E D I T E D B YJ E S S I C A B E R M A N

A Companion toVirginia Woolf

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and John Unsworth94. A Companion to Virginia Woolf Edited by Jessica Berman

A C O M P A N I O N T O

IRGINIAOOLFEDITED BY

J ESS ICA BERMAN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Berman, Jessica Schiff, 1961– editor.Title: A companion to Virginia Woolf / edited by Jessica Berman.Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016. | Series: Blackwell

companions to literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015040293 | ISBN 9781118457887 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941–Criticism and interpretation. |

BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.Classification: LCC PR6045.O72 Z57866 2016 | DDC 823/.912–dc23 LC record available at

http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040293

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Virginia Woolf photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell, June 1926. © National Portrait Gallery,London.

Set in 11/13pt Garamond by Aptara Inc., New Delhi, India

1 2016

Contents

Notes on Contributors viiiAcknowledgments xiiiIntroduction 1

Part I Textual Encounters 11

1 The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography 13Alison Booth

2 The Short Fiction 27Laura Marcus

3 Silence and Cries: The Exotic Soundscape of The Voyage Out 41Emma Sutton

4 The Transitory Space of Night and Day 55Elizabeth Outka

5 Jacob’s Room: Occasions of War, Representations of History 67Vincent Sherry

6 Mrs. Dalloway: Of Clocks and Clouds 79Paul K. Saint-Amour

7 A Passage to the Lighthouse 95Maud Ellmann

8 Orlando’s Queer Animals 109Derek Ryan

vi Contents

9 Global Objects in The Waves 121Jane Garrity

10 The Years and Contradictory Time 137Anna Snaith

11 Between the Acts: Novels and Other Mass Media 151Marina MacKay

12 Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading, and Writing with theCompanion Species 163Jane Goldman

13 Woolf’s Essays, Diaries, and Letters 177Anne E. Fernald

14 A Room of One’s Own in the World: The Pre-life and After-life ofShakespeare’s Sister 189Susan Stanford Friedman

15 Three Guineas and the Politics of Interruption 203Jessica Berman

Part II Approaching Woolf 217

16 Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Class 219Jean Mills

17 Woolf and the Law 235Ravit Reichman

18 Woolf and the Natural Sciences 249Christina Alt

19 Digital Woolf 263Mark Hussey

20 Woolf and Crip Theory 277Madelyn Detloff

21 Woolf and the Visual 291Maggie Humm

22 Feminist Woolf 305Pamela L. Caughie

23 Ecocritical Woolf 319Bonnie Kime Scott

Contents vii

24 Woolf, War, Violence, History, and … Peace 333Sarah Cole

25 Queer Woolf 347Melanie Micir

Part III Woolf in the World 359

26 Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Intimacy 361Jesse Wolfe

27 Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and Global Print Culture 377Claire Battershill and Helen Southworth

28 Woolf’s Urban Rhythms 397Tamar Katz

29 Woolf and Geography 411Andrew Thacker

30 Woolf’s Spatial Aesthetics and Postcolonial Critique 427Nels Pearson

31 Woolf in Translation 441Genevieve Brassard

32 Reading Woolf in India 453Supriya Chaudhuri

33 Woolf in Hispanic Countries: Buenos Aires and Madrid 467Laura Ma Lojo-Rodrıguez

Index 481

Notes on Contributors

Christina Alt is a Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Her research centers onexchanges between modernist literature and science, particularly the biological sci-ences. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (2010) and is currentlywriting a monograph on modernism and ecology.

Claire Battershill is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She haspublished articles on biography and autobiography at the Hogarth Press, contemporarywriters’ rooms, and theories of authorship. She is currently working on a book projectentitled “Selling Real Lives: Biography in the Literary Marketplace, 1918–1939.”

Jessica Berman is Professor of English and Director of the Dresher Center for theHumanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is theauthor of Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (2011)and Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (2001). With PaulK. Saint-Amour, she edits the Modernist Latitudes book series for Columbia UniversityPress.

Alison Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author ofHow to Make It as a Woman (2004), Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf(1992), and a book on literary house museums. She directs the Collective Biographiesof Women online project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanitiesand the American Council of Learned Societies.

Genevieve Brassard is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Englishat the University of Portland, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British,Irish, and postcolonial literatures. She has published articles on Woolf, Austen, Bowen,Wharton, Sinclair, and Irene Rathbone.

Notes on Contributors ix

Pamela L. Caughie is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. Her pub-lications on Woolf include Virginia Woolf Writing the World (co-edited, 2015), WoolfOnline (co-edited, 2013), Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (edited,2000), Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991), and contributions to several compan-ions, collections, and journals.

Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor (Emerita) in the Department of English, JadavpurUniversity, Calcutta. Her specializations include European Renaissance literature,nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian cultural history, the novel, cinema, andtheory. She has written on modernist movements in India and has translated modernistpoetry and fiction.

Sarah Cole is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,and the author of two books, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England andIreland (2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (2003), and ofnumerous articles. She is the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar, and therecipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Madelyn Detloff, Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexual-ity Studies at Miami University, is former vice president of the International VirginiaWoolf Society and author of The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twen-tieth Century (2009), as well as of essays in Hypatia, Women’s Studies, ELN, LiteratureCompass, MMLA, and Modernism/Modernity.

Maud Ellmann is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Developmentof the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. She has written widely on mod-ernism and psychoanalysis; her most recent book is The Nets of Modernism: James, Woolf,Joyce, and Freud (2010).

