preface [to 1855 Leaves of Grass]. Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of
America, 1996. 5–26.
——. “Song of Myself ” [1881–1882 edition]. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself ”: A Sourcebook and Critical
Edition. Ed. Ezra Greenspan. New York: Routledge, 2005.
——. “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand.” Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose. New York: Library
of America, 1996. 270–71.
Willis, J. H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917–41. Charlottesville: UP of
Virginia, 1992.
Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.
Woolf, Virginia. “American Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Orlando:
Harcourt, 1994. 169–280.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Oliver Bell. 5 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979.
——. “How Should One Read a Book?” Collected Essays. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, 1972. 1–11.
——. “Modern Novels.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt,
1988. 30–37.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1975–1980.
——. “Melodious Meditations.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1987. 80–82.
——. “Mr Symons’s Essays.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2. 67–71.
——. “Visits to Walt Whitman.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2. 205–208.
——. The Voyage Out. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1948.
——. The Waves. San Diego: Harvest, 1931.
Reading Intercultural, Intergenerational and
Intertextual Woolf: Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady
in the Looking-Glass,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx
without a Secret,” and Lady Murasaki’s Yugao
by Yukiko Kinoshita
V
irginia Stephen, as a young writer, was exposed to the early twentieth-century
japonisme around 1905, and became interested not only in Japan but also in Far
Eastern cultures in general.1 She reviewed Charlotte Lorrimer’s The Call of the
East—a collection of Lorriemer’s short stories and essays about China and Japan—for
the TLS in 1907; and her meeting with Roger Fry in 1910 and her lasting friendship with
him and other Bloomsbury artists and intellectuals as well as her union with Leonard
Woolf matured her interest in the East. Woolf ’s comradeship with Roger Fry—whose
friend Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913), with his book The Book of Tea (1906), helped him
to understand Far-Eastern aesthetic and aesthetics—must be noted.2 Leonard Woolf
worked in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and E. M. Forster in India. Julian Bell studied Chinese
and stayed in China for two years. One should invoke Woolf ’s association and rivalry
with Katherine Mansfield who read The Book of Tea and went to the 1910 Japan-British
Exhibition, as well as with T. S. Eliot, who also read Okakura’s book and studied the Noh
theatre with Arthur Waley, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound in London in the 1910s.3 Virginia
Woolf reviewed Waley’s translation of Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji for
Vogue in 1925. Virginia and Leonard published William Plomer’s Paper House (1929)
with Fry’s cover design and Sado (1931), both of which were based on Plomer’s experi-
ence of staying in Japan between 1926–1929.4 Woolf ’s interest in Far Eastern art and
literature was not a short-lived intellectual flirtation: it was a lasting influence and source
of inspiration, affecting the formation of her aesthetics and aesthetic as a prose artist.
This paper is an attempt to demonstrate Woolf ’s aesthetic tie with the Far East by
analysing her short story “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” (1929) and
discussing textual connections chiefly between Woolf ’s story, Genji, and Oscar Wilde’s
“The Sphinx without a Secret: An Etching” (1887). I will demonstrate that there are
textual connections between Wilde’s short story and Kencho Suematsu’s abbreviated
translation of Genji (1882), between Wilde’s and Woolf ’s short fiction, and between
Waley’s Genji and Woolf ’s story. The connections between the three texts are not coin-
cidental. Wilde, the fin-de-siècle japonisant, shared a common interest in the East with
the modernist Woolf: Genji connected and interwove the two British authors.
A Veiled Woman of No Substance
Woolf ’s “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” (hereafter “The Looking-Glass” or “LG”) has
two themes: one is feminist; the other, aesthetic. Like Oscar Wilde’s short fiction, Woolf ’s
stories are often “thinking in stories” (Sloan x).5 The narrator of “The Looking-Glass” is
observing Isabella Tyson, a fashionable upper-class middle-aged woman—more precisely,
Reading Intercultural, Intergenerational and Intertextual Woolf 261
the reflections in the looking-glass of her figure and her drawing room in which the narra-
tor is sitting: she is attempting to figure out her elegant friend’s true nature and being. The
narrator says that she has been acquainted with Isabella for many years, but that she knows
nothing substantial about her friend. She knows “facts” about her such as her elegant cot-
tage-house, good taste, and social gatherings (64). The external or “facts” about her do not,
however, tell her interior, which is the center of her being. The narrator knows none of her
beliefs, intimate relationships, in-depth feelings or thoughts, concerns or desires. Isabella’s
interior is “veiled” and a mystery (67). The narrator, not being a “materialist” (“Modern
Fiction” 9), attempts to “look within” to penetrate Isabella’s “being” (8), for she the “spiritu-
alist” does not believe that “facts” tell anything about Isabella’s inner self (9; “LG” 64). The
narrator’s imagination is at work and attempts to fill the void; but the uncontrolled flight of
imagination is as chaotic and misleading as the uncritical acceptance of facts.
What reveals Isabella’s being is the mirror, which stands for art and its power to re-
veal truth: “all [is] changing” outside the looking-glass and there is no grasping things
out there, whereas “all [is] stillness” in the mirror (64). The mirror as art or controlled
imagination “slice[s] off ” (63) as a ukiyoe or a masterpiece painting might, seizes the
world that fleets, and crystalizes the things that it reflects. Just as Mrs Ramsay’s dinner
party as a true work of art gives the fluid, shapeless, floating vagueness of reality the
right “order” or shape which gives it a meaning (TLH 80), it gives the fluid and chaotic
a shape or design, which denotes its essence. The mirror as art reveals that Isabella’s
being is “nothing” and “perfectly empty” (68)—she is of all atmosphere and a “Sphinx
without a secret”: she has no thoughts of her own, no spontaneous desires, and is hol-
low. The narrator’s “reflections” on Isabella’s character are answered by the “reflection”
of her friend’s insubstantial self in the mirror. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Re-
flection” illustrates Woolf ’s modernist aesthetics and her feminist critique of a woman
of no substance. Fiction—or the “reflection,” not “facts,” and art, not nature—reveals
truth far better. This aesthetic proposition is Woolf ’s as well as Oscar Wilde’s expressed
in “The Decay of Lying” and his short fiction such as “The Portrait of Mr W. H.”6
Intertextuality: Wilde’s Alroy and Woolf’s Isabella
Woolf shares Oscar Wilde’s aesthetics. “The Looking-Glass” and Wilde’s “The Sphinx
without a Secret” have similar female characters: Isabella Tyson is a parody of Wilde’s
Lady Alroy, his “Sphinx without a secret.” Lady Alroy is a veiled character, an enigma
which stirs the protagonist Gerald’s imagination. Yet she turns out to be a woman of
air but no substance. Her vagueness in manners and character is suggestive of a secret,
which entices Gerald, the narrator’s friend. Wilde’s narrator who observes her in the
photo—the portrait framed in Gerald’s “little sliver-clasped morocco case” (56), just as
Woolf ’s narrator observes Isabella in the gold-rimmed looking-glass—notes:
It [Lady Alroy’s face] seemed to me [the narrator] the face of some one who
had a secret, but whether that secret was good or evil I could not say. Its beau-
ty was a beauty molded out of many mysteries—the beauty, in fact, which is
psychological, not plastic—and the faint smile that just played across the lips
was far too subtle to be really sweet. (Emphasis added 54)
Wilde’s narrator calls Lady Alroy a “Gioconda” (54). The young widow is perhaps well
aware that she has “nothing” special as a woman—no distinguished beauty, talent or per-
sonality—and she consciously acts out a “Sphinx” to allure her man although she has no
particular secrets in life to hide. She knows the effect of having a veiled void—the void
suggestive of meanings—and how it could stir one’s imagination which creates something
out of nothing. Her veiled void—that is, an alluring insubstantiality “like a moonbeam in
grey lace” (55)—is conjured up, for instance, by her vague, timid way of speaking, manners
and attitude, and her “tea-gown of silver tissue looped up by some strange moonstones
that she always [wears]” (56). Lady Allory is not a femme fatale in a traditional (that is,
physical) sense; but she creates a new kind of fatal woman—the “psychological” kind—by
“acting” a mysterious heroine in an ordinary, day-to-day setting. She is, to the narrator’s
eye, not a genuine femme fatale, but a fake: a piece of “alloy.” Gerald, nevertheless, becomes
madly “infatuated with her […] in consequence of ” her mysterious air or thin veil which
her vagueness weaves around her (56). The story shows that she is, like Isabella, nothing
once the veil is taken off: the narrator suggests to Gerald, very correctly, that she has no
secrets but “a mania for mystery” (58). Yet her sudden death and the image which she has
already molded in Gerald’s mind make it very hard for him to accept the narrator’s view or
to forget her: Gerald continues to be trapped by his maniacal love for her. His love remains
obsessive because it is, in nature, not physical, but “psychological”: her body is gone, but
her image persistently remains in his mind—despite her being a nonentity.
To Woolf ’s narrator, Isabella Tyson’s charm is just like Lady Alroy’s to Gerald. The
most elegant and “exquisite” Isabella (“LG” 66), who does “not wish to be known” (66)
and whose face “the lacy clouds” seem to “veil” (67), strikes the narrator as “shad-
owy and symbolic” of some profound feelings and hidden complex stories of her life,
as “spindly and hieroglyphic” (65), like some entangled, delicate ivy plant. Woolf ’s
narrator compares Isabella, whose air is
psychologically alluring, to “the fantas-
tic and the tremulous convolvulus” (64).
Wilde also seems to have compared his in-
substantial woman with “the atmosphere
of mystery” to a convolvulus creeper
(Wilde 55): the first edition of Lord Arthur
Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891) in
which the story appeared has, in the first
page of the story, a pictographic letter “O”
Figure 1: © British Library Board; Shelfmark, of a delicate, “hieroglyphic” convolvulus-
General Reference Collection T.C.4.a.4. like plant (Figure 1).
Intertextuality: Wilde’s and Lady Murasaki’s “Sphinx” /Yugao
There is yet another convolvulus-like, insubstantial figure which has a “psychological”

appeal and allures men: Lady Murasaki’s Yugao, or the Convolvulus, in The Tale of Genji.
I would suggest that both Wilde’s and Woolf ’s critical responses to this character might
have led to the creation of their heroines: Wilde’s Lady Alroy is a parody of Lady Mura-
saki’s Yugao, and Woolf ’s Isabella is a parody of both Wilde’s Lady Alroy and of Yugao.
There are analogies between Wilde’s Lady Alroy and Lady Murasaki’s Yugao al-
though there are obvious differences. The text implies that the widow Lady Alroy wishes
to charm the young affluent aristocrat Gerald; her wish is very subtly expressed—but
subtlety does not mean that her desire is slight: she is the most elusive fugitive and
ingenious hunter. Yugao, a young woman of nineteen, charms the flamboyant and
irresistible seventeen-year-old womanizer Prince Genji by her “peculiar charm […]
impossible to describe,” her “full charm of youth not altogether void of experience,”
her “slight and delicate” figure, and “her voice soft and insinuating” (Suematsu 80, 82).
Yugao strikes him as a timid, frail enigma. Her creeper-like “pliability” does not appear
“manoeuvring” (Suematsu 94, 80); but it is as an effect. Genji falls unreasonably and
helplessly in love because of her vague identity and fleeting air. Her general evanescent
air which seems to represent life’s ephemerality becomes the greatest appeal to Genji.
In Wilde’s story Gerald’s “most ardent curiosity” leads him to “[fall] passionately, stu-
pidly in love” with Lady Alroy: his love is stirred by Lady Alroy’s “slight” figure (54),
“low, musical voice” which sounds “as if she was afraid of some one listening” and her
general “indefinable atmosphere of mystery that surround[s] her” (55).
There are several—not obvious—correspondences between Wilde’s story and
Lady Murasaki’s “Yugao” in situation and plot. It is the white convolvulus like the face
of a vaguely smiling beauty found in an obscure corner of the capital that arrests Genji’s
attention; it draws him onto the impoverished aristocratic woman Yugao. Gerald, in a
busy, congested street of London, takes a glimpse of Lady Alroy’s “face” appearing from
the carriage, which “fascinate[s] [him] immediately” (54). Genji’s and Gerald’s curios-
ity about the “belles inconnues” are aroused and become intense and irresistible because
of their haziest identities (Wilde 54). For both, their women are like the clouded moon,
or the mystifying moonflower.7 Genji has a hard time learning about Yugao’s iden-
tity and personal history; her identity and privacy are, despite their growing intimacy
through the exchanges of poems and meetings, kept unknown to him for some con-
cealed reason. Genji the Emperor’s son “in veil” visits Yugao in her humble residence,
but the one with a veiled identity is Yugao, not Genji. In a very similar way, Gerald’s
exchange of letters with Lady Alroy and meetings with her at her house make her even
more cryptic; and then he one day sees Lady Alroy, “deeply veiled” (56), go into a flat
in an obscure corner of the city: she seems to be frequenting it for some unknown
reason. After Yugao’s sudden death which shatters Genji, Ukon, her lady-in-waiting,
tells Genji her mistress’s history, which is, indeed, nothing extraordinary. Lady Alroy’s
unexpected death devastates Gerald; he learns from Lady Alroy’s “respectable-looking”
landlady the fact that Lady Alroy took up the flat to do nothing in particular (57). The
two most insubstantial women’s deaths eternalize—or substantialize—their presences
in their men’s hearts and minds “in spite of,” rather, “in consequence of ” their vacuum
(Wilde 56). Wilde’s text could be read as his critique of Lady Murasaki’s Yugao.
Yugao in Genji
Yugao, a daughter of a middle-class aristocrat, becomes impoverished after her parents’

