Early Bloomsbury

ELT 41 : 3 1998 a literary heritage for woman writers. She represents the genres of essay , poetry, personal letters, diaries, and the novel, illustrating each with a figure from Woolf's Renaissance. Readers may wonder if these writers are the only links in the chain or if Dusinberre has simply presented the most influential cases. In any case, the study sheds light on Woolf's concerns as a female modernist and, while linking her thematically and stylistically to writers of bygone centuries, does not attempt to dislodge or displace her from the tradition of early modernists. Dusinberre is a master artisan of prose, communicating with force and impact through paragraphs and chapters densely packed with essential information. She provides extensive notes on each chapter, and the volume offers a select bibliography and a short index. Scholars of Woolf and of modernist studies will find the volume a worthwhile study, and scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will find new perspectives on Renaissance writers. The volume will engage feminists and reception theorists as well. Lesli J. Favor SuI Ross State University-Rio Grande College Early Bloomsbury Peter Stansky. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 viii + 289 pp. Cloth $27.95 Paper $14.95 "THERE ARE YEARS that ask questions and years that answer," says Zora Neale Hurston. In his latest book, On or About December 1910, the historian, Peter Stansky, asserts that 1910 is a year that asked questions . Taking Virginia Woolfs remark that "on or about December 1910 human character changed" as his point of departure, he slices the onion of English history in 1910. Stirred by Woolfs hyperbole, he cleverly sets the events of the year spinning, and these include the rise of Cubism in France, the performance of Stravinsky's "Firebird" ballet in Paris, Halley's comet, Tolstoy's death, Freud's analysis of dreams, and Edward VIFs death. This device of focusing on a single year, of course, has its attraction and danger. Its attraction for the critic or historian is his ability to manage the growing number of writings by and about Bloomsbury—the diaries, letters, reviews , articles—scattered in British and American archives, and then to weave the texture of a particular year; its danger, the strain of making aesthetic and cultural explanations fit the Procrustean bed of a single year and a single intellectual community (other important modernists 330 BOOK REVIEWS like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence get short shrift). Stansky is well aware that history is rarely so tidy, but keeps his focus on 1910 Bloomsbury , nonetheless. The book is intended for a general audience and has two chapters on Virginia Woolf, another on E. M. Forster, and an overlong one on The Dreadnought Hoax, including answers to all the questions you never wanted to ask about this escapade that involved a group of Bloomsberries who impersonated Ethiopians to get a tour of a British ship. The other half of the book focuses on the visual aesthetic—Stansky^ main interest and strength in this work—and calibrates the impact on British society of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910 organized by Roger Fry. It is to this event that all the other currents of this book contribute. And numerous events are sketched. Some of the literary events: Forster 's publication of Howards End marking him as a major British novelist asking questions about class; Lytton Strachey's movement toward writing the rebellious biographies of The Eminent Victorians (published 1918); Oscar Wilde's Salome and George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance, plays that asked questions about gender roles; and Virginia Woolfs first narrative experiment, Melymbrosia, to be completed in 1915 as The Voyage Out. It was a turbulent political time also, of revolts of the poor in Ireland and the growing militancy of the women's suffrage movement in England. On a more personal level, this was the year of Quentin Bell's birth to Vanessa and Clive; the year of Clive's flirtation with Virginia Woolf when she was recovering from a manic-depressive episode at Miss Thomas's house; and the homoerotic triangle of Lytton Strachey and J. M. Keynes vying...