Anne E. Fernald is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University’sLincoln Center campus. She is the editor of the Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway(2014) and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006), and has publishedarticles and reviews on Woolf, feminism, and modernism.

Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’sStudies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She publishes on modernism, femi-nist theory, narrative theory, migration studies, and world literature. She was foundingco-editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing. Recent books include Planetary Modernisms:Provocations on Modernity across Time (2015) and Comparisons: Theories, Approaches, Uses(2013).

Jane Garrity is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boul-der. She is the author of Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and theNational Imaginary (2003); the co-editor, with Laura Doan, of Sapphic Modernities: Sex-uality, Women, and National Culture (2006); and the editor of “Queer Space,” a special

x Notes on Contributors

issue for English Language Notes (2007). She is currently writing a monograph titled“Fashioning Bloomsbury.”

Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is ageneral editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf and is editingWoolf’s To the Lighthouse and co-editing A Room of One’s Own for the series. She is theauthor of With You in the Hebrides: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013); The CambridgeIntroduction to Virginia Woolf (2006); Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (2004);and The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-impressionism and the Politicsof the Visual (1998). She is currently writing a book entitled Virginia Woolf and theSignifying Dog.

Maggie Humm is Emeritus Professor at the University of East London. Her publica-tions on Woolf include The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (2010),Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (2005), andModernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Cinema and Photography(2002).

Mark Hussey is Professor of English at Pace University in New York. He is editorof Woolf Studies Annual and has published widely on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.Among his current projects are Modernism’s Print Cultures (with Faye Hammill) and abiography of Clive Bell.

Tamar Katz is Associate Professor of English at Brown University and the author ofImpressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England (2000). She isworking on a book entitled “City Memories: Modernism and Urban Nostalgia in NewYork City.”

Laura Ma Lojo-Rodrıguez is Senior Lecturer in English at the Department of Englishand German, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Some of her publicationson Woolf include Moving across a Century: Women’s Short Fiction from Virginia Woolf to AliSmith (2012) and “‘A Gaping Mouth but No Words’: Virginia Woolf Enters the Landof Butterflies,” in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe (2002).

Marina MacKay is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow of St. Peter’sCollege, University of Oxford. Her publications include The Cambridge Introduction tothe Novel (2011), Modernism and World War II (2007), and British Fiction after Modernism(co-edited with Lyndsey Stonebridge, 2007).

Laura Marcus, FBA, is Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature at the Universityof Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. Her publications include Dreamsof Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014); The Tenth Muse: Writing aboutCinema in the Modernist Period (2007), which was awarded the 2008 James RussellLowell Prize of the Modern Language Association; Virginia Woolf: Writers and Their

Notes on Contributors xi

Work (1997); Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994); and, asco-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004).

Melanie Micir is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St.Louis, where she is also an affiliate faculty member in women’s, gender, and sexualitystudies. She is finishing a book about queer feminist biographical acts.

Jean Mills is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, City University ofNew York. She is the author of Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit ofModernist Classicism (2014). Her most recent essay is “To the Lighthouse: The CriticalHeritage,” in The Cambridge Companion to “To the Lighthouse” (2015).

Elizabeth Outka is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Rich-mond. She is the author of Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and theCommodified Authentic (2009); her current project, “Raising the Dead: War, Plague,Magic, Modernism,” explores how World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemicradically shifted perceptions of the corpse.

Nels Pearson is Associate Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies at FairfieldUniversity. He is the author of Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in JamesJoyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett (2015) and many articles on modernism. Healso co-edited Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (2009).

Ravit Reichman is Associate Professor of English at Brown University, and the authorof The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (2009).

Derek Ryan is Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent. He is theauthor of Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and Virginia Woolf and the Mate-riality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (2013). He is currently co-editing Flush: A Biographyfor the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf.

Paul K. Saint-Amour teaches in the Department of English at the University of Penn-sylvania. He is the author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (2015)and The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (2003). With Jes-sica Berman he edits the Modernist Latitudes book series for Columbia UniversityPress.

Bonnie Kime Scott is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and the Uni-versity of Delaware. Her books include In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf andModernist Uses of Nature (2012), Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersec-tions (2007), and Refiguring Modernism (1995), which centers on Woolf, Djuna Barnes,and Rebecca West.

Vincent Sherry is the Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities and Professorof English at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include Modernism and

xii Notes on Contributors

the Reinvention of Decadence (2015), The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003),Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1995), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993), andThe Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (1987). He is the editorof The Cambridge History of Modernism (forthcoming) and of The Cambridge Companion tothe Literature of the First World War (2005).

Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London.She is the author of Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London 1890–1945(2014) and Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000). She has edited TheYears for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (2012) and A Room ofOne’s Own and Three Guineas for Oxford World Classics (2015).

Helen Southworth is Associate Professor of Literature at the Robert D. Clark HonorsCollege at the University of Oregon. She is the editor of Leonard and Virginia Woolf,the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (2010) and the author of The IntersectingRealities and Fictions of Virginia Woolf and Colette (2004).

Emma Sutton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.Her publications include Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (2013), Opera and the Novel(co-edited, 2012), and Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (2002). Sheis co-editing The Voyage Out for Cambridge University Press.

Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature at Nottingham TrentUniversity. He is author and editor of several books on modernism, including Movingthrough Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2009) and The Oxford Critical andCultural History of Modernist Magazines (co-edited, 2009–2013).

