<\/strong>This review appeared first in Virginia Woolf Bulletin<\/em> No. 39, January 2012.<\/p>\n Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism<\/i><\/b>, ed. Helen Southworth, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (ISBN 978 0 7486 4227 4), 2010, \u00a370<\/b><\/p>\n Did you know that the Hogarth Press published the first novel written by a Muslim to appear in English, the first book in English by a Kikuyu, and the first English translation of the earliest autobiography written in Russian?\u00a0 Or that it had two official wolf\u2019s head logos from 1928 onwards?\u00a0 Among the virtues of this nine-essay collection is the important attention its array of topics and approaches brings to the Press\u2019s own rich diversity of writers, topics, genres, styles and perspectives in the period 1917\u201341.<\/p>\n Through these nine perspectives we see Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their press occupying a variety of liminal spaces\u2014aesthetic, philosophical, political, pragmatic\u2014in the midst of dramatic societal changes shaped by two world wars.\u00a0 Anna Snaith subtly discusses \u2018hybridity of resistance\u2019 (120) in Bloomsbury\u2019s complex anti-colonialism, while Stephen Barkway conveys the way in which the Woolfs manoeuvred within a small space between criticism and calculation on the one side, and advocacy and loyalty on the other.\u00a0 Mark Hussey contributes invaluable depth to the book\u2019s presentation of idiosyncratic editorial decisions through a close reading of a threshold image in Joan Easdale\u2019s Amber Innocent<\/i>.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n There is a space called the threshold, The Press engaged with writers and artists in a transition as complex as Amber\u2019s step.\u00a0 Through the resulting exchange, it both lent and borrowed value.\u00a0 Accordingly, these essays examine the \u2018cultural capital\u2019 (56) or \u2018symbolic capital\u2019 (181) invested by the various actors in a publishing endeavour.\u00a0 Social and economic class, as well as race and gender, come strongly into play as Leonard and Virginia employ scholarly-class clout and savvy activism to build their brand, the Hogarth Press.<\/p>\n In the first of three essays grouped as \u2018Class and Culture\u2019, Hussey places the poetry of Joan Easdale in the foreground of a complex milieu.\u00a0 Contemporary reviews of 1930s British poetry and the Hogarth approach to poetry (especially after the arrival of John Lehmann) frame the social relationships surrounding Easdale\u2019s introduction to the Press. \u00a0In publishing eighteen-year-old Easdale\u2019s work, Virginia went directly against the advice she offered in \u2018Letter to a Young Poet\u2019 to \u2018publish nothing before you are thirty\u2019 (quoted 34).\u00a0 Hussey\u2019s contextualisation opens new windows on Easdale\u2019s poetry and throws light on Virginia\u2019s multifaceted attitudes toward and interactions with poems and poets. \u00a0His essay provides telling details to fill out Southworth\u2019s notion of \u2018a lively counterpublic sphere peopled by a network of innovators\u2019 (16).<\/p>\n Melissa Sullivan\u2019s essay on popular fiction writers Rose Macaulay and E. M. Delafield attempts with mixed success to sort out the different kinds of cultural capital invested by the Press and by the writers themselves in their lesser-known scholarly works.\u00a0 Sullivan posits that those works indicate \u2018the fluid boundaries between highbrow and middlebrow spheres\u2019 (56).\u00a0 Unfortunately, her own argument becomes muddied as elements of her conceptual framework, such as \u2018highbrow\u2019 and \u2018modernist\u2019, conflate into indistinctness.\u00a0 Along the way, however, she offers an effective sketch of the remarkable range of women writers published under the Hogarth impress in the interwar period\u2014from Edith Sitwell and Lady Rhondda to Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein.<\/p>\n Diane F. Gillespie, focusing on the Press\u2019s religion list, highlights its \u2018direct interrogations of entrenched religious concepts and institutions\u2019 (74).\u00a0 Gillespie\u2019s research unearths surprising background details: Logan Pearsall Smith (from a Quaker family like \u2018Apostles\u2019 Roger Fry and R. B. Braithwaite) was as a child the subject of a pamphlet, How Little Logan Was Brought to Jesus<\/i>, by his revivalist father.\u00a0 Gillespie summarises four diverse books and explores their intersections with the careers of Leonard and of Virginia.