deaths. Her life is a drifting one: her relationship with To-no-Chujo, Genji’s brother-in-
law, close friend and rival, lasts for three years and she gives birth to a baby girl. Flippant
To-no-Chujo tends to neglect her who, with no material means, has no choice but to depend
on him. Chujo’s wife has, meanwhile, discovered her husband’s love affair, becomes jealous
of her, and starts harassing her. Yugao is forced to hide herself from him in an obscure place,
which happens to be in Genji’s nurse’s neighbourhood. Genji who visits his old nurse in her
sickroom one evening notices the hiding young lady and begins to call her Yugao after the
darling creeping flowers which he notes on the rough fence of her temporary residence.
Lady Murasaki gave the character the name Yugao, or the Moonflower Con-
volvulus, because of her creeper-like frail beauty, lack of self-assertion and absolute
dependency upon men. Yugao’s insubstantiality or “pliability” is thorough. Lady Mu-
rasaki’s criticism of Yugao as a woman without her own “self ” is very subtle: she in the
Yugao chapter juxtaposed with her the very contrasting figures of Ususeme—the “Ci-
cada” who sheds the veil—and Lady Rokujo, both of whom are women of iron will and
stubbornly in control of their own selves and lives. The juxtaposition allows the reader
to interpret that it is Lady Rokujo’s double—her living spirit—who out of her uncon-
trollable jealousy tortures Yugao and leads her to a sudden death.8 The delicate, frail,
futile Yugao, however, has the creeper’s resilience—she depends on whomever she can
with her remarkable patience and adaptability, which is the only means for survival left
to the declined aristocratic woman with no substantial means or guardianship. Lady
Murasaki’s description of the creeping Yugao convolvuli which attract Genji’s attention
implies her heroine’s social decline, ephemerality, enigma and pliability; and Waley’s
translation expresses the intended effects of the original:
There was a wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool
green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-un-
folded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.
“They are called Yugao, ‘Evening Faces,’” one of his [Genji’s] servants told
him; “how strange to find so lovely a crowd clustering on this deserted wall!”
And indeed it was a most strange and delightful thing to see how on the nar-
row tenement in a poor quarter of town they had clambered over rickety eaves
and gables and spread wherever there was room for them to grow. (Waley 52)
Lady Murasaki’s Yugao, Wilde’s Lady Alroy and Woolf ’s Isabella, despite their dif-
ferences in age and social and cultural loci, have common characteristics as “Sphinxes
without a secret” or veiled women of no substance whose chief appeal is the indefin-
able air of secrecy, fugitiveness and ephemerality. The three authors—Lady Murasaki,
Wilde and Woolf—describe their heroines as “clouded” or “veiled” figures whose beau-
ty is subtle, suggestive, mysterious, and not obvious (Wilde 36; Suematsu 83; Woolf
66–67; Waley 63). For the three authors, particularly for Lady Murasaki, such a heroine
denotes not only “psychological” beauty which intrigues one, but also ahware, that
is, the Far-Eastern perception of the fleeting beauty which is at once memento mori,
and therefore pathetic and affective. For Wilde’s and Woolf ’s intellect and perception,
masked beauty—the moon in thin clouds—is more of the one which could hide some-
thing essential and is, thus, enticing, but could be misleading and cheat one. Indeed,
Yugao’s charm is more of ephemerality than of secrecy whereas Lady Alroy’s and Isa-
bella’s appeal is more of secrecy than of ephemerality.
Intertextuality: Woolf’s and Lady Murasaki’s Text
There are the scenes and descriptions in the Yugao chapter of Waley’s translation which
Woolf ’s narrator’s voice in “The Looking-Glass” echoes. The narrator’s object of curios-
ity is elegant but aloof Isabella Tyson, a very attractive but reserved middle-aged single
woman, who slips away from her grasp. Isabella is compared to the “elegant sprays of
convolvulus that twine round ugly walls” (“LG” 64) just as in Genji the Yugao lady is
compared to “so lovely a crowd clustering on [the] deserted wall” (Waley 52). Woolf ’s
narrator’s description of Isabella is evocative of that of the yugao convolvulus, the sym-
bol of the heroine, in Genji:
She [Isabella] had gone presumably into the lower garden to pick flowers; or
as it seemed more natural to suppose, to pick something light and fantastic
and leafy and trailing, traveller’s joy, or one of those elegant sprays of con-
volvulus that twine round ugly walls and burst here and there into white and
violet blossoms. She suggested the fantastic and the tremulous convolvulus
rather than the upright aster, the starched zinnia, or her own burning roses
alight like lamps on the straight posts of their rose trees. (“LG” 64)
For the narrator, Isabella, “in thin summer [grey green] dress” (64), like Yugao in
Genji who wears “a soft, grey cloak” (Waley 62), is an elegant mystery. Woolf ’s review of
Waley’s translation of Genji suggests to the reader that one of the passages in Genji that
drew Woolf ’s attention was the expression which implies Yugao’s enigma: “…she [Lady
Murasaki] gazed from her lattice window at flowers which unfold themselves ‘like the
lips of people smiling at their own thoughts’” (“The Tale of Genji” 267).
Woolf ’s narrator in “The Looking-Glass” turns her eyes to Isabella’s Far-Eastern
“red and gold lacquer cabinets” with “many little drawers” (63, 64), which she guess-
es contain Isabella’s private letters that would tell what the “mask-like indifference of
her [Isabella’s] face” never reveals—“the traces of many agitations, of appointments to
meet, of upbraidings for not having met” (65). They must be, the narrator speculates,
“long letters of intimacy and affections, violent letters of jealousy and reproach, terrible
final words of parting […]” (65). The passage reminds the reader of one scene in Genji’s
second chapter “The Broom-Tree,” in which To-no-Chujo tells Genji about his love
affair with the fugitive Yugao. To-no-Chujo who visits Genji in his room cannot hide
his curiosity about Genji’s private letters, which Genji keeps “in the drawers of a desk”
and which would surely tell him his enchanting friend’s romantic escapades: “passion-
ate letters written in moments of resentment, letters hinting consent, letters written at
dusk…” (Waley 19).
In the narrator’s imaginative mind, Isabella is a refined intellectual, who would
understand Genji’s sentiment of ahware—although, at the end of the story, the mirror
betrays Isabella’s superficiality: in the narrator’s imagination, Isabella sees, in the flower
that is to be cut, our futile existence in the incessant flow of time that passes: “To cut
an overgrown branch saddened her because it had once lived, and life was dear to her.
Yes, and at the same time the fall of the branch would suggest to her how she must die
herself and all the futility and evanescence of things” (“LG” 67).
The imaginary scene of Isabella elegantly cutting the creeper could be associated
with the scene in which Genji orders his servant to pick some convolvuli and Yugao’s
servant offers a perfumed white fan—on which Yugao’s poem is scribbled—to delicate-
ly place the plucked convolvuli on it. Woolf ’s passage could be linked with yet another
scene of the same “Yugao” chapter that takes place in Lady Rokujo’s fashionable garden,
in which “a very elegant page wearing the most bewitching baggy trousers came among
the flowers brushing the dew as he walked, and began to pick a bunch of the convol-
vuli”—the scene which “Genji longed to paint” (Waley 57–58).
Woolf ’s passage could further be associated with the chapter of “Flowers” in Kaku-
zo Okakura’s in The Book of Tea (1906) which Woolf must have read.9 Okakura in his
book suggests to the reader that the philosophy and practice of teaism is to learn to cre-
ate the moment of being in our day-to-day lives, to “dream of evanescence and linger in
the beautiful foolishness of things” (Okakura 8). The equating of the life of a flower to
that of a human being and the cherishing of its mortal life as one’s own is Buddhist and
Far-Eastern. Isabella is, in the narrator’s mind, being a Japanese tea- and flower-master.
The Allure of a Veiled Void
The allure of mystery is universal; but the obsession with a “void,” the worship of the
incomplete and the aesthetic of the interplay between the text with a void and the
reader/viewer’s response to it are—arguably—Far-Eastern in origin: in Taoist and Zen
philosophy, “True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally complete[s]
the incomplete” (Okakura 40). The veil or mask that hides something behind it is much
like the allure of the incomplete or imperfect. One’s tendency is to read what is behind
the veil/mask, which is the suggestiveness of something significant; and the very vague-
ness—the air—becomes a mystery, a challenge to one’s intellect. The airy veil/mask
could, however, be merely an affectation, and have nothing behind it, while imagina-
tion stimulated by curiosity could create something out of nothing. “Imagination,” as
Woolf states elsewhere, “with all her merits, is not always strictly accurate” (“America,
Which I Have Never Seen…” 132). The narrator of Woolf ’s “The Looking-Glass” is a
reader of a veiled void; but she discovers with the help of the mirror of truth that the
veil hides nothing, whereas Gerald, without such a mirror of truth, is left puzzled and
made to feel undecided about Lady Alroy’s insubstantiality. The Sphinx has no secret
and is a non-being even before her death, for Yugao or Lady Alroy or Isabella is the
elegant creeper which is all adaptability with no moral core. Their depersonalization is
thorough and their “selves” are vacuums, fully dependent on the viewers’ interpreta-
tions: they are, therefore, anybody and nobody.
Notes
1. See Kubota 57–59 for Woolf ’s early exposure to japonisme; also, see Kinoshita Horizons 67–83.
2. See Kinoshita “The 1910 Japan-British Exhibition” and “West Meets East.”
3. See Benfry xvii, Sung 170–92, and Kinoshita Horizons 81.
4. See Plomer 213, 249–51.
5. See Kinoshita “A Romantic Criticism” and “Modernity and Modernism in ‘The Canterville Ghost.’” For
Woolf ’s short fiction as “thinking in stories,” see Kinoshita “West Meets East” 10–16.
6. For a detailed analysis, see Kinoshita “Romantic Criticism.”

7. Diana Swanson informed the author that another English name for yugao is moonflower.
8. The identity of the evil spirit who kills Yugao has been controversial. While Yanai et al. suggest that it
is the one which haunts the deserted palace, not Lady Rokujo’s double, that kills Yugao (145n20), Aki-
yama et al. note that Lady Murasaki’s construction of the story encourages the reader to connect with
Lady Rokujo the evil spirit that possesses Yugao (164n1).
9. There is circumstantial evidence that Woolf read The Book of Tea. See Kinoshita Horizons 79–83.
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Print.
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Woolf.” Horizons: Seoul Journal of Humanities 4-1 (June 2013): 63–86. Print.
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——. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Kenchō Suyematsu. 1882. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1974. Print.
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2010. Print. 5 vols.
To “write about Mrs Lindbergh”: Woolf, Flight, and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient
by Kathryn Simpson
O
n 27th August 1935, Harold Nicolson gave Woolf a copy of Anne Morrow
Lindbergh’s North to the Orient (1935), which was a record of the Lindberghs’
attempt to map a new and uncharted air route from America to Asia in 1931.
Recently returned from staying with the Lindberghs, he conveyed to Woolf the wel-
come news of her fame and popularity in America, an important boon for Woolf whose
struggles with writing The Years were causing her an “acute despair” (D5 17). The im-
mediate impact was to motivate Woolf to work on her novel, seemingly stimulating
her creative faculties. Woolf ’s diary records that it “[w]oke my insensate obsession—
to write P & P [one possible title for The Years]—by telling me how a room of one’s
own is regarded & my American fame” (D4 335). Although this renewed impetus was
short-lived, in her diary entry that records her writer’s block she wonders whether she
might “write about Mrs Lindbergh?” (D4 338). This paper will explore how North to
the Orient may have prompted Woolf to consider writing about this female pilot whose
experience in many ways seems so remote from her own.
The mid-1930s was an intensely fraught and volatile period politically as negotia-
tions and attempts to halt the rise of fascism in Europe repeatedly failed and Woolf, as
a pacifist, felt increasingly isolated from friends and family, including Leonard, who
supported rearmament as a response to Hitler’s increasing power and territorial con-
quests. As her diary records, she felt “in a stew about war & patriotism” and, “desperate,
almost in tears” (D4 335) about being unable to write, she turns to books, specifically
John Bailey, 1864–1931, Letters and Diaries (1935) and North to the Orient, for consola-
tion and possibly hope. Both writers represent the literary world (Bailey was a literary
critic and Morrow Lindbergh a writer) but they also represent the idea of preservation
which resonates with Woolf ’s own similar commitments (in relation to literary and
English cultural traditions) at this time. Bailey was the chairman of the National Trust
for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, the charitable organization that seeks
to preserve English heritage, and Morrow Lindbergh’s account of air travel is rich in
description of natural beauty and landscapes, and implies the need for preservation.1
Morrow Lindbergh’s book perhaps also offered hope of another more personal kind at
this point in Woolf ’s life, given the Lindberghs’ final destination in Hankou in China,
one of the three cities that were combined to form the capital of the Wuhan municipal-
ity. On 29th August 1935, Julian Bell began his journey to Wuhan University where he
was to teach and, saddened by his departure, Woolf ’s diary records, “We think of going
to China, at any rate think so, to mitigate the parting” (D4 336).
What is also fascinating to note is that the Lindberghs lived in close geographical
and social proximity to Woolf for over two years, renting Long Barn from January 1936
until they left for France in Spring 1938. Escaping the persecution of the press following
the tragic kidnapping and murder of their eighteen-month-old son in 1932, Long Barn
To “write about Mrs Lindbergh” 269
represented a place of peace, safety and happiness for the Lindberghs. Although Woolf de-
clined Harold Nicolson’s invitation to meet them because of the severe pressure she felt to
complete her novel, she remained aware of their proximity. For instance, visiting Vanessa
Bell’s exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in May 1937 she encountered Mina Curtiss (Mor-
row Lindbergh’s mentor at Smith College) who had been staying at Long Barn (L6 126).
It is interesting to speculate about what Woolf and Morrow Lindbergh would have
made of one another had they actually met given the great differences in their experi-
ence. Morrow Lindbergh’s mother was a poet and teacher and her father a successful
banker who became a Republican senator for New Jersey in the early 1930s. She met
Charles Augustus Lindbergh in December 1927 and they married in May 1929. Lind-
bergh taught her to fly and she was the first woman to attain a glider’s licence, gaining
her private pilot’s licence in 1931. In preparation for their flight she also learnt both
radio theory and Morse code, passing the third class radio operators exam. These were
no mean feats and demonstrate her ability, determination and resilience. But Morrow
Lindbergh was also a writer and greatly admired Woolf ’s work, a feeling seemingly
mutual as Woolf ’s praise of North to the Orient indicates in her letter to Nicolson: her
writing is “‘too good’ and “‘it seems to come so clean and clear’” (cited in Amran, 165).
Woolf was clearly a keen traveller and, although she never flew, aeroplanes and
aerial views are recurrent features in her writing so it seems unsurprising, perhaps,
that she might consider writing about a female pilot. Here I will consider some of the
particular aspects of North to the Orient that may have resonated with Woolf, speculat-
ing on possible connections and significances of this book for Woolf at this time. Both
women clearly valued the sense of freedom, but were also aware of the risks this could
entail. In North to the Orient Morrow Lindbergh comments on what is commonly un-
derstood as the “freedom” of flight, achieved, as she explains, after centuries of “patient
desiring” and the determination to develop the technology that “enabled man to be a
bird” (20). She remarks on the mapping of a flight path—the black lines that are seem-
ingly so easily charted on the map:
The firm black lines which we ruled straight across Canada and Alaska, pre-
paratory to our flight, implied a route which, in its directness of purpose and
its apparent obliviousness of outside forces, looked as unerring and resistless
as the path of a comet. Those firm black lines implied freedom, actual enough,
but dearly won. Months, and indeed years, of preparation made such freedom
possible. (21)
We might add that such freedoms were also “dearly won” in face of the dangers faced and
survived as part of this flight. She notes that the freedom of flight is not free, but rather
“[i]t rests, firmly supported, on a structure of laws, rules, principles—laws to which plane
and man alike must conform. Rules of construction, of performance, of equipment, for
one; rules of training, health, experience, skill and judgment, for the other” (21). This
resonates with Woolf ’s own thoughts about flight as representing freedom in a num-
ber of ways, particularly in giving free rein to the imagination, but also as something
epitomizing technological progress and modernity—both of which carried potential
dangers—suggesting that Woolf too felt the freedom of flight may be dearly won.
This description of aerial freedom could also be seen as a comment on writing