Jesse Wolfe is an Associate Professor of English at California State University, Stanis-laus, and the author of Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (2011). Hiscurrent book project, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities,examines the influence of Bloomsburian treatments of intimacy on six contemporaryAnglo-American novelists.

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the community of Virginia Woolf scholars whose innovative andinsightful work has continued to create new ways to understand and appreciate Woolf.They were the inspiration for this volume. I also want to express my deep appreciationto the contributors to this Companion, and especially to those who stepped in undershort deadlines, for their brilliant and creative scholarship, which made the task ofediting a joy. Thanks go to Emma Bennett at Wiley Blackwell, who proposed thevolume, and to Ben Thatcher, Bridget Jennings, Hazel Bird, and Jacqueline Harvey,who saw it through. I am very grateful to Ruth Anne Blusiewicz, my student assistant,who rescued me from a chaotic inbox and kept the project on track. Working on thisbook was, for her, a dramatic introduction to Woolf, but I hope she will be only thefirst of many readers who will find inspiration for further study in these pages.

Introduction

Virginia Woolf’s legacy, reputation, and popularity seem to expand daily. Students andscholars of modernism read her at all levels of the curriculum, while she also contin-ues to inspire interest in gender, women’s, and sexuality studies. Her work is widelyanthologized and excerpted, while her persona and image permeate contemporary cul-ture. And, yet, we do not have the kinds of resources surrounding her work that exist forother authors of this significance. Standardized scholarly editions such as the HarcourtVirginia Woolf Annotated Editions, the Shakespeare Head Press Edition of VirginiaWoolf, the Oxford World’s Classics editions, and the Cambridge Edition of VirginiaWoolf have begun to emerge in recent years as Woolf’s work comes out of copyrightprotection. But, while scholarship abounds, there are no Norton Critical or BedfordCultural editions, only a small number of stand-alone introductions and just a fewgeneral collections of essays, most notably The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf(2nd edition 2010), edited by Susan Sellers, and Virginia Woolf in Context (2012), editedby Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman. My hope is that, along with these recent texts,A Companion to Virginia Woolf will help seed a new crop of Woolf resources, which willsustain her growing significance in the twenty-first century.

A Companion to Virginia Woolf offers a state-of-the-art introduction to the study ofWoolf, as well as insightful and provocative essays from top critics in the field thatwill have much to offer seasoned readers. The volume provides an entree into each ofher major works while connecting Woolf studies to major currents in contemporaryscholarship on modernism and post-colonialism. Entries in sections on “ApproachingWoolf” and “Woolf in the World” highlight the various approaches employed by Woolfscholars today to understand the multi-dimensionality of her writing as well as thecritical trajectories it travels when understood within transnational contexts.

A Companion to Virginia Woolf, First Edition. Edited by Jessica Berman.© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2 Introduction

A special hallmark of A Companion to Virginia Woolf is its effort to bring whatis known as the new modernist studies to bear on Woolf studies. While there aremany ways to understand this new foray in scholarship, as I employ it here “the newmodernist studies” stands for the temporal and spatial expansion of the purview ofmodernist studies, its connection to transnational concerns and increasingly globallocations, its recognition of the importance of mass culture and media technologiesin conjunction with what used to be called “high modernism,” and its intersectionwith many of the historical and political concerns of the early to mid-twentiethcentury, including many of those now associated with the ends of empire and thebeginnings of post-colonialism. This emphasis shows, for example, in the inclusionof essays that connect Woolfian texts to colonial contexts (Chaudhuri, Ch. 32) orreassess the ongoing role of media cultures in reading Woolf (MacKay, Ch. 11), ratherthan through a polemical editorial perspective or the imposition of a unitary atti-tude throughout the volume. Woolf’s writing and career are multi-faceted, dippinghere into life writing, there into essayism, all the while advancing in many direc-tions the modernist effort to remake fiction for the twentieth century. A Compan-ion to Virginia Woolf seeks to honor that heterogeneity by offering a wide range ofapproaches and contexts for Woolf study, suggesting new modes for reading Woolf,whether in relation to animal studies (Ryan, Ch. 8; Goldman, Ch. 12) or in ecocriticalcontexts (Scott, Ch. 23), which will point readers in the direction of scholarship yet tocome.

The Companion begins with the section devoted to encounters with Woolf’s life andmajor texts. Alison Booth starts us off with her essay, “The Lives of Houses: Woolf andBiography,” by raising the matter of Woolf’s life as a subject for criticism and remind-ing us of “Woolf’s immersion in biography, particularly as a writer highly sensitiveto physical experience and the domestic lives of houses.” By exploring a number ofthe houses of importance to Woolf’s life and work, she offers us a way to understandWoolf’s preoccupation with (auto)biography as both material and immaterial, shapedby places and also, importantly, transcendent of them.

Laura Marcus then takes us to an exploration of Woolf’s short fiction (Ch. 2). Point-ing out the difficulty of finding a unifying framework for this diverse work, Marcusnonetheless identifies some common strands between the stories. Many of Woolf’s sto-ries focus on consciousness and perception. Several are linked to her experiments innovelistic form, including “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens,” the severalstories linked to the writing of Mrs. Dalloway, and later stories such as “The Fascinationof the Pool” or “A Haunted House.” Other stories, such as “Solid Objects” and “KewGardens,” are written in dialogue with the Bloomsbury artists, particularly VanessaBell and Roger Fry, with whom Woolf was most closely engaged. Ultimately, Marcusargues, Woolf’s short fiction “was at the heart and not the periphery of her literaryaesthetics and her world-view.”

