Leonard Woolf, “The World of Books,” and Literary Categorization

Leonard Woolf's 1928 essay, “Imaginative Biography,” begins by quoting Egerton Brydges, a nineteenth-century man of letters who defines the genre as follows: “By Imaginative Biography, I mean an Imaginary Superstructure on the known facts of the Biography of eminent characters” (qtd. in Woolf “Imaginative Biography” 45). In a characteristic move, Leonard Woolf transports his own exploration of literary genre to the realm of the book trade, which is always informed by practical concerns. He remarks that in the marketplace, ethical considerations often fall by the wayside: “It is little use stressing the points of good taste, and respect for family feeling. Publishers on the look out for saleable matter, and authors lacking a job, are never greatly affected by such nebulous considerations” (45). It is unlikely here that Woolf means to include himself among the “publishers on the look out for saleable matter” (45) since the Hogarth Press's mandate —to produce “works of merit that the ordinary publisher refuses” (L 2 242)—was predicated on the assumption that there were other reasons than profit for which the Hogarth Press, at least, might produce a book. However, the “nebulous considerations” of genre frequently came into contact with the practical and economic demands of the book trade, and Leonard Woolf's role as both editor and publisher at the Hogarth Press and literary editor at the Nation & Athenaeum between 1923 and 1929, made him intensely aware of the potential for disagreement when literary or social ideals conflict with the world of books. Although at first glance Woolf's might appear to be a skeptical attitude towards his fellow publishers, not to mention a rather cynical, corporate-minded approach to genre, his view stems from a more extreme and interesting reading of imaginative biography with which Woolf concludes his essay: “All biographies are ‘imaginary superstructures’—and admit of reconstruction” (45).

Leonard Woolf's remarks on imaginative biography, of course, written in the year that Virginia Woolf's Orlando was published, have particular relevance to that novel. The question that Leonard Woolf suggests that biographers must (regrettably, in his view) ask themselves when they experiment with the genre, and particularly when they walk the precarious high wire between fiction and non-fiction—“is such a thing permissible?”—is tested in the case of Orlando as the book enters the marketplace.