Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (review)

Christine Froula's Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde is a timely and valuable contribution to Woolf studies emphasizing Woolf's relation to the political, aesthetic, and feminist milieu of her own era and beyond. The project consolidates much of Froula's scholarship on Woolf into a single volume, interweaving previously published articles with new research. Trenchant and always witty, Froula claims a feminist reading of Woolf as necessary and normative, an unquestioned given. Froula follows a roughly chronological publication sequence from The Voyage Out to Between the Acts and invokes the genetic text in her discussion of Woolf's works, distinguishing, for example, between the published "Lily" and the "ur-Lily" in To the Lighthouse, and referencing a broad range of sources including not only memoirs, letters, and diary entries but suggestive passages from the manuscripts. While Froula's study closely scrutinizes most of Woolf's major works including Orlando (listed as a "fictional biography" in the index) and her manifestos A Room and Three Guineas, it omits any significant reference to Night and Day, Flush, or Roger Fry.

Froula's preface "situates Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury within a modernity understood as a 'permanent revolution'" and establishes unequivocally that "Woolf has emerged on the world stage, read around the world in English and translation amid an array of Bloomsburies" that include scholarly works by Leon Edel, Raymond Williams, S. P. Rosenbaum, and an increasingly intricate tapestry of "Bloomsbury biographies, personalities, sexualities, friendships, lifestyle, décor and affinities with material culture, consumer culture, and the popular imagination" (xi). In the first chapter, "Civilisation and 'my civilization'," Froula plunges into this froth of swirling debates and discourses evoking in her writing style—whether intentionally or not—the heady urgency, rapidity and turmoil of the modernist movement. With telegraphic speed, she identifies key elements of modernity's interaction with the avant-garde and establishes Bloomsbury's intricate matrix of creativity, intimacy, aesthetics, and politics as the chapter moves at breakneck speed through thirty-two pages rife with fleeting glimpses of essential texts, strewn with scraps, orts and fragments of scholarly quotations, and supported by one hundred endnotes that add twenty pages of sublimated commentary and bibliographic references to the argument. Zig-zagging from Immanuel Kant to John Maynard Keynes, from Sigmund Freud to Roger Fry, from Clive Bell to Leonard Woolf, Froula leaves the reader almost breathless until halfway through the chapter, when she pauses for a moment and reflects: "Leonard Woolf would have been Leonard Woolf, Keynes Keynes, and Freud Freud without Bloomsbury, but what would Virginia Woolf have been? And what would Bloomsbury have been without her?" In response to her own rhetorical query, Froula underscores the "rare patrimony" Leslie Stephen bequeathed to his brilliant daughter and suggests that, even though "Bloomsbury rose from the Stephen family ashes . . . Woolf would have had to invent Bloomsbury . . . had not fate landed her there" (19). It is in this chapter that Froula first interrogates Woolf's use of the pronoun "one," a topic that will arise again, arguing that "the universal pronoun one extends the woman novelist's claim," thus refuting Elaine Showalter's much earlier assertion that "the pronoun 'one' in the title [of A Room of One's Own] depersonalizes, and even de-sexes, the subject."¹ The chapter also offers a brief but important commentary on the ethnographic and ethnocentric resonances of the reference to "a very fine negress" in Room (30–1).

In "Rachel's Great War," Froula fuses a critique of empire and raciality with rigorous feminist inquiry as she envisions The Voyage Out as a counter-text to Heart of Darkness, focusing on the representation of women in Conrad's work (see also 294). Marking out a theme that will reappear in subsequent chapters, Froula reads Rachel's engagement to Terence as a reenactment of an ancient fertility myth and, in her discussion of Jacob's Room, Froula not only closely examines the Greek elements of...