In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ELT 41: 1 1998 ledged a debt to "Dora Marsden's philosophic algebra" in the development of his own thinking. Clarke suggests that in her "lingual psychology" Marsden was grappling with some of the tough issues of linguistic philosophy, and reflected something of the intellectual stance that was restored with postmodernism after the hegemony of secondary modernism had been subverted. In her quest for a linguistic purity of reference she labored in isolation and chiefly in vain, but in this and her other intellectual endeavors she was in touch with the central modernist issues. My one quarrel with Clarke is that he consistently refers to "Dora Marsden's London" as the milieu in which she conceived and developed her ideas. He thus ignores the strength and influence, both intellectual and political, of provincial centers in Britain. In fact, Marsden was actually resident in London for less than two years. Her upbringing and education in Yorkshire, Lancashire and elsewhere, her undergraduate work at Manchester University, where she studied philosophy under Samuel Alexander and first conceived the ambition to write on philosophy , and her experience of living in Manchester, a center for radicalism and political movements, as well as the suffrage group that Emmeline Pankhurst took to London—all had an influence on her thinking. The Freewoman and her succeeding journals had readers in the English provinces and in Scotland who were the first to request the formation of Freewoman "discussion circles" that were among the liveliest offshoots of the movement she began. Dora Marsden reflected in her work several important strains within the Britain of her time. Her failure to attain the lifelong recognition she deserved is regrettable. Margaret Storch ________________ Lexington, Massachusetts Woolf's "The Hours" Virginia Woolf. "The Hours": The British Museum Manuscript of "Mrs. Dalloway". Transcribed and edited by Helen M. Wussow. New York: Pace University Press, 1996. xxx + 491 pp. $57.00 WOOLF'S MRS. DALLOWAY (1925) was her fourth novel and the first secure expression of her breakthrough to a new style of fictional narration—what in her diary she calls her "tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments." It allows her to explore characters in greater depth, since it focuses on their thoughts rather than their words or deeds, and since it saturates the present moment with the formative 94 BOOK REVIEWS influences of the past. Memory and observation easily coexist, as Woolf follows Joyce's example in Ulysses (1922)—a book she both admired and detested, but which clearly encouraged her own fictional experiments. She started her new novel late in 1922, wrote it over the next two years, and was so obsessed by its subject that she completed various related stories about the Dalloway world after the book was finished. Indeed, Clarissa and Richard Dalloway had appeared as minor, satirically conceived characters in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). This compositional history, in which a particular fictional project is not contained by the novel but spills over into earlier and later texts, is virtually unique in Woolf's career. More than anything she wrote, it makes us think of composition as gestation and allows us to trace the distinct stages through which the work was formed. Aside from the published pieces the Dalloway project produced (two novels, a group of short stories collected by Stella McNichol in a volume she called Mrs. Dalloway's Party [1973]), there is also a great deal of previously unpublished material in holograph notebooks at the British Museum and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library that show us the author planning, composing and revising the novel day by day. By reading this material with care it is possible to reconstruct the process through which Woolf turned what began as a largely satirical work about the social rituals of upper-class public figures into the complex and empathetic novel we have. Woolf originally planned to write a book to be called "At Home: or The Party" to explore what she called "the party consciousness," by which she at first meant our public performances for the benefit of other people, many of them strangers. But she was also interested in the way strangers...

pdf

Share