Reviews

ni. THE EDITOR'S FENCE The Season to Repent: I'm certain it would take an entire issue-of EFT to contain a confession of all the editorial sins committed this past year, but my judges have been generous in their oversights. Under Forster's name I make amends for several sins of various degrees of seriousness committed in the annotated bibliography of writings about Forster (II, l). Here I wish to make amends for various missteps at scattered points in the same issue of EFT.: Aikin (p. 41) should read Aiken, which is given correctly elsewhere; Brustein (p. 42) should read Brustlein; Mr. Harvey's MA Thesis should have been reported as having 299 pages instead of 209 (p. 42); and Mr. Harvey's address is 209 (not 200) W. 109th Street (p. 49J7 Amends for errata in both issues dealing with Moore (II, 2, i and II, 2, ii) will be printed at the end of the Moore supplement when this appears—actually, I take consolation from the fact that out of the probably 1,000 or so Moore items listed there should be so few errors. I have declined to take refuge in the excuse that EFT has been and continues to be produced in a forest of nettles, swamp, and occasionally smog on the grounds that such excuses might discourage geñerous-minded readers from sending in their very helpful, much-desired corrections. The Season for a Backward Glance: EFT, thanks to subscribers; new and old, and thanks to some assistance from the Purdue English Department, remains financially solvent. It is a pleasure to report that approximately 100 libraries have not been greatly disturbed by the low-cost format of EFT and that all individual subscribers have, in fact, been grateful. It is a pleasure to report that librarians , collectors, editors of journals, graduate students, and established scholars have during the past year taken the time to write a line, a paragraph, a page, and, sometimes, three pages of generous comment on EFT. During the first hectic year of EFT's existence I responded to about 700 letters; this past year there has been little abatement of this pleasure. The many friendly exchanges that have sprung up between editor and reader are, I like to think, the kind of human activity that leavens scholarly activity. The Season for a Forward Glance: If present plans work out, we shall be able to stencil future EFTs on an IBM Executive typewriter with a Modern Elite type. We shall continue to mimeograph on one side of the page as long as it is financially feasible. 'We shall continue to expand the coverage of EFT each year. However, expansion will be necessarily slow. Kipling will make his appearance in EFT with the annotated bibliography of writings about him now in progress for publication in about September, I960; work on Henry Handel Richardson, Olive Schreiner, John Buchan, Havelock Ellis, and Lytton Strachey has been begun or will shortly be begun; the inclusion of Edmund Gosse, Dorothy Richardson, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the non-too-distant future has been planned. The future of thé MLA Conference on English Fiction in Transition we shall discuss in Chicago. REVIEWS 1. O'Connor on Bloomsbury: Sometimes articles of broad scope come to my attention that cannot be properly noticed in abstracts under the names of specific writers they deal with more or less extensively. One of these is William Van O'Connor's "Toward a History of Bloomsbury," which though published as long ago as Winter, 1955 (SOUTHWEST REVIEW, XL), seems to have been overlooked by me and other editors. Because it has extensive comments on Forster, Strachey, and other "Bloomsbury" writers who, to varying degrees, come within the scope of EFT, this article warrants special notice, iv. In the main Mr, O'Connor summarizes attempted'histories and descriptions of the Bloomsbury Group by its members, its oponents, and later scholarly critics. He reviews the membership of the Group, other writers' notions about the unity of the Group, he evaluates the two leading books on the Group (Rantavaara's VIRGINIA VJOOLF AND BLOOMSBURY and J.K. Johnstone's THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP), he surveys the...