itself and seems to echo ideas about modernist art as articulated by Lily Briscoe in
To the Lighthouse, ideas that also suggestively function as a comment on Woolf ’s own
narrative technique: “Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and
evanescent, one color melting into another like the colors on a butterfly’s wing; but
beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron” (163). Like much of
Woolf ’s writing, North to the Orient has a sturdy structure—it is a travelogue orga-
nized by the line of flight plotted on a map—but it also takes flight from this structure.
Morrow Lindbergh describes her book as a record of a personal and professional expe-
rience that is soon to be surpassed by technological progress, likening this moment to a
specimen, “caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness”
(8). But like Woolf ’s literary experiments, it simultaneously breaks boundaries as it
flutters between genres to articulate wider political and personal perspectives.
In the Preface to North to the Orient, Morrow Lindbergh explains her purpose in
writing her book, describing its form in ways that also resemble the hybrid forms that
Woolf strived so determinedly to create. Like Woolf, she was keenly aware of the resis-
tance to a woman’s “trespass” on male-dominated cultural and professional territory
and to what some might perceive as the potentially threatening role she had as co-pilot,
navigator and radio operator. Her description of her book as “nameless, awkward and
shy, and asking to be introduced” seems to play with gendered expectations of feminine
deference in seeking a place in this male-dominated field. Similarly, her articulation of
her thoughts and concerns about “the anomalous collection of chapters before [her],
purporting to be an account of an air voyage” but which “evades classification” (7)
seems to acknowledge that not only is her subjective account of her experience at odds
with others, but that her own position as a woman advancing the field of aviation is
anomalous. In this apparent struggle to define or classify her book she is aware that
she is writing a new form of aviation record which contrasts dramatically, for instance,
with her husband’s account of his record-breaking flight across the Atlantic, titled WE
(1927). As one contemporary critic says, “the young flying Colonel, as his friends know,
has no imagination in the personal sense, but great imagination in the mechanical
sense. His mind works without embroidery. He thinks and speaks in condensed terms
suitable to his purpose” (Green 1927). His account is logical, efficient and practical, and
relates only to the technicalities of flight.
Ostensibly to avoid her reader’s disappointment, Morrow Lindbergh lists what her
book is not: it is “not a technical account,” a repository of “geographical knowledge,” a
“scientific record,” nor a guide book (7–8). However, this self-consciousness could also
be seen as a way of drawing attention to the hybrid and experimental form she employs,
preparing her readers for something new, for a testing of boundaries both geographi-
cal and generic. As a woman aviator and writer, she “trespass[es] freely and fearlessly”
(as Woolf advocates in “The Leaning Tower,” 125) across generic boundaries just as she
moves freely in the air over geographical and national boundaries. Written by a woman,
her account offers “only a superficial picture” (emphasis added) of their “short and hur-
ried” stops, but one that captures “the vividness of impression” and speaks of the “magic”
of flying, capturing the intense moments of experience, sharpening and marking indel-
ibly those “moments of being” that continue to resonate as she remembers and records
them in words. There are echoes here of Woolf ’s own strategy for subversively recording
women’s experience that is at odds with gendered expectations, as articulated in A Room
of One’s Own (a book Morrow Lindbergh knew well). Woolf ’s modern woman writer,
Mary Carmichael, is instructed to record the intensity of women’s experience in a ten-
tative and subjective way, to capture it only in glimpses, in “unsaid or half-said words,
which form themselves [like] the shadows of moths on the ceiling” (81).
As other critics have argued, aerial perspectives and the presence of aeroplanes in
Woolf ’s writing carry political significance. Gillian Beer argues that aeroplanes offer
new literal and metaphorical perspectives on England and Englishness, opening up
new “axes of experience” for individuals and new views of the island which is at the
heart of Empire (269). Erica Delsandro, discussing the global political significances
of the aerial views afforded by aeroplanes in Woolf ’s writing, argues that “Woolf reap-
propriates the aerial view in service of her pacifist aesthetics” (122). Elizabeth F. Evans
argues that “[i]n Woolf ’s writings of the thirties and until her death in 1941 there is a
greater emphasis on the link between aerial perspectives and the destruction of war”
(62), focusing specifically on the inclusion of the preludes and interludes in The Years
as key to Woolf ’s “anti-tyranny aesthetic.” Focused more specifically on what she sees
as the direct influence on Woolf ’s later works of Morrow Lindbergh’s book and “the
panoptic aerial view” it offers, Rinni Marliyana Haji Amran argues that Woolf ’s 1936
addition of the preludes and interludes to The Years “were in part shaped by Woolf ’s
reading of Lindbergh’s portrayal of the aerial views in North to the Orient,” noting
particularly Woolf ’s use of the “downward-looking vantage point similar to an aerial
perspective” (Amran, 13, 176). She argues that this book also served to support a more
positive view of the aeroplane in its “potential to promote a more inclusive, global
perspective that highlights the interconnections between people and the world around
them” (134). On what is perhaps a more trivial note, but which may also suggest an in-
fluence, Woolf ’s character “George” becomes “North” at some point in this mid 1930s
process of revision of The Years.
Amran notes the “traces of modernist characteristics” in Morrow Lindbergh’s style:
“she mixes in poetry and images of maps, forming a hybrid narrative not unlike Woolf ’s
own fragmented modernist writings” (166). In particular she comments on the inclusion
of the maps Charles A. Lindbergh produced specifically for this book, noting that these
represent “the technical aspect of the journey” and “the simplified, perhaps reductive,
view of the world as contained in maps,” in contrast to Morrow Lindbergh’s “more in-
timate perspective” (168). She perhaps rightly argues that Morrow Lindbergh included
the maps “for her readers’ interest” and did not intend her text to “undermine or crit-
icize” what maps convey, namely “the illusion of human mastery over land and [the]
symbolic […] exertion of colonial power over others” (168). As Holly Henry notes in her
discussion of “Woolf ’s global aesthetic vision” and her fascination for maps, maps con-
ventionally show the geographical relationship between continents and countries (74).
She also notes that orthographic maps (those that reformulate 3D sea and landscapes into
a 2D representation) were “the map of choice” in this period, arguing also that “[i]n Three
Guineas, Woolf specifically associated maps with human aggression and war” (88). There
seems an implicit connection between the loss of representational depth in these flatten-
ing and totalizing modes of representation and the inability or unwillingness to perceive
a depth of connection between the peoples inhabiting the land masses designated on
maps—a necessary lack, perhaps, when waging war.
While Morrow Lindbergh’s use of maps may be expected as part of a travelogue, the
way in which they are presented seems to counter the map’s abstract impersonality in a
way that may have resonated with Woolf at this time. Indeed, what seems significant is
that they are not only boxed off from the text, framed and discrete, but that they do not
join up to form a whole. They are like mosaic pieces, fragments, offering some refer-
ence to geographical spaces but without the usual geographical relationship that maps
typically provide, nor the totalizing view associated with imperialist power and control.
Diane F. Gillespie suggests that maps “orient us to where we are, or show how we might
get elsewhere, but they cannot represent what it is like to live in these spaces. As a writer,
that was Virginia Woolf ’s job” (“Mapping Virginia Woolf ” 3). In North to the Orient,
Morrow Lindbergh’s use of maps does serve to “orient” the reader in this sense. However,
there is often not a direct correlation between the map that begins each chapter and the
account that follows: the map does not simply illustrate or encapsulate Morrow Lind-
bergh’s experience at the different stages of the journey. Instead, Morrow Lindbergh, as a
“writer,” also gives her readers significant insight into what it means to live in the various
places she visits and she is keen to find points of connection with her own experience.
An early unsigned review of North to the Orient notes that Morrow Lindbergh’s ac-
count of her flight is not typical but is rather sensitively observed and lyrically written,
and appraises the way “she gives heightened expression to geographical feeling” (“The
Magic of Flying” 704). This “geographical feeling” can be understood as the emotions
stirred by aerial views and an appreciation of the landscape—its immense beauty and
danger. Morrow Lindbergh’s book conveys her sense of great privilege in seeing land-
scapes not seen before by human eyes, and seems to suggest her understanding of the
hard won harmony which remote communities achieve with the harsh landscapes they
inhabit. Her account also suggests the impact of aviation technology in creating a posi-
tive sense of global connection:
It was not only that we flew from Baker Lake to Aklavik in twelve hours,
by the midnight sun, but that while flying over those grey wastes of Victoria
Land [Antarctica], isolated and wild as the moon, I could hear through my
ear-phones the noisy chatter of big cities over the edge of the world. (9)
In a period in which European communication was dangerously faltering and oppor-

tunities for negotiating peace were closing down, Morrow Lindbergh’s eclectic text, its
map fragments and experimental form work to emphasize her focus on other, more
positive, possibilities that air travel and aerial perspectives afford: forging connections
between people(s), communication, human relationships and the relationships of hu-
mans and the natural landscape, as Amran also argues (133–34).
It is likely that Woolf would also have read with interest Morrow Lindbergh’s
perspective on her own experience as a woman in the male-dominated world of avia-
tion, particularly in the light of Woolf ’s understanding of the “many phantoms and
obstacles” facing women as they enter the professions, “[e]ven when the path is nomi-
nally open” (“Professions for Women” 8). Morrow Lindbergh’s account highlights and
undermines the rigidly gendered ideas of what is expected of her as a woman, as is

