To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft by Virginia Woolf (review)

440 LETTERS IN CANADA 1982 insistence on the 'absence of history' (p 100) in Women in Love, places him in a tacit dialogue with Keith; the two essays interestingly comment on each other. Both of them deserve to be read by serious readers of Lawrence, and so go far toward justifying Ballin's collection. (MICHAEL L. ROSS) Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, transcribed and edited by Susan Dick University of Toronto Press. 63, 366. $60.00 As part of a series, Bloomsbury Studies, this edition has the same format as an earlier edition in the series, the manuscript of The Waves, with some refinements suitable for this particular manuscript. The production is therefore clean, uncluttered, and elegant, another example of the high production standard met so consistently by the University of Toronto Press. My only cavil concerns the acidulous green and blue cover, which is no more attractive than the battleship grey covers of The Waves; but this cavil is merely salt to the feast between the covers. It is a feast served plain, without over-refined garnishes of pedantry or self-indulgence on the part of Professor Dick, but with a discreet seasoning of useful information. Let me drop this metaphor before I start talking coyly of bCEufen daube (a malady too many critics have caught trom Woolf at her critical worst). I have had no difficulty in using the clear functional apparatus of the edition, have found it helpful exactly where it needs to be, and can think of nothing I expect from an editor that Dick has not supplied. The transcription is remarkably accurate, judging trom my comparison of it with sixty-eight photocopies of the original that I happen to have. As Dick observes, the holograph draft of To the Lighthouse 'did not undergo the complicated metamorphoses of which the manuscripts of earlier and later manuscrips show evidence' (p 13). Critics delight in complicated metamorphoses because wrestling with them helps us avoid the enigmatic transparency confronting us in simple creation. That is the challenge of this particular manuscript: it records a process of composition in which Woolf simply made a book out of the simple substantive elements of her art, without impediment or crisis of the kind that generates subtle controversy in learned journals. There is, alas, no deliciously intricate Gordian knot for us to cut. But there is a simple question to face; and to answer if we can: what did Woolf do, so that a congeries of loosely defined scenes and images finally coalesced in a work notable for its fluent continuity, its intricately woven texture of imagery and symbol, and (pace Empson) its structural coherence? Dick offers some clues that may help answer that question: HUMANITIES 441 how Woolf tended to begin her day by writing in order to find the right rhythm; how scene and image are the integers of her artistic equation; how she gradually diminished the narrator's voice; how she compressed or amplified certain scenes. All these are useful and critically acute signals to help us on our way; but Dick rightly leaves the rest to us. If we wish to pursue it all any farther, we must track it for ourselves through the tangle and rubble of what was left behind, trying to follow the elusive course of the hare who is still a long way ahead of her hounds, the critics. (JOHN W. GRAHAM) Judith Scherer Herz and Robert K. Martin, editors. E.M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations University of Toronto Press, 337. $25.00 The most recent volume in Toronto's Bloomsbury series, this collection contains papers presented at the E.M. Forster Centenary Conference held at Concordia University, Montreal, in May 1979. To this selection a few commissioned essays have been added, notably contributions by P.N. Furbank, G.K. Das, and Ahmed Ali. The eighteen articles, introduced by Judith Scherer Herz, are arranged in three categories: 'Politics and Philosophy,' 'Literary History,' and 'The Novels.' A transcript of a Writers' Panel and Frederick P.W. McDowell's survey of Forster criticism since 1975 close the volume. The 'revaluation' promised in this collection's title is largely confined to the essays discussing Forster...