The Woolfs as Publishers

BOOK REVIEWS The Woolf s as Publishers J. H. WUlis, Jr. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992. xvi + 451 pp. $29.95 IN HIS Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41, J. H. WUlis has undertaken an ambitious and useful study. At once an account of Leonard and Virginia Woolf as intellectual partners, a social history of British publishing in the twentieth century, and a biographical catalogue of the many important writers who first found a home in print through the Hogarth Press, WUlis's book is a monument of common sense and erudition. WUlis's preface frankly admits the difficulties of shaping such an enterprise: The press offerings do not reveal a clear or consistent plan of development." He organizes his study chrOnologically, from the Woolfs' acquisition of a handpress for the basement of Hogarth House in 1917, to the cessation of the Press as a working partnership with Virginia Woolfs suicide in March 1941. As the Woolfs imagined the possibUities of the Press, so it took on new incarnations, physical and metaphysical. WUlis describes five phases of development. At first the Woolfs viewed printing as a therapeutic hobby, an opportunity to enjoy the sensuous delights of ink and paper, the balanced pleasures of centering the text, sewing, and binding. By 1924, when they moved to Tavistock Square, the intellectual passion for shaping literary production and running a business in the black had supplanted their earlier conception. WUlis's third phase depicts the expansion associated with John Lehmann's first affiliation as press manager in 1931-1932. The last two sections are devoted to the Press's growing list of political writing in the 1930s, and the creation of a business partnership between Lehmann and Leonard Woolf (accompanied by the withdrawal by Virginia Woolf from the working operations of the press) between 19381941 . WUlis interrupts this thematic and chronological exploration with three chapters devoted to technical discussions of the Hogarth Press's Russian translations (of Gorky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin, and others), political pamphlets and novels (attacks on British aclministration of East and South Africa and India, mostly sympathetic views of the emerging Soviet Union, and discussions of disarmament, pacifism, and the rise of fascism in Europe), and the publication of the International 69 ELT 37 : 1 1994 Psycho-Analytic Library, including the first English translations of most of Freud's writing. The scope of these topics suggests WUlis's energy and dedication, whUe underscoring the difficulties in constructing a coherent conceptual framework for a project of this magnitude. Willis synthesizes copious amounts of contextual information, but these three thematic chapters nonetheless pose a narrative challenge. The writing here is especially dense with names, dates, and titles. The logical transitions between paragraphs, occasionaUy even within them, can seem obscure or arbitrary : Some of the Merrtens lectures remain little known today, but there are two exceptions, G. P. Gooch and Sir Arthur Salter. Gooch, who gave the Merrtens Lecture in 1935 (Politics and Morals), was a distinguished writer and editor, another Trinity GoUege man long known to Woolf. He became a noted scholar and historian of modern Europe and joint editor of the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy. He was serving as president of the National Peace Council when he delivered his Merrtens Lecture. Sir Arthur Salter, the last Merrtens lecturer published by the press (Economic Policies and Peace, 1936), had served many years with the British delegation to the League of Nations as an expert in transportation, economics and finance, was a member of the Economic Advisory Council, and would soon become a M. P. for Oxford University. He contributed frequently to the Political Quarterly. In 1936, with the last of the Merrtens lectures, the Hogarth Press published a final antiwar pamphlet. The Roots of War: A Pamphlet on War and Social Order was written by eight members of the Friends' Anti-War Group and the No More War movement and edited by J. W. Strange. H. G. Wells, another famous lecturer-writer committed to world unity and peace, moved in circles familiar to Leonard Woolf and became a Hogarth author. (224-25) Certain...