evident in the very different questions the reporters ask her and Lindbergh as they
board their plane for the start of their survey flight. Lindbergh is asked “vital masculine
questions, clean-cut, steely technicalities or broad abstractions,” whereas she is asked
about her “‘clothes’” and her “‘housekeeping in the ship’”—the pressing question being,
“‘Where do you put the lunch-boxes?’” (33, 32). She feels insulted by this distinction
but also not entirely confident that she could answer “the important questions about
the trip” (33). As she turns to look at their seaplane, at this point her description of-
fers a significant counter to this momentary doubt about her own ability: “Perched on
top of the big pontoons, it seemed small and dainty.…I thought of all the emergency
equipment for both north and south, land and water, all parts of the world, packed into
that little space” (33). This could be a description of Morrow Lindbergh herself: she is a
skilled and experienced aviatrix, part of a crew of two, and more than prepared for the
new adventure ahead, “ready to go…anywhere” (33). The preparations for the various
social engagements that will form part of their trip also starkly highlights her anoma-
lous position as a woman pilot. Aware that they will meet with dignitaries and be guests
of honour at various social functions, she attempts to find one pair of shoes appropriate
for a number of different occasions: “‘balls and dinners…teas and receptions…[to wear
with] semi-sport dresses…[and as] bedroom slippers’” (24). Her request confounds the
shop assistant she consults and he escapes this impossible task by directing her to the
“Growing Girl” department. He clearly has no way to classify Morrow Lindbergh as a
woman and his suggestion could be seen as dismissive and infantilizing, but it also sug-
gests that she, as a woman, is “growing”—she is like a girl in being the next generation
of woman, a position full of promise and opportunity.
This sense of promise is the prevalent note on which North to the Orient ends.
The final chapter relates to Morrow Lindbergh’s return to flying several years later and
is more contemplative and philosophical than the earlier chapters. Here the ways in
which an aerial view alters literal, personal and political perspectives on everyday life,
shifting values about what is important, seems more apparent. Morrow Lindbergh lik-
ens the flashes of light reflecting off ordinary and every day things (apartment windows
and car windscreens) to “a bright speck of glass in a road, sparkling beyond its worth”
(201). From the air, “There was no limit to what the eye could seize or what the mind
could hold—no limit, except that somewhat blurred but inescapable line of the horizon
ahead. And even that line looked as though it might be limitless also” (201). For Woolf,
feeling hemmed in and isolated personally, politically and professionally as war ap-
proached in Europe, this sense of hope and limitless possibility may be what prompted
her desire to “write about Mrs Lindbergh.”
Note
1. When they arrived in China, the Yangtze River was in flood and the Lindberghs assisted the National
Flood Relief Commission. Later they were involved with environmental issues and promoted the idea
of a necessary balance between technological progress and the conservation of the natural world, as
Amran also notes (171–72).
Works Cited
Amran, Rinni Marliyana Haji. “The Aeroplane as a Modernist Symbol: Aviation in the Works of H. G. Wells,
Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos.” PhD. University of Exeter, 2015. Web. 25
August 2016.
Beer, Gillian. “The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi
K. Bhabha. London, New York: Routledge, 1990. 265–90. Print.
Delsandro, Erica. “Flights of Imagination: Aerial Views, Narrative Perspectives, and Global Perceptions.”
Virginia Woolf: Art, Education, and Internationalism: Selected Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Con-
ference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diana Royer and Madelyn Detloff. Clemson, SC: Clemson University
Digital Press, 2008. 117–24. Print.
Evans, Elizabeth F. “Air War, Propaganda and Woolf ’s Anti-tyranny Aesthetic.” Modern Fiction Studies 59.1
(2013): 53–82. ProQuest. Web. 16 August 2017.
Gillespie, Diane F. “Mapping Virginia Woolf: A Library ‘Containing Continents.’” The Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf, University of Reading, 29 June–2 July 2017. Unpublished Conference
Paper. 2017. Print.
Green, Horace. “‘We’ Reveals Lindbergh as More Careful Than Lucky.” The New York Times, 7 August, 1927.
nytimes.com. Web. 25 June 2017.
Henry, Holly. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003. Print.
“The Magic of Flying” (unsigned). The Geographical Review 25.4 (October 1935): 704. JStor. Web. 22 June
2017.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols). Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London:
Penguin, 1977–1984. Print.
——. “The Leaning Tower.” The Moment and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1947. Print.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols). Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Chatto and
Windus, 1975–1984. Print.
——. “Professions for Women.” Killing the Angel in the House: Seven Essays. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.
——. A Room of One’s Own, London: Grafton, 1989. Print.
——. To the Lighthouse, London: Vintage, 1992. Print.
Lives in Writing
Taste and the Tasteful: Woolf, Radclyffe Hall,
and the Culture of Queer Elitism
by Aaron J. Stone
W
hen Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness went on trial for obscenity in 1928,
E. M. Forster drafted a defense that was published in the Nation on Sep-
tember 8 of that year. Virginia Woolf, having reluctantly signed, wrote in
frustration to Vita Sackville-West: “now it appears that I, the mouthpiece of Sapphism,
write letters from the Reform Club!” (L3 530). It is understandable, if not exactly laudable,
that Woolf would be anxious about the public insinuation of her sexual nonnormativity.
What is even more telling, however, is her disparaging reference to the Reform Club it-
self. Although Forster was part of the progressive political collective, so too were Arnold
Bennett and H. G. Wells, whose writing Woolf had famously dismissed as, among other
things, too reform-minded.1 For Woolf, literature with an explicitly reformist agenda was
decidedly middlebrow. In “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” she goes as far as to define “two
great camps to which most novelists belong”: “preachers and teachers” and “the pure
artists” (“Novels” n.p.). The word “pure” here is telling: by contrast, reformist writing is
not only aesthetically mediocre, it’s downright dirty. Although Woolf ’s committed op-
position to censorship led her to sign Forster’s letter and agree to testify at Hall’s trial,
she feared association with those literary reformers—Hall included—whose middlebrow
social novels were, for Woolf, perhaps even filthier than queer sex.
Yet it is difficult to determine whether, for Woolf, sexual indiscretion or literary
mediocrity was the more egregious sin. While Woolf is often retrospectively claimed
as a sexual liberal by virtue of her extramarital relationship with Vita Sackville-West
and her closeness with notorious libertines like Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant,
Woolf ’s scrupulous self-censorship, the comparative sexual reticence of her novels, and
her apparent dismissal of overt sexual nonconformists like Radclyffe Hall underscore
Woolf ’s insistence that sex is a private matter best left out of public discourse. Fur-
thermore, as revealed by Woolf ’s less-than-enthusiastic involvement in Hall’s obscenity
trial, her idea of what was sexually tasteful happened not-so-coincidentally to align
with the aesthetics of “high” literary taste. Here I argue that Woolf, by maintaining the
notion that “high art” should deal only indirectly with sex (let alone queer sex), inad-
vertently helped to create what I term a culture of queer elitism. As I will show through
an overview of recent critical comparisons of Woolf and Hall, this culture of queer elit-
ism remains latent in much scholarship today, privileging highbrow modernists over
middlebrow artists like Hall by emphasizing the former’s more subtle and inventive
modes of queer resistance. I then suggest, through a brief glance at Woolf ’s private
writings during Hall’s trials and her subsequently published works, the importance of
recognizing the radical and transformative influences that Hall and others may have
had on their highbrow counterparts.
It is no secret today that Woolf desired to be known as a highbrow writer, hav-
ing written in an unsent but posthumously-published letter to the editor of the New
Taste and the Tasteful 277
Statesman and Nation that “if any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed
worm dares call me ‘middlebrow’ I will take my pen and stab him, dead” (“Middle-
brow” n.p.). As Robert Scholes lays out in Paradoxy of Modernism, this “Battle of the
Brows” dominates both how modernist authors discussed themselves and how literary
scholars have constructed what we have come to call modernism. As Scholes suggests,
many modernist scholars often still inadvertently maintain that experimental work
constitutes a privileged locus of literary value. Scholes, however, does not explicitly
discuss the role of cultural critique in these systems of literary valuation. Following
Scholes’s impulse to deconstruct the binary oppositions—“high” vs. “low, “experimen-
tal” vs. “conventional,” “hard” vs. “soft”—that have not yet been fully excised from
modernist scholarship, I argue that socially transformative potential is often critically
over-attributed to overtly experimental works at the expense of those for which differ-
ently experimental tactics are obscured by the stigmatizing designation “middlebrow.”
Scholes also helps us to see the antagonism between sex and taste that character-
izes high modernism. He argues that “the attack on the mediocre hedonism of the
middle class…reveals a Puritanism at the heart of the High Modernist aesthetic. You
would think that the terror and boredom of modern life might justify a little pleasure,
but, no, fun will be exposed and rooted out wherever it lurks” (190). If applied di-
rectly to Woolf, this charge of Puritanism might even be taken literally: despite Woolf ’s
privately liberal attitudes toward sex, her textual reticence on such matters betrays a
puritanical aversion to the sexually explicit that feels intimately connected to a high-
brow aesthetic. Woolf ’s personal comfort with discussions of sex, at least within her
immediate circle, is famously documented in the posthumously published essay “Old
Bloomsbury.”2 According to Woolf, early on in Bloomsbury’s history, Lytton Strachey’s
utterance of the word “semen” lifted all verbal taboos within the group. Woolf writes:
“With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.…Sex permeated
our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.…It is strange to think
how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long” (56). While Woolf here
focuses on the strangeness of Bloomsbury’s prior reservation with regards to sex, she
finds nothing strange about such reticence in more public venues. Adam Parkes diag-
noses this tendency as “suppressed randiness” in his reading of Orlando, enumerating
the ways in which “Woolf excised several details that made her challenge to conven-
tional thinking about sexuality more overt,” including “references to ‘the great season
of Orlando’s lusts’ and his ‘red sensual lips,’ as well as a description of chastity as ‘a
bore’” and “an allusion to Sappho” (163). In Orlando, as with much of Woolf ’s writing,
these deletions of even such innocuous phrases as “lusts” or “sensual lips” illustrate
Woolf ’s nearly obsessive tendency to censor herself.
Indeed, as a number of critics have pointed out, this disconnect between Woolf ’s
professed openness within the Bloomsbury group and her reticence outside it becomes
glaringly evident when we consider her alongside a figure like Radclyffe Hall, whose
fiction Woolf not only disapproved of but perhaps modelled her own depictions of
sexuality against. Critical discussions of this relationship, however, have a tendency to
reinscribe Woolf ’s modernism as the more effective enactment of sexual transgression.
Parkes, for one, while noting these revisions to Orlando, quibbles with Woolf ’s biog-
rapher Hermione Lee’s statement that “the finished version is slightly less risqué” (qtd.
in Parkes 163). Parkes argues that “it would be more accurate…to say that in revision
the novel became transgressive in more subtle, less outspoken ways” (163). Sound-
ing almost defensive here, Parkes feels compelled to rephrase Lee’s assessment just
enough to advocate for the revised Orlando’s more effectively transgressive subtlety.
For Parkes, Orlando’s subtlety represents “a crucial difference between Virginia Woolf
and Radclyffe Hall” (163). In his comparison of Orlando and The Well of Loneliness,
Parkes problematically aligns Hall’s straightforward depiction of lesbian sexuality with
a naïve identity politics while associating Woolf ’s aesthetic subtlety with a more radical
postmodern sensibility: “Where Hall points to natural fact, Woolf exploits the theatri-
cal properties of sexual identity to create a whole world of performance that renders
the rhetoric of sincerity ever more doubtful” (147). Emphasizing Woolf ’s distaste with
the inversion theory of sexuality and masculine lesbians, Parkes associates The Well
of Loneliness with the identitarian essentialism of “natural fact” while reading Woolf ’s
novel as the queerer one, insofar as her theory of sexuality is more fluid and amorphous
than Hall’s. Parkes fails to point out, however, that this distinction is problematically
linked to a queer elitism insofar as it assumes that literary depictions of queerness can
only be properly appreciated by a class that is already primed—either by education or
by an already-liberal sexual sensibility—to receive them. In this sense, we might read
Woolf as not merely trying to keep queerness a private matter, but as in fact working
to make it more exclusive.
If Parkes’s comparison of Orlando and The Well of Loneliness reinforces the notion
that the subtlety of highbrow literature has a higher potential for queer subversive-
ness, Celia Marshik similarly uses Woolf to privilege highbrow irony over middlebrow
earnestness. Irony, like subtlety, already implies a level of difficulty, a fundamental
equivocation that separates those who get it from those who don’t. Marshik writes of
Orlando:
The narrator’s verbosity exemplifies one strategy for representing indecorum:

the obscene can always be “clothed” with a rhetoric that purports to disguise
more than it reveals. Figurative language…ostensibly preserves the moral
tone of the text. It is, however, easy to read between the lines, so readers can
laugh at the biographer’s vain circumlocutions. Readers can also go beyond
laughing to cultural critique. (115)
Marshik tries to save Orlando from charges of elitism with these last two lines. If read-
ing between the lines is “easy,” and if it’s a short jump from “laughing” to “cultural
critique,” then Orlando’s transgressive implications are rendered transparent and obvi-
ous. But the argument that Woolf ’s jokes in Orlando are “easy” is about as defensible
as Parkes’s claim that “when the book appeared on 11 October 1928, the title character
was quickly identified as the dedicatee, Vita Sackville-West” (162). Parkes’s phrasing
insinuates that Orlando’s connection to Woolf ’s private life was practically common
knowledge rather than the privileged understanding of an inner circle familiar with
the goings-on of Bloomsbury. Indeed, the very fact of Orlando’s correspondence to
Vita renders the novel an esoteric text. It is no coincidence that the novel frequently
hailed as Woolf ’s most sexually transgressive and culturally critical was conceived as
an inside joke whose punchline was only accessible to those who knew enough about
Bloomsbury to make the proper connections. To anyone outside the elite group that
was privy to the queer tendencies of Bloomsbury, the social critique undertaken by
Orlando would have been significantly dampened, if not altogether defused.
Even Bloomsbury’s defense of Hall during the Well of Loneliness trials may be read
as an act solidifying the queer elitism of an exclusive in-group. Jodie Medd complicates
the standard narrative of praise for Bloomsbury’s involvement in the Well of Loneliness
trials, refocusing on the ways in which Bloomsbury took advantage of the publicness
of the trial. Medd argues that the trial’s publicity allowed the sexually nonnormative
group to distance both itself from Hall’s overt and public sexuality, and to distinguish
its highbrow literary productions from those, like Hall’s, that they considered mid-
dlebrow. The Well of Loneliness trials, read as a test of Bloomsbury’s commitment to
altering public views on queer sexuality, is one that they ultimately fail; as Medd writes:
“Bloomsbury’s negotiation of the publicity of homosexuality, as demonstrated through
Hall’s trial, is critical to its identity and cultural legacy as a group whose sexualities
are revolutionary in private but whose writing, art, and cultural work are respected in
public” (176–77).
But despite Medd’s criticism of Bloomsbury’s duplicitous involvement in the trials,
her reading of The Well of Loneliness alongside Orlando curiously aligns with Parkes’s
praise of the latter’s superior subtlety. Medd sets up The Well of Loneliness as a foil to
Orlando, an embodiment of the dangerous earnestness that Woolf avoids through sat-
ire. Furthermore, Medd implicitly suggests the merit of Woolf ’s delicate employment
of lesbian suggestion in lieu of overt representation. She writes:
I read Woolf ’s texts as critically redeploying the suggestion of lesbianism as

an alternative to Hall’s novel and its scandal. Once again, the scandalous sug-
gestion of lesbianism is deployed to achieve a variety of effects…[that] serve
Woolf ’s agenda of cultural critique, literary critique, and narrative experi-
mentation. Ultimately, Woolf ’s use of the scandalous suggestion of lesbianism
works differently, and perhaps more expansively, than Hall’s novel, precisely
by being vaguer, broader, more elusive, and even more cognitively challenging
to her readers. (178)
While Medd does not shy away from representing Woolf and the Bloomsbury group as
problematically disengaged from political advocacy, she still deploys a preference for
the highbrow, representing Woolf ’s writing as more “expansive” for its difficulty, go-
ing so far as to praise it for being “vaguer” and “more cognitively challenging.” In this,
Medd hardly tries to conceal the fact that she, too, believes that it is Woolf ’s difficulty
and experimentalism that most successfully disseminates queer ideas.
Whereas even those critics who are skeptical of Woolf ’s motives praise a text like
Orlando for its subtle, ironic, or suggestive sexual transgressiveness over a text like The
Well of Loneliness, Hall eschewed experimental forms for precisely these reasons. Hall’s
antimodernism and distrust of literary experimentation is championed by her biogra-
pher, Diana Souhami, against the “modernist heresies” of other queer writers—Woolf
chief among them—who, in Souhami’s reading, felt the need to present their own
depictions of nonnormative sexualities in a veiled form, hidden behind the smoke-

