Woolf's Renaissance

BOOK REVIEWS Leonard's London residence and the fact that both of them were on the Nazi proscription list and planned a joint suicide in the event of a Nazi conquest of England. All in all, Art and Affection is a convincing, calm, and well-written attempt to deal with the ultimately unknowable complexities of a major artist. Stephen E. Tabachnick _______________ University of Oklahoma Woolf's Renaissance Juliet Dusinberre. Virginia Woolfs Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. xiii + 281 pp. Cloth $29.95 Paper $14.95 JULIET DUSINBERRE makes a substantial contribution to Woolf studies with her incisive study of Elizabethan influence on Virginia Woolf. In Virginia Woolfs Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? Dusinberre meticulously explores Woolfs "affinity on many different levels with the early modern period, and her own sense of being reborn through the creation of an alternative tradition of reading and writing whose roots go back to the Elizabethans and beyond." Clearly, however, Dusinberre does not perform simply a study of literary influences on Woolfs thinking and writing. Rather, she situates Woolf as an artist and as a female in the early modern period, and by examining Woolfs critical essays in the Common Reader volumes she traces the genesis of Woolf s modes of thought beyond the inheritance of the nineteenth century to key male and female author-thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She demonstrates Montaigne, Donne, Dorothy Osborne, Madame de Sévigné, Pepys, and Bunyan to be dynamic forces in Woolf's construction of her own epistemological thinking, reading , and writing as a female. Carefully constructed in chapters focusing on intellectual pairings of Woolf and her Renaissance predecessors, the volume exposes the roots of the "tradition of female discourse" for which Woolf sought and into which she placed herself. After a preliminary chapter presenting the premise and scope of the volume, Dusinberre begins her study with "Virginia Woolf and Montaigne: Them and Us" in which she establishes Woolfs affinity with Montaigne as a communicator in female modes of thought. In Montaigne's Essays Woolf "sees... a valid attempt to create a new space within language for a private world of human consciousness, which can accommodate gender differences. The woman reader has access to Montaigne's text because he testifies to division and fragmenta327 ELT 41 : 3 1998 tion within the human psyche . . . rather than to an ideological commitment to the 'whole man' commonly associated with Renaissance Humanism." In Montaigne's essays, Dusinberre posits, Woolf discovers and embraces a "psychological space which will harbor later women writers" such as herself. For instance, "Woolf always sought to deny her culture's distinctions between poetry and prose, creating in her own writing a harmony between the two which she perceived in Montaigne." Dusinberre draws extensively on Montaigne's ideas, prose style, and philosophies to demonstrate their impact on Woolfs. Between the two writers extends a common thread of belief "that self cannot speak from, cannot begin to exist within the gender divisions of culture as he has inherited it. It can only speak from a place of dissolution of those divisions ." In an equally cogent chapter on John Donne, Dusinberre continues her examination of the female tradition that Woolf sought out and then extended with her own writing. Dusinberre focuses on sexual identity and gender construction in Donne and on Woolf's reading of him. Donne, like Montaigne, is able to transcend gender boundaries in his own life and writing, and Woolf recognizes in him a harbinger of her own identity as a woman reader and woman writer. Woolf identifies with Donne's position as an outsider to society for much of his life, a result of his "clandestine marriage" and subsequent relegation to unemployment and the struggle to survive. Woolf identifies as well with Donne's "independence of spirit" resulting from years of isolation, unemployment, and position as outsider. Additionally, she perceives in him feminine attributes of domesticity not apparent in other male writers of his time, ascribing these qualities to his close involvement in household matters resulting from his inability to leave the domicile daily for employment. Dusinberre mentions that "not only his poems, but in...