Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (review)

Most modernist writers are associated more or less strongly with a set of specific places. James Joyce has Dublin and Trieste, E. M. Forster Italy and India, D. H. Lawrence the coal towns of northern England and the deserts of New Mexico. Virginia Woolf is almost inescapably linked to Bloomsbury and Cornwall. Writing in 1905, Virginia Woolf — then Virginia Stephen — argued that this relationship between literature and geography was dangerous: literary pilgrimage focused on the historical figure of the author is an incitement to unimaginative sentimentality — “Dickens shaved behind that identical window,” the gawking tourist says in awe; the attempt to locate fictional characters in real places is an “unnecessary act of violence.”¹ Fiction, however closely it may adhere to the conventions of realism, however firmly it may seek to situate its world in our world, inhabits a geography of the imagination. Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place does not reject Woolf’s lesson: it seeks, as Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth explain in their introduction, to outline the ways in which Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional writings address the politics of space, to connect her literary aesthetics with her interrogation of established spatial categories, and to establish connections between material and psychological realities, between the geographical realities of place and the negotiable intangibles of space. In doing so, Snaith and Whitworth are explicitly inspired by the resurgence of interest in space as a conceptual category in the social sciences and cultural studies (in the works of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja).

The politics of space and place is a roomy category, as the structure of Locating Woolf indicates. The essays are divided into five thematic chapters: gendered spaces, urban and rural spaces, postcolonial spaces, new technologies, and transcultural spaces. These categories include a great deal of the ground covered by recent Woolf criticism. This is both a strength of the collection, and its weakness. Snaith and Whitworth argue that “[l]ocating Woolf is a task which not only permits, but requires a multiplicity of diverse approaches” (28). This variety of approaches is indeed rewarding, but it does raise the question of how inclusive a critical category can become before incurring the risk of conceptual diffuseness. Helpfully, Snaith and Whitworth’s introduction demonstrates three ways in which concepts of space and place can be productively applied to Woolf’s writing. First, an examination of the history of Kingsway, a London street opened in 1905 as part of a major urban reclamation project, in relation to the narrative role of this street in Night and Day (1919), shows how the historically geographical reconstruction of a specific place as an active space of constructed meaning can help uncover implications embedded in the text which may be inaccessible to a modern reader. Second, a comparison of Peter Walsh’s voyeuristic walk through London in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) with a similar scene in H. G. Wells’ Ann Veronica (1909) establishes how, through intertextuality, a literary space can be superimposed on a geographical place: the urban spaces of London are a palimpsest of literary spaces, and a writer’s response to a given geographical place is also a response to its literary construction. Third, a reading of Woolf’s essay “The Docks of London” (1931) demonstrates how ideological — in this case imperial and capitalist — structures work to shape physical places and our responses to them as spaces.

The essays in this collection which attempt to situate Woolf’s writing within a firm historical sense of place are illuminating though sometimes modest in their aims. Suzanne Lynch assesses the sources of information about Ireland available to Woolf, including newspaper reports and her own trip to the country in 1934, and relates this information to the ambiguous construction of the character of Patrick in The Years (1937). Leena Kore Schröder relates Woolf’s sense of the temporal and spatial freedom inherent in motoring, most notably demonstrated in Orlando (1928), to the developing geographical and social...