The Cambridge companion to Virginia Woolf

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The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) xxi + 272pp The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Ed. Maren Tova Linett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) xxiii + 224pp Published in 2000, first edition of The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf declared that its attentions would be directed Woolf's mind: breadth of her intellectual range; her impulsive flights of creative brilliance, long labours of composition; her conversations with present; her arguments with history (xiii). This second edition, directed towards those wishing to augment their reading through an introduction to interrogations and discoveries of Woolf scholars today (xix) has lost none of its enthusiasm for its subject, and its scope remains impressive. The first five chapters of revised edition focus on establishing intellectualism and radicalism of Woolf. Andrew McNeillie's opening essay is still a lively read, concentrating on geographical and intellectual connections of group and tracing early cultural influences on Woolf, while acknowledging that [w]e need to recognise Woolf's resistance, her difference, and admit her own trajectory, beyond Bloomsbury (14). The following three chapters turn their attention to Woolf's fiction by period. Susan Dick's examination of Woolf's use of literary realism is gone, and instead volume appears to concentrate on more obviously modernist innovations of Woolf's fiction. Suzanne Raitt's exploration of voice(s) in Woolf's early novels is effective in its aim to move beyond reading of these as what she terms apprentice work; Jane Goldman, meanwhile, explores lyric experimentalism of Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, interrogating distinctions between poetry and prose in Woolf's writing. Julia Briggs's analysis of Woolf's later fictions of 1930s, however, opens up possibility of moving beyond modernist tropes. She discusses gender, class and historical moments (70), but one of most intriguing aspects is her description of way in which Between Acts adapts a way of writing with amused affection about domestic or village life that was popular during 1930s (77). She goes on to invite comparisons to writers such as E. M. Delafield, Jan Struther and E. F. Benson--writers typically associated with middlebrow culture. Woolf's own views on middlebrow are of course well known, but recent developments in study of middlebrow have attempted to rescue term from its pejorative associations. Critics such as Nicola Humble, Faye Hammill and Ann Ardis have led way for reevaluation of relationship between modernism and middlebrow modes of fiction. Of course, paradigms concerning high and low cultures have also shifted considerably since first edition, and more highbrow elements of Woolf's fiction and her interest in common reader are discussed here. Lee's chapter on Woolf's essays, for example, notes their accessibility and popularity as opposed to their credibility (citing reception of Eliot's criticism as a point of comparison). Given impact of rethinkings of brow boundaries in criticism today, however, it does seem a pity that a more explicit and prolonged discussion of cultural hierarchy in relation to Woolf is absent. The study does, however, touch on sometimes difficult and tentative relationship between Woolf and modernism. The chapter that best reflects this is Michael Whitworth's excellent analysis of Woolf, modernism and modernity. (It should be noted here that this is only essay from previous edition to have undergone notable revisions; majority of other chapters, with exception of Raitt's, have been largely untouched.) The addition of term to title of chapter is significant. Ardis has argued that literary modernism has been privileged as the aesthetic of (115), and indeed criticism has tended to treat modernism and modernity as practically synonymous. …