On 27th August 1935, Harold Nicolson gave Woolf a copy of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's North to the Orient (1935), which was a record of the Lindberghs’ attempt to map a new and uncharted air route from America to Asia in 1931. Recently returned from staying with the Lindberghs, he conveyed to Woolf the welcome news of her fame and popularity in America, an important boon for Woolf whose struggles with writing The Years were causing her an “acute despair” (D5 17). The immediate impact was to motivate Woolf to work on her novel, seemingly stimulating her creative faculties. Woolf 's diary records that it “[w]oke my insensate obsession— to write P & P [one possible title for The Years]—by telling me how a room of one's own is regarded & my American fame” (D4 335). Although this renewed impetus was short-lived, in her diary entry that records her writer's block she wonders whether she might “write about Mrs Lindbergh?” (D4 338). This paper will explore how North to the Orient may have prompted Woolf to consider writing about this female pilot whose experience in many ways seems so remote from her own.

The mid-1930s was an intensely fraught and volatile period politically as negotiations and attempts to halt the rise of fascism in Europe repeatedly failed and Woolf, as a pacifist, felt increasingly isolated from friends and family, including Leonard, who supported rearmament as a response to Hitler's increasing power and territorial conquests. As her diary records, she felt “in a stew about war & patriotism” and, “desperate, almost in tears” (D4 335) about being unable to write, she turns to books, specifically John Bailey, 1864–1931, Letters and Diaries (1935) and North to the Orient, for consolation and possibly hope. Both writers represent the literary world (Bailey was a literary critic and Morrow Lindbergh a writer) but they also represent the idea of preservation which resonates with Woolf 's own similar commitments (in relation to literary and English cultural traditions) at this time. Bailey was the chairman of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, the charitable organization that seeks to preserve English heritage, and Morrow Lindbergh's account of air travel is rich in description of natural beauty and landscapes, and implies the need for preservation.

Jane de Gay has argued that “Woolf 's preoccupation with the literary past had a profound impact on the content of her novels, on her philosophies of fiction and on certain aspects of her fictional method,” including “revisiting and revising plots which had made an impression on her as a reader” (1). As Woolf 's essay “Jane Austen” (1925) indicates, Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion (1818) engaged Woolf 's interest, so much so that in her own first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), one woman (Clarissa Dalloway) makes a gift of a copy of Persuasion to another (Rachel Vinrace). However, Rachel is disparaging of Jane Austen and complains that Austen is “so like a tight plait” (VO 49), suggesting that, as Rachel perceives them, Austen's novels are too ordered and predictable in terms of form and content, that the romance plots are too neatly concluded and, perhaps, that Austen's heroines always ultimately conform to social expectations. Critics such as Christine Froula and Susan Stanford Friedman argue that Clarissa's gift of an inscribed copy of Persuasion, as well as the discussion about “Jane” that goes on between Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, attempt to persuade Rachel to enter dominant heterosexual culture via “the plots of the female literary tradition” that contribute to the cultural promise of “marriage and maternity as the destiny that will fulfill her [a woman's] life” (Froula 148, 136). However, Clarissa's gift, her explanation of her own motivation for marriage, and the complicated nature of persuasion itself, opens up other ways of exploring The Voyage Out in the light of this earlier novel.

Persuasion is the novel that diverges most from the predictable pattern of Austen's other plots and there are elements of Austen's “tight plait” of a plot in Persuasion that seemingly for Woolf were ripe for a little unraveling. In “Jane Austen” Woolf speculates that, had she lived for longer, Austen may have written novels that “trespass” beyond the literary boundaries within which her work is typically located, giving rise to novels in which a greater “complexity of human nature” would have been apparent (143, 145). Detecting “a new element in Persuasion” and a sense of “transition” to a new stage of writing (144, 143), Woolf considers that Austen's next six novels would have been more “suggestive” in conveying not only what characters said but what remains “unsaid” (145).

In many ways Woolf and Mansfield seem to have occupied very different cultural positions. Woolf was a member of Bloomsbury and her intellectual and cultural credentials were secure; she and other “Blooms Berries” (as Mansfield called them) referred to Mansfield and Murry as having a sense of “the underworld” about them (D1 159, 222). Mansfield, the “little colonial” (Notebooks 166), occupied a more marginal cultural position but one which, in many ways, afforded her a different critical perspective. However, in spite of these and other differences between them, both were aware of their shared goal of shaping the literary landscape in new ways, and many of their personal writings in diaries, journals and letters attest to the affinity at work in their friendship and professional roles. Critics and biographers have identified important, if sometimes unlikely, parallels and correspondences in their thinking, perspectives and aims. As Angela Smith argues so persuasively, Mansfield and Woolf “mirror each other constantly, in spite of their evident differences” (1999, 1). Their relationship was complex and shifting, and characterized by intense feelings of personal and professional envy, as well as by intimacy, generosity and a sense of being in tune with one another.

