With the death of my mother last April (2015) and on its heels the death of my intellectual mother, Virginia Woolf scholar and feminist upstart, Jane Marcus, last May (2015), I found myself over the course of last year in the curious position of being between the two rocks of their respective archives and a hard place.

My mother, also an upstart, and volatile personality, never made it to college. We were working class and always strapped for cash. She, a voracious reader, was self-taught, but instilled in us, in between factory jobs, a love of language, literature, and ideas. When I left for college, she had a nervous breakdown. She began casting about for intellectual outlets to suit the extravagances of her mind, which, without going into too many personal details, were many, at the time. She tried joining a local Native American Indian tribe, as she claimed we were part Cherokee (there actually may be some truth to this, or, as Virginia Woolf might write, dot, dot, dot, […] her famous ellipses indicating silence, or a persistent, yet, paradoxically, generative gap in one's knowledge…and so, there may be some truth to this…or not). In any case, she was given the name, Squash Blossom, but was soon banned from tribal gatherings for her outspokenness.

When her letters to me at college no longer ended with “Love, Squash Blossom,” but, instead, “Live Long and Prosper, Mom,” I knew she was in the midst of a seachange. Apparently, after a few false starts, she found an intellectual home of sorts in an obscure sub-culture known as K/S, or Kirk/Spockers. Some in the audience familiar with the genres of science fiction and fantasy will recognize the phrase, “Gay Star Trek,” while others will perhaps wonder, dot, dot, dot […] where is she going with all of this? In plainer terms, my mother began writing, editing, and critiquing stories written by fans of the popular television show, Star Trek, which take the characters of the show, created by the visionary Gene Roddenberry, on a variety of queer journeys, to say the least.

Most of my personal memories of Jane Marcus revolve around food. A year ago, during spring semester, while I was teaching four classes in a row at John Jay College-CUNY, the last two in a building which can only be described as decrepit—windowless, airless, no faculty lounge, furniture nailed to the floor—Jane and her beloved husband Michael, Mike, Big Mike, insisted I come up to their apartment each Tuesday and Thursday evening in between classes three and four for dinner. I had a 50-minute break in between. I'm like, “Ohhhh, mannnn, I don't know if I have enough time.” But Jane insisted. She said, “You need SUSTENANCE!”

So every Tuesday and Thursday night, I'd jump on the bus or hop in a cab at 59th and 10th and ride up to their apartment on 73rd Street for dinner. Well, it wasn't just a quick bite. It was grilled salmon and asparagus one night, brisket another, salad greens and vegetables from their garden, duck confit (I didn't even know what duck confit was; it turns out it's delicious), followed by dessert, usually ice cream drizzled with preserves she had canned over the summer, and, yes, a glass (or two) of wine. I'd walk back into class with 30 seconds to spare, fed and renewed by our conversation, and teach with an energy I had found lacking in class number three.

Because Jane was right. I needed sustenance. For, “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (AROO 18). We need sustenance “so that,” as Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One's Own (1929), we are “able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day's living” (AROO 19). Jane Marcus gave me—and so many of the scholars in this room—personal, intellectual, and professional sustenance. As one of her students, Rowena Kennedy Epstein, posted on social media, “It is such a unique relationship to mourn—through it one becomes part of a community, is someone else's legacy, gets a job, is given permission, makes another network of legacies, moves somewhere, publishes, thinks, writes, gains authority. It's profound when it is nurturing,” and Jane nurtured all of us in this way.

When Diana Swanson and Pamela Caughie first invited me to organize this roundtable, we discussed bringing together some of the contributors to Virginia Woolf and War, the 1991 essay collection published in the Syracuse UP series, Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution. But in the more than two decades since I claimed in that volume that “all Woolf's work is deeply concerned with war; that it helps redefine our understanding of the nature of war; and that from her earliest to her final work she sought to explore and make clear the connections between private and public violence, between the domestic and the civic eff ects of patriarchal society, between male supremacy and the absence of peace, and between ethics and aesthetics” (3), there has been such an abundance of sophisticated work done on violence in its many forms, both in the context of modernist studies and of Woolf scholarship generally, extending and complicating our understanding of violence, conflict, force and aesthetics, that a retrospective look seemed likely to be less valuable than more current reflections. It is a long time since it has been possible to think of Woolf in isolation from her contemporaries or as a voice disconnected from the political currents of her time. Virginia Woolf and War played its part in that transformation of Woolf's reception.

The four scholars on this roundtable each have thought deeply about issues of violence, war, peace, conflict, force, and form in the work of Virginia Woolf. In At The Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, Sarah Cole describes Woolf as “one of the great formalists of violence in the twentieth century” (37), a description that brought home to me the vast change in Woolf's cultural presence eff ected by the past few decades of scholarship. Ashley Foster's work examines the interrelationships among pacifism, modernism, and war and tries to recuperate the lost threads of modernism's pacifist history.