My title takes words linked to the ironic chorus from Wagner's Lohengrin and turns the bride around. “There goes the bride” implies an identity transformation— from unmarried to married. Yet, however idealized the rite of passage, the past remains ever-present, human tendencies to thwart perfection exist, and unpredictable realities of married life lie ahead.

Introduction: “a…remarkable acidulated story” —V. Woolf

What do brides and weddings have to do with the Hogarth Press? Not much overall, yet at least three books by women authors, published between 1928 and 1937, examine this event. The one that caught my eye was a first edition of Julia Strachey's novella, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, published by the Hogarth Press in 1932, and still among the Woolfs’ books at Washington State University. To Clive Bell, Virginia described the manuscript as “a very cute, clever, indeed rather remarkable acidulated story” (L5 27). To Carrington, Julia's friend, Virginia wrote early in March 1932 that the manuscript was “astonishingly good…extraordinarily complete and sharp and individual” (L5 29). Hoping to distract Carrington from her grief after Lytton Strachey's death, Virginia tempted her with “scenes that want illustrations” (L5 29). Sadly, her effort failed to prevent Carrington's suicide. With no other illustrators in line for the job, Duncan Grant, Julia's cousin, agreed to design a jacket. (See illustration, below).

Although he thought it “poorly lettered,” in need of Vanessa Bell's color sense, and somewhat “vulgar,” Frances Partridge thought it “entirely appropriate” (Spalding, Duncan 317), and James Beechey calls it one of Grant's “most fluent” (19). The eye-catching jacket includes a floral bouquet, a white-gowned bride, and a blurb marketing the author as the late Lytton Strachey's niece. It is Julia's text, however—what Leonard Woolf calls “the immaterial inside of a book”—that evokes a mixture of absurdity and despair in the face of social expectations (Downhill 80).

What attracted Woolf, as fiction reader for the Press, to Strachey's story? Not unlike Julia's bride, Virginia thought she and Vanessa seemed fated to wed. When Vanessa, both “reluctant and yielding,” said, “’Of course, I can see that we shall all marry,’” Virginia felt “a horrible necessity” that would “descend…just as we had achieved freedom and happiness’” (MOB 192).