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BOOK REVIEWS A Woolf of One's Own Diane Gillespie Washington State University Beth Rigel Daugherty and Eileen Barrett, eds. Virginia Woolf Texts and Contexts: Selected Papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace University Press, 1996. 315 p. Clare Hanson. Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. 216 p. Mark Hussey. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to Her Life, Works, and Critical Reception. New York: Facts on File, 1995. 452 p. James King. Virginia Woolf. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994; Penguin, 1995. 699 p. Kathy J. Phillips. Virginia WoolfAgainst Empire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 267 p. Beth Carole Rosenberg. Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 144 p. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin, eds. Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. 208 p. Cjiven the ever-increasing numbers of Virginia Woolfs constructed by readers of her work, it becomes essential to devise—and continually to revise— mental maps of the critical landscape. Any recent map would reveal the multiplication of theoretical sites and of national and international transportation and communication networks. Woolfs work, reflecting as it does her own increasingly fluid, complex, and multiple visions of self and world, lends itself to a wide variety of readings. Most satisfying are those by people who, aware of their assumptions and, like Woolf herself, wary of their own authority, consciously join the widely reverberating, boundary-transcending conversations about her texts. Less satisfying, although often sources of valuable insights for the larger discussions, are studies that present their readings as keys to everything Woolf thought and accomplished. In this context, it is heartening to read books on Virginia Woolfs life and works that see her as more than a victim—of sexually abusive half brothers, of a domineering husband, of the entire male medical profession, among other people and institutions. In contemporary Western societies where increasingly informed and sensitive audiences encourage oppressed individuals and groups to confess and to protest (often in the law courts) their victimization, such studies are perhaps inevitable. On at least one level, they are also laudable. The cases against the variety of victimizers offered 169 170Rocky Mountain Review up for vilification, however, are not always documented convincingly. Nor are the so-called victims presented as the complex people they are. Objectivity is an elusive goal. Still, the degree to which some recent constructions of Woolf and her work have become, not always inadvertently, Rorschach ink-blot personality tests assisting in the definition of the reader's own problems or obsessions is a cause for concern.' The books under review take us to the next—also perhaps inevitable— stage. Assimilating and occasionally qualifying studies like those that focus on victimization, they recreate the complexities of Woolfs life, the reality and multiplicity of her achievements, and the increasing variety of theoretical approaches capable of illuminating her work. These books fall into groups representing three among the many general, often overlapping concerns of the current scholarship on Woolf. First we have volumes that, like world atlases, serve as overview, reference, or introductory material. Then there are those that delineate Woolfs writing from a particular theoretical or ideological perspective, as a special-purpose map marks monuments or national parks. Finally, as topographical maps define the relative characteristics of towns and cities, intertextual studies position her work in the context ofthat of other writers. In the first broad category, Mark Hussey's Virginia WoolfA to Z provides, as his subtitle says, "Students, Teachers and Common Readers" with an excellent introductory set of mental maps of Woolfs "Life, Work and Critical Reception." The more than 1300 entries in this reference work are arranged alphabetically and cover everything from allusions in Woolfs work, to writers and painters with some connection to her, to her major and even minor fictional characters. Most helpful are the entries focused on individual texts. Given Woolfs rejection of the standard linear plot and her poetic attempts to capture instead the intense and multi-layered experience of being alive, however, the outlines of the scenes and sections vary in their success...

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