Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary and Intellectual History by S.P. Rosenbaum (review)

474 letters in canada 1999 vulgarisation et de développement agricole féminins. Chapter 1 sets forth the origins of the project in two feminists' questioning of dominant disciplinary paradigms, notably modernization theory, that give short shrift to female activism. The second chapter considers the evolution of the groups, dating from 1915 in Quebec and from particularly the 1960s in France. Rooted in the traditions of Catholic activism, both sets of organizations took up the struggle to improve farm women's daily lives and to maintain the family farm. Chapter 3 examines 389 farm women, of whom slightly half in each nation were club members. The scrutiny of farms, age, education, family size, religious practice, legal relationships, and on- and off-farm work yields a picture that is summed up in the depiction of four`exemplars,' Andreé, Brigitte, Christiane, and Diane, who together capture the complexity and similarities of the larger groups. Chapter 4 turns to an evaluation of such women's response to mainstream politics. To the surprise of the authors, their subjects did not see politics `in the form of a conventional partisan conflict.' Instead politics emerged more generally as the achievement of the public good, a perspective that fuelled many respondents' criticism of traditional parties. Feminism's meaning for these Québécoises and French women preoccupies the next chapter, with its wonderfully sensible and contextualized approach to the recurring problem of definition. Chapter 6 questions how private politics, particularly about labour and sexuality, relates to claims of contentment and feminist sensibilities more generally. The final chapter provides an exemplary set of reflections on the process and the meaning of the conclusions. Black and Cuthbert Brant claim significance for political lives of their `very energetic and independent-minded respondents,' reject`conventional criteria for importance and for value in political activity' in recognition of farm women's acceptance of many feminist goals, and embrace `political change as something everyday, regular, unrevolutionary and cumulative.' In short, they remain optimistic about ordinary people. It is a very feminist insight well worth importing into political discussion at every level. (VERONICA STRONG-BOAG) S.P. Rosenbaum. Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary and Intellectual History Macmillan 1998. xii, 216. US $45.00 No one has done more than S.P. Rosenbaum to establish the materials of Bloomsbury's literary history and then weave the intricate web of their interconnections. Victorian Bloomsbury and Edwardian Bloomsbury have appeared, with Georgian Bloomsbury soon to follow, and the project continues. There is, as well, the important collection of documents Rosenbaum has assembled in his Bloomsbury Group Reader. But not humanities 475 everything he has uncovered, examined, speculated about fits the structures of those volumes. The present gathering of essays written over a more than twenty-year period complements that undertaking very well. It also has a remarkable coherence and freshness. The early essays hardly read like old news; rather they enter an ongoing conversation, a Bloomsbury genre that aptly describes this collection. The title, too, in its implicit homage to Aspects of the Novel, suggests a Forsterian eclecticism that, like Forster's, carries an overarching argument. `Only connect,' functioning here, too, as epigraph, describes this undertaking without the glimmer of irony the phrase carries in the original. The first and last essays make probing use of philosophical contexts. In the 1971 `The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf,' Rosenbaum examines Woolf's fiction in relation to G.E. Moore's epistemological realism. He uses Moore's principles of organic unities as context for the statement in Jacob's Room, `It's no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.' In the closing essay, the 1994 `Wittgenstein in Bloomsbury,' the Tractatus, read as a modernist text of `obscurities, fragmentariness, paradoxes and ironies,' is placed next to Jacob's Room, `an elegiac novel without a hero that narrates fragmentedly a story of emptiness and loss.' The differences between the religious sensibility of Wittgenstein and the secular world views of Bloomsbury are clearly established, but so too is their shared sense of the mystical, even if, as in Forster's caves, that experience is...