Emma Sutton’s essay, “Silence and Cries: The Exotic Soundscape of The Voyage Out”(Ch. 3) is the first of 12 essays focused on a single Woolf text. She shows us TheVoyage Out as “a novel of sonic extremes, of silence and cries.” Sutton asks us to pay

Introduction 3

attention to what cannot be articulated in the novel, and to the confluences, connec-tions, and divergences formed by the characters’ responses to sound. By exploring thesonic landscape of The Voyage Out, including popular contexts for understanding thesounds Woolf attributes to the Amerindians, Sutton’s essay offers a new approachto understanding Woolf’s treatment of cultural otherness and the exotic in thatnovel.

Elizabeth Outka’s “The Transitory Space of Night and Day” (Ch. 4) focuses on thespatial elements of Woolf’s second novel to show how she brings together Victorian andmodern sensibilities in what she terms the “Vicmod” mode. In Night and Day, Outkaargues, Woolf uses three interconnected strategies that bring the temporal past into apresent space, which demonstrate Woolf’s efforts to push back against a simple, pro-gressive view of history. The novel brings Victorian ancestors into the present throughthe Hilberys’ relic room. It inscribes a pre-war past into its pages by studiously avoid-ing treatment of World War I or its lead-up. And it depicts the way that new modes ofadvertising and window display combine “nostalgic evocations of the past with a senseof the new and fashionable.”

Vincent Sherry’s essay, “Jacob’s Room: Occasions of War, Representations of History”(Ch. 5) takes up another perspective on the status of war and history in Woolf’s earlynovels. He focuses on what goes unsaid in the novel, arguing that “much of the imag-inative energy in Jacob’s Room results from the pressure of the unsaid on the said” andthat “[t]his reticence marks a point of obvious difference and development from Woolf’spre-war work.” The novel, he claims, develops a strategy of reticence or withholdingthat permeates its elliptical and allusive style and governs its approach to the treat-ment of war. Silence is important in Sherry’s reading, as it was for Sutton and Outka,marking the emergence of a particular Woolfian poetics in these first three novels –but especially in Jacob’s Room.

In “Mrs. Dalloway: Of Clocks and Clouds” (Ch. 6) Paul Saint-Amour returns usto the issues of matter, time, and place in Woolf’s work by looking at the “dialecticsof brick and dusk” in Mrs. Dalloway. Rather than read the novel, as is often done,in light of Woolf’s famous comments from her manifestos of the twenties about the“myriad impressions” received by the mind, Saint-Amour argues that Mrs. Dalloway isa novel poised between materiality and consciousness, design and happenstance, brickand dusk. In this way, he helps us see the precisely timed serendipity of the final scenesof the novel as not only the climax of its plot but also the inevitable logic of its dualsensibility.

Maud Ellmann’s “A Passage to the Lighthouse” (Ch. 7) also makes much ofthe strong, architectural structure of Woolf’s work, particularly in terms of how“Woolf’s insistent images of corridors, tunnels, and passageways” in To The Lighthouse“implicate the architecture of the novel, Lily’s painting, and the Ramsays’ house inprimal psychophysical experience.” Calling on Freud and several other thinkers inthe Kleinian tradition (Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes, and Ella Sharpe), she readsthe bodily physicality of the “Time Passes” section as it evokes the desire for humanmerger as well as its figuration of the passage from death to creative resurgence. She

4 Introduction

explores Lily’s painting as both elegy and exorcism, highlighting Woolf’s insistenceon the aggression and abjection inherent in the creative process, the importance of thedark passage as crucial to the novel’s art.

In “Orlando’s Queer Animals” (Ch. 8) Derek Ryan adopts a queer perspective onthe novel by “focusing on the ways in which often overlooked animal figures becomeintimately entangled in Woolf’s exploration of sexuality.” He takes up the importanceof dogs in the novel and reads the interspecies kiss between Orlando and her salukiPippin as challenging the divide between humans and animals in the novel. This isone of several ways Orlando – a novel that abounds with reference to multiple dogsand other animals – presents this challenge. “The strangest thing about the Arch-duchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom,” Ryan argues, “isnot so much her name, as that she is a hybrid of human and animal, obduracy andtimidity.” That hares were known in the early modern period for their ability to changesex adds another dimension to our understanding of the gender/species fluidity of theArchduchess/Archduke – and Orlando himself/herself.

In “Global Objects in The Waves” (Ch. 9), Jane Garrity asks us to consider the recur-rence of reference to the spherical form of the globe throughout the novel. Garritytakes us into the history and development of globe-making and shows the power of itsperspective throughout The Waves. Called up by each of the novel’s characters, but espe-cially by Bernard, figures of the globe – or what Garrity terms “circular homologies”– invoke Western imperial history, totality, and universality, as well as the non-linearpassage of time. The figure of the globe also suggests a connection between geograph-ical discourse and the nature of language in The Waves, whose images of spheres, rings,and bubbles convey a notion of wholeness and containment that is both world- andnarrative-making.

Anna Snaith’s “The Years and Contradictory Time” (Ch. 10) moves away from con-cern with the spatial to explore the confluence of past and present time in The Years.“Although, of course, an inter-war novel,” she argues, “The Years anticipates conflict andexplores the connections between different kinds of tyranny. Its exploration of the pastalways happens in conjunction with an awareness of the present moment.” In this way,Snaith proposes the novel as less conventionally structured than commonly supposed.By showing us the concatenation of seemingly contradictory temporalities, Woolf illu-minates the experience of modernity in the novel. The contemporary emerges in the“moments of tension between chronological and simultaneous or dislocated time,” mak-ing The Years a novel that challenges temporality and historiography, as well as con-ventional narrative structure.

