Literary London

2021 ◽  
pp. 226-245
Author(s):  
Helen Southworth
Keyword(s):  
Large Network ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Press ◽  
Literary Subject ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Jacob's Room

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

Leonard Woolf

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Early Death ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Unusual Position ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
The Village

This is a wide-ranging biography of Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), an important yet somewhat neglected figure in British life. He is in the unusual position of being overshadowed by his wife, Virginia Woolf, and his role in helping her is part of this study. He was born in London to a father who was a successful barrister but whose early death left the family in economic difficulty. Though he abandoned his Judaism when young, being Jewish was deeply significant in shaping Leonard’s ideas, as well as the Hellenism imbibed as a student at both St Paul’s and Trinity College, Cambridge. Despite his secularism, there were surprisingly spiritual dimensions to his life. At Cambridge he was a member of the secret discussion group, the Apostles, as were his friends Lytton Stracheyand John Maynard Keynes, thus becoming part of the later Bloomsbury Group. He spent seven years as a successful civil servant in Ceylon, which later enabled him to write brilliantly about empire as well as a powerful novel, The Village in the Jungle. Returning to London in 1911, he married Virginia Woolf the next year. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, a successful and significant publishing house. During his long life he became a major figure, a prolific writer on a range of subjects, most importantly international affairs, especially the creation of the League of Nations, a range of domestic problems, and issues of imperialism, particularly in Africa. He was a seminal figure in twentieth-century British life.

Hogarth Press

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Battershill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Press ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Fully Functioning

The Hogarth Press was a publishing company run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. A small independent publisher, the Press produced works by modernist thinkers and writers including Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf herself. The Press originated in the Woolfs’ drawing room at Hogarth House in Richmond, London. In 1922 the Press moved to the Bloomsbury area of London, a geographical hub for modernist publishing and the home of their social and intellectual circle, the Bloomsbury Group. Despite its domestic origins, the Hogarth Press quickly became a fully functioning publisher and an influential force in the early twentieth-century literary world. The Press published over five hundred titles between 1917 and 1946, when the firm was sold to Chatto & Windus. These books and pamphlets ranged across a wide variety of topics and approaches: everything from best-sellers to privately printed personal memorial books for family and friends came under the publisher’s imprint, with its widely recognizable ‘Woolf’s head’ logo.

Early Novels and Stories (1915–1923)

2021 ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Rodal
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Era ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Modern Novels ◽  
To Come ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Jacob's Room

Between 1915 and 1923, Virginia Woolf published her first three novels (The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room) as well as some of her most iconic essays and stories. This chapter examines that work with particular attention to how Woolf’s early fiction describes modern novels, placing it in conversation with her essays on the modern novel. Woolf turned repeatedly to the problem of how to achieve the freedoms of a new modernity, and her early work struggles to imagine a new kind of novel while acknowledging that this new kind of novel does not exist: not quite yet. This chapter examines Woolf’s deliberately undetermined vision of modernity, tracing how her early work persistently ponders and imagines what a new era of writing will offer even as she refuses to specify and delimit what has yet to come to pass.

“Vision and Design” in Virginia Woolf

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-847
Author(s):  
John Hawley Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Hogarth Press

The fact that Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were friends and colleagues in the realm of art needs no demonstration. Not only were they closely associated for many years as members of “the Bloomsbury Group,” but the Hogarth Press, established by the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, published some of Fry's essays. After Fry's death in 1934, it was Virginia Woolf who, at the request of Fry's sister, became his biographer. This portrait of the critic was undertaken, says Margery Fry in the “Foreword” addressed to Mrs. Woolf, as a result of “one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you.”

Virginia and After

Leonard Woolf ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 50-80
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Central Member ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Falling In Love

When Leonard returned from Ceylon after seven years on home leave, his growing doubts about a career in the civil service, and his falling in love with Virginia Stephen, led him to resign. For the rest of his life he would be a central member of the Bloomsbury Group and deeply involved in its cultural and literary activities. On his marriage in 1912, he devoted himself to enabling his wife to become an extremely important writer and to being the custodian of her work after her suicide in 1941. Together they founded the small but highly successful publishing house, the Hogarth Press. Through his innumerable reviews he was a major literary figure, but he abandoned fiction after his second novel, The Wise Virgins. After Virginia’s death, his life was enriched through the companionship of Trekkie Parsons. Also in his last decade he wrote five superb short volumes of autobiography.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Brockington
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Hogarth Press

Vanessa Bell was a painter and decorative artist, and an innovator in interior design, who became central to the development of modernism in Britain in the early 20th century. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, she was a key figure in the ground-breaking Omega Workshops, set up by the artist and critic Roger Fry in 1913. She worked across several media, including painting, print-making, photography and textiles; and she designed illustrations and dusk-jackets for the Hogarth Press, notably for books published by her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. Her work was at its most radical between 1910 and 1920, when she was among the first artists in Britain to respond to "post-impressionism," a term coined by Fry to describe the new art from Europe. Her experimental art explored the limits of representation through a variety of modernist techniques, including bold use of color, emphatic outlines, flattened surfaces, and papier collé, while her subjects were often intimate and domestic.

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