Bloomsbury Documents

Book reviews scholarship, WUlis has deciphered the complete records and accounts of the Hogarth Press, in hitherto unexamined holdings at the Universities of Sussex and Reading. Besides giving us a sense of the actual readership of Hogarth books, these materials relate Leonard Woolfs acute, sometimes prickly business sense. As publishers the Woolfs embodied paradox: rigidly opposed to popular culture, yet dedicated to the Press as a money-making venture, alternately at their most generous and curmudgeonly. WUlis captures the character of Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the detaUs. Moreover, in sharply written, witty vignettes, he characterizes the writers associated with the Press: Three prominent disciples [of Freud] had defected noisily: Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and Carl Jung. A secret "Committee" of five members (Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, and Hanns Sachs) had appointed themselves a sort of Praetorian Guard to defend and promote the interest of Freud. They awarded themselves symbolic gold rings. At its best, this large book whets our appetite for its subject. WUlis masterfuUy interweaves the Woolfs letters, diaries, and memoirs to demonstrate the inventive habits of mind which marked their roles as publishers. Moreover, he explores the relation between the Woolfs' own writing, fiction and non-fiction, and their continuing education as readers . WUlis persuasively demonstrates how "the Hogarth Press gave Virginia Woolf the inestimable prize of editorial freedom to do what she wished as a writer without the real or imagined criticism of a publisher's reader." He leaves us wanting to know more about underappreciated writers like the novelist WUliam Plomer, historian Norman Leys, and feminist social historian Ray Strachey. As an introduction or a continuing resource, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers belongs in every college library. Wendy Moffat ------------------- Dickinson College Bloomsbury Documents Edward L. Bishop, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series. An Illustrated Chronicle. Volume Ten: The Bloomsbury Group. Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. 290 pp. $65.00 THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES of the Dictionary of Literary Biography describes itself as "an Ulustrated chronicle" that depicts "the lives and work of authors—including photographs, manuscript facsimUes, letters, notebooks, interviews, and contemporary assessments." The 71 ELT 37:1 1994 series is separate from the Dictionary of Literary Biography itself (now numbering 122 volumes) and the Yearbooks that have been appearing since 1980, and also the concise dictionaries of American and British Literary Biography (six and eight volumes respectively). The previous nine volumes in the Documentary Series have all been devoted to American topics. Adding the Bloomsbury Group is a welcome development that should make certain aspects of the Group's lives and works more avaUable. Fortunately, the literary aspects of Bloomsbury have not been narrowly interpreted, and considerable space is rightly devoted to the Group's concern with art and aesthetics. But the volume still raises certain questions about the nature of the literary research that it encourages and about the conception of the Bloomsbury Group that it assumes. The documents illustrating the careers of the Bloomsbury Group have been assembled and commented upon by Edward L. Bishop, whose previous work has been largely devoted to the most famous literary figure of Bloomsbury these days, Virginia Woolf. (Has the literary fame of E. M. Forster as a source of movie scripts now overshadowed Woolfs or are the dramatizations of A Room of One's Own and the film of Orlando harbingers of yet another rediscovery of her work?) Bishop is famUiar with much of the Group's history and achievements. He reproduces some sixty excerpts, from the autobiographical writings of the Group and from the novels, biographies, essays, and criticism that they wrote. There is also a selection of reviews of that work. AU of this is illustrated with photographs of the individual members, their settings, their paintings, their drawings, and their manuscripts or typescripts. The general quality of reproduction is quite poor, however. The manuscripts and typescripts make the best Ulustrations, and the paintings the worst. There are a number of other better documentary picture books on the art and life of various Bloomsbury members, Quentin Bell's brief Bloomsbury being one of the best. Indeed Bloomsbury Ulustration has become an industry all by itself. The...