Vita and Virginia

BOOK REVIEWS Later sections trace m some detaU Hardy's courtship and marriage, his abandoning architecture for novel-writing, his progress m that field, and his second career change (abandoning the novel to pursue a career as a poet). In them the cross-referencing of Hardy's professional pursuits with those of his personal IUe, and his close contact with certain Wessex scenes, yields unexpected riches. Of course blending striking Cornish scenery of Hardy's courtship of Emma with suitable quotations from his love poetry can hardly be called "unexpected"—though it certainly is powerful. One aspect of Hardy's vision is perhaps slighted: its darker side, not only in the extreme form seen in Jude the Obscure, but Ui the more moderate as in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Since the pivotal action of Jude occurs away from Wessex, slighting this novel is understandable, but more might have been made of Hardy's tragic vision of people and scenes common to Wessex Ui such novels as Mayor. This is, however, a minor reservation. What the production crew aimed to achieve has been effectively realized through the careful selection of words, visual imagery and music. VV. Eugene Davis --------------------- Purdue University Vita and Virginia Suzanne Raitt. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. xv + 195 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $12.95 SUZANNE RAITT OFFERS a serious examuiation of much of Vita SackvUle-West's and some of Virginia Woolf s writing hi the context of their friendship. Raitt begins almost salaciously by insisting that Woolf s description of Vita Ui the grocer's shop "a couple of days after they had first become lovers" recalls "the unexpected angles from which the body of a lover is viewed." Raitt goes on to say that Woolf s late 1925 description of SackvUle-West intertwines "sexual and linguistic play." These words promise revelations about the women's sexuality, but the topic is almost immediately dropped for drier analyses of such topics as "moral eugenics." Later Raitt concedes that the sexual relation between Vita and Virginia was minimal and that by 1926 Vita SackvUle-West "avoided sexual contact with Woolf partly out of fear for Woolf s mental stabUity and partly out of disinterest. Thus Riatt's original salaciousness would 91 ELT 38: 1 1995 seem unjustified, except that Virginia Woolf did find the relationship both enabling and crippling. Raitt says that SackvUle-West's "sexual independence, whUe inspiring Woolf to transports of desire and of story-teUing, could also... threaten Woolf s precarious sense of her self." Raitt explains that "beneath the desire to compliment and to flatter, so evident m Orlando, lay a more sinister impulse to punish and to hurt." Thus humor became a means to disguise aggressiveness and reflected "WoOu3S experience of loss, as weU as of power." Writing this fantastic "biography" of her friend without letting SackvUle-West read any of it until it was published was of course a power play that allowed Woolf to take possession of her friend's IUe. Raitt reads the psychological dynamic of composition and discovers that "Orlando at once mourned the death of SackvUle-West's fideUty and punished her by ousting her from the centre of [Woolf s] own IUe." Raitt provides several such insights into Woolf and a great many into SackvUle-West. She offers an extensive, serious, much-needed treatment of SackvUle-West's writing. One of the book's strengths is its effectively and succinctly uniting literary and psychological analysis. For example, she finds similarities Ui both writers' impulse to autobiography . Both wrote Ui hopes of recapturing maternal care. Raitt argues that the "pull of autobiography, and the puU of mysticism, was back toward a tune when gender was m suspension, not yet resolved; but when the attentions of women were all-encompassing." Another strength is Raitt's historical contextualizing. She integrates her literary study with informative discussions of contemporary inteUectual and social movements: theories of biography, of eugenics, of autobiography and gender, and of mysticism. Raitt offers a useful corrective to those who would overlook or deny class prejudices Ui either author. The woman with whom Woolf...