In “Between the Acts: Novels and Other Mass Media” (Ch. 11) Marina MacKay returnsus to the question of sound in Woolf’s work by focusing on the emphasis on noise inBetween the Acts and the questions it raises about both private and mass communica-tion. “Speech,” she argues, “seems peculiarly inconsequential in the novel. Conversely,silence itself can be a forceful means of expression.” The gramophone often underliesor disrupts this silence, creating a polyphonous soundscape that is amplified by theinclusiveness of the many voices of the pageant. As MacKay points out, the novel also

Introduction 5

evokes the voices on the wireless and the more unified sound of the documentary filmsfrom the period, raising the question of how literature can make itself heard in this“culture of cacophony.”

Jane Goldman’s “Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading, and Writing with theCompanion Species” (Ch. 12) asks us to take seriously Woolf’s underappreciated novel,Flush, by recognizing the importance of the questions it raises about animality in rela-tion to writing, gender, and feminism. Calling our attention to the ways that Woolflimns the divide between “mute dog and speaking woman,” Goldman draws some sur-prising links between Woolf’s portrayal of Elizabeth Barrett (Browning)’s dog and herexploration of the subordinated status of women under patriarchy. By asking not onlythe question “Can Flush speak?” but also “Can Flush write?” Goldman shows us how aninterspecies model of community and textuality grows out of this fictional biographyof a dog.

Anne Fernald’s “Woolf’s Essays, Diaries, and Letters” (Ch. 13) explores the vast cor-pus of Woolf’s non-fiction, arguing for “the pervasive intertextuality of all Woolf’s writ-ing, the extensive play between art, reading, and life, and the centrality of even the mostfragmentary paratexts to understanding her work as a whole.” In particular, Fernaldshows the importance of Woolf’s critical reading and writing as she was creating Mrs.Dalloway, the interconnection between the essays of The Common Reader and A Room ofOne’s Own, and the creation of patterns of characterization and allusion in The CommonReader that will permeate much of Woolf’s fiction. Fernald helps us see the centralityof even the most fragmentary paratexts in understanding Woolf’s work as a whole.

Susan Stanford Friedman’s essay “A Room of One’s Own in the World: The Pre-life andAfter-life of Shakespeare’s Sister” (Ch. 14) asks “What might it mean to read A Room ofOne’s Own as a text in the world, one that engages in writing the world?” To answer thequestion, she traces the after-lives of Woolf’s feminist essay and the work of artist KabeWilson and writer Pamela Mordecai, as well as its surprising pre-life in the biographyand writings of Swarnakumari Devi, Rabindranath Tagore’s sister. Wilson “recycles”Woolf’s writing into a story of a mixed-race queer girl at Cambridge; Mordecai stagesan angry encounter with Woolf in a poem called “The Angel in the House.” In manyways, Swarnakumari Devi and Rabindranath Tagore play out the brother–sister rivalrycontained within Woolf’s trope of “Shakespeare’s sister.” Together these examples showus the “transnational and transhistorical circulation of feminist ideas” as well as thegenerative power of A Room of One’s Own.

My own essay, “Three Guineas and the Politics of Interruption” (Ch. 15), argues thatmuch of the power of Three Guineas lies in its narrative form, which is designed tomark, refute, and evade the patriarchal construction of social identities, and to resistthe aggressive, authoritarian national cultures and their systems of possession. Woolffirst addresses these issues by marshaling an enormous number of facts and figures aboutthe history of British women and their exclusion from education, political power, andthe economy. But the book’s epistolary form, its spiraling and its interruptive stylealso work to challenge the fixed identities and unreal loyalties connected to warfareand war propaganda. In the end Three Guineas offers a powerful critique of gendered

6 Introduction

social identities and economies as well as a compelling narrative model of feministthought.

Part II, “Approaching Woolf,” begins with Jean Mills, whose essay, “Woolf and thePolitics of Class” (Ch. 16), tackles head-on the popular assumption that Woolf wasan elitist and class snob. She argues that Woolf saw issues of class as inseparable fromthose of gender and that she engaged with them again and again in her life and work.In focusing on three categories of concern – money, access, and power – Mills bringsus a complex portrait of Woolf’s engagement with the imbricated matters of class andgender. She shows that, since many of her political positions were presented throughthe social experience of women, Woolf’s work not only participates in but also enlargesthe conversation about class.

In “Woolf and the Law” (Ch. 17) Ravit Reichman argues that the concept of lawfigures critically in Woolf’s work as a means of imagining vaster possibilities of jus-tice. By examining novels like Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway, she shows how Woolfconfronts the very issues jurists were grappling with at a time when courts were trans-forming the notions of responsibility and negligence. But, as Reichman claims, in allher writings Woolf emphasizes justice over law, pressing for a larger sphere of care. Toapproach Woolf as a legal writer, then, means to see law “as a means by which to bringprecariousness into view, and to demand responses to it that exceed the limited justiceof courtrooms and legal doctrines.”

