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Virginia Woolf and the War on Books: Cultural Heritage and Dis-Heritage in the 1930s
- from MODERNISM AND HERITAGE
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Jane deGay, Tom Breckin, Anne Reus
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and Heritage
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 12 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 08 June 2017, pp 176-182
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Summary
In front of the library at Washington State University is Terry Allen's bronze sculpture, “Bookin’, “ a walking human form made of books. We may be what we read, as the sculptor suggests, but our books do not conveniently walk from one job, office, or home to another. We load them into heavy boxes and vow—uselessly—“No more books!” Our personal libraries can be burdens. Still, collected together, our books reflect intellectual growth and cultural heritage. How would we react if some extremist labeled us heretics, then confiscated or destroyed our writings, personal libraries, or the academic and public libraries we use?
In the 1930s, the Nazis launched a campaign of book burning that targeted socalled unGerman ideas, first in Germany, then in countries it occupied. Prior to Britain's declaration of war in 1939, Hogarth Press publications warned about intellectual intolerance on the continent. Today, with cultural devastation still rampant, scholars and historians are looking back at Nazi book burning. These interrelated contexts—Nazi cultural destruction, Hogarth Press responses, and scholarly retrospectives—are large topics in themselves. A brief look, however, helps to illuminate the last years of Virginia Woolf 's book-centered life. In a decade of book burning on the continent, and twenty years after a suffragette arson campaign in England, Woolf used fire to wage peace in Three Guineas.
“When they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
—Heinrich Heine, 1821 (qtd. Knuth, Burning 2)
“Only our books? Once they would have burned us with them”
—Sigmund Freud, 1933 (qtd. Polastron 182)
These comments were both historically apt and prophetic. Soon after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, the Third Reich banned all printed materials containing so-called “inaccurate information” (Polastron 179). Beginning on May 10th, in Berlin and over thirty other towns, university students and Hitler's brown shirts flung onto bonfires thousands of books. They did it with jubilant pageantry, sang Nazi anthems, and gave the Nazi salute. As a French journal reported, “with each new packet of books…, a voice declared the name of the…author and pronounced the sentence of execution” (Polastron 180). Because a major target in Berlin was the Magnus Hirschfield Institute for Sexual Science (Knuth, Burning 102), a good example is this announcement: “Against spiritual corruption and the…unhealthy complication of sexuality…, I commit to the flames the works of Sigmund Freud” (Polastron 180).
Advise and Reject: Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and a Forgotten Woman's Voice
- from Virginia Woolf's Contemporaries at Home
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Julie Vandivere, Megan Hicks
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 10 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 16 June 2016, pp 170-176
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Adventures in Common: Investing with Woolfs and ”Securitas”
- from Woolf Beyond the Book
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Helen Wussow, Mary Ann Gillies
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2014, pp 205-211
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Summary
Introduction: “a society for asking questions” —V. Woolf
In 1997, a group of faculty women at Washington State University formed an investment club. Because we knew too little about retirement funds and investment options in general, we, like the women in Virginia Woolf's “A Society” (1920), formed one “for asking questions” (CSF 125). In Woolf's story, women who critically examine men's accomplishments do provide a report on “the Stock Exchange,” but we're not told what it says (CSF 131). We only know that “Sir Harley Tightboots” refused to talk about “the capitalist system” (CSF 132). Today, far more easily than for Woolf's “daughters of educated men” (TG 4), women can enter financial professions. Laywomen can study stocks and buy and sell online. Do we still need Woolf's warning in Three Guineas about barren “lives” and skewed “loyalties” (70)?
Optimistically, we named our group “Pleiades.” In one version of the myth, Zeus transformed the daughters of Atlas and Pleione into a cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus (the Bull). During a “bull market,” stock values increase, although our club's aim was less to make money than to learn about stocks and market cycles. With monthly contributions of $30, not enough to bankrupt any of us, we affiliated with a national organization called “Better Investing.” How do we avoid the boredom that had kept some of us from facing our finances in the past? Motivating each other to research stocks, we meet in our homes and leaven business with food, wine, and conversation.
As a small investor myself, then, I was intrigued to discover that in the 1930s the Hogarth Press published two books on investing, partly in response to the “great slump” or “great crash” of 1929. The first was Financial Democracy (1933) by Margaret Miller and Douglas Campbell. My focus is the second book, Adventures in Investing (1936) by “Securitas,” pen name for C. Patrick Th ompson, financial editor of Time and Tide. He got my attention by calling investment not a “fixed science,” but a “great and ruthless game,” “an impassioned drama,” and an “adventure” that takes us “among the roots of life itself ” (“Securitas” 24, 9).
