Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (review)

Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf by Natania Rosenfeld. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+215. $37.50 cloth.

It never ceases to amaze me that commentators well after the fact not only assert with absolute certainty what went on in the marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf but feel confident to pass judgment on it, when, if one were honest, one would have to admit that we can never be sure what is going on in the marriages of those we see daily. To her great credit, Natania Rosenfeld makes no such judgments in her highly intelligent and richly detailed study of the two writers, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Instead, working closely with the materials we have, the written texts, Rosenfeld sets out to read them within and through the social and cultural contexts that shaped the writers' world, including their marriage. Foremost for her rendering of this world are Virginia's gender and Leonard's Jewishness, categories that placed them both in the position of insider/outsider within the sociopolitical, cultural milieu of early twentieth-century Britain. Operating from this multiply split position, a position associated with borders and boundaries, the two sustained not only a marriage and a major publishing house, the Hogarth Press, Rosenfeld argues, but a shared commitment to a critique of injustice that culminated in their anti-fascist writings of the 1930s. In the process, they played a major role in the advent of what we understand to be modernism.

"Border Cases," the title of the Introduction, says it all, bringing into play a number of recent paradigms for exploring the complexity of sociopolitical relations and narratives at any particular historical moment. As Rosenfeld notes, "borders can be neglected edges, margins, repositories for refuse--prisoning yet often fecund spaces;" they can also be boundaries marking "the center of contested or quiet territory." In this latter guise they can be either "closed, absolute, policed--and permeable only by violence" or "porous, open, as good as unnoticeable" (7). Borders, as Jeffrey Cohen has argued, are where monsters reside, those signifiers of category crises in their crossing of boundaries, even as they police and excite our desires. Those living on the borders may be perceived by others or experience themselves as monstrous, as out of place, but their monstrosity, their displacement or alienation, can also be productive; it may be necessary for cultural critique. Edward Said makes this point when, equating culture with place, with "belonging to or in a place, being at home in a place," he posits that the critic has to be "out of place," displaced, or homeless to acquire a critical consciousness. This displacement, this split, can occur even as one stands squarely at the center of the culture, a point that Virginia Woolf makes clearly in A Room of One's Own when she writes, "If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical." ¹

For Rosenfeld, the concept of the border and the "border case" provides a metaphor for the complex patterns of inclusion and exclusion at the heart of both Leonard's and Virginia's writings. Beginning from the premise that "in opposed yet complementary ways, the Woolfs were outsiders together--she privileged by her background, but excluded from centers by her gender, he privileged by gender and marginalized through background," she sets out her thesis as follows: "Such a chiasmic alliance forces social borderlines into relief, making them inevitable objects of scrutiny--all the more so because Leonard Woolf, in his political scholarship, was by vocation a student of borders. . . . In their marriage the Woolfs enacted, and in their work they fantasized, theorized, and attempted, the crossing of borders intently policed in the 'real world.' As the founders and editors of the Hogarth Press, moreover, Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf...