Woolf & Lessing

BOOK REVIEWS Woolfs novels. Phillips's methodology may in principle wed the political and aesthetic, but in actual practice her readings tend to look through the stylistic distinctiveness of each novel to find the same satirical agenda at work inside. In sum, readers who are happy to learn that Woolfs novels come out squarely against empire may nonetheless regret the price that Phillips has paid in furnishing Woolf with such pure political conviction. Though I do not think Phillips's book delivers the final word on this topic, perhaps its faüings are merely the inevitable missteps that accompany any venture into a really new line of inquiry. Certainly one cannot leave this book without being impressed by how deeply Woolfs texts are woven into the social fabric of empire in which she lived; and readers wül also appreciate Phillips's painstaking research into the political landscape of Woolfs day. Giving us lots to think about, this book finally makes us wonder what the many Virginia Woolfs not represented here—the Woolf who is riven by contradiction, or who satirizes herself, or who is not obsessed by liberal guilt, or who even risks at time defending British civüization—what all these other Virginia Woolfs would think of empire. Mark Gaipa ------------------------ Brown University Woolf & Lessing Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin, eds. Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. xiii + 208 pp. $40.00 IN 1977, portraits of Charlotte Brontë and Doris Lessing illustrated the cover of Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. The title's echo of Virginia Woolfs well-known feminist essay suggested a third face hovering near those of Brontë and Lessing, the face of a writer belonging to the traditions of British women novelists, but even more, one whose words were now marshalled to both construct and lend strategic significance to those traditions. Thus, as feminist criticism made its way into the academy in the 1970s, Showalter's book suggested that the two writers of the twentieth century who represented its strongest forces were Woolf and Lessing. In the association of one writer's words with the face of another on the cover of this influential book, an affinity between them seemed evident, as if, somehow, they belonged together. And in the 1980s, "women's literature" and "feminist criticism" often included these 123 ELT 39 :1 1996 now canonical writers, while incorporating compelling challenges to the process of feminist canon formation from African-American and postcolonial writers and critics. The publication of Saxton and Tobin's collection of essays on Woolf and Lessing reaffirms Showalter's sense nearly two decades earlier that the two writers occupy central and somehow related positions in the traditions of women's writing and critical constructions of those traditions . As Claire Sprague puts it in the first sentence of the opening essay, "Like many Doris Lessing and Virginia Woolf readers, I have always imagined a deep and visible connection between Lessing and Woolf. But that connection was elusive." In putting together "the first collection of essays to examine together these two great writers of the twentieth century" (preface), the editors found an opportunity to grasp the connection more firmly if not, as they insist, conclusively. However, I wished for more from Saxton and Tobin than they offer, in the form of either a substantial introduction or an afterword which would give readers a critical context for the essays. Given the many years and pages of critical writing on the separate figures and oeuvres of Woolf and Lessing and given their perceived but elusive connection, the first collection to treat them together could have provided an occasion for editorial reflection on their joint critical importance . Readers of the volume wül likely open it with at least some of the following questions which editorial comments might have raised and addressed without appearing to be too conclusive: What specifically will the ess ays in this volume contribute to our understanding of the writers, their writings, and critical engagements with them? Why do Woolf and Lessing occupy together in 1996 the status of "great writers of the twentieth century...