Literary London

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.

Materialities of Abstraction

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

The Reception of Virginia Woolf and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

This chapter surveys Woolf’s reputation in Australia from the 1920s to the 1970s as it was moulded by colonial cultural politics. The competing influences of cosmopolitanism and nationalism shaped the ebb and flow of Woolf’s reception in Australia during these decades. The rise of the more nationalist Leavisite curriculum in Australian universities from the later 1930s, coupled with ambivalent responses to Woolf’s death in 1941, led to more a more divisive reception of Woolf and modernism in Australia in the mid-century. Australian literary critics Nettie Palmer and Margaret (Margot) Hentze espoused a cosmopolitanism that they found reflected in Woolf’s work, a focus also embraced by Nuri Mass, who, in 1942, submitted the first student thesis on Woolf at University of Sydney. Finally, the chapter examines how three women Australian painters, including Grace Cossington Smith, were influenced by Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace

From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture. The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf’s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.

“Messages of Peace”

This chapter uncouples the binary opposition between peace and war to consider a number of unbridled notions of peace through close attention to its deployment in a rich nexus of Woolf’s writings. Proposing a Woolfian peace more properly understood as otium (a classical Latin term commonly translated as peace) with a queer twist, this chapter argues that Woolf, in collaboration with the intersectional pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, offers a way of thinking through what it might mean to live, work and write peacefully. Offering a number of close and attentive readings, including a genetic account of the 'messages of peace' passage that straddles sections 9 and 10 of 'Time Passes' in To the Lighthouse, and the traces of Catullus that can be found in The Waves, this chapter demonstrates the presence of a radical and louche, ancient and avant-garde otium at work in Woolf’s writing.

Introduction

Beginning with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s response to the 1918 armistice and her fictional reimagining of it in her novel The Years, this introduction sets out the importance of questions of peace and Europe to Woolf’s practices as a writer. Situating Woolf within broader literary responses to questions of war and peace, including those who supported war, such as H.G. Wells, and her involvement with the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, we explore Woolf’s legacy as a writer whose aesthetical innovations and theoretical interventions aimed to bring new ideas of peaceful co-existence into being. Surveying the critical legacy of Woolf as a theorist of war and of violence, we suggest that the recent turn to “weak theory” within modernist studies can benefit from Woolf’s literary pacifism and her willingness to embrace “the subjunctive, the speculative, and the counterfactual”.

The Whitechapel Group

This first interchapter tells the early history of ‘the Whitechapel Group’, the network of Russian Jewish artists and writers who grew up together in the East End of London. We tend to separate the members of this group into associations with different modernist sets—David Bomberg and Jacob Kramer with Wyndham Lewis’s vorticists, Mark Gertler with the Bloomsbury group, John Rodker with James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and Isaac Rosenberg with the war poets. When the Whitechapel Group’s collective identity has been considered, it has been almost exclusively in terms of the members’ Jewish ethnicity, but this chapter examines the significance of the other shared aspect of the Whitechapel Group’s heritage—that is, their families’ lives in, and departure from, the Russian Empire.

“It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.