<i>Women &amp; Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of</i> A Room of One's Own, and: <i>Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41</i> (review)

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.

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The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198811589.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

Secondary Students ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Magical Realism ◽

Natural World ◽

The Novel ◽

Post Secondary ◽

The Core ◽

The Times ◽

The Many ◽

Hogarth Press

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for post-secondary students, scholars, and common readers. Feminist to the core, each chapter offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six parts focus on Woolf’s life, her texts, her experiments, her as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf’s life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. Part II on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf’s practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf’s experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf’s writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while ‘Professions of Writing’, invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the Times Literary Supplement. Part V on ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final part, ‘Afterlives’, demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

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“Vision and Design” in Virginia Woolf

PMLA ◽

10.1632/459250 ◽

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.”

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‘Classics behind plate glass’: The Hogarth Press and the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf

Cheap Modernism ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417242.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Lise Jaillant

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

The United States ◽

Plate Glass ◽

Wide Audience ◽

Literary Reputation ◽

Standard Edition ◽

Hogarth Press

In her letter on the Middlebrow collected in The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf wrote: “I dislike bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass.” Despite her proclaimed mistrust of the “middlebrow” sphere, Woolf was aware that cheap series of reprints could widen her readership and consolidate her literary reputation. In 1928, she wrote the introduction to Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey for the Oxford World’s Classics edition (as explained in Chapter 1). And in 1929, the Hogarth Press started publishing Uniform Editions of her work. As J. H. Willis has argued, “to put a living novelist’s works into a standard edition is to make a claim for the permanence and importance of the writer’s work, to establish a canon, to suggest the classic.” This chapter, based on extensive research in the Hogarth Press archive, argues that the Uniform Editions published by the Hogarth Press achieved at least three things: (1) they reached a wide audience of common readers in Britain; (2) they encouraged Harcourt Brace to issue a similar edition in the United States; and (3) they presented Woolf as a canonical writer whose work deserved to be “collected.” In short, thanks to the Uniform Editions, Woolf’s texts became “classics behind plate glass.”

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An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing with In-Authority

Virginia Woolf and Heritage ◽

10.5949/liverpool/9781942954422.003.0035 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Eva Mendez

Keyword(s):

Women Writers ◽

Short Story ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Women's Writing ◽

Alice Munro ◽

Rhetorical Strategy ◽

Shared Interest ◽

Room Of One's Own ◽

Point Of Departure ◽

Women’S Writing

In Alice Munro’s short story “The Office,” the protagonist claims an office of her own in which to write. Munro’s narrative can thus be read as engaging with the ideas on the spatial conditions for women’s writing which Virginia Woolf famously explored in A Room of One’s Own. My paper takes this thematic connection as a point of departure for suggesting that a Woolfian legacy shapes Munro’s “The Office” in ways which go beyond a shared interest in spaces for women’s writing. Both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” this paper argues, use the discussion of women’s writing spaces as a launching pad for exploring in how far women writers may claim for themselves traditionally masculine positions of authorship and authority, and in what ways authoritative forms of literary discourse may be transformed by women’s writing. In both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” the interruption as element of plot and rhetorical strategy plays a central role in answering these questions.

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