The essay reveals, describes, and discusses an important event, overlooked by her biographers, in the childhood of the detective novelist and religious writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers. In August 1908, when she had only just turned fifteen and was still being educated at home, she made a major contribution to a pageant in the Huntingdonshire village of Somersham, near her home in Bluntisham, where her father was rector. Historical pageants were so much in vogue at this time that the term “pageantitis” was coined to describe the infectious enthusiasm for them. The Somersham pageant, under the professional direction of D’Arcy de Ferrars, was an important local event and even the subject of a report in a national newspaper. Dorothy, as well as being one of three musical accompanists, composed the words for the “Somersham Triumph Song,” sung by a professional soprano, and the verses for at least two of the tableaux. Her compositions, revealing a prodigious talent and singled out for special praise at the time, including in the national newspaper, total a minimum of fifty-six lines of verse.

Bloomsbury in the book’s title is the “Bloomsbury Group” of writers, artists, thinkers, and theorists associated with the Bloomsbury area of London and active in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Essays 1–6 are mainly, but by no means exclusively, about four of its pivotal members – the artists Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell, the art critic Clive Bell, and the writer Virginia Woolf. The essays do not attempt a comprehensive account of their lives and works, and the same is true of the writers and the artist treated in the five out-of-Bloomsbury essays – Rose Macaulay, Katharine Tynan, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien’s schoolteacher Richard Williams Reynolds, and Tristram Hillier. Instead, the intention is to enhance knowledge and understanding of them by presentation of previously unpublished texts and works of art, pictures, and photographs, and by the close re-examination of known documents. Rebecca West warns that biography is often heavily reliant on speculation. The present book prefers to deal in hard facts, many of them previously unknown. The mixture of Bloomsbury and non-Bloomsbury, present even in the Bloomsbury essays, makes possible a varied and balanced picture of the cultural scene in the first half of the twentieth century.

The first discussion concerns Virginia Woolf’s attempted suicide in September 1913 and her recuperation from the attack of mental illness that provoked it. The main focus is on the interest and advice of Roger Fry, whose wife, Helen Coombe, had a long history of mental illness which invites comparison and contrast with that of Virginia. When Virginia was convalescing, and a new nurse was required for her, Roger approached the medical superintendent of the hospital in which Helen was a patient. The letters exchanged between the two are made known for the first time. The superintendent was a keen amateur artist, and Roger discussed with him the effect of colour on the mind and its possible therapeutic benefits in cases of mental illness. The second discussion is a postscript to the discussion, in the preceding essay, of the photographs taken by the Woolfs in Greece. It is about Maggie Humm’s claim that the error of misidentifying the Temple of Olympian Zeus as a building on the Acropolis originated with Virginia herself and is of psychobiographical significance. It is demonstrated that Humm’s claim is incorrect, and that the edifice she seeks to build on this fallacious foundation is unsound.

After Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry was published in 1940, she received a letter from Mary Louisa Gordon strongly critical of her portrayal of Roger’s wife, the artist Helen Coombe, and even more critical of Roger’s character and conduct. Mary and Helen had been friends before the latter married in 1896 and went on to develop severe mental health problems. In 1936 the Woolfs had published Mary’s historical novel, Chase of the Wild Goose, about the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. The essay is in four sections. The first is introductory. The second is about Mary, discussing Chase of the Wild Goose, its relationship to Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, and Virginia’s comments on it and its author, whom, in letters to Ethel Smyth, she calls “the Hermaphrodite.” It goes on to describe Mary’s life and career as medical doctor, suffragist, first female Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales, and scathing critic of the prison system. The third section presents Mary’s letter to Virginia, with significant corrections of the text published by Beth Rigel Daugherty; and the fourth describes Helen’s life, personality, and artistic talents, with discussion of Mary’s assessments of her and Roger.

Moving beyond Ishiguro’s literary output, in the collection’s final chapter, Anni Shen explores ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s film and television scriptwriting’. Making extensive use of the archive held at the Harry Ransom Center, Shen’s uniquely informed chapter argues that Ishiguro ‘expresses his ideas, in terms of themes, narrative voice, and character relationships, through screenplays before finalizing them in novels’. While countering the notion that Ishiguro’s screenwriting is something of an offshoot, a secondary form of his art, Shen demonstrates the centrality of A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984), The Gourmet (1986), The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and The White Countess (2005) to Ishiguro’s development of themes and characters that would become typical of and most prevalent in his fictions. Supported by unprecedented use of Ishiguro’s draft materials and his own thoughts about the relationships between screen and page, Shen traces the rich interconnectedness between his fictions and films. While uncovering these similarities, Shen also provides an insight into Ishiguro’s own meditations on his developing oeuvre, while highlighting the fact that film ‘remains at the centre of Ishiguro’s art [because] he divides his energy, especially at the beginning of his career, almost equally between these two media’. Concluding with a nod towards Living, Ishiguro’s English-language adaption of Akira Kurosawa’s quintessentially Japanese Ikiru, Shen powerfully resituates his screenwriting with the fiction.

