Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (review)

Networking is as old as literature itself. Literary networks, however, took on a different coloring at the end of the nineteenth century when professional writers were faced with a choice between the rich pickings of popular success or the prestige that came with high standing among a select circle of arbiters of critical taste, offering what Pierre Bourdieu has called a "capital symbolique" bankable in prizes and awards, invitations to esteemed institutions, and even more exalted burial grounds. Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press has long been recognized as one of the shapers of the canon of advanced writers we have come to label "modernist." Unashamedly highbrow in its criteria for printing new work, the Hogarth Press is celebrated for the risks it took on books by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, Chekhov, Bunin, Rilke and Freud. It has also been attacked for its incestuous methods of recruitment and self-promotion—"clique-puffery" cried the editors of Scrutiny, investing their own cultural capital in a non-metropolitan academic clique.¹

Helen Southworth claims the innovation of her engaging collection Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, assembled from a distinguished team of Woolf critics, is that it adopts a "network approach" pioneered by the study of modernist periodicals (3). According to Southworth, close attention to the social and intellectual networks in which the Woolfs worked allows modern scholars to trace the burgeoning of the Hogarth Press from the small, amateurish handpress founded in Richmond in 1917 to the commercially viable publishing house operating in Tavistock Square during the interwar years, no longer content merely to promote the work of experimental creative writers but now willing to offer forthright interventions into the social and political issues of the day. A focus on networks, Southworth argues, sheds light on lesser-known figures in the files of the Hogarth Press who have not yet received adequate attention. These essays frequently complain of lacunae in J. H. Willis Jr.'s 450 page history, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers (1992).²

Mark Hussey's chapter on the teenage poet Joan Easdale, daughter of a family friend of the Woolfs', shows how she struggled to impress John Lehmann, who as a young apprentice manager of the firm launched the "Auden group" in New Signatures (1932). Lehmann's penchant for "masculine" traits (and male homosexual writers) marginalized Easdale, who was dropped after 1939 and subsequently had a severe breakdown. Hussey invites us to compare Easdale's fate with the parable of "Shakespeare's sister" (48) in A Room of One's Own, which is not to say that Easdale possessed Shakespeare's genius. Melissa Sullivan examines the "academic work of middlebrow women writers" (56), claiming that the Hogarth titles published by Rose Macaulay and E. M. Delafield reveal the porous nature of highbrow / middlebrow distinctions that modernist studies once held dear. By publishing these works, the Woolfs were "arguing against maintaining strict cultural hierarchies in literature" (65). Diane Gillespie's chapter considers the handful of Hogarth books and pamphlets (omitting two by Freud) advertized under the heading of "Religion" in 1934. She concludes that these disparate works share a "rationalist bias" (91) that soothed the rational atheist, Leonard Woolf, who agreed to publish them.

Anna Snaith's examination of the links between the Hogarth Press and "networks of anti-colonialism" (103) is one of the best chapters in the collection. Written with verve, it makes several subtle yet incisive points. She shows how both C. L. R. James and Mulk Raj Anand courted the approval of Bloomsbury Group intellectuals but came to resent the contradictions inherent in British anti-colonialism. Snaith highlights Leonard's irritable introduction to Anand's Letters on India (1942), reminding us that this act of "cultural imperialism" (116) issued from "one of the foremost theorists of anti-imperialism" (103), a former imperial administrator wary of colonial nationalisms. John Young...