Virginia Woolf by Susan Dick (review)

138 LETIERS IN CANADA 1990 discussion of ancillary figures, but, then, what is one to make of her casually quoting Caird's Sermons (1865) or Massey's Poetical Works (1857)? A firmer sense of purpose here would have been useful. Subtitled The Roots and Growth ofan Agnostic Poetry, this is an intelligent and capable study. It would appear to have taken shape originally under the discerning eye of W. David Shaw, probably between his 'The Agnostic Imagination in Victorian Poetry' (Criticism [Winter 1980], 116-39) and The Lucid Veil. In any case, the informing aper~u is most immediately Shavian, and though, by my reading, the Louis-Shaw understanding of 'agnostic' is seriously misleading when applied to Tennyson, it takes one a fair distance in Swinburne; at least the ordering it results in does not seem to reduce Swinburne to doing and being something quite other than he himself would recognize. Yet I find it odd that a discussion of so definitively passionate a man as Swinburneshould find no place for such insights as those of De Rougemont (not in the bibliography), especially when one considers Louis's clear recognition that death for Swinburne becomes the desired fulfilment. Regarding 'Ex-Voto: Louis writes, 'dissolution alone is an adequate image. ofentire satisfaction.' Less readiness to acceptSwinburne's view ofpassion would have been useful: out of it could have come, perhaps, a discussion to set against the bald assertiveness of C. Paglia's recent Sexual Personae. But, perhaps, this is like asking for a fuJIer statement of the malformation ofSwinburne's idea of liberty by Carlyle's influence. The book, after all, is focused on a reading of the poetry itself, and Louis's able study of that opens a way to other things. (KENNETH M. MC KAY) Susan Dick. Virginia Woolf Modern Fiction Series. Edward Arnold 1989. xiv, 97. $11.95 paper As a fledgling writer musing on the multiplicity of thoughts aroused by the human hand, Virginia Woolfs Orlandoshrinks, naturally and understandably , from 'the cardinal labour of cOfIlPosition, which is excision.' How much more understandably one might shrink if the task were to produce an 'authoritative' study of Woolf's career, in under one hundred pages! Should one summarize the major debates in current criticism? Provide 'readings' of the major novels? Or, embracing selectivity, develop one theory about the writer, as a starting place for the inquiring reader? The latter approach is the one taken in this brief study of'virginia Woolf, one of a series of introductory studies ofwriters and movements in modern fiction. The result is not a handbook, not a case study, not, thank heaven, a book to tempt undergraduates to look up a title in the index and rapidly take down notes that wiII later form the substance of their essays. (I might note that errors in the indexing here also frustrate this approach.) It does HUMANITIES 139 offer a succinct yet amazingly comprehensive account of the major events in each year ofWoolfs life; there is also a helpful, if perhaps too restrained, overviewofexisting scholarship (the reader might be allowed some glimpse of the heated controversies in this extraordinarily prolific area of literary and biographical commentary). But Dick's real accomplishment is to offer a successful introduction to the works at the same time as she advances a sophisticated and challenging view.The audience for this book could well range from undergraduate to specialist; the important thing is for readers to read the book as a whole for its tightly integrated and cumulative argument. Dick's focus is on Woolf as a writer; the goal is an understanding of narratology, especially Woolf's handling of narrative voice, character, and structure. Unfolding throughout is the thesis that Woolf's writing is informed by the principle of rhythmic alternation. The oppositional patterns are many and various, and Dick avoids the danger of conflating them to two principles and producing a neat but reductive schematic grid. Her primary focus, however, is on a 'systaltic rhythm' of contraction and expansion in perspective, as the narrative now contracts to personal perception, now expands to impersonal vision. In turn, Dick sees these shifts of perspective as combining Woolf's interest in 'our...