Christina Alt’s “Woolf and the Natural Sciences” (Ch. 18) shows that “Woolf’s allu-sions to the natural sciences from her earliest diary entries to her final work of fictiondemonstrate not only her abiding interest in nature as a subject of study but also herinterest in scientific practices and scientific thought.” By exploring Woolf’s responsesto natural history, evolutionary theory, the new biology of the laboratory, and the devel-oping disciplines of ethology and ecology, Alt reveals the ways that Woolf engaged thekey scientific questions of her day – including the biological construction of gender –and how her interest both in the ways that science was shaped by cultural assumptionsand in science’s ideal of disinterestedness informs her work.

Mark Hussey considers the perils and promises of digital approaches in his essay“Digital Woolf” (Ch. 19). Reminding us of the speed with which new reading andwriting technologies can become outdated, Hussey considers several recent projectsdevoted to Woolf, such as the “Mark on the Wall” versioning site created under theauspices of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) and Woolf Online,which includes all seven editions of To the Lighthouse within a wider context of digitalmodernist studies. He asks how reading might be affected by online tools used to searchtext and how students will be encouraged to continue reading narrative prose works inan era of “distant reading.”

Madelyn Detloff’s essay, “Woolf and Crip Theory” (Ch. 20), examines Woolf’s lifeand work from the perspective of “crip theory,” a blend of critical disability studiesand queer theory. By embracing the “messiness” of the queer or crip archives, Detloffdestabilizes our attempt to know whether or not Woolf was “mad,” or to place, sci-entifically, the specific etiology of Woolf’s various mental “symptoms.” Focusing on

Introduction 7

Mrs. Dalloway, “Professions for Women,” and The Years, among other texts, Detloffinstead offers us a way to read Woolf’s “neuro/affective atypicality” as one of the waysin which, despite her sometimes troubling reiteration of bodily and mental norms,Woolf’s life and work challenges biopolitical power.

Maggie Humm’s essay “Woolf and the Visual” (Ch. 21) makes a case for Woolfas one of the foremost visual writers of the twentieth century. The visual functionsimportantly in Woolf’s fiction to help illuminate characters’ minds or generate mod-ernist patterns for narration. But, in more than 40 essays from 1904 to 1941 specificallyon the visual, Woolf can also be seen to develop as a visual critic. These essays’ threemain features are their variety of visual topics and subjects, their strong focus on theart and work of family and friends, and their speculative and open-ended form. Theessays, Humm argues “become a space, for Woolf, of self-construction” while revealing“a writer contributing new perceptions and new visual insights to the modern visualworld.”

Pamela Caughie’s “Feminist Woolf” (Ch. 22) addresses the question of what morecan be said about Woolf and feminism by providing an historical overview of femi-nist Woolf scholarship while interrogating the assumptions behind feminist criticism.“Woolf’s feminism isn’t something that we find, like a ‘nugget of pure truth’,” Caughieargues, “but something we fabricate from the odds and ends of discourse we piecetogether over time. If we cannot easily distinguish our analytic vocabulary (‘feminist’)from the material we analyze (‘Woolf’), then where are we to begin?” Woolf points toone such beginning: the feminist literary history she traces in A Room of One’s Own.But in both A Room and Three Guineas Woolf disrupts our ability to settle on any oneperspective, any one answer. “Woolf’s feminism,” in Caughie’s view, “inheres in howshe writes. To apprehend her feminism would be to change our writing practices.”

In “Ecocritical Woolf” (Ch. 23) Bonnie Kime Scott positions Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist and critic. Anticipating trends in current ecocriticism, Woolf not onlydisplays her interest in the natural world throughout her life and work but also ques-tions power relations between male and female, human and non-human. The impactof the natural, material world “on human consciousness is obvious both in Woolf’sdescriptions of her own experience, found in her memoirs and diary, and in the mentallife of her characters,” Scott argues. “Nature and culture become one.” Attending toWoolf’s concern with a world that women and men share with other sentient beingsalso helps us recognize her importance to a new “green” understanding of modernism.

Sarah Cole illuminates the dialectic between war and peace that permeates Woolf’swork in “Woolf, War, Violence, History, and … Peace” (Ch. 24). Asking us to thinkof war, violence, force, and brutality as a cluster poised against the values of peace,harmony, resistance, and cooperation, Cole shows how this paired antagonism animatestexts like Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse. In this way, Woolf showsthe violence at the base of Western culture and its role in fueling the Western gendersystem. “At the level of novelistic form,” Cole points out, “violence creates many of thebreaks, interruptions, and silences that give primary shape to Woolf’s texts, and it isthe onus of her fictional experimentation to repair, complete, and find new language in

8 Introduction

the wake of these losses. But the alternatives are there, and in many cases what standsout from Woolf’s works are the spellbinding efforts to give peace a place of prominence,if only fleetingly.”

In “Queer Woolf” (Ch. 25) Melanie Micir makes clear that the question of Woolf’ssexuality, and the effect of her sexuality on her fiction, are not simple. Though manycritics draw on queer theory to read the indeterminacy or the fluidity of desire andidentity in Woolf’s life and work, Micir reminds us that there are aspects of Woolf’swork that are more or less “queer” and approaches to Woolf that may be obscured by atoo quick move beyond identity-based approaches. “In writing about a ‘queer Woolf’in the twenty-first century,” she argues, “we must take care not to lose sight of whatJane Marcus calls her ‘seductive Sapphistry’.” Still, recent work on queer temporalitiescan offer a new approach to reading Woolf’s life and work. By exploring the effects oftime and aging in Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, and Between the Acts, Micir shows thequeer temporality that animates much of Woolf’s work.