This chapter expands on Chapter 1 by looking at the way the Newgate novel emerged out of Newgate calendars. The focus of the chapter, however, is on William Ainsworth Harrison’s Jack Sheppard (1839–40). The chapter examines the way that the novel was read in relation to the craze it initiated. It examines the reasons why authorities understood the novel as subversive, as potentially lending force to Chartism and radical politics. Unlike the dominant criticism that tends to separate out and isolate the fully recognised cultural confrontations in the novel, the chapter locates radical energies and direct political content in it. Though the novel also includes conservative content, the amenability to radicalism demonstrates yet again that there was an understood market for radical politics.

Moving away from the Japanese setting of his early works, Sara Upstone’s chapter ‘“An inevitable course”: political responsibility in The Remains of the Day’ offers a re-evaluation of Ishiguro’s most celebrated novel. In the first part of the chapter, Upstone draws on Derrida to advance the notion of ‘nonresponsibility’, suggesting that Stevens, as a butler, struggles to move beyond conditional hospitality and claim personal responsibility when confronted with socio-political events beyond his remit. Developing this line of thought, the second half of the chapter goes on to consider the fruitful consequences of rereading the novel in light of the 2016 British EU referendum, where questions of accountability are brought to the fore, forming parallels with Shaw’s reading of The Buried Giant in the process. For Upstone, then, Stevens functions as ‘a synecdoche for the British voting public and its emergent political consciousness’, with the fateful Brexit vote not an aberration but rather ‘an inevitable course that has its roots in twentieth-century attitudes towards political responsibility’. In this sense, The Remains of the Day emerges as a prescient novel which taps into the early stirrings of an exclusive English nationalism and Britain’s wider desire for a more accountable politics. However, Upstone provides a delicate balance by also acknowledging Ishiguro’s claim that the novel is work of fabulism, rather than direct political commentary, gesturing to the novel form’s more general function ‘as an abstract space for applicable meaning’: a quality that assumes a fresh piquancy in Ishiguro’s later works.

Emily Horton explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, considering his negotiation of the discourses of memory and trauma in order to investigate their relevance to postwar migrant experience. Focusing on A Pale View of Hills’s repeated engagement with Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, Horton demonstrates how Ishiguro provides a world literary critique of Orientalist thinking and exposes the discriminatory discourses underpinning Western accounts of Japanese culture. The novel, in this sense, questions stereotypical accounts of ‘Eastern fragility’ and victimhood, and their role in nurturing ‘false nationalist mythologies’ that fail to align with complexities of migratory experience. In addition to this world literary rereading, the chapter also investigates the lingering impact of memorial revision, guilt and disavowal in relation to the mother–daughter relationship of Etsuko and Niki, particularly in relation to their diasporic negotiation of the past. Providing a finely balanced critique of postwar Orientalism, as well as an acknowledgement of the historical ties to prewar Japanese imperialism, A Pale View of Hills negotiates what Horton terms ‘a multi-directional approach to history and memory’, disrupting any simplistic East v. West cultural binaries. Horton’s concentration on Ishiguro’s authorial fascination with the migratory nature of memory and the lingering effects of trauma develops a common thread that runs throughout the following chapters in the volume.

In a reading of Ishiguro’s most affecting novel, Never Let Me Go, Peter Sloane situates the work in a longer context of clone and posthuman fictions, beginning with Frankenstein, Brave New World and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Informed by and developing from Suzanne Keen, Martha Nussbaum, and Anne Whitehead’s important and influential insights into the complicated causal relationship between novel reading and the capacity for empathy, Sloane proposes that literary fiction has a peculiar power to provoke empathy, but that empathy is predicated on finding in its subject something which resembles the ‘human’, an uncovering of shared values, shared traits, shared hopes. However, he argues, Never Let Me Go very deliberately resists readings of the clones as human, and rather fosters an empathetic environment in which compassion is founded not on our shared humanity but on our shared posthumanity. The novel very pointedly highlights the various ways in which the clones, Kathy H. and her small, tragic band of friends, not simply lack fundamental human attributes but are in fact defined by these apparent absences (futurity, fertility, self-actuation). Yet as Sloane argues, in the posthuman age and in the contemporary novel, ‘both text and reader need to be epistemologically and even ontologically resituated in relation to the refiguration of the humanities to the posthumanities’.