3 - ‘Can I Help You?’: Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press
- from PART TWO - Language and Translation
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Gill Lowe, Senior Lecturer of English, University Campus Suffolk, School of Arts and Humanities, University Campus Suffolk., Jeanne Dubino, Professor of English and Global Studies, Appalachian State University, Kathryn Simpson, Senior Lecturer, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Vara Neverow, Professor of English and Gender Studies, Southern Connecticut State University
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 30 November 2014, pp 51-71
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In the turbulent mid-1960s, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a personal cry for ‘Help!’, the title song for both movie and soundtrack album. Suddenly famous, the Beatles confronted lives transformed in a variety of ways. Had they written a line like ‘Help me if you can’ during the 1930s, an advice column called ‘Can I Help You?’ in London's Sunday Dispatch might have echoed reassuringly. For eight years, actress and writer Viola Tree (1884–1938) answered letters from ‘ hundreds and thousands’ (Tree 1937: 14) of people. Lacking self- confidence and facing unfamiliar social situations, they asked for advice on how to behave.
In the spring of 1937, Viola Tree ‘thrust’ upon Leonard and Virginia Woolf a manuscript with the same title (L 6: 111). In it, Tree drew upon material from her etiquette column as well as from her personal experience of various kinds of social occasions. Virginia, although continuing to read some submissions, was by then less involved with everyday work at the Hogarth Press. When their manager died suddenly (Marder 1989: 224; Willis 1992: 294), however, both Woolfs worked closely with Tree's Can I Help You? until its publication in the fall of that year. Tree's personal treatment of manners parallels some of Virginia Woolf's own experiences in society, echoes those of characters she had created in her fiction, and anticipates concerns in her future writing. During a time of escalating totalitarian sentiment on the continent following her nephew Julian Bell's death in Spain in July of 1937, Woolf was researching and drafting her own version of a Can I Help You? book, one with national and international implications. Three Guineas, a blend of interconnected letters and replies that appeared in 1938, is about ‘how we can help you to prevent war’ (TG: 11).
Woolf's largely business relationship with Tree supports recent research, like Helen Southworth's essay collection (2010), that emphasises the Hogarth Press's increasing involvement in a variety of modernist cultural controversies and discussions. Can I Help You? reflects the personal experiences of many living in a period of great social change and class fluidity. Like Woolf's, Tree's view of conventional social behaviour was an evolving mixture of qualified respect and spirited resistance.
There Goes the Bride: Virginia Woolf, Julia Strachey, and the Hogarth Press
- from Publishing, Politics, Publics
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Ann Martin, Kathryn Holland
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- Book:
- Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2013, pp 247-255
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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).
“Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Derek Ryan, Stella Bolaki
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- Book:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2012, pp 173-180
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Summary
In the turbulent mid-1960s, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a personal cry for “Help!,” the title song for both movie and sound-track album. The Beatles, suddenly famous, describe a life “changed in oh so many ways.” Their way of dealing with lost self-confidence and a need for affirmation was to sing rhyming stanzas to an upbeat tempo. If they had written a line like “Help me if you can” during the 1930s, an advice column called “Can I Help you?” in London's Sunday Dispatch might have echoed reassuringly. For eight years, hundreds of people dealt with their social insecurity by writing letters to its author, Viola Tree (1884-1938).
In the spring of 1937, Tree brought the Woolf s a manuscript that quoted or referred to several letters from her column and bore the same title. Virginia, although she continued to read certain submissions, had been less involved with everyday work at the Hogarth Press (Willis 369-70). She pitched in, however, after their manager's sudden death left them short-handed (Marder 224). Along with Leonard, therefore, she had a hands-on relationship with Can I Help You? until its publication in the fall of 1937. During this time of escalating totalitarian sentiment on the continent and her nephew Julian Bell's death in Spain in July of 1937, however, Virginia Woolf was contemplating help and advice on a larger scale. She was drafting her own Can I Help You? book of letters and replies, published in 1938 as Three Guineas.