screen of formal experimentation (xix). While Souhami does pit these two modes of
representation against one another rather simplistically, she also raises the provocative
suggestion that Hall’s refusal of modernism is not an artistic failure but a courageous
choice consciously made for the purpose of unambiguous queer representation. Sou-
hami advocates for The Well of Loneliness on the grounds of its singularity and its own
brand of experimentalism sans exclusivity, writing that “nothing of the kind ha[d] ever
been attempted before in fiction” (182).
Souhami’s account of Hall’s antimodernism leaves us with an important question:
must we pit ourselves against Bloomsbury and high modernism if we are to defend
authors like Hall who both embrace explicit depictions of nonnormative sexuality
and reject overt formal experimentalism? So far I have been suggesting as much,
taking critics to task for ultimately coming down on the side of high modernism. But
there’s also a way in which we might see Woolf herself as having been profoundly af-
fected—we might even go so far as to say inspired—by Hall. This would allow us to
reconsider the dynamic between Woolf and Hall as something other than simply an-
tagonistic. A brief consideration of A Room of One’s Own is instructive on this point.
As Marshik and Medd both point out, Room’s manuscript draft contains evidence
of Woolf ’s post-Well of Loneliness self-censorship of both lesbian content and direct
allusions to Hall’s trial, which Woolf respectively softened and removed.3 But Mar-
shik and Medd both treat this only as evidence of an antagonistic engagement with
Hall; Marshik reads the expungement of the material as evidence of Woolf ’s desire to
distance herself from Hall, while Medd reads Woolf as opportunistically “min[ing]
the trial for ironic allusions and images to shape a subtler but no less critical com-
mentary on censorship” (178).
Woolf ’s letters and diary entries that reference Hall’s trial are also frequently de-
ployed by critics as evidence of this antipathy against Hall. Woolf, in a letter to Vita,
gives an extraordinary account of Leonard and Forster’s attempt to draft and collect
signatures for a letter defending Hall’s novel, describing Hall as having “scolded [For-
ster] like a fishwife” for defending the novel only on the basis of its theme without
praising its “genius” (520). In her letters, Woolf seems to take pleasure in articulating
her contempt for The Well of Loneliness, calling it so dull that “any indecency may
lurk there—one simply can’t keep one’s eyes on the page” (556). In Woolf ’s personal
writings on these themes she seems unable to mention Hall or The Well of Loneliness
without disdain.
However, we must also account for those underexamined moments of ambiva-
lence or even empathy that arise within these writings. Particularly noteworthy here
is the tension between Woolf ’s apparent need to distance herself publicly from Hall
and the more ambivalent portrayal she gives in private. In recounting a night spent
drinking with Forster, Woolf reveals in her diary that the unflattering description
of Hall as a scolding fishwife in her letter to Vita was actually a somewhat muted
version of the story Forster told, in which she writes that he described Hall as hav-
ing “screamed like a herring gull, mad with egotism & vanity” (D3 193). As Woolf
also alludes here to Forster’s prejudices against Sapphists and mentions that “he dis-
liked that women should be independent from men” (193)—we might read Woolf ’s
softening of Forster’s misogynistic imagery as revealing more sympathy for Hall than
she feels comfortable making explicit. This ambivalence, too, seems latent in Woolf ’s
famous description of Hall at the trial as “lemon yellow, tough, stringy, exacerbat-
ed” (D3 207). While Medd writes that Woolf describes Hall here as “aggressively
jaundiced and insalubrious” (173), this paraphrase ignores the fact that Woolf ’s por-
trait of Hall is not merely anemic; by calling her “tough” and “exacerbated,” Woolf
also expresses sympathetic acknowledgement of Hall’s tenacity and the difficulty
of her situation. Read in this light, “lemon yellow” and “stringy” may not be mere
expressions of aesthetic disapproval; rather, they paint a pathos-laden portrait of a
persecuted individual. This leads us to the most puzzling line from this diary entry
about the day of Hall’s trial, wherein Woolf muses: “What is obscenity? What is lit-
erature? What is the difference between the subject & the treatment?” (207). Woolf,
far from sitting idly by during the trial praying that she won’t have to testify, is fixated
on Hall and actively absorbing the scene, so engaged in the drama of which Hall is
the center that she begins to question her own assumptions about what constitutes
not only sexual tastefulness, but literature itself.
This, of course, is not to dismiss or overlook the truly nasty things Woolf says
about Hall and The Well of Loneliness. Rather, it is to suggest that Hall’s radical am-
bition to write a novel that would change the world may have affected Woolf more
than she cared to admit. If her subsequent revisions to A Room of One’s Own and
Orlando are any evidence, Hall’s “middlebrow” novel was powerful enough to make
Woolf not only think differently but also to write differently. Why, then, do critics
continue to praise the subtle queerness of experimental forms over radically explic-
it—albeit “conventional”—depictions? While Hall was perhaps unable to overthrow
the culture of queer elitism that Bloomsbury helped to reify, the wide influence of
Hall’s oft-disparaged novel does much to contradict the implicit scholarly assump-
tion that highbrow art is best suited to transmitting queer content. Furthermore, the
vexed relationship between Woolf and Hall exposes the necessity of understanding
(literary) taste and the (sexually) tasteful as mutually constitutive; armed with this
understanding, we might further question the scholarly fetishization of the modern-
ist highbrow aesthetic and work to resist the uncritical deployment of such systems
of sexual and literary valuation.
Notes
1. In “Modern Novels,” Woolf writes of Wells: “He is a materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking
upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials” (32); in “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she attributes the aesthetic failures of the Edwardians to the fact that “The
social state was a mass of corruption.…So the young novelist became a reformer” (386). Neither is For-
ster spared this critique: in “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” Woolf writes: “He has many of the instincts
and aptitudes of the pure artist…but he is at the same time highly conscious of a message” (n.p.).
2. Originally presented as a talk to the Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club in 1928.
3. For instance, Woolf ’s manuscript draft of “Chloe liked Olivia” was originally a much more explicitly
lesbian depiction that also featured an ironic allusion to Sir Chartres Biron, one of the magistrates who
had ruled against Well (Medd 178–79).
Works Cited
Marshik, Celia. “Virginia Woolf and the Gender of Censorship.” British Modernism and Censorship, Cam-
bridge UP, 2006, pp. 88–125.
Medd, Jodie. “Bloomsbury and the Scandal of The Well of Loneliness.” Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of
Modernism, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 151–91.
Nicholson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage. Athenum, 1973.
Parkes, Adam. “‘Suppressed Randiness’: Orlando and The Well of Loneliness.” Modernism and the Theater of
Censorship, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 144–79.
Scholes, Robert E. Paradoxy of Modernism. Yale UP, 2006.
Souhami, Diana. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. Doubleday, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1925–1930. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew
McNeillie, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.
——. Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1923–1928. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
——. “Middlebrow.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. eBooks@Adelaide, 2015, https://ebooks.
adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/. Accessed 23 Dec. 2016.
——. “Modern Novels.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1919–1924. Edited by Andrew McNeillie,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, pp. 30–37.
——. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1919–1924. Edited by Andrew
McNeillie, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, pp. 384–89.
——. “The Novels of E. M. Forster.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. eBooks@Adelaide, 2015, https://
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/. Accessed 23 Dec. 2016.
——. “Old Bloomsbury.” Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, Pimlico,
2002.
Defining Life in Essays and Reports:
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and the
Government Reports on Infant Human Mortality
by Julie Vandivere
T
oday I want to go back to Woolf ’s claims in her famous 1924 essay, “Mr. Ben-
nett and Mrs. Brown” and revisit two of its major points: that human nature
changed in or about December 1910, and that novelists have become too caught
up in “things” as they try to understand human character. Like many readers, I’m both
entertained and entranced by Woolf ’s claim about the pivotal if fabricated importance
of December 1910 and the change in humanity that took place on that date. Woolf as-
sociates the change she saw that year with a leveling of humanity; the Victorian model
of hierarchy dissipated and the cook was no longer the Leviathan in the basement but
rather a “creature of sunshine and fresh air” who popped in to ask sartorial advice (4).
The servants emerged from the darkness and the wife from her saucepans. I cannot
help but wonder how profound was the December 1910 change that Woolf spoke of.
She doesn’t simply align this change to social hierarchies or relations between men and
women, but to the entire “human race,” urging us to rehearse our Agamemnon if we
doubt the “power of the human race to change” (5). An almost instantaneous reshaping
of the race is quite a claim, even if it’s not an overnight transformation that produces a
flowering bud or an egg, but “a change, nevertheless” (5). Perhaps the transformation
was more like one of those evolutionary changes where fish developed those ineffectual
little legs and itsy bitsy lungs that allowed them to gasp their way to shore. For how else,
except by such degrees, does the “human race” evolve?
I’m sure someone before me has asked what happened in or about December 1910
and has, like I, checked the papers. There were all the normal debutante balls, sporting
events, and political statements. In November of 1910, 200 Suffragettes were arrested
in the Black Friday incident, sparking greater public support for the women’s right to
vote. But perhaps there is another way that the human race changed around this time—
a change that is suggested by Woolf as she devotes much of the essay to distinguishing
between persons and things. For example, she complains that Mr. Bennett only de-
scribes a character by the things that surround them:
He would notice the advertisements; the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth;

the way in which the cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs. Brown
wore a brooch which had cost three‐and‐ten‐three at Whitworth’s bazaar; and
had mended both gloves—indeed the thumb of the left‐hand glove had been
replaced. (13)
As we reflect on her complaints about describing character in terms of things, we

should attempt, perhaps, to equate it with the 1910 window Woolf talks of. If you look
back into the dawn of the 20th century, those very years towards which Woolf turned
her perceptive eye, what we see is that the line that distinguished the living from the
dead, the animate from the inanimate, the world of people, character, human life from
the world of inanimate objects (garden gates, freehold estates, cushions, buttons, and
gloves) shifted. Let me explain.
Although men had always fought for control both of women’s bodies and the children
they bore, before the twentieth century, decisions about the beginnings of life produced
very different definitions than the 21st-century mind is comfortable with. One 19th-cen-
tury obstetrician, addressing the Edinburgh Obstetrical Society, described a fetus as “a
parasite performing no function whatsoever” (Scottish Medical Journal 409). This view
might explain why infant mortality for illegitimate infants hovered at 90 percent, and the
coroner’s office in London alone received an annual average of 5000 inquests a year into
dead, abandoned infants over ten years, leading officials to believe that 12,000 London
mothers killed their babies without detection (Davies 118). The 14 abandoned infant
deaths a day in London did not consider abortions or the untold dead who were never
found. Nor are we able to consider the abortion rates in an era when abortion was not
considered murder; as one 19th-century activist observed, “provided only that any part
of the child is within her own natural passages at the time, [a mother or midwife] can-
not be brought in guilty of murder, a hand, a foot, an arm still within the passages of the
woman, screens the murderess from the penalties of murder” (Ryan 6). These grisly ac-
counts do not indicate a lack of caring or human kindness but a different equation about
when human life began in an economy where food was scarce and pregnancy inevitable;
mothers mattered more than babies, and strong children mattered more than the sickly.
But in or about December 1910, those battles over fetal personhood in which we
are now so firmly enmeshed began. The armies were called, the arms were heralded,
the commandeers put in place and that pre-modern distinction between a thing (fetus)
and a human life (child) became blurred. I use such overwrought military imagery for
a purpose, and it’s one I hope you can guess. For in or about 1910, the reason behind
the battle over fetal life was war.1 1910 might seem, at first glance, to be too early. And
yet, the flurry to account for and cherish every infant human life came from the real-
ity of war that England already knew because of the second Boer war. In South Africa,
between 1890 and 1895, the Maxim Gun had been used for the first time, the modern-
day machine gun that had proven itself in 1891 by giving 50 British soldiers with four
machine guns the power to stop the charge of 5000 Matabele warriors. Thus, it is with
an awareness of the power of mechanized war, that C. W. Saleeby in his 1914 keynote
address at the first Meeting of the National Association for the Prevention of Infant
Mortality, reviewed the important correlation between the use of mechanized, rapid-
fire weaponry and human life:
At the time of the Boer War and afterward, we found that it was the men
that mattered. Men with long-lost teeth, or suffering from the consequences
of rickets were of no use to us.…Then we went back further…gradually to
the expectant mother. The whole thing is the history of a military problem.
We cannot get soldiers or men ready-made. We must go back to infancy and
motherhood. (3–5)
Defining Life in Essays and Reports 285
Let’s not rely just on Saleeby, but turn also to the 1917 government report on Maternal
and Child Welfare that declared:
The value of the population has never been appreciated as it is today and re-
grets at the unheeded wastage of infant life in bygone years are as sincere as
they are useless. A simple calculation shows that had the annual wastage of
male infant life during the last 50 years been no greater than at present, at least
500,000 more men would have been available for the defence of the country
today. (1)
Thus, in 1924 when Woolf surveyed the previous two and a half decades and fixed a
point wherein human life changed, she bore closely alongside those years when incipi-
ent (male) human life became the most important commodity. The state invested capital
into its production and recovery, tracing the manufacturing process back as diligently
and resourcefully as an expedition to find and develop the metal ores that would be the
raw materials for the guns and shells. Their births were noted and checks and securities
established because what had previously been no more than scraps, orts, and fragments,
became valued human beings. Women became the equivalent of the earth from which
metal ore was derived—the womb became the mine and motherhood became the found-
ry to forge the soldier that would be destroyed by incendiary war.
In short, about 1910, the line between what had been a pre-natal object and post-
natal human changed, and certainly, as Woolf claims, the human species changed.
Perhaps it was with the 1902 Midwife’s Act that forbade any midwife from practicing
unless she was certified and complied with the law that forbade her from issuing either
death certificates or pronouncing a baby stillborn, or the 1907 Notification of Births
Act, a controversial act condemned by the British Medical Association that required
someone present at any birth to notify local authorities of whether or not it was a live
or stillbirth. Or perhaps, in an uncanny alignment with Woolf ’s observation, it was the
1910 revision of the Midwife’s Act that closed the last loophole that allowed uncerti-
fied women to attend the birth of other women. This 1910 amendment was necessary,
because, as reported in the April 2, 1910 British Medical Journal, women had to get
over their inclination to ask for midwives, ascribing the mother’s preference to the idea
that midwives were more “compassionable” because she is believed to enjoy “a lot of
churchyard luck.” In commenting on this, the witness said, “they do not want the chil-
dren to live” (825). Babies were saved and mothers died in childbirth at record rates as
the state recalibrated the world of objects and persons.2
But I fear I, like Woolf in her essay, have wandered too far from Mrs. Brown. With
our new awareness of the shift in life that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century
that realigned the worlds of objects and persons, I want to return to the elderly lady
in the coach. Woolf ’s protest of her mistreatment in the hands of other authors and
her proposal for Mrs. Brown’s reanimation relies on rejecting the dichotomy between
humans and objects and imaging a different economy. She chides Mr. Wells for only
being able to see Mrs. Brown against a world of miraculous barges bringing tropical
fruit, condemns Mr. Galsworthy for perceiving her in relation to the walls of Douton’s
factory, and criticizes Mr. Bennett for his view of Mrs. Brown by way of her gloves and
“a brooch” (11). Woolf ’s complaint is that these writers “have laid an enormous stress
upon the fabric of things. They have given us the house in the hope we may be able to
deduce the human beings who live there” (emphasis mine) (18).
In Woolf ’s criticism of how Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells see Mrs. Brown by the
material objects that surround her, Woolf rejects the terms of definition that rely on a
separation of what is a character and what is a thing. In so doing, Woolf rejects three
possible ways that humans and objects complement each other.
1. The idea of things as a sort of ring buoy on a rope thrown into the water
that we can hang on to that will carry us into the depths of what it means
to be human; she doesn’t rely on a view of the supernatural associated
with Romanticism in which the concrete carries us into the unknown.
2. A simple binary, a world of xs and os, like a computer code that allows
one to see something by creating contrast.
3. The idea that we can understand what humanity is by naming the things
that surround it, as one would identify the star systems around a black
hole in order to discern the dimensions and contours of the black hole. In
other words, it doesn’t seem that we can predictably know the ineffable by
tracing the contours of the effable.
Instead, Woolf offers an alternative way to view humans, one that does not rely on
some distinction between humans and objects in any of those ways. She says:
Writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beauti-
fully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that
she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appear-
ing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows
what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her
nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for
she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself. (23–24)
Here, Woolf eschews oppositional structures of person and thing on which she claims
other writers relied in order to begin to imagine what Mrs. Brown might be. Replacing
logic with a contradiction, Mrs. Brown (like Wonder Woman on a train), has unlimited
capacity and infinite variety. She defies time and place in her ability to appear in any
place, and wear any dress, say anything, and best of all, “do heaven knows what.” To
understand her, Woolf says we must “tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmen-
tary” (21), and recognize that a view of reality as based on oppositional structure that
produces sequence, teleology, and time is really just a fool’s game.
Let me try to make my point about the changing definition of life a slightly differ-
ent way. In or about 1910, human character changed. The battle over fetal personhood
began, and when it did, we realized that the line between human and thing is fun-
gible. One cannot describe a person in relation to things (factories, gloves, buttons, seat
cushions) because the dissolution of the barrier between the world of objects and per-
sons leavens all; humans might be things, or some humans might be things. Whatever
Defining Life in Essays and Reports 287
humanity or character is, it is much too complex to be imprisoned by a simple and