\u00a0 For instance, Braithwaite\u2019s book The State of Religious Belief<\/i> is an interpretation of responses to a \u2018Questionnaire on Religious Belief\u2019 in The Nation<\/i> authored by Leonard.\u00a0 Gillespie invites the reader to view these intersections in terms of a \u2018cultural context for certain aspects of Virginia Woolf\u2019s own desire to create\u2019 (76).<\/p>\n The second group of essays, \u2018Global Bloomsbury\u2019, begins with Snaith\u2019s examination of Hogarth collaborations with Mulk Raj Anand (\u201ca voluntary exile after his arrest for nationalist agitation in India\u201d 107) and Trinidadian C. L. R. James.\u00a0 Snaith presents these collaborations as points from which to evaluate the Press\u2019s international character, especially its dissemination of anti-colonial theory.\u00a0 She writes convincingly that the \u2018outsider-insider status\u2019 (105) of both Leonard and Virginia facilitated the creation of the Press as a \u2018hub\u2019 (106) connecting them with other \u2018outsider-insiders\u2019.\u00a0 Snaith underlines the Press\u2019s commitments to freedom of speech and to revolution, not only in the forms of art but also in social and political systems.\u00a0 At the same time, the mixture of socialism with avant-garde aesthetics reveals \u2018the impossibility of pure or all-pervasive resistance\u2019 (121).<\/p>\n John K. Young\u2019s essay on South African-born William Plomer converses helpfully with Snaith\u2019s piece.\u00a0 Young focuses on Plomer\u2019s specific outsider-insider experience, a \u2018sense of dislocatedness\u2019 (131) that exists \u2018somewhere between belonging and dispersion\u2019 (quoted 129).\u00a0 The Press published nine titles (including five fiction works) by Plomer, who lived in Japan for three years before settling in England.\u00a0 Young analyses the narrative strategies in Plomer\u2019s \u2018challenging representations\u2019 (145) of race, sex, class and colonialism.\u00a0 Young also notes the connection of Plomer\u2019s books to other Hogarth publications (such as Anna Whyte\u2019s Lights Are Bright<\/i> 1936) concerned with revising \u2018conventional notions of gender and nationality\u2019 (146) and resulting in \u2018a queer geomodernism\u2019 (145).<\/p>\n Jean Mills\u2019s essay steers us away from \u2018Anglo-Afro-Asian\u2019 (quoting Plomer, 137) concerns and delivers us into the midst of Russian matters.\u00a0 This is my favourite of the essays because of its focus on Jane Harrison, linguistics and translation, and because of its attention to the transmission of literature.\u00a0 Mills writes a compelling piece telling how an odd assortment of political leftists, who were also lovers of language, collaborated to publish an English translation of the autobiography of the martyr Archpriest Avvakum, an extremist leader of seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox Old Believers.\u00a0 The key players are scholar, linguist and Russophile Harrison, writer (and long-time companion of Harrison) Hope Mirrlees, Russian literary historian and critic D. S. Mirsky, and the Woolfs.\u00a0 They are connected not only through the Avvakum translation, but also through Mills\u2019s analysis of a shared crisis of identity consisting, as Mirsky himself put it, of a \u2018combination of a Radical intellect with Conservative tastes and manners\u2019 (166).\u00a0 Mills highlights in Avvakum\u2019s voice \u2018simplicity, sincerity and vitality\u2019 (171) and argues that Mirsky, Harrison and Virginia valued and strived for these qualities in their own work.<\/p>\n The last section, \u2018Marketing Other Modernisms\u2019, follows its predecessors in containing three diverse essays.\u00a0 Elizabeth Willson Gordon\u2019s on E. McKnight Kauffer stands out as the only contribution focusing on visual art.\u00a0 Her richly detailed piece provides context for and gives instances of Kauffer\u2019s dedication to \u2018bridging or combining art and commerce\u2019 (189).\u00a0 Gordon sees Kauffer as the artist type described by Roger Fry in his 1926 Hogarth Art and Commerce<\/i>: \u2018an intolerant individualist claiming a kind of divine right to the convictions of his peculiar sensibility\u2019 (191).\u00a0 Fry and Kauffer crossed paths repeatedly, and Fry and his Omega Workshops participated in a cluster of concerns shared by Kauffer and the Press: aesthetic emotion, priority of form, and the putative contradiction between good artwork and good salesmanship.