A number of Woolf scholars have treated overlapping topics related to social behavior. Closest to my topic, however, is an insightful 2008 article by David Dwan who discusses manners, especially in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), in the context of philosophical skepticism. In the face of meaningless flux and incoherent identities, he says, social rituals are useful—so long as they are recognized as fiction and do not harden into dogma (Dwan 261, 263). Viola Tree's Can I Help You? offers a parallel context for Woolf's challenges to conventional values and rules of etiquette, one that also affirms manners as an evolving art form helpful, at best, in fostering harmonious human relationships in lives well lived.
“The Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Kristin Czarnecki, Carrie Rohman
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- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the Natural World
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2011, pp 133-142
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My title “The Bird is the Word” dates me. It refers to a song from the 1960s that morphed into a surf–rock song, taken up more recently by the Family Guy and Big Bird on Sesame Street. What does it have to do with Virginia Woolf? It came to mind when I was free–associating about nature and words. Next I recalled Woolf's famous comment in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939). It ends, “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself ” (M0B: 72). If “the bird is the word” and, more seriously, “we are the words,” then, the bird and we are one wiTheach other and also with an authentic mode of expression.
Relevant scholarship examines Woolf 's many bird images with their classical and medieval precedents and suggestions of continuity, community, or social commentary (e.g. Blyth, Ames, Leslie, Walker). As others note too, Woolf supported bird protection acts, but disliked the dogmatism and sentimentality of some proponents. Her graphic essay “The Plumage Bill” (1920) is a feminist response to those who blamed women's feathered hats exclusively for the torture and extinction of whole species of birds (Abbot). More philosophical studies of Woolf and nature focus on language (e.g. Waller, Walker, Sultzbach, Westling). Among all these insightful readings, however, are only brief references to British naturalist and ornithologist W. H. Hudson (1841–1922) (e.g. Blyth, Abbot, Walker). I want to use two of his books especially to create cultural contexts for Woolf's writing. When she reviewed Hudson's memoir Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life in 1918, she linked his interest in birds with his fl ights of words. In her later fiction, she re–envisioned Hudson's attempt in his bird–filled 1904 novel Green Mansions to express oneness with nature.
PART I: “I WISH I HAD SEEN HIM.”—V. WOOLF (L 2: 549)
In spite of differences in sex and socialization, age and reputation, Hudson and Woolf were surprisingly kindred spirits. Both had distinctive childhood experiences of non–urban places that reverberate throughout their writing.
A City in the Archives: Virginia Woolf and the Statues of London
- from NAVIGATING LONDON
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- By Diane F. Gillespie, Washington State University
- Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans, Sarah E. Cornish
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- Book:
- Woolf and the City
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2010, pp 55-62
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The personal library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf is a treasure trove of clues for scholarly detectives. We can locate evidence to illuminate Virginia Woolf's work, or to support or amplify something we have already discovered there. For example, of several books that focus on London, two especially create biographical and cultural contexts for sculptural metaphors she devised for her characters and for specific London statues that appear among the characters’ rapidly shifting thoughts and feelings. The first is an edition of London Revisited (1916) by E[dward]. V[errall]. Lucas (1868–1938), a popular author who wrote for Punch and produced, under several pen names, nearly 100 books. The second, The People's Album of London Statues (1928), is a collaborative effort between writer Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) and artist Nina Hamnett (1914–1953). Their book reflects controversies about traditional versus modern statuary, parallel to those about painting, that Virginia Woolf no doubt had already read about and discussed, given the artistic and social networks in which she moved. Ultimately, observing London statues was part of her ongoing examination and disruption of social hierarchies.
Although I find no evidence that Woolf knew E. V. Lucas personally, she did review London Revisited for the Times Literary Supplement (9 November 1916). Lucas's book, she says, is for readers who want “to contemplate London” from the perspective of the author's interests (E2 50). One of these interests is outdoor statues to which he devotes five chapters. Lucas writes that London is less prone than Paris to outdoor statuary, partly because “the English mind does not tend much to this kind of celebration,” and also because marble in Paris “continues to dazzle” while in London it becomes “dreary and dingy” (70). Although much of London's statuary is therefore “under cover,” Lucas writes for “the pious pilgrim in the streets” (71).
In her review, Woolf generally agrees with Lucas's London/Paris contrast. She also confesses she is not “quite reconciled” to the imitative “attempt which has been made of late to comb out [… London's] huddle of little streets and substitute military-looking avenues with enormous symbolical mounds of statuary placed exactly at the wrong spot” (E2 50–51).