Anne E. Fernald (ed.), Virginia Woolf, Mrs. DallowayVictoria Rosner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Bloomsbury Group

Abstract

Academia’s fascination with all things Bloomsbury—the collective group of writers and artists who first gathered around the Stephen siblings in a Bloomsbury square in the early 1900s—continues unabated, as the two volumes reviewed here confirm. Virginia Woolf is undoubtedly the most famous writer to emerge from the Bloomsbury group. While Woolf was alive, she herself supervised new editions of her work; since her death, aside from the Hogarth Press originals, there have been numerous other editions of varying quality and consistency. It is only recently, however, that a definitive edition of her works has appeared—The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf—with two outstanding Woolf scholars, Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers, as general editors. Their mission is to provide a comprehensive, scholarly edition which reveals every detail of composition and publication history, and which includes extensive annotations. Twelve volumes in total are projected, edited by a number of internationally recognized Woolf scholars, covering ten novels, a volume of essays, and a volume of short stories.