Two on Woolf

31:1, Book Reviews Sharma's book is so poorly printed, loosely reasoned, and riddled with typographical , editorial, syntactic, grammatical and idiomatic errors that his explanations of Murry's critical method and reasons for admiring it are difficult to follow. He argues that Murry was a multi-faceted critic who combined textual analysis, biographical and psychological data with "impressionism." That much was established in 1958 in a compact essay by Derek Stanford. The only reaUy fresh ground trod by Sharma is his discussion of Middleton Murry's impact on the young F. R. Leavis. Unfortunately, Sharma does not contend with the distance Leavis later developed from Murry by insisting on intellectual stringency in criticism, and he does not explore the interesting differences between the Leavisite and Murryian modes of interpreting D. H. Lawrence's significance for twentieth-century British culture. In all other respects, the book is unhappily inferior. Sharma violates fundamental canons about accurately ascribing sources and exhibits disconcerting confusion about the nature of fact. Lawrence scholars will be surprised to learn from this text that Murry's relationship with D. H. Lawrence "changed into homosexuality," and certainly even more astounded to discover that the footnote appended to this unexpected assertion refers to Women in Love. Although this study of Murry is too flawed to command attention, the writer quite reasonably reminds us that John Middleton Murry has been dismissed unfairly and that the breadth and originality of his thinking has never been widely acknowledged. Sharron Cassavant Simmons College TWO ON WOOLF Harold Bloom, ed. Virginia Woolf. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. $24.50 Mark Hussey. TAe Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. $25.00 The many works devoted to Virginia Woolf published in the last decade or so have included biographies, considerations of individual novels, explorations of Virginia Woolf s art, and textual studies based upon examinations of manuscripts as well as collections of critical essays and studies of Virginia Woolf s "philosophy." Among the most recent additions to the latter two categories are Harold Bloom's edited collection in the Modern Critical Views series published by Chelsea House and Mark Hussey's TAe Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf s Fiction, two very different books that in an interesting way are also complementary. 107 31:1, Book Reviews Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale and one of the country's foremost critics, has gathered together a selection of works about Virginia Woolf published between 1951 and 1983. These include both essays published as journal articles and excerpts from longer critical studies. The collection purports to be a "representative" selection beginning with Reuben Brower's classic and traditional essay on Mrs. Dalloway and ending symmetrically with Elizabeth Abel's 1983 feminist reading of the same novel, "Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of 'Mrs. Dalloway.'" Bloom's introductory essay focuses, as one might expect, on the question of literary influence, especially that of Walter Pater upon Virginia Woolf. Bloom reaffirms Perry Meisel's thesis that Woolf s sensibility is essentially Paterian , one that sees the self as the center of a flux of sensations. This sensibility enables the doubling of Clarissa and Septimus and prevents Mrs. Dalloway from becoming disjointed. It also, to Bloom, explains both Lily Briscoe's vision as an affirmation of the possibility of meaning and the restrained exultation of the ending of TAe Waves, which Bloom calls "profoundly representative of Woolf s feminization of the Paterian aesthetic stance." Bloom's brief essay concludes with a bow to the formidable and pervasive influence of Woolf on contemporary feminist literary criticism although he declines himself to accept Woolf s central claim that the creative power of men differs from the creative power of women. The essays in this collection are organized chronologically, an organization intended to demonstrate the development of Woolf criticism from the 1950s through the "intense Woolf renewal of the early 1980s," a renewal which Bloom attributes to both "a public obsession with the Bloomsbury set, and the spiritual reliance of feminist literary criticism upon A Room of One's Own and other...