singular logic of contrast with the inanimate. Instead of tying ourselves down to a te-
leological sequence, we can only approach the reality of humanity by thinking in terms
of networks, fractals, and (to use Caroline Levine’s words), forms. Then reality becomes
a fascinating constellation that turns and twists, affording views and correspondences
that amaze and delight. Mrs. Brown could be, as Woolf points out, Ulysses, Queen
Victoria or Mr. Prufrock, and as Woolf writes, there was Mrs. Brown protesting that
she was different, quite different, from what people made out, and luring the novelist
to her rescue by the most fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms (20). So, if one
looks at definitions of fetal personhood alongside Mrs. Brown, we have a new under-
standing that people are things, things are people, and there is no necessary logic that
determines the difference. The line is both fungible, and heaven knows, as history has
shown, political. We, as scholars, must work to expose the consequences of how and
where that line is drawn.
I want to close with one last, rather obvious point. By concentrating on Mrs.
Brown, Woolf chooses the demographic that, in the economy of war, had the least
value. If, young, virile male life was, as Saleeby so proudly asserts “what matters,”
then there is a progression of what matters less: women who can produce and care for
infants matter less than men, a fact supported by the hard evidence of death statistics
that showed that in the first three decades of the twentieth century, infant mortality
fell while maternal mortality rose at alarming rates. Logically, elderly women whose
childbearing years are past matter least of all. And yet, it’s this demographic that
Woolf pulls out of the dustbin of the early 20th-century war economy of human bod-
ies and forces us to consider, tenaciously arguing that the image of this old lady is
nothing like “the version readers allow writers to palm off, an image of Mrs. Brown
which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever” (23). Instead Woolf,
in a grassroots appeal asks readers to concentrate on the image that has the least
social currency, a sort of “she who is last shall be first, approach.” And perhaps, we
can only see humanity by concentrating on the demographic with the least capital
in a war economy. And for that reason, as Woolf says, “At whatever cost to life, limb,
and damage to valuable property, Mrs. Brown must be rescued expressed, and set in
her high relations to the world. We must do what she asks and “never, never to desert
Mrs. Brown” (24).
Notes
1. Feminist social historians such as Jane Lewis and Anna Davin opened up the first inquiries into the
emphasis on infants in the early twentieth century. These researchers from the early 1980s believed that
the charge to cherish infant life came from the poor condition of recruits (Lewis 15). More archival
work revealed that the recruits’ health was not particularly poor but that the government had used the
observation to jump start their drive to preserve infant life (Dwork 18–21, Oakley 36). The most recent
research attributes the emphasis on preserving human life to the increased stratification of humans
into machine-like definitions, as charted through the early twentieth century by Sir Arthur Newsholme
(Higgs 250, Woods 347).
2. Jane Lewis reports that from 1900 to 1930, infant mortality rates fell from 130 per thousand to 55 per
thousand (32) while maternal mortality rose from 4.8 per thousand to 5.8 per thousand (37).
Works Cited
British Medical Association. BMJ: British Medical Journal. 1910: 1–82.