Part III of the volume situates Woolf in an ever-widening sphere of reading, schol-arship, and critical contexts. Jesse Wolfe’s essay, “Woolf, Bloomsbury, and Intimacy”(Ch. 26) points us toward the new directions in Woolf scholarship promised by inti-macy studies. Woolf’s work is important in part because she explores “what it’s like tobe a woman in a male-dominated world, and to be homosexually, bisexually, or ambigu-ously oriented in a heteronormative world.” But, Wolfe argues, the work also gesturesto a less identity-bound treatment of intimacy, one rooted in everyday life – includingintimate relations and the design of living spaces – and the constructedness of gen-der taxonomies. As inspiring as Woolf’s and Bloomsbury’s departures from Victorianassumptions were, however, Wolfe argues, their legacies remain contentious topics.Ultimately her writing presses us to ask, “What does intimacy mean? What forms canit take?” and “What can the early twentieth century teach the early twenty-first?”

In “Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and Global Print Culture” (Ch. 27) Claire Batter-shill and Helen Southworth offer up the Woolfs’ publishing operation, the HogarthPress (1917–1946), in a global context. They showcase the relationship of theHogarth Press with the American press Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., as well as the HogarthPress’s publication of the works of John Hampson and Vita Sackville-West. Battershilland Southworth argue that, while the press certainly began as a domestic operationpublishing work by Virginia Woolf and a small group of friends and acquaintances, itsoon moved into a wider orbit. Exploring the press’s efforts at translation, its pursuitof foreign rights, and its connections to publishers outside the United Kingdom, suchas Knopf, reveals the substantial international interest and impact of the press.

As opposed to approaches focused on Woolf in the natural world, Tamar Katz’s“Woolf’s Urban Rhythms” (Ch. 28) asks us to recognize the many patterns of citylife crucial to Woolf’s work. She explores the ways that rhythms of movement informWoolf’s London novels, Mrs. Dalloway and The Years, as well as her essay “Street Haunt-ing.” For Woolf, London seemed to offer a collective identity less coercive than thenation or empire, but she remained ambivalent about whether its social divisions couldbe overcome and remained suspicious of its impulse toward unity. Writing in a period

Introduction 9

of expanding mobility for women, Woolf “foregrounds a model of urban connection,but also highlights the intense and coercive desire to impose wholeness that such con-nection may mask.”

Andrew Thacker’s essay on “Woolf and Geography” (Ch. 29) first traces Woolf’s“geographical imagination” in her writings, then shows how Mrs. Dalloway, The VoyageOut, and the essays in The London Scene in particular demonstrate the political ramifi-cations of her approach to geography and social space. Like Katz, Thacker argues thatWoolf’s depiction of London in much of her writing shows “the complex intertwiningof material spaces with a thematics of power,” particularly in terms of its class and gen-der dynamics. Woolf’s interest in literary geography also feeds the social critique of ARoom of One’s Own and her love of travel writing contributes to her depiction of “con-necting geographies” in The Voyage Out and many other texts. Throughout her work,Thacker argues, “we see how Woolf perceived the ‘externalities’ of ‘social space’ … ascrucial for an understanding of human character.”

Nels Pearson’s essay, “Woolf’s Spatial Aesthetics and Postcolonial Critique”(Ch. 30), takes concern with the spatial in another direction, exploring how Woolf’swriting both challenges and reflects imperialist ideology, even while engaging in whatsome postcolonial theorists have argued are the problematic tendencies of modernistform. In particular, Pearson reads the variety of uses of spatial form in Woolf’s work inlight of its potential for imperialist bias, arguing that hers was a two-sided response toempire. Through expressions of the spatial, Woolf inscribes a sense of imperial crisis orfailure while conveying a “progressive desire to criticize England’s conspicuous publicconfidence regarding its global position and dominion.”

In “Woolf in Translation” (Ch. 31) Genevieve Brassard shows us the challenges fac-ing translators from Europe, Latin America, and Asia as they attempt to bring Woolf’swork in all its richness and complexity to non-English readers. This is the first of threeessays that ask us to encounter Woolf outside the sphere of the anglophone world. AsBrassard puts it, translators act as guides, collaborators, and social activists to strikea balance between fidelity, legibility, and respect for Woolf’s modernist style and herfeminist politics. The more successful projects, she argues, “bear the mark of a delib-erate and purposeful feminist agenda, with an attendant impulse on translators’ partto share an authentic Woolf with readers while rendering her formally and themati-cally legible in their languages.” Yet, even deeply flawed translations teach much aboutWoolf’s artistic practice. By examining a number of different translations of Woolf inthe light of translation theory, Brassard shows the “paradoxical nature of ‘translatedWoolf’.”

Supriya Chaudhuri’s essay, “Reading Woolf in India” (Ch. 32), examines responsesto Woolf in India through three linked trajectories: an imagined feminist sisterhood;transnational modernism and its discontents; and the “internationalist moment” ofthe inter-war years. She explores the ambiguity of Woolf’s own attitude to Indiaand the sometime distrust of modernism among writers in the Progressive Writers’Association. Despite the contradictions, “to read Woolf and Joyce in colonial India,”Chaudhuri argues, “was to politicize the modernist aesthetic and direct it toward a

10 Introduction

socialist, even revolutionary agenda.” In the postcolonial context, writers like AnitaDesai also read Woolf as a means of reflecting on memory and history, as well as ofrecasting women’s experience of time.

