Abstract
MLR, ., the task should not be underestimated since many of these diaries will be unfamiliar to readers inside as well outside the Academy. In addition, there is too much speculation as to what Woolf might have felt or thought as she read, and what she might have ‘got’ from the diaries she was reading. Undoubtedly, Woolf’s capacious mind absorbed much from what she read but to reduce her reading of others’ diaries to what she ‘got’ from them is to impoverish her (indeed any) reading experience, surely motivated by curiosity about lives and the writing of those lives, different from as much as they are like one’s own. e approach tends towards tunnel vision, producing links or connections that a reader conscious of the multifarious cultural and social contexts of Woolf’s writing will find implausible. In her second volume, for instance, Lounsberry proposed that A Room of One’s Own was ‘Woolf’s private gi to Katherine Mansfield’ merely on the grounds that in her journal (reviewed by Woolf in ) Mansfield expressed frustration at not having her own room in which to work (Barbara Lounsberry, Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ), p. ). In the volume under review, she claims that the description of an eighteenth-century dinner at the University of Oxford in e Diary of a Country Parson by James Woodforde (read by Woolf in ) ‘underwrites [sic] the famous dinner in A Room of One’s Own’ (p. ). In their details the meals are not sufficiently alike to warrant such a claim, and