Carnegie United Kingdom, Trust. “Report on the Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children.” Dunfermline:
C.U.K.T., 1917.
Davies, D. Seaborne. “Child-Killing in English Law.” The Modern Law Review, 1.3 (1937): 203–23.
Davin, Anna. “Imperialism and Motherhood.” History Workshop Journal, 5.1 (1978): 9–66., doi:10.1093/
hwj/5.1.9.
Dwork, Deborah. War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: a History of the Infant and Child Welfare
Movement in England 1898–1918. London: Tavistock, 1987.
Hart, Berry. “Introductory Address Given at Surgeon Hall Class of Midwifery.” The Scottish Medical and
Surgical Journal, 5 (1899): 388–99.
Higgs, Edward. “From Frankpledge to Chip and Pin: Identification and Identity in England, 1475–2005.” The
History of Information Security: A Comprehensive Handbook, edited by Karl de. Leeuw and Jan Bergstra.
London: Elsevier, 2007, pp. 243–62.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.
Lewis, Jane. The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England 1900–1939. London: Croom
Helm, 1980.
Newsholme, Arthur. The Elements of Vital Statistics and their Bearing on Social and Public Problems. London:
Allen and Unwin, 1928.
Oakley, Ann. The Captured Womb: a History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women. Oxford: Blackwell,
1984.
Ryan, William Burke. Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, and History. London: J. Churchill, 1862.
Saleeby, C. W. Carnegie United Kingdom, Trust. “Report on the Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children.”
C.U.K.T., 1917.
Woods, R.I., et al. “The Causes of Rapid Infant Mortality Decline in England and Wales, 1861–1921 Part I.”
Population Studies, 42.3 (1988), 343–66., doi:10.1080/0032472031000143516.
Woolf, Virginia. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924.
“Penning and pinning”: Vita, Virginia, and Orlando
by Gill Lowe
I
n the late 1970s Gilbert and Gubar posed the question “If the pen is a metaphor-
ical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?” (3). They asserted that
“the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch
whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis” (6). They cited John
Irwin who suggested that writing is an “autoerotic act…a kind of creative onanism.”
The pen spends and wastes itself continually on the “‘pure space’ of the virgin page”
(6). They referred to the seventeenth-century poet Anne Finch’s complaint that the
pen has been defined as “essentially a male ‘tool,’ and therefore not only inappro-
priate but actually alien to women” (8). In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
wrote that Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea, was “bursting out in indignation against
the position of women” (AROO 59) because men “have the power to bar her way to
what she wants to do—which is to write” (60). In a poem called “The Bird and the
Arras” Anne Finch used the metaphor of a bird to suggest rising female ambition
and frustrated distress. The birds plying their pinions on the arras in her poem are
imitations, only appearing “to mount in flight,” but a real bird confined in the room
soars high and is dashed by the ceiling and the windowpane. She flutters in “endless
circles of dismay” but is successfully released through a casement into the “ample
space” of the sky. In an interesting echo of this, when Orlando marries Shelmerdine
there is a thunder clap and uproar and a bird is “dashed against the pane” (O 181).
The words of their vows “went dashing and circling like wild hawks together among
the belfries and higher and higher, farther and farther, faster and faster they circled,
till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground” (181). In this nar-
rative there is no release, no escape. I will return to the image of a wild bird flying
free later in this paper.
Woolf had money, a room of her own and “the habit of freedom and the
courage to write” what she wished (AROO 112). But she needed to remove both
feminine and masculine parental influences before she was able to write freely. In
“Professions for Women” (1931) she figures a girl sitting “with a pen in her hand,
which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot” (E6 482).
The feathered wings of the judgmental angel are a barrier shadowing the poten-
tial of the blank page. In defence of her wish to write, the girl uses the inkpot as a
missile against this maternal presence. There is a smash and an explosion and her
imagination dashes “itself against something hard” (482). The trance of her writing
block is over.
The Victorian Angel in the House who “died hard” (E6 481) was re-visioned as a
symbol of power on the cover of the Suffragette magazine for 13 June 1913, following
Emily Wilding Davison’s death (see Figure 1). She is depicted as a genderless celestial
creature. We might re-vision Woolf ’s pen not as a metaphorical penis but as “man-
womanly” and “woman-manly” (AROO 102): a quill from an androgynous angel.
Figure 1: Front cover of The Suffragette 35.1, 13 June 1913. Artist unknown. https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22The_Suffragette%22,_13_June_1913_-_Emily_Davison_memorial_
edition.jpg. Accessed 23 Nov. 2017
“Penning and pinning” 291
During her 1920 exchange with Henry Massingham about The Plumage Bill, Woolf
suggests, perhaps ironically, that he “overrates the power of my pen” (E3 245). There
is no doubt though that she was acutely aware of its influence and used her writing to
make money, as a way of asserting control, as a defence against mortality and of time
passing (Lee). Writing is a talisman against loss. Woolf uses pen and ink as erotic tropes
when writing to Vita Sackville-West. There are numerous references to pen, quills and
ink in Orlando where feathers are frequently associated with authority and power. Kit
Marlowe is “in high feather” (O 62); ostrich plumes wave and toss in the breeze (15; 86;
168); Shelmerdine’s name is “wild, dark-plumed” with “the steel-blue gleam of rooks”
wings’ (174); his “glittering name” falls “out of the sky like a steel-blue feather”; “like a
slow-falling arrow” (227).
At the start of the book Orlando dips “an old stained goose quill” in ink, soon
covering “ten pages and more with poetry” (O 13). Writing is compared to the com-
pensatory pleasure of masturbation. Orlando “held his pen in his hand,” “turned his
pen in his fingers, this way and that way” (16). Disappointed in love, alone in “the dead
of night,” he “approached the inkhorn, fingered the quill, and made other such passes
as those addicted to this vice begin their rites with” (54). He dips his pen in the ink,
thinking of “the mocking face of the lost Princess,” Sasha (55). His jealous questions
are “as arrows dipped in gall” (55) and, “as if to vent his agony somewhere, he plunged
his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spurted over the table” (56). Later, now a
woman, Orlando looks at the ink pot and wonders if she has the courage to take up her
pen; “‘Hang it all!’ she cried, with a touch of her old spirit, ‘Here goes!’” (183).
This time only the clitoral pen neck is plunged into the ink. To Orlando’s “enormous
surprise, there was no explosion. She drew the nib out. It was wet, but not dripping. She
wrote. The words were a little long in coming, but come they did” (183). The orgasmic
association is unequivocal. Orlando concurrently senses a guiding invisible presence
reading over her shoulder, this censoring “power told her to stop” but once the act is
complete the exorcised “spirit passed on” (183).
In the sixteenth century “nib” referred to the beak or bill of a bird; by the first decade
of the seventeenth century it was being used to mean the point of a pen or quill. In Old
Norse nibba meant a sharp point, Neb refers to a nose in Scots, nebby still means to be
inquisitive or “nosy” in northern Britain. His/her nibs refers to someone in authority. The
same lexical connection can be seen in Woolf ’s critical use of “beak.” Having read the
proofs of Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf gave her “a very severe lecture.” She felt “It was like
being pecked by a very strong hard beak”…“the beak struck deeper deeper” (D5 271).
Woolf refers to Sackville-West’s “pen of brass” in a letter to Jacques Raverat (L3
150) which Nigel Nicolson interprets as a “dismissive verdict” on his mother’s writ-
ing (Nicolson 2000 74). In To the Lighthouse Mr Ramsay’s “beak of brass” (TTL 44;
45) “plunged and smote” “demanding sympathy” (45). This “arid scimitar” (45) has
been read as a symbol of phallic aggression. A beak is used for probing, manipulating,
fighting, grooming and courting. Woolf too could plunge, smite, seduce, and demand
sympathy with her own “beak of brass.”
It is only when the context of Orlando is recalled that its dedication to Vita Sack-
ville-West might be seen as proprietary. Woolf was feeling a complex resentment of
Mary Campbell who had moved with her poet husband Roy into Long Barn on 1
October 1927 (De Salvo 31). My contention is that in writing Orlando, Woolf uses
the power of her pen to demand sympathy and, simultaneously, to pin down her lover
by inscribing her, pinioning her with the point of her pen. My reading is similar to
Suzanne Raitt’s who suggests that, “Beneath the desire to compliment and to flatter”…
“lay a more sinister impulse to punish and hurt” and to gain “a new hold” on her lover
(Raitt 18). Raitt focuses on Woolf ’s disappointment in love, asserting that “Orlando
was bound up with Woolf ’s experience of loss, as well as power. In writing Sackville-
West’s life, she established her own claim to it” (34).
Orlando has been seen to reclaim Knole for Sackville-West as well as a way of
securing Sackville-West for Woolf. My contention is that writing Orlando was a more
personal act of appropriation: an attempt to restrain a straying lover, analogous to cut-
ting off the pinion of a bird to prevent flight. The pointed arrow of Woolf ’s pen aims
to bring her quarry to ground. Victoria L. Smith writes that Orlando was written as “a
kind of memorial” (16) or compensation. She uses Freud to argue that the book is “an
enactment of melancholia,” that loss is recuperated by the text (6). Orlando “was one
way of capturing Sackville-West, establishing a kind of power over her life, laying claim
to it and wooing her” (8). Nigel Nicholson also writes that “[s]he would recapture Vita
by writing a book about her, so ingenious, so affectionate that Vita would be unable
to resist its appeal” (Nicolson 2000 89). Nicolson described Orlando as “The longest
and most charming love-letter in literature” (Nicolson 1973 186). The word “charm-
ing” is apposite if we consider its synonyms: enchanting, alluring, engaging, beguiling,
tempting, inviting, irresistible, seductive, endearing. And Sackville-West was lured and
dizzied by the dedication, writing to her husband on the day of publication, “I am com-
pletely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell.” She expresses her excitement and
confusion; the book is “like a cloak encrusted with jewels,” “it dazzles and bewilders
me” (Nicolson 1992 205–206).
In their correspondence, Sackville-West and Woolf animate pen and ink so that
they become agents in gauging their relationship. At different times Woolf ’s pen flows,
scratches, needs pushing, is shaky, paralyzed, twists, quivers, itches, wriggles. On 19 Jan-
uary 1941 Woolf writes, “I must buy some shaded inks—lavenders, pinks violets—to
shade my meaning. I see I gave you many wrong meanings, using only black ink” (De
Salvo 471). Since To the Lighthouse she thinks herself as “virgin, passive, blank of ideas”
(D 131). Feeling neglected, in compensation, she takes up her pen and, on 14 March
1927, writes, “Although annoyed that I have not heard from Vita by this post nor yet last
week, annoyed sentimentally, & partly from vanity—still I must record the conception
last night between 12 & one of a new book” (D3 130–1). In October, seven months into
Orlando’s gestation, she accusingly tells Sackville-West that the “lovely page” of her cur-
rent letter “might all be filled to the brim with lovemaking unbelievable: indiscretions
incredible” (De Salvo 251). Instead, she is jealously “in despair” about “the Campbell.”
Then she takes control, and, in an act of resistance, dips her “pen in the ink” and, “as if au-
tomatically, on a clean sheet,” writes “Orlando: A Biography” (251). The ink flows easily:
my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly
until 12.…But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and its all about
you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none,
who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell)…Shall you mind? Say
yes, or No:.… (252)
She clearly intends her lover to mind. The letter is left unsigned. The piercing dot-
dot-dot ellipsis that Woolf so often uses at the end of her letters leaves space for a
sympathetic response.
Sackville-West is concurrently “thrilled and terrified” “at the prospect of being
projected into the shape of Orlando” (De Salvo 252). But she immediately sees that
there is retribution involved in this project as evidenced by the images of torture used;
she asks that the book be dedicated to “your victim,” “having drawn, quartered me, un-
wound and retwisted me” (252). Five days later Woolf issues an ultimatum, “If you’ve
given yourself to Campbell, I’ll have no more to do with you, and so it shall be written,
plainly, for all the world to read in Orlando…” (255). As Elizabeth Hirsh notes, “The
offset word ‘plainly’, rebuffs Sackville-West’s repeated appeals to Woolf for ‘discretion’
in the conduct of their affair” (Hirsh in Humm 174). By dedicating the book to her
lover, Woolf was boldly advertising their affair at a time it was under threat from a rival.
Sackville-West wonders if the publication of Orlando might be too much of a challenge
to their relationship. Two months before the private was made public she encourages
Woolf to stay the night, “If October 11th is to see the end of our romance, it would be
as well to make the most of the short time that remains to us” (De Salvo 292).
Victoria Glendinning writes that when Sackville-West was in love she felt released
“from stagnation and alienation” (Glendinning 238). In a 1931 diary poem she welcomes
being “afraid of my own sensations” and enjoys being swept by the pain of “irrational
passion”; she is not averse to a “sudden springing and stinging of pain” (Glendinning
238). She welcomes the same ambivalent stinging sensation in the “In Memoriam” poem
published after Woolf ’s death in the Observer on 6 April 1941. Here she draws attention
to her lover as being simultaneously vulnerable and predatory. Woolf is both moth and
moth-hunter, hiding a sharp sting “beneath the brushing wing.” Her lover’s perceived
unkindness is, posthumously, made public. Sackville-West has patently recognised the
power that Woolf gained in writing Orlando. Woolf used the book for ultimate control;
seeing it as an act of murder. She wrote to Vita on 20 March 1928:
ORLANDO IS FINISHED!!!
Did you feel a sort of tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last
at 5 minutes to one? That was when he died—or rather stopped talking with
three little dots… (L3 474)
She asks Sackville-West, “Have I made you up?…” (De Salvo 279) leaving the habitual
sharply stabbing three dots to invite a response. Demonstrably Woolf does make up
Sackville-West; she plays with her physical and sexual identity in Orlando, dressing her
up in different costumes for the three photographs shot by Vanessa Bell, Lenare and
Leonard Woof.
Adapting her image, suspending her animation, halting her in time was another
way to possess Sackville-West who is perfectly aware that she has been objectified and
commodified by the portraits. She is overwhelmed by Woolf hanging “so splendid a
garment on so poor a peg” and feels “like one of those wax figures in a shop window,
on which you have hung a robe stitched with jewels” (De Salvo 305). In the photograph
taken by Lenare on 2 November 1927, “Orlando on her return to England,” Sackville-
West is loaded with pearls: a sexual signifier of their affair. Woolf spent three days at
Long Barn at Christmastime in 1925, voluptuously describing Sackville-West as shin-
ing “with a candle lit radiance”…“pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the
secret of her glamour, I suppose” (D3 52). In 1926, again at Christmas, she is described
as “hung with grapes, pink with pearls, lustrous, candle-lit.” She ends this letter with
“Ah, but I like being with Vita” (De Salvo 86).
Orlando is inscribed to Sackville-West in other veiled ways. Leslie Hankins notes
that the wild geese in a V-shaped skein “replicate the ‘VW’ signature” (Hankins 189).
Hankins cites Diane Gillespie who reads the “playful, artful use of the ‘V’” in Vanessa
Bell’s design for the cover of A Room of One’s Own as an oblique signal. There is an
implication in an August 1929 letter from Woolf to her sister that there was something
scandalous about the hands being at 11.05; that it would cause “a stir” (L4 81). The sug-
gestion is that this was a coded reference to the lesbian “V” symbol. Woolf had asked
Sackville West on 23 March 1927 “Now what would happen if I let myself go over?
Answer me that. Over what? You’ll say. A precipice marked V” (L3 352). Woolf scaled
that Sapphic height, then, disappointed by disloyalty, she chose to use her V-shaped nib
to preserve their affair in fictional form.
Some of the playful personal references in Orlando may not have been fully appre-
ciated by their target. In 1920 Sackville-West ran away to Amiens with Violet Trefusis
and “was impressed” (Nicolson 1973 37) and “very much astonished” (118) when, on
Valentine’s Day, her husband, Harold Nicolson, came after her “in an aeroplane” (37).
Perhaps Woolf writes a sly adaptation of Nicolson’s patriarchal mission to save his wife
from Violet’s clutches. She mischievously ends Orlando with Nicolson, thinly disguised as
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, confidently descending from an aeroplane. A wild
goose appears above his head. Shel’s aeroplane shoots “nearer and nearer,” masterfully
rushing through the wind and out of the clouds. But Orlando does not seem to be im-
pressed; instead she “looks anxiously at the sky.” What is she looking for? As the midnight
hour strikes, her pearls, glow and burn sensuously “like a phosphorescent flare in the
darkness” (a similar clitoral image is the match burning in the crocus in Mrs Dalloway).
The aeroplane hovers in ascendancy but then “a single wild bird” springs up over Shel’s
head. Orlando knows this bird, crying in recognition, “It’s the goose!” and then “The wild
goose…” (228). In A Room of One’s Own, also 1928, Woolf writes about the longing “to
pin down the moment with date and season” (88). Here she pins down the precise instant
of the publication of Orlando. The final lines record the twelfth stroke of midnight, the
start of “Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight” (228).
But Vita Sackville-West was puzzled by the ending, “I simply cannot make out
what was in her mind. What does the wild goose stand for? Fame? Love? Death? Mar-
riage? Obviously a person of V.’s intellect has had some object in view, but what was it?
The symbolism doesn’t come off ” (Glendinning 204). Gilbert suggests it “may symbol-
ize supernatural intervention” or “the search for self or for an elusive reality” (Woolf
263). When Woolf conceived the book, as “The Jessamy Brides” she wrote in her diary
in March 1927, “And it is to end with three dots…so” (Woolf 131). The final lines of the
manuscript of Orlando differ markedly from the published version. As Shel leaps from
the aeroplane to meet his wife, “a wild goose with its neck outstretched flew above them
and Orlando cries to him: ‘The [wild] goose is—‘[The secret of life] is…’” (Moore 339).
The line is left incomplete with the ellipsis Woolf habitually uses to seek a response
from her lover. My suggestion is that this untamed, unattainable goose is a trope for
Woolf herself. The bird is now flying free in the ample space of the sky. Sackville-West,
however, has been effectively pinned like a specimen: appropriated, safely possessed
and beautifully bound, inside the book.
Works Cited
De Salvo, Louise and Leaska, Mitchell, eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. London:
Hutchinson, 1984.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination. Yale: Yale UP, 1979.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. “Orlando: A Precipice Marked V”: Between “A Miracle of Discretion” and “Love-
making Unbelievable: Indiscretion Incredible” in Barrett, Eileen and Cramer, Patricia, editors. Virginia
Woolf: Lesbian Readings. New York and London. New York UP, 1997.
Hirsh, Elizabeth. “Virginia Woolf and Portraiture” in Humm, Maggie, ed. The Edinburgh Companion to Vir-
ginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Lee, Hermione. “To Pin Down the Moment with Date and Season.” The Virginia Woolf Society of Great
Britain Annual Lecture, 25 January 2014.
http://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/annual-virginia-woolf-birth-
day-lecture-pin-down Accessed August 2017.
Moore, Madeline. (1979) “Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 25, no.
3/4. Fall/Winter 1979, 303–55.
——. The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf.
Boston, London and Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984.
Nicolson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.
——. Virginia Woolf. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
——. Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1919–1962. London: Weiden-
feld & Nicolson, 1992.
Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993.
Smith, Victoria L. (2006) “‘Ransacking the Language’: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf ’s Or-
lando.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 29, no. 4. Summer 2006, 57–75.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925–1930. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeil-
lie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5: 1936–1941. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6: 1933–1941. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London: The Hogarth Press, 2011.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1923–1928. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York
and London: Harcourt Brace, 1977.
——. Orlando: A Biography. Ed. Brenda Lyons with an Introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert. Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
——. A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1929–1931. Eds. Nigel Nicolson
and Joanne Trautmann. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
——. A Room of One’s Own. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
——. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
Notes on Contributors
Leslie Arthur is a rare book cataloguer and seller for the William Reese Company with
a particular interest in the modernists, early printing, fine binding, and book design.
Her undergraduate degree is from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and her
MS in English is from Southern Connecticut State University.
Claire Battershill is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at

Simon Fraser University and the 2017 SSHRC Impact Award Winner in the Talent
Category. Her books include Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014), Modernist Lives: Bi-
ography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s Hogarth Press (Bloomsbury,
2017) and two co-authored volumes on book history, teaching, and digital humanities.
Megan Beech is an AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her

thesis focuses on the manuscripts for Charles Dickens’s performance readings. She is
particularly interested in compositional practices, and her current research is especially
preoccupied with questions of form and note-taking and how manuscripts address these
areas of thought. Whilst her research focuses largely on the nineteenth century, she is
also fascinated by the evolution of compositional practice in the modernist period.
Jessica Berman is Professor of English and Director of the Dresher Center for the
Humanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her recent
publications include Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Mod-
ernism (2011); A Companion to Virginia Woolf (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) and Iqbalunnisa
Hussain’s Purdah and Polygamy (annotated edition Oxford, forthcoming). She also co-
edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia University Press. In 2016–17 she
served as president of the Modernist Studies Association.
Ted Bishop teaches creative nonfiction, book history, and modernist literature in the
Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author
of Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Books and Motorcycles and The Social Life of Ink, as
well as many works of travel writing and creative nonfiction on topics ranging from
e-readers to avalanches to fashion shows. As Edward L. Bishop, he has edited the man-
uscript of Virginia Woolf ’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, for Pace University
Press, and published a critical edition of the novel for Blackwell’s Shakespeare Head
Press edition of Virginia Woolf. He has also published work on the Bloomsbury Group,
James Joyce, dust jackets, archives, and bookstores.
Michael Black is preparing a PhD on William Blake and Virginia Woolf. The project is
indebted to Diane Filby Gillespie’s great research, which established that Blake is a vital
figure in Woolf ’s socially engaged ekphrasis. Michael graduated from the University
of Dundee in 2013, having received great teaching from the late Dr Jim Stewart. He
then completed a Masters in twentieth-century literature at the University of Glasgow,
graduating in 2014.
Notes on Contributors 297
Tom Breckin is currently completing his PhD at Leeds Trinity University, UK. His
thesis focuses upon the textual relationship Woolf had with her father, Sir Leslie Ste-
phen. He co-edited the Selected Papers for the 26th Annual International Conference
on Virginia Woolf.
Lindsey Cordery is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Universidad de

la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. She has published numerous articles in publica-
tions devoted to the study of canonical literary works in English read from a located,
postcolonial, Latin American perspective, also co-editing the Coloquios Montevideana
series of books which collect selected essays by local and foreign contributors following
these lines. In 2013, she co-edited Virginia Woolf en América Latina of the same series.
Madelyn Detloff is Professor of English and Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami
University. She is author of The Value of Woolf (Cambridge UP), The Persistence of
Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP), co-editor of
Queer Bloomsbury (Edinburgh UP), and author of several essays on queer and feminist
theory, modernism, and feminist studies. She is the former Vice President of the Inter-
national Virginia Woolf Society and former co-chair of the H.D. International Society.
Aimee Gasston is Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of Lon-

don, where she completed her doctorate on modernist short fiction and objects. She
was awarded a Harry Ransom Research Fellowship for a project on Elizabeth Bowen
and literary stammering, and was winner of the fourth Katherine Mansfield Essay
Prize. She is Editorial Assistant and Reviews Editor for Katherine Mansfield Studies
(Edinburgh University Press).
Amanda Golden is Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technol-
ogy. She edited This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (UP of Florida, 2016)
and her book Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to
the Confessional Poets is under contract with Routledge. She has published in Modern-
ism/modernity, The Ted Hughes Society Journal, and Woolf Studies Annual.
Jane Goldman, Reader in English at Glasgow University, is a General Editor of the

Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Her books include
The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), The Cambridge Introduction to Virgin-
ia Woolf (2006), and With you in the Hebrides: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013). She
is also a poet. Her poems have been published in Gutter, Blackbox Manifold, Tender and
elsewhere. Her first slim volume is Border Thoughts (Leamington Books, 2014), “a little
theatrical box of spectacle and light […] the living underworld of Brecht’s Threepenny
Opera translated into raucous girlish post-war wayward ways” (Hix Eros)
Sara Grimm (née Barnard) received her BA in English Literature from The King’s Uni-
versity (2017) and intends to pursue studies in Library and Information Science and
the Digital Humanities. Her varied interests span modernist and medieval literature,
book history and the life of the library catalogue.
Adam Hammond is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Univer-

sity of Toronto. He is the author of Literature in the Digital Age: A Critical Introduction
(Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the co-author, with Melba Cuddy-Keane and
Alexandra Peat, of Modernism: Keywords (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
Leslie Kathleen Hankins has published dozens of articles on Virginia Woolf and cine-
ma, including sections in The Gender Complex of Modernism, the Woolf Studies Annual
and the Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts as well as several articles
on Woolf and letterpress printing. She is a professor in the department of English and
Creative Writing at Cornell College, and is also pursuing a graduate degree at the Cen-
ter for the Book at the University of Iowa.
Maggie Humm is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East Lon-
don, whose books on Woolf include Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia
Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema; Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private
Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia
Woolf and the Arts. Her debut novel Talland House was shortlisted for both the Impress
and Fresher Fiction prizes 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?).
Karina Jakubowicz completed her PhD on gardens in the work of Virginia Woolf,
and specialises in the literary uses of space and place in modernist culture. She has
published widely on the work of modernist writers, including a book on Garsington
Manor and its influence on the Bloomsbury Group. She has studied at University Col-
lege London, The University of Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin.
Tyler Johansson is an undergraduate student at King’s University, Edmonton.
Joyce E. Kelley is an associate professor of English at Auburn University at Montgom-

ery. Her previous publications include articles in Journal of Narrative Theory, Victorians,
The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Children’s Literature, Virginia
Woolf Miscellany, and Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing. Her monograph
on women’s modernist fiction and travel writing, Excursions into Modernism: Women
Writers, Travel, and the Body, was published by Ashgate in December 2015.
Yukiko Kinoshita is Professor Emeritus, Kobe Women’s University, Japan, and is cur-
rently teaching part-time at Kyoto University. She earned her PhD in English from
Queen Mary, University of London in 1997 and has published works on fin de siècle
and modernist writers such as Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster and
Virginia Woolf. Her current focus of research is on Far-Eastern influences on Woolf.
Her recent work includes “A Study of Far Eastern Influences on Virginia Woolf: Kaku-
zo Okakura, Roger Fry, and Virginia Woolf ” (2013).
Hana Leaper has contributed catalogue essays for the Vanessa Bell exhibition at Dulwich
Picture Gallery in 2017 (“Between London and Paris”), and for Virginia Woolf: an exhibi-
tion inspired by her writings, a touring exhibition beginning at Tate St Ives in February
2018 (“From Inheritance to Legacy: Virginia Woolf ’s place within networks of women
creatives”). She recently published an extensive scholarly investigation of Vanessa Bell’s
and Duncan Grant’s Famous Women dinner service in British Art Studies. She holds the
post of John Moores Painting Prize Senior Lecturer and Development Manager at LJMU.
Gill Lowe is Visiting Fellow in English at University Campus Suffolk, UK. Her re-
search interests are life-writing, narrative and early-twentieth-century literature. She
edited Hyde Park Gate News, the Stephen Family Newspaper, the juvenilia written
between 1891–1895 by Vanessa, Thoby and Virginia Stephen. Gill co-edited Virginia
Woolf: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, a collection of critical and theoretical es-
says published by EUP in 2015. She is currently working on a new Woolf project for
Bloomsbury Academic.
Sangam Macduff is a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Holloway, University of Lon-

don, where he is working on literary logic in Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.
He has published on Joyce and modernism in the James Joyce Quarterly, European
Joyce Studies, Genetic Joyce Studies, the James Joyce Broadsheet and Swiss Proceed-
ings in English Language and Literature.
Paula Maggio has taught Women’s Studies at the University of Akron, Kent State Uni-
versity, and the University of Mount Union. She is the editor of Blogging Woolf, a
comprehensive website covering Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. She has
published several monographs with Cecil Woolf Publishers and her work has appeared
in the Selected Papers from Annual Conferences on Virginia Woolf, as well as in the
Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Feminist Formations, and the Feminist Wire.
Eleanor McNees is Professor of English at the University of Denver where she teaches
Victorian and modern British literature. She is editor of the four-volume Critical As-
sessments of Virginia Woolf and of the Harcourt annotated edition of The Years. She has
published essays on Virginia Woolf and a number of Victorian authors. She is currently
completing a monograph on the literary influence of Leslie Stephen on Virginia Woolf.
Maria Oliveira has been a professor at the Federal University of Acre since 2013. Her
dissertation “Women Representation on Virginia Woolf ’s Works: A Dialogue between
her political and aesthetic discourse” was published by Paco Editorial in Portuguese in
Brazil and in English by Lambert Academic Publishing both in 2017. She is currently
working on her postdoc project at the University of Toronto on Woolf and Brazilian
Women Writers.
Paulina Pajak is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wrocław and is writing a

dissertation on gendered memory in Virginia Woolf ’s oeuvre, under the supervision
of Professor Teresa Bruś. She has obtained an MA in British Literature and an MA in
Psychology from the Jagiellonian University. Her research interests include modernist,
comparative and reception studies. Currently, she is working with Professor Jeanne
Dubino on the book Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature.
Alexandra Peat is an Associate Professor of Literature at Franklin University Switzer-

land. Her research focuses on transnational and transcultural elements in modernist
literature, specifically as embodied in narratives of travel and travelling exhibitions and
world’s fairs. She is the author of Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical
Journeys (Routledge, 2010) and the co-author (with Melba Cuddy-Keane and Adam
Hammond) of Modernism: Keywords (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
Virginie Podvin is currently completing a PhD in literature—“Samuel Beckett’s Aes-

thetics in light of Correspondence”—at the Université of Brest (France) under the
supervision of Pr. Sophie Guermès. She belongs to the Centre d’Étude des Corre-
spondances et Journaux Intimes. Her particular field of study is the literature of the
twentieth century and, more precisely, of Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras (whose
comparison was the topic of her Master’s dissertation), and Samuel Beckett. She is a
member of The Beckett Circle, the Société d’Études Woolfiennes, and the Société In-
ternationale Marguerite Duras.
Bryony Randall is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

She is co-General Editor, with Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers, of the Cambridge edi-
tion of the works of Virginia Woolf, and is an editorial board member and volume
editor on the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project. Key publications include
Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (CUP, 2007), and, as co-editor with Jane
Goldman, Virginia Woolf in Context (CUP, 2013).
Anne Reus is a PhD Student at Leeds Trinity University. Her thesis examines the represen-
tations of nineteenth-century women writers in Virginia Woolf ’s journalism, focussing
on the influence of Victorian biography and changing definitions of female professional-
ism. Her research interests include mid-Victorian sensation and domestic fiction, and
she has an article forthcoming on visual arts in the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon
and Margaret Oliphant. She has co-organized conferences on Woolf and Heritage (2016),
Water in the long 19th century and New Work in Modernist Studies (2017) and was co-
editor of the Selected Papers on Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Clemson UP, 2017).
Brian Richardson teaches at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor

of several books on modernism and postmodernism, including Unnatural Voices: Ex-
treme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006) and Narrative Beginnings:
Theories and Practices (2009). He guest-edited a special issue of Conradiana on “Con-
rad and the Reader” in 2003. He is currently completing a book on modernism and
misreading.
Susan Sellers is a general editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Woolf ’s
writing, volume editor of The Waves, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Vir-
ginia Woolf (2000). She gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture in 2017 and
has written on Woolf for a range of academic and mainstream publications. Woolf
also inspired her first novel, Vanessa and Virginia (2008). She is Professor of English at
St Andrews University.
Kathryn Simpson’s research primarily focuses on the work of Woolf and Katherine
Mansfield and is published widely. Her monograph, Gifts, Markets and Economies of
Desire in Virginia Woolf, was published with Palgrave (2008), and she is co-editor of
Virginia Woolf: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (EUP, 2014). Her most recent book
is Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her current research explores
the work of modernist women writers in relation to aviation in the 1920s and 1930s.
Retired after 35 years teaching English and Women’s Studies at Clemson University
in South Carolina, Elisa Kay Sparks continues to do academic research and publish
on flowers and gardens in the work of Virginia Woolf and on Woolf ’s connections
with and similarities to Georgia O’Keeffe. As a printmaker, Sparks specializes in color-
reduction woodcut and encaustic monotype, often combining the two processes with
digital photography to explore archetypes of the feminine.
Alice Staveley is Lecturer and Director of Honors in the Department of English, Stan-
ford University. She won Stanford’s 2017 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and
has published extensively in books and journals on Virginia Woolf ’s role as self-pub-
lisher, including her relationships with women in the publishing industry, most notably
her “lost” marketing agent, Norah Nicholls. Her book Virginia Woolf and the Making
of Modernism is in progress. With her MAPP colleagues, she has published Scholarly
Adventures in Digital Humanities (Palgrave, 2017). She is currently PI on “Buying and
Selling Modernism,” a Roberta Bowman Denning Fund Initiative for Humanities and
Technologies at Stanford, to transcribe all Hogarth Press financial and distribution re-
cords between 1917 and 1946.
Aaron J. Stone is a PhD student in English at the University of Michigan. Their main
areas of focus are queer and transnational modernisms, queer theory and history, and
narrative theory. Their current work asks how the seemingly “conventional” narratives
of many marginalized modernists might be resignified as experimental or queer in
order to challenge the hegemonic criteria that often disqualify these texts from signify-
ing as such.
Claudia Tobin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of

Cambridge. She has published articles on Vanessa Bell and Bloomsbury aesthetics, and
is currently completing a book about still life and modernism. She assisted Prof Fran-
ces Spalding on the National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and
Vision” (2014), and she is contributing to “Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired By
Her Writings,” forthcoming at Tate St Ives.
Julie Vandivere is the director of Honors and a professor of English at Bloomsburg

University of Pennsylvania. She has published articles, editions, and collected essays on
many modernist women writers including, H.D., Bryher, Virginia Woolf, Peggy Guggen-
heim, Emily Coleman, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Rosa Chacel. She is presently finishing
a monograph on changing definitions of infant life at the beginning of the twentieth-
century entitled “Fetal Wars: Birth Registration, Bastardy, and the Rise of Modernism.”
Adriana Varga is Lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno. She specializes in Brit-
ish and American literature and culture, global Anglophone literatures, postcolonial
and globalization theories, gender studies, modernism in a transnational context, post-
modernism, diaspora and immigrant studies, inter-art studies, and translation. She is a
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation recipient.
Rynelle Wiebe is an undergraduate student at King’s University, Edmonton.
Elizabeth Willson Gordon is Assistant Professor of English at King’s University, Ed-

monton, Canada. She is one of the creators of the Modernist Archives Publishing
Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive, and co-author of Scholarly Adventures in
Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (Palgrave, 2017).
She is author of Woolf ’s-head Publishing (UAL, 2009) and is currently at work on the
monograph Publishing, Branding, and Selling an Icon: the Cultural Impact of the Hog-
arth Press 1917–2017.
Nicola Wilson is a lecturer in book and publishing studies at the University of Read-
ing. Her first book is Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015) and her current
project is Books by Mail: The Story of the Book Society, 1929–69. She has written vari-
ous articles and chapters about the history of reading, libraries, and the archives of the
Hogarth Press, and is a co-author of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Mak-
ing the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017).
Riley Wilson recently graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in
English Literature and is currently applying to graduate programs. Her research centers
on Woolf, sound, and material culture.

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Virginia Woolf and the World of Books:

The Centenary of the Hogarth Press

Selected Papers from the Twenty-seventh

Selected Papers from the Twenty-seventh

Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill

print ISBN: 978-1-942954-56-9

For information about Clemson University Press,

Typeset in Minion Pro by series editor Wayne Chapman,

Cover imagery by Matthew Standage.

Notes on Contributors........................................................................................................ 296

by Claire Battershill and Nicola Wilson

Theurer, Michiko. “Circling the Waves.” Web. https://www.michikotheurer.com/circling-the-waves.html

AHH A Haunted House

Figure 1: Gall nuts and gum arabic. Author photo.

Figure 2: Ink ingredients, Cobb.

Figure 3: Table-top press, University of Reading. Author photo.

And inky it was.

Figure 6: Carrington’s snail. Note the smudges, the

Figure 7: Eliot, 2 faces, 2 fonts; evenly inked. Image courtesy

the erotics of the dip pen

the respectability of the fountain pen

Figure 8: Swan Pens.

the rigidity of the typewriter

The truth is I cannot write on a typewriter; I make enemies whenever I do;

haptics, space, and labour

“Ah life!” as Woolf might say.

extension of an institution, but Woolf turns to private space in Orlando, dramatizing

Echo Texts: Woolf and Krzywicka

Sexual inversion? I do not want to translate this word as “perversion”. Perversion

commissions. Thornton, reluctant to include Blake’s work, insisted it be qualified as

Figure 5: William Blake. Wood Engraving Illustration to Thornton’s

Figure 6: Original page

Figure 8: (left) Blake’s

Figure 11: Hogarth

——. A Bibliography of William Blake. London: Grolier Club, 1921.

delay as demonstrative of a writer behaving lackadaisically, either disorganized or over-

Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in An Unwritten novel—

Adamson, Glenn, ed. The Craft Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2010.

these early experiments with covering materials had significant bearing on

The Tuileries are in a trance

Paris overthrows traditional boundaries, not only between different languages

The complex network of allusions, techniques and transgressions alive in Mirrlees’s

These nymphs are harmless

A female flânerie—a flâneurserie—not only changes the way we move through

[women made] literary contributions—which include major works of prose,

The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening

When I say this morning incautiously, “I’m reviewed in the M[ancheste]r

What really interests [Romains] is the feelings of persons, not as individual

the same course and oscillations of communal psychology can be traced in

this psychology is a system of privilege […] from that of wearing a particular

Leonard is often regarded as a model for Louis (Glendinning 261), so it is striking

a whole brakeful of boys is swept up and goes cricketing, footballing. An army

Figure 1: L. B. Pekin, Darwin (London: Hogarth Press, 1937). Dust

The Darwin biography strikes an admirable balance between summarizing Dar-

thought of as inferior mining-machines” to contemporary Africans who slave away in

Virginia borrows from different pictorial movements to realise portraits which

As regards character-drawing, Mrs Woolf (in my opinion) told us ten thou-

II. From Book to Masterpiece

To her brother Thoby, in 1897:

Gradually all my presents have arrived—Fathers Lockhart [the Life of Sir

Virginia’s ambiguous relationship with painting became a successful collaboration

Here Stephen is put forward by Woolf as a like-minded literary companion; the

He is a man of intense curiosity…to whom reading is more of the nature of