Finally, Laura Lojo-Rodrıguez’s essay, “Woolf in Hispanic Countries: Buenos Airesand Madrid” (Ch. 33), shows us the rich critical reception and translation history ofWoolf in Spain and Argentina In particular, Lojo-Rodrıguez focuses on the connec-tions between Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset and Argentine writer, femi-nist, and editor Victoria Ocampo. Ocampo founded the literary journal Sur, as well astwo related publishing houses, Sur and Sudamericana, which functioned as a vehicleto introduce major European authors in translation to a Spanish-speaking readership.Ocampo regarded Virginia Woolf as a key author in this project, thus commissioningtranslations from Jorge Luis Borges, among others. After the Spanish Civil War, promi-nent Spanish intellectuals in exile collaborated in Woolf’s translations, which allowedfor a new opportunity for Woolf to be read in Spain via Argentina.

Part I

Textual Encounters

1The Lives of Houses

Woolf and Biography

Alison Booth

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was born and bred in a culture of biography and com-memoration. The late nineteenth century in Britain witnessed an explosion of printedlife narratives, short or full-length, accompanied by an interest in preserving anyobjects or locations associated with cultural heroes. In her lifetime, it became widelyacknowledged that the truth about someone’s life should include personal details andprivate moments rather than polite generalizations, and that many kinds of lives wereworth noting, not just those of eminent public figures. These realizations about thevalue of ordinary experience inspired Woolf as a novelist, to be sure. Yet it is alsoworth noting how much of what Woolf wrote consisted of non-fiction life writing orcommentary on documented lives of the past. Woolf was the daughter and friend ofbiographers, and many of her writings, including novels, touch on life narrative, witha strong attraction to the revealing intimate detail. Striving to express physical experi-ence, Woolf also evoked objects and places that shape lives. I shall pursue Woolf’s lifeas a biographical writer who was at the same time a haunter of houses, her own andthose that seemed alive with biographical meaning.

Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was the founding editor of the Dictio-nary of National Biography, which ran to 63 volumes by 1900. Much of Woolf’s writingcan be regarded as biographical. In addition to a biography of her friend the art criticRoger Fry (1940), she produced satiric fictions, Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), anda novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), that in various ways dramatize the effort to recreate alife in words from fragmentary documents, objects, houses, and environment. Bothfather and daughter have had a profound influence on the understanding of English-language biography. Although it is often assumed that the exposure of intimate details

A Companion to Virginia Woolf, First Edition. Edited by Jessica Berman.© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

14 Alison Booth

was a twentieth-century trend, Stephen’s writings on biography anticipate a search for“familiar atmosphere” (Stephen 1956: 20) and the flawed truth of character. Extend-ing her father’s vision of biography, Woolf’s biographical imagination inhabited phys-ical space, yet always with a sense of memory and loss rather than satisfied physicalpossession.

Woolf’s earliest publications in the new century reaped the benefit of her educationat home in her father’s library. Her essays often reveal strong responses to the person-ality of writers, not only forebears such as Laurence Sterne or Jane Austen but alsothe newly rediscovered diarists and correspondents such as Dorothy Osborne and JohnEvelyn. In essays and reviews, she declared principles for “new biography” similar tothose written by her close friend (and briefly fiance) Lytton Strachey and by HaroldNicolson (husband of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover). The modernist idea of a newbiography was more explicitly small-scale and idiosyncratic than Stephen and the Vic-torians would have it. Strachey and others debunked the pieties or public relations offamily-sponsored commemorations. Crucially, women, people of all classes and walksof life, and everyday experience were coming into focus as well. Woolf’s version offresh, vital biography for the new age resembles her father’s principles for good biog-raphy, with the crucial difference that the subject might be obscure or female. Biogra-phy should be neither weighted down with fact nor idealized, but honed to essentialmoments of being. It should concede, as Stephen also recognized, the elusiveness ofmemory and the unknowability of others.

As if anticipating the current intensity of interest in her own life and career, Woolfgenerated a trove of material to enrich biographies about her. Except in periods ofenforced rest during treatment for mental illness, she wrote daily, and she leaves behindalmost 4,000 letters and 30 volumes of diaries, pages that seem to keep alive an accessi-ble woman behind the public “Mrs. Woolf,” author of some 400 signed or anonymousessays. A few early studies carefully examined her fiction for innovative form and style,but for decades in the mid-twentieth century appreciation of Woolf was hampered inBritain by her characterization as a neurotic, upper-class elitist. The ground-breakingtwo-volume biography by her nephew Quentin Bell (1972) called attention to therich material of Woolf’s archives without dispelling this reputation. Yet Bell’s biogra-phy accompanied and aided a surge in feminist criticism of Woolf’s writings, and sheemerged in new roles. Considerable attention centered on the novels themselves notonly as examples of modernist experimentation comparable to James Joyce but also aschallenges to the linear logic and power of masculine discourse, in feminine writing orecriture feminine (Caughie 1991; DuPlessis 1985).

Beyond the textual and theoretical studies, however, there were many that focusedbiographically on evidence from Woolf’s life. In the 1980s readers began to find inspi-ration in the life of Woolf as a great woman writer who was a lesbian. Interpretationsdeveloped from her love affair with Sackville-West, the model for Orlando. Woolf’slife was further reconsidered in light of her characterization of Mrs. Dalloway andher beloved Sally Seton, or of Lily Briscoe and her beloved Mrs. Ramsay. As scholarsbecame more familiar with the fragments of autobiography and her diaries and letters,