“Vision and Design” in Virginia Woolf

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-847
Author(s):  
John Hawley Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Hogarth Press

The fact that Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were friends and colleagues in the realm of art needs no demonstration. Not only were they closely associated for many years as members of “the Bloomsbury Group,” but the Hogarth Press, established by the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, published some of Fry's essays. After Fry's death in 1934, it was Virginia Woolf who, at the request of Fry's sister, became his biographer. This portrait of the critic was undertaken, says Margery Fry in the “Foreword” addressed to Mrs. Woolf, as a result of “one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you.”

Leonard Woolf

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Early Death ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Unusual Position ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
The Village

This is a wide-ranging biography of Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), an important yet somewhat neglected figure in British life. He is in the unusual position of being overshadowed by his wife, Virginia Woolf, and his role in helping her is part of this study. He was born in London to a father who was a successful barrister but whose early death left the family in economic difficulty. Though he abandoned his Judaism when young, being Jewish was deeply significant in shaping Leonard’s ideas, as well as the Hellenism imbibed as a student at both St Paul’s and Trinity College, Cambridge. Despite his secularism, there were surprisingly spiritual dimensions to his life. At Cambridge he was a member of the secret discussion group, the Apostles, as were his friends Lytton Stracheyand John Maynard Keynes, thus becoming part of the later Bloomsbury Group. He spent seven years as a successful civil servant in Ceylon, which later enabled him to write brilliantly about empire as well as a powerful novel, The Village in the Jungle. Returning to London in 1911, he married Virginia Woolf the next year. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, a successful and significant publishing house. During his long life he became a major figure, a prolific writer on a range of subjects, most importantly international affairs, especially the creation of the League of Nations, a range of domestic problems, and issues of imperialism, particularly in Africa. He was a seminal figure in twentieth-century British life.

Hogarth Press

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Battershill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Press ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Fully Functioning

The Hogarth Press was a publishing company run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. A small independent publisher, the Press produced works by modernist thinkers and writers including Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf herself. The Press originated in the Woolfs’ drawing room at Hogarth House in Richmond, London. In 1922 the Press moved to the Bloomsbury area of London, a geographical hub for modernist publishing and the home of their social and intellectual circle, the Bloomsbury Group. Despite its domestic origins, the Hogarth Press quickly became a fully functioning publisher and an influential force in the early twentieth-century literary world. The Press published over five hundred titles between 1917 and 1946, when the firm was sold to Chatto & Windus. These books and pamphlets ranged across a wide variety of topics and approaches: everything from best-sellers to privately printed personal memorial books for family and friends came under the publisher’s imprint, with its widely recognizable ‘Woolf’s head’ logo.

Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Brockington
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Hogarth Press

Vanessa Bell was a painter and decorative artist, and an innovator in interior design, who became central to the development of modernism in Britain in the early 20th century. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, she was a key figure in the ground-breaking Omega Workshops, set up by the artist and critic Roger Fry in 1913. She worked across several media, including painting, print-making, photography and textiles; and she designed illustrations and dusk-jackets for the Hogarth Press, notably for books published by her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. Her work was at its most radical between 1910 and 1920, when she was among the first artists in Britain to respond to "post-impressionism," a term coined by Fry to describe the new art from Europe. Her experimental art explored the limits of representation through a variety of modernist techniques, including bold use of color, emphatic outlines, flattened surfaces, and papier collé, while her subjects were often intimate and domestic.

Literary London

2021 ◽  
pp. 226-245
Author(s):  
Helen Southworth
Keyword(s):  
Large Network ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Press ◽  
Literary Subject ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Jacob's Room

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Students ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Many ◽  
Hogarth Press

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for post-secondary students, scholars, and common readers. Feminist to the core, each chapter offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six parts focus on Woolf’s life, her texts, her experiments, her as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf’s life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. Part II on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf’s practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf’s experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf’s writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while ‘Professions of Writing’, invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the Times Literary Supplement. Part V on ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final part, ‘Afterlives’, demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

‘Classics behind plate glass’: The Hogarth Press and the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Jaillant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The United States ◽  
Plate Glass ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
Standard Edition ◽  
Hogarth Press

In her letter on the Middlebrow collected in The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf wrote: “I dislike bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass.” Despite her proclaimed mistrust of the “middlebrow” sphere, Woolf was aware that cheap series of reprints could widen her readership and consolidate her literary reputation. In 1928, she wrote the introduction to Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey for the Oxford World’s Classics edition (as explained in Chapter 1). And in 1929, the Hogarth Press started publishing Uniform Editions of her work. As J. H. Willis has argued, “to put a living novelist’s works into a standard edition is to make a claim for the permanence and importance of the writer’s work, to establish a canon, to suggest the classic.” This chapter, based on extensive research in the Hogarth Press archive, argues that the Uniform Editions published by the Hogarth Press achieved at least three things: (1) they reached a wide audience of common readers in Britain; (2) they encouraged Harcourt Brace to issue a similar edition in the United States; and (3) they presented Woolf as a canonical writer whose work deserved to be “collected.” In short, thanks to the Uniform Editions, Woolf’s texts became “classics behind plate glass.”

Virginia and After

Leonard Woolf ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 50-80
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Central Member ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Falling In Love

When Leonard returned from Ceylon after seven years on home leave, his growing doubts about a career in the civil service, and his falling in love with Virginia Stephen, led him to resign. For the rest of his life he would be a central member of the Bloomsbury Group and deeply involved in its cultural and literary activities. On his marriage in 1912, he devoted himself to enabling his wife to become an extremely important writer and to being the custodian of her work after her suicide in 1941. Together they founded the small but highly successful publishing house, the Hogarth Press. Through his innumerable reviews he was a major literary figure, but he abandoned fiction after his second novel, The Wise Virgins. After Virginia’s death, his life was enriched through the companionship of Trekkie Parsons. Also in his last decade he wrote five superb short volumes of autobiography.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

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