Bloomsbury Gleanings

BOOK REVIEWS piece to his edition.) There are long stretches in the book of genuine nonargumentative Trollope. Moreover, it can be surmised that Super and Michigan Press intended to make available a handful of hard-to-find titles at reasonable prices. The three novels were in print in the very expensive 1981 library editions from Amo Press (now Ayer). But in the meantime Oxford University Press World's Classics have been gradually bringing out the complete forty-seven novels (the last two are in the works). Further, marvelous to say, Penguin is about to launch out on the same venture: beginning in September 1993, they will release in the U.S. one title a week in a uniform paper edition until they have brought out all of TroUope's fiction in some fifty volumes. In hard cover, the Trollope Society, in conjunction with the Folio Society, is publishing at a pace of four titles a year the first-ever uniform hardcover edition. Trollope enjoys positively staggering popularity with the reading public: the current U.S. Books in Print lists over 160 editions of his work. By next year, with the new Penguin titles and those of the newly revived Everyman Library (which wiU publish about a dozen titles), and if one includes the twenty-four privately-printed Trollope/Folio Society books, the total of Trollope editions available will swell towards the staggering figure of 250. Very few of these are intended for the lucrative classroom market, and a case can be argued that Trollope is more read by the so-caUed common reader, the non-captive reader, than any other of the classical English novelists. Henry James at the close of his famous essay on Trollope said, Trollope did not write for posterity; he wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket." That is precisely what has happened. We know this, not from the pronouncements of "experts"—academics, critics—but from publishers . They do not bring out books for the fun of it, but to sell them. And among this huge number of Trollope editions in print, there is ample room for these excellently produced, meticulously edited University of Michigan Press titles. N. John Hall Bronx Community College & the Graduate School, CUNY Bloomsbury Gleanings Hugh Lee, ed. A Cézanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 191 pp. $24.95 369 ELT 36:3 1993 IN 1916 VANESSA BELL and her two sons Julian and Quentin together with Duncan Grant and David Garnett settled in a late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-century farmhouse called Charleston on the estate of Lord Gage, near Lewes, in what is now called East Sussex. To avoid being conscripted, Grant and Garnett were required to do agricultural labour, and this they performed on a neighbouring farm. Another advantage of Charleston for Vanessa was that her sister and brother-in-law, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, were renting a house on the other side of Lewes. At one time Charleston had been a kind of country hotel, and as other Bloomsbury friends and relatives such as Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey began visiting Charleston, it became something like a Bloomsbury hotel. Vanessa and Duncan began to decorate Charleston as soon as they arrived, and made the house into a visual symbol of Bloomsbury's way of life. They painted the walls, the mantlepieces, the doors, the cupboards , the tables, the bookcases, even the bedsteads, transforming Charleston into a unique manifestation of twentieth-century English decorative art. It is not surprising, then, that thousands of visitors toured Charleston last year, not only for its historical and literary associations but for its extraordinary decor. With the death of Duncan Grant, the last survivor of Charleston, in 1978, the question of Charleston's future became pressing. Two years later The Charleston Trust was formed and the long, expensive process of preserving Charleston began. In 1982 The Charleston Newsletter, under the editorship of Hugh Lee, started circulating among contributors who supported the extensive renovation of the house and its gardens. Soon the Newsletter began to publish...