Woolf & Astronomy

BOOK REVIEWS is left to question whether this book adds anything to Coates's already substantial contribution to our understanding of Chesterton. MARK KNIGHT Roehampton University of Surrey Woolf & Astronomy _____________ Holly Henry. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiii + 208 pp. $55.00 HENRYS WORK joins a 2001 book by Emily Dalgarno (Virginia Woolf and the Visible World) in underlining the relationship between Woolf s work and science. These studies attend to similar events (such as the 1927 total eclipse of the sun) and technologies (telescopes and cameras) as well as to the responses of mass media and high art to scientific developments. While the objects of the two studies are uncannily close, their methodologies are entirely different. Where Dalgarno approached the "visible world" through psychoanalytic criticism to consider the relationships among the visible, language and the subject, Henry works through "the cultural studies of science" to concentrate on "science as an activity" and on responses to scientific discourses. The result is a study that complements previous work by locating Woolf in a richly documented historical context. Henry places Woolf in a network of artists, scientists, and lay observers, all of whom were intrigued by emerging discoveries about the universe and the implications thereof for humans. Henry's central claim is that scientific developments, particularly advances in astronomy, shaped Woolf s "global aesthetic vision" and "pacifist politics." The popularization of astronomical knowledge—the distances between galaxies, the expansion of the universe—necessitated what Henry calls a "modernist human decentering and rescaling ," a reassessment of the importance of humans as a species given their brief historical existence and small number in an enormous and old universe. While many of her contemporaries found this decentering anxiety inducing, Woolf developed a twofold response to the work of scientists . She critiqued scientific practice for its pretense to objectivity and unity and for its links with militarism, fascism, and eugenics but also responded positively to the "liberating and freshening" vistas astronomy made possible. Throughout her study, Henry pays particular attention to the influence of the astronomer James Jeans ( 1877-1946) on Woolf and her con213 ELT 47 : 2 2004 temporaries. Jeans wrote popular astronomy texts, delivered well-attended lectures and spoke on the BBC during his long career. Henry points out that Woolf and scientists such as Jeans published in the same journals (particularly the Athenaeum) and shared numerous social contacts. Although Henry's study also touches on other writers (including Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, and T S. Eliot) who were interested in the work of Jeans, Edwin Hubble, and others, she focuses on Woolf's response to the cultural dialogue among artists and scientists. Henry begins by tracing the "pervasive public preoccupation with astronomy that Britain experienced in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as how this interest was generated." Events such as the 1910 passing of Halley 's comet and 1927 solar eclipse, in addition to newspaper coverage of emerging scientific theories and models, prompted the public to reconsider humans' role in the universe and to contemplate the possibility of human extinction. Henry then turns her attention to one specific technology —the telescope—to argue that some of Woolf's narrative strategies , such as shifting from a micro- to macro-representation of time and space, grew out of her experience and fascination with the device. Although she argues that Woolf took the telescope as an aesthetic model, Henry also explores the military applications of the technology and demonstrates that telescopes become devices for promoting pacifism in Woolf's short stories "The Searchlight" (1944) and "The Symbol" (1941). Henry's third chapter explores the impact of mapping and globes upon Woolf s aesthetic vision, specifically as exemplified in "Solid Objects" (1920) and The Waves (1931). Henry argues that Woolf s interest in "multiform narratives"—in including a range of perspectives and blending different genres—"emerged in the context of the Cambridge debates on materialism, as well as in relation to her thinking of the earth as a globe in space." Throughout this chapter, Henry connects Bertrand Russell 's theories about perception of material phenomena as well as developments in cartography and...