\u00a0 Gordon sees both Kauffer and the Press as \u2018placing importance on … the concepts of integrity and merit\u2019 (193).\u00a0 The multiplicity of products by both Kauffer and the Press prove crucial to understanding Kauffer\u2019s contributions to the success of the Hogarth brand: the 1928 wolf\u2019s-head logo and numerous striking dust-jackets.<\/p>\n Southworth on working class writers provides an overview of significant Hogarth titles that attempt \u2018to represent a range of voices and to reach a range of readers\u2019 (229).\u00a0 Coal: A Challenge to the National Conscience<\/i> (1927), Lancashire Under the Hammer<\/i> (1928) and Drifting Men<\/i> (1930), among others, show the Press\u2019s engagement with the British worker \u2018as subject, as author, and as reader\u2019 (206).\u00a0 Southworth gives extensive summaries of John Hampson\u2019s and Huw Menai\u2019s work and suggests ways in which the \u2018socio-political works of the Press\u2019 (216) may be read in conversation with Leonard\u2019s and Virginia\u2019s writings.<\/p>\n Barkway\u2019s study closes the collection with attention to an often-overlooked aspect of Vita Sackville-West\u2019s relationship to Virginia: the professional relationship of writer to publisher.\u00a0 In establishing Leonard\u2019s role as essential to managing the emotional gamble of mixing business and intimate friendship, Barkway traces subtle negotiations to be found in the extant correspondence, drawing on unpublished letters from the Hogarth Press Archive at the University of Reading. \u00a0Leonard is seen acting with respect and skill to maximise important details of timing and presentation.\u00a0 In contrast, Virginia\u2019s letters provide lighter, humorous remarks that reveal a mixture of discomfort and pleasure in acting as publisher to writer (and competitor) Vita, her \u2018Dearest Creature\u2019 (see Letters<\/i>, passim<\/i>).<\/p>\n As editor, Southworth extends \u2018the study of networks\u2019 (13) to the labyrinthine connections surrounding the Hogarth Press, opening intriguing paths of inquiry.\u00a0 Strong in isolated passages, the introduction she provides nevertheless guides us inadequately. \u00a0Southworth\u2019s discussion seems to assume that networks belong uniquely to modernism; there is no indication that networks could be essential and consequential to writers and presses in other eras.\u00a0 Further, though supported by well-documented critical discourses, the informing concept of network here remains a chimera, first obscured by jargon, then by confusing sentence structures.\u00a0 For instance, Southworth writes that \u2018the Hogarth Press, as an idea, a physical institution and a site of cultural capital, became a node that linked together writers as disparate as Anand, Easdale, Menai and Sackville-West with emergent cultural formations like the middlebrow, religion, and globalism\u2019 (21).\u00a0 Is a network a metaphor, or is it a perceptible structure in a given time and place?\u00a0 In what sense is religion emergent here?\u00a0 Southworth\u2019s worthwhile project of problematising one-dimensional views of modernism thus becomes mired in an underlying lack of delineation.<\/p>\n A variety of small copy-editing mistakes combine to distract from valuable passages in the book.\u00a0 For example, on page 76, the section-title, \u2018The desire to create . . . gone slightly crooked\u2019, incorrectly punctuates the quotation from Virginia\u2019s Letters<\/i> (no. 1742)\u2014yet it is correctly rendered in the text on the same page.\u00a0 The reader pauses to wonder which is correct.<\/p>\n The occasional flaws in the book\u2019s fabric do not prevent the enjoyment of its beauties.\u00a0 The physical volume itself is lovely, with dark-cherry cloth-covered boards and a dust-jacket that pays homage in two ways to Hogarth design.\u00a0 It echoes the 1920 Hogarth cover for Logan Pearsall Smith\u2019s Stories from the Old Testament<\/i> (illustrated on p. 79) and it reproduces a graphic pattern used in 1917 on cloth wrappers for Two Stories<\/i>.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 The volume includes thirteen absorbing black-and-white illustrations, including Kauffer\u2019s striking abstract dust-jacket design for T. S. Eliot\u2019s Journey of the Magi<\/i> (1927).\u00a0 Worthwhile, too, are the \u2018Hogarth Press Timeline\u2019, the appendix of Vita Sackville-West publications, and especially the \u2018Works Cited\u2019 lists, fascinating to peruse in their ranges of dates, genres and subjects represented.<\/p>\n The chief strength of the book lies in its most compelling analytical passages, where Bulletin<\/i> readers will find impetus for further work. \u00a0Hussey\u2019s close reading of Easdale\u2019s work includes analysis of intersections between her work and Virginia\u2019s.\u00a0 He shows not only that Easdale and her mentor share in their imagery an exploration of \u2018vision\u2019 and \u2018solidity\u2019 (46) but also that the two concepts are related, citing Woolf\u2019s \u2018The Mark on the Wall\u2019 and the character Rhoda in The Waves<\/i>.\u00a0 In highlighting their common search to portray \u2018the moment as eternity\u2019 (quoted 47), Hussey\u2019s work perhaps opens an avenue of interchange between modernism and romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe).\u00a0 Hussey\u2019s essay converses with Gillespie\u2019s in this area.\u00a0 Gillespie writes that Virginia \u2018is among those who [focus on] inner lives, unified by larger patterns\u2019 (76\u20137).\u00a0 She quotes Virginia\u2019s \u2018A Sketch of the Past\u2019:\u00a0 \u2018We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself\u2019 (77).\u00a0 A persistent challenge for Woolfians remains articulating the pivot between Virginia\u2019s visionary imagery and her worldly engagements with socio-economic issues of money and violence.<\/p>\n Young supports this train of thought with his observations on Plomer\u2019s work: \u2018Turbott Wolfe<\/i> [Hogarth 1926] critiques the South African race\/sex system while also retaining a textual self-awareness of its situatedness within that system\u2019 (138).\u00a0 Reading this in light of Snaith\u2019s discussion of Virginia\u2019s \u2018hybridity of resistance\u2019 (120), we can posit that Virginia\u2019s texts offer critiques with parallel self-awareness of situatedness.\u00a0 Young\u2019s discussion of Plomer\u2019s \u2018reliable elliptical narration<\/i>\u2019 (quoted 142) likewise furnishes food for thought with respect to Virginia\u2019s narrative strategies, especially in The Waves<\/i>.\u00a0 In the same vein, Southworth\u2019s description of Virginia\u2019s tendency toward non-polemical humanism in her \u2018interrogations into the relationship between class and reading and writing\u2019 (229) offers another perspective on the challenges of liminal spaces.<\/p>\n In her exploration of Hogarth liminality, Snaith notes that in \u20181917 Virginia was closely involved in researching and indexing for Empire and Commerce in Africa<\/i>\u2019 and that she \u2018used a phrase from one of Leonard\u2019s epigraphs to the book in A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/i>\u2019 (118).\u00a0 Snaith further highlights Leonard\u2019s critique of the \u2018extreme nationalist psychology in [imperialism\u2019s] victims\u2019 (quoted 115) and Virginia\u2019s interest in \u2018the androgynous union of Shiva and Shakti\u2019 (115).\u00a0 These seemingly disparate but nevertheless related observations support a characterisation of Virginia\u2019s novels, Leonard\u2019s critiques, and the Hogarth Press\u2019s diversity as representing \u2018the plethora of motivating and interdependent forces … that determine … capacity for change\u2019 (121).\u00a0 Through its richly detailed contributions, wide in scope, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism<\/i> demonstrates that vital forces for change include variegated strands of artistry and revolution, and that these strands cannot in the end be separated when we consider Leonard, Virginia and the Hogarth Press.<\/p>\n Karen R. Daubert<\/i><\/p>\n [1]<\/a>See also Stephen Barkway\u2019s \u2018An \u201cincredible goose\u201d and a \u201ccountry flapper\u201d: Virginia Woolf and the Easdales\u2019 and his review of Who was Sophie?<\/i>, VWB<\/i>28 (May 2008).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [2]<\/a>The same pattern was reproduced on the cloth-covered boards of the catalogue, This Perpetual Fight<\/i> (NY: Grolier Club, 2008); see also VWB<\/i>31 (May 2009).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This review appeared first in Virginia Woolf Bulletin No. 39, January 2012. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, ed. Helen Southworth, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (ISBN 978 0 7486 4227 4), 2010, \u00a370 Did … Continue reading
\nImmeasurably long or unaccountably short,
\nBut it is crossed, and all that is remembered
\nIs where we have left and where we have arrived.
\nBut Amber did not cross, she stepped in to the threshold. (quoted 45)<\/p>\n
\n