What is very apparent is that both found their relationship to be richly rewarding— their talk, as Woolf describes it, was “priceless” (D2 45), and Woolf agrees with Mansfield's view that they were “the only women at [that] moment […] with gift enough to make talk of writing interesting” (D 2 61). Gifts and ideas of a gift economy recur in their fiction and two stories, Mansfield's “A Cup of Tea” and Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” articulate the subversive possibilities of women giving gifts to other women, but simultaneously foreground the potential dangers of the gift. Both stories were written in 1922 and published in 1923, and the tantalizing correspondences between them reaffirm Smith's insistence on the affinity Woolf and Mansfield shared. As these stories suggest, this extends to a sense of their affinity in “economic thinking” as this revolves around shifting notions of the gift and capitalist trade.

Woolf's troubling and contradictory attitude to Jewishness has long been seen as a source of perplexity and frustration for her readers and critics. At times she expresses her sense of identification as a Jew, aligning herself specifically with Leonard and with a more general sense of being an outsider. Yet her personal and public writing is riddled with instances of antisemitism, including pointed attacks on Leonard and his family, which are shocking in their vehemence.

The coexistence of these contradictory perceptions of her Jewish relatives and Jewishness more generally can be seen as symptomatic of a wider cultural confusion about the figure of the Jew in this historical period. Simultaneously perceived as an ancient race, outcast and alien in the modern Christian world, ‘Jews were often viewed as moderns par excellence, … cosmopolitan, rootless, urban’ (Linett 2007: 80). The significant influx of East European Jewish immigrants during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the pre-war period heightened cultural tensions within established Jewish communities in London and in the wider society, adding further complexity to issues of identity and belonging and giving rise to the perceived sense of the ‘problem’ of the Jew in British society. That ‘the conceptual Jew’ is a ‘semantically overloaded entity’, ‘blending meanings which ought to be kept apart’, as Zygmunt Bauman explains (2000: 39), seems key to understanding the Jew as a figure of contradiction and boundary-troubling complexity in Woolf's political thinking and writing.

Woolf's antisemitism was also closely bound up with class prejudice, as Michael Whitworth suggests: ‘[i]f social classifications motivated her distaste, class and not race was the important factor’ (2005: 72). But Woolf was also critically self-aware of her ‘snobbery’ (particularly in her response to Leonard's family) and of the ways in which her own class privilege and racial prejudice sometimes created a myopic view and dangerous blind spots. Hermione Lee argues that ‘Woolf separates herself off from the habitual, half-conscious anti-Semitism of her circle’ but that she also ‘spells out her complicity in bigotry and offensiveness by way of self-accusation and social critique’ (1996: 680).

Our vision for this project has been to bring together a collection of articles taking diverse twenty-first-century academic approaches to Woolf studies. The publication emerges from the collaborative effort of four editors: two from the UK and two from the US. Representing recent trends in scholarship about Virginia Woolf, the volume offers multiple angles of interpretation and enquiry. It examines patterns in Woolf's life and work that are unstable, multilateral or evolving; fractured but also fused; contradictory yet connected. Many of the essays examine unresolved dissonances, binaries and doubles, ruptured meanings, and oppositional factors, and focus on ambivalence, antithesis, and paradox. Each essay takes a distinctive perspective and examines unresolved or previously unexplored tensions, whether in the contexts of Woolf's own experience or in the framework of her literary, political, and intellectual work.

The essays are organised into five interconnected sections. Beginning with essays exploring the private and personal, the focus then moves outwards to consider linguistic investigations, wider cultural concerns focusing on commodification and constructions of identity, and a scrutiny of ideas of being (human or nonhuman). The collection concludes with a fresh perspective on firmly established themes in Woolf studies – gender, sexuality, and the nature of the other – offering new and illuminating lenses through which to read her work in the twentyfirst century. Woolf's own assertion in her 1924 diary entry that ‘we're splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes’ (D 2: 314), fully validates our investigation of the splinters and mosaics in Woolf's life and work. As this introduction will establish, these approaches are embedded in contemporary scholarship, such as Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman's edited collection Woolf in Context (2012). Gabrielle McIntire's Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf offers the reader an intensive co-analysis of literary expression and issues of authorial identity in the chapter ‘Virginia Woolf, (Auto)biography and the Eros of Identity: Reading Orlando’. McIntire's analysis is representative of the sophisticated ways in which Woolf's personal experiences and creative expressions are currently being interpreted by scholars who cross the boundaries between the text and the author, casting aside the mantra of the intentional fallacy.