Woolf Bibliography: Fourth Edition

BOOK REVIEWS ing or following statements. Furthermore, the logic of this paragraph warps under the weight of its concluding sentence: "These [examples of naming] easily support what appear to be accidental or haphazard instances of language, speech, or character action" (101). The reader wishes that the author had allowed himself additional space for reflection and elaboration in order to do justice to his assertions. Aside from a lack of lucidly interpretative discussions, there are numerous incidents of faulty logic and factual misrepresentation. While many instances of these are not serious, their accretion does a discredit to an obviously knowledgeable writer. For example, the discussion of "Calypso" is marred by remarks such as "Since he can do nothing about either wife or daughter, Bloom goes to the outdoor privy for his morning bowel movement" (61). The book offers the slender addition of three appendices, notes, a "selected bibliography," and an index. The appendices do not always seem to supply what they promise (e.g., pp. 98,106). The index is riddled with pagination errors, omissions, and irrelevant entries. Why bother indexing "Derrida, Jacques" (with the wrong page number at that) if only his name is mentioned once cryptically and with no further reference, discussion , or bibliographical entry? The accumulation of such technical errata detracts from the work's potential value. Susan Mooney __________________ University of Toronto Woolf Bibliography: Fourth Edition B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. Fourth edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 xiv + 472 pp. $135.00 WHY WOULD a bibliography of an early twentieth-century writer need by this time to go into a fourth edition that differs significantly from the previous three? Why would such a work have to be over 200 pages longer than its immediate predecessor, published in 1980—nearly four decades after Virginia Woolf's death—when it does not even include secondary materials? Should a research library (or a Woolf scholar) acquire the latest edition rather than relying on one of the earlier ones, especially given its steep price? The record of Woolf publications since her death gives the bizarre impression that she produced more from the grave than when she was alive, though she was prolific throughout her career. What has been published in the last decades represents material either left in manuscript 245 ELT 43 : 2 2000 or previously uncollected and perhaps never intended for book publication . For Woolf, writing much of the day was almost as natural and necessary as breathing, but she wrote differently for different audiences— the consumer of journalism, what she called (after Dr. Johnson) "the common reader," the more strenuous souls of the modernist coterie, the smaller circle of her intimates, and finally herself in solitude. Each of these readers is addressed in a different style, and much of the work was not publicly acknowledged. Robert Frost once said that only some of his published poetry was "out," by which he meant that he was unwilling to read all the poems aloud, relying on his secret sharers to understand them in private. Such distinctions between various shades of private and public writing were constantly in Woolf s mind as her pen raced across the page. Her novels, biographies, feminist works and some of her essays were signed and intended for publication. These were the works by which she was known when she died in 1941. But the more private writings had to wait until long after mid-century to appear in print, or to be acknowledged as hers. The publication of such work over the last twenty-five years has changed the nature of her reputation and appeal, and brought her an entirely new readership. A list of volumes that have appeared since 1975 will suggest how the "new" Woolf differs from the old: the five volumes of the Diary, the six-volume Letters, the collection of memoirs Moments of Being, The Complete Shorter Fiction, most of Andrew McNeillie's projected six-volume edition of the Essays, Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks, The Early Journals. In addition, scholars have produced facsimile and variorum editions of most of Woolf's major works, now that her heavily revised manuscripts have become available—The Voyage...