Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice

205 Pages·2010·1.15 MB·English

by  Gina Potts

Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Volume 1
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Virginia Woolf’s
Bloomsbury, Volume 1
Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice
Edited by
Gina Potts
and
Lisa Shahriari
in association with the Palgrave Macmillan
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Gina Potts & Lisa Shahriari 2010
Individual chapters © contributors 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-51766-0
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Notes on the Contributors xiv
List of Abbreviations xvii
1 Back to Bloomsbury 1
Cecil Woolf
2 The Voyage Back: Woolf’s Revisions and Returns 9
Suzanne Raitt
3 ‘Young writers might do worse’: Anne Thackeray
Ritchie, Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf 20
Beth Rigel Daugherty
4 Mapping the Ghostly City: Cambridge,
A Room of One’s Own and the University Novel 37
Anna Bogen
5 London Rooms 50
Morag Shiach
6 Leonard and Virginia’s London Library:
Mapping London’s Tides, Streams and Statues 64
Elisa Kay Sparks
7 Sense of Self and Sense of Place in Orlando:
Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of Pantomime 75
Caroline Marie
8 ‘My own ghost met me’: Woolf’s 1930s
Photographs, Death and Freud’s Acropolis 86
Maggie Humm
9 Woolf, Fry and the P sycho- Aesthetics of Solidity 104
Benjamin Harvey
10 Virginia Woolf and Changing Conceptions of Nature 121
Christina Alt
vii
viii Contents
11 Comparative Modernism: The Bloomsbury
Group and the Harlem Renaissance 135
Kristin Czarnecki
12 Sketches of Carlyle’s House by Two Visitors, a Young
Virginia Woolf and a Japanese Novelist, So¯seki Natsume 153
Makiko Minow-Pinkney
Bibliography 171
Index 185
Preface
Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury collects together scholarship from a range
of perspectives, covering the broad areas of aesthetics in Volume 1 and
politics in Volume 2. The work in these areas of Woolf studies, along with
the intersections between them, reveals not only the development of
Virginia Woolf as a writer and intellectual of her time, but also the influ-
ences on her work and the impact that her writing has had upon readers
and other writers across the twentieth and early t wenty- first century.
This volume, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury: Aesthetic Theory and Literary
Practice, brings together new insights and scholarship on different
aspects of Woolf’s aesthetics and influences. Woolf’s applications of her
aesthetic approaches are revealed by tracing some of her early influ-
ences and exploring the relationships between her writing and different
creative forms. It is not only the work and ideas of Woolf which are
explored, but also those of her Bloomsbury contemporaries and others.
The chapters in this volume illuminate the wide and continuing
reverberations of Woolf’s work, in relations to, for example, concep-
tions of women as intellectuals and writers; the implications of spaces
and places; questions of identity and ideas of self; the roles of literary
groups; and how Woolf’s work has influenced understandings of writers
from outside Woolf’s own literary circle and cultural milieu. The signifi-
cance of employing Woolf when studying the work of other writers is
revealed not just by looking back to, but also beyond, Bloomsbury.
This volume opens by looking back to Bloomsbury with reminis-
cences by Cecil Woolf, the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His
affectionate personal reflections on his aunt and uncle offer a unique
view of the couple from simple details of their day- to- day lives to the
humorous wit, fertile imagination and occasionally cruel ‘takings-off’
of his aunt Virginia. Cecil Woolf also reveals how his aunt and uncle’s
work for the Hogarth Press influenced his decision to start his own
publishing house, which is modelled on theirs. Taking forward the idea
of returns, Suzanne Raitt’s “The Voyage Back: Woolf’s Revisions and
Returns” discusses the implications of the revisions Woolf made to her
novels and the significance of the returns to, and departures from, early
drafts. Raitt argues that return, like revision, engages both memory and
fantasy, hope and disappointment, even when the place one returns to
is as familiar as one’s own writing or one’s own past.
ix
x Preface
In “‘Young writers might do worse’: Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Virginia
Stephen and Virginia Woolf”, Beth Rigel Daugherty looks back to Woolf’s
home- schooling, and the influences that her Aunt Anny had on her
education and development as a woman writer. Daugherty traces the
influences of Ritchie’s biographical sketches and her writing for Atalanta
(‘a magazine for girls’) and other publications, revealing striking links
between some of Ritchie’s work and Woolf’s. This offers new insight
into feminist understandings of the influences of Woolf’s formative
education and her subsequent profession as a woman writer and literary
critic. In “Mapping the Ghostly City: Cambridge, A Room of One’s
Own and the University Novel”, Anna Bogen explores further Woolf’s
relationship to education. Uncovering Woolf’s complicated r elationship
to university women of her time, Bogen examines the reception of the
lectures Woolf gave in Cambridge in 1929, which became A Room of
One’s Own; the popular genre of university fiction; and the implications
of “Oxbridge” and London in Woolf’s conceptualisations of the modern
woman writer. Bogen argues that Woolf’s grounding of creativity within
London’s urban environment is continually haunted by Cambridge
and that the m ulti- dimensional vision of the city extends imaginative
syntheses for women.
The significance of space and place in Woolf continues to be of
imp ortance to scholars of her work, and new insights continue to open
up perspectives on the roles that space and place play in Woolf’s writ-
ing. Morag Shiach’s “London Rooms” addresses the material notion
of rooms in Woolf’s London Scene essays. Shiach identifies the rooms’
multiple meanings – as social spaces, as sites of technological innovation,
as part of the landscape of the familial and as the boundary of the self.
Illuminating Woolf’s lifelong relationship with London, Elisa Kay Sparks
examines the various influences on Woolf’s relationship to London
in “Leonard and Virginia’s London Library: Mapping London’s Tides,
Streams and Statues”. By looking back to London guide books held in
Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s library, Sparks explores Virginia’s particular
understandings of and writings about London as a woman writer, and
how the shapes and movements of London are written in Mrs. Dalloway.
Sparks extends understandings of the city lore which lies behind the
walks in Mrs. Dalloway by considering how much and what Virginia
Woolf knew about London’s history. Bringing together ideas of place
and self, Caroline Marie investigates the ways that Woolf’s attendance at
dramatic performances in London influenced the w riting of Orlando. In
“Sense of Self and Sense of Place in Orlando: Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of
Pantomime”, Marie argues that pantomime hinges on the transformation