Essay 2 presents and discusses ten previously unpublished nude photographs of Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry taken during a seaside holiday at Studland in Dorset. The photographs were taken out of doors on a single occasion in early morning. The Bells had several holidays in Studland, in 1909 and the following years, but there was only one occasion when Roger was there as well, and that was in September 1911. This was a time when he and Vanessa, unknown to Clive, were vigorously pursuing their love affair, and it is this circumstance that makes this nude-posing threesome particularly remarkable. It is most likely to have been organised by Vanessa. Although the Bells were in Studland for almost the whole of September, the event can be securely dated to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th for several reasons, including the presence of the only known spectator, the economist Gerald Shove.

Researched and written in collaboration with Helen Walasek, former curator of the Punch archive, the essay concerns the remarkably frank account which Clive Bell gave the select and influential Bloomsbury Memoir Club of his first lover, Annie Raven-Hill, the wife of the illustrator and cartoonist Leonard Raven-Hill. The full text of the memoir, read at a meeting on 2 February 1921, is published for the first time, with full annotation and discussion. The affair began in 1899, when she was thirty-five and he was not quite eighteen and about to go up to Cambridge. It continued, with interruptions, until 1914. The relationship was one of lust rather than love, although there was clearly some affection on both sides. The text of the memoir is preceded by an introduction of four sections. The first describes the foundation, character, and history of the Memoir Club. The second is about the presentation and reception of Clive’s memoir. The third, a selective chronology, illuminates his life and work and provides a context for his affair with Annie. The fourth, about Annie, is the first attempt to compare Clive’s account with the facts of her life and to present a fuller and fairer picture of her.

In his moving chapter ‘Klara in the junkyard: on loneliness in The Unconsoled’, Bruce Robbins unites Ishiguro’s most recent and most narratologically complex work through mutual interest in feelings of loneliness. Beginning with a short exemplary analysis of the final scenes of Ishiguro’s Artificial Intelligence fiction, Robbins opens his chapter by pondering whether Klara herself is immune to the loneliness which she is ironically designed to remedy, and therefore in some sense immune from the fate of many of Ishiguro’s most iconic characters, perhaps foremost The Unconsoled’s Mr Ryder. As he argues, Ishiguro’s characters tend to find themselves personally isolated, most often because of their prioritising of their professional lives, before seeking some final yet ultimately unavailable consolation at novels’ end. Avoiding the critical tendency to simply condemn these characters, to hold them accountable for their own various neglects (of family, of morality, of society) and to see in their aloneness some poetic justice, Robbins instead argues that ‘Ishiguro lays out elements of an ethical case in favour of the professional, impersonal, cosmopolitan commitments that are set against intimacy and that lead both figures into their final solitude’. Indeed, Robbins asks provocatively, do Ishiguro’s fictions – in which familial, romantic and friendly relations often involve complex forms of ridicule and exclusion – promote the idea ‘that belonging as such is inextricable from cruelty’? Robbins teases out the economies of belonging and loneliness which foster the interpersonal tensions so typical of Ishiguro’s fictions, and figured most powerfully in The Unconsoled.

This extensive critical introduction examines Ishiguro’s work in the context of global identities and literary inheritance. The introduction then provides a detailed breakdown of the individual chapters on each of Ishiguro’s novels, his short-story collection and his film and television screenwriting.

Chapter 3 reads penny bloods as intimating and even endorsing strains of political radicalism, if casually and sporadically. Focusing on a reading of Sweeney Todd (1846–47) that brings out its criticism of the relations of production, relations between employers and employees that get reproduced in social relations, the chapter demonstrates the use of radical tenets and tropes in the bloods so as to increase its share of a perceived market of poor and disenfranchised readers with active political imaginations. Radicalism is understood as part and parcel of the entertainment. The chapter also examines the image of the crowd in a number of other penny bloods, including Varney the Vampire and Ada, the Betrayed. Finally, the chapter looks at questions of authorship and audience in Edward Lloyd’s cheap periodicals.