Private Photos of Bloomsbury

book reviews in many years, an example of what rigorous scholarship and fine writing can achieve. Indeed, if one was ever tempted to set off on one of Conrad's dreaded round-the-world trips, one could do a lot worse than to have a copy of Donovan's Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture as a travelling companion. RICHARD NILAND Corpus Christi College Private Photos of Bloomsbury Maggie Humm. Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. χ + 226 pp. $32.95 AT FIRST GLANCE, Maggie Humm's Snapshots of Bloomsbury might appear a popular book, the sort one would place on a coffee-table for perusal by guests. A closer look reveals this book to be equally academic , a detailed analysis of the private photographs of the Bloomsbury group, collected and placed in albums by Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Virginia and Leonard's albums are part of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Vanessa's are in the Archive and Special Collections in The Hyman Kreitman Research Centre at the Tate Museum in London. Humm's volume includes 200 images from these albums, and her analysis in the preface (and also in more specific introductions to each of three sections of images) emphasizes the genre of private/amateur photography and the influence of this type of photography had on Virginia's writings and Vanessa's paintings. The author of a number of other books on women and modernism, including Modernist Women and Visual Cultures (2003), Humm argues that both the practice of photography itself and the arrangement of photos in the albums illustrate the development of Virginia and Vanessa as "autobiographical artists," who were continually using their familial past as a way to respond to the cultural atmosphere of the early twentieth century. Still, to read Humm's book as one that appeals to the general public but also to Bloomsbury scholars is appropriate, since Humm herself states in the preface that she intends Snapshots of Bloomsbury to speak to a diverse audience. The overarching theme about the supplementary (in the deconstructionist sense) nature of the private photographs and their relationship to more public images of members of the Bloomsbury group will not be new to scholars. Sybil Oldfield's recent collection of letters, Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf and reviewed in ELT (49.2, 2006), makes a similar argument about 475 ELT 49 : 4 2006 the private letters sent to Leonard after Virginia's death, especially when these letters are set next to the more public commentary about her parting in newspapers of the time. Still, Humm does offer a new approach to the discussion of amateur photography as a genre by taking a "hybrid" approach, which she describes as "drawing on cultural history, discourse analysis, Bloomsbury biographies and criticism, and photographic and psychoanalytical studies." Whereas previous scholars writing about amateur photography have emphasized certain aspects of the genre (for example, memory studies has emphasized the role of family relations on the composition of the image), Humm's attention to various critical approaches provides a more complex analysis of the images included in this volume than might be the case had she adopted a more narrow approach. Even without this new angle on the genre of amateur photography, the images in the book should be useful to scholars trying to illustrate the interdependency of private and public spheres to a more generalist audience. I used the image of Virginia and her friends lounging on Studland beach, one of them reading a copy of the newspaper Votes for Women, in a course about "Literature and the Rights of Women" to show students the degree to which Virginia engaged the suffrage movement, both in person and in her writing. I placed this image next to images of "more public" acts taken by suffragettes Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, such as speaking in Trafalgar Square and risking arrest at Buckingham Palace. The students could visualize that Virginia's engagement of the movement was different from that of the Pankhursts but also that there is a continuum between so-called "public " and "private" acts as...