Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press by Claire Battershill (review)

Claire Battershill's Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press is the latest volume in the Bloomsbury Academic series Historicizing Modernism. This series publishes books that use newly discovered documents and little-known archival materials to expand upon ways that scholars have looked at writing from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War. Volumes in the series emphasize what the editors call "historical specificities" to generate "fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods." Modernist Lives does precisely that.

Battershill's most important resources are the Hogarth Press Business Archives (University of Reading, England); Monk's House Papers and The Leonard Woolf Papers (University of Sussex); the digitalized Modernist Archives Publishing Project; and additional holdings in the US and Canada. Acknowledging previous archival and critical work in line with her own efforts, as well as future research that remains to be done, Battershill establishes the scope of her book to be biography and autobiography in Hogarth's list of over 500 titles. Although the Woolfs' interests as publishers reached beyond literature to sociology, psychology, art, politics, translation, and economics, Battershill effectively shows Leonard and Virginia Woolf intently and consistently engaged in all varieties of life writing as integral to the larger modernist enterprise.

Working with data and correspondence from the original files, the author cites details on manuscript acquisitions, genre categorization, print runs, editions, pricing, marketing venues, book design, reviewing, and more. While she acknowledges that hers is but one approach in the reconsideration of modernism, her conclusions are both useful and broad, exploring the dynamics between materialist and literary cultures and between the business of publishing and the intellectual endeavor of producing art and text. Most readers interested in literary modernism will know the basic facts. As a project that Leonard and Virginia Woolf started out of their home after World War I, Hogarth Press published modernist writers such as Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, the Bloomsbury group, and Virginia Woolf's manuscripts, including Kew Gardens, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room, and The Waves. Hogarth's reputation for making experimentalist texts available to a small, select readership—initially in hand-printed editions with designs by Vanessa Bell—has eclipsed the 500+ books and pamphlets the press put out over thirty years. Battershill demonstrates that the mission was to achieve "diversity" and that the Woolfs sought "writers of various social classes, nationalities, ages, political and ideological persuasions, genres, and sexualities" (6). Her focus, though, is on the diverse biographical and autobiographical selections in the press's offerings. Battershill's thesis is that the Woolfs' evolving views on lifewriting genres as expansive and experimental led them to print what they deemed interesting, appealing, and politically and formally progressive. The appendix shows, for example, that the booklist for 1937 included Can I Help You?, an etiquette book with autobiographical elements by the actress Viola Tree, and numerous children's biographies like Socrates, Darwin, and Joan of Arc. Other 1937 selections were quite different: The Amberly Papers, a collection of family letters and diaries edited by Bertrand and Patricia Russell, Virginia Woolf's The Years, and Freud's An Autobiographical Study.

The volume covers the period in which the Woolfs maintained sole control over the business through 1938, when John Lehmann, already working at the press, purchased Virginia Woolf's share, and finally to 1946, when Leonard Woolf arranged for Hogarth to become an imprint of Chatto & Windus. The introduction, which clarifies Battershill's position relative to other scholars, singles out Helen Southwell for her edited collection, Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, and her research on Hogarth and working-class writers. Other scholars are cited for their work on the press and anticolonialism, contemporary politics, feminism, and religion (7). Battershill interweaves information from the archives...