Virginia Woolf and the World of Books

312 Pages·2019·3.004 MB·English

by  Nicola Wilson (editor), Claire Battershill (editor)

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
For information about Clemson University Press,
please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.
Typeset in Minion Pro by series editor Wayne Chapman,
with production and design specialist Charis Chapman.
Cover imagery by Matthew Standage.
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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
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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
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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)

The 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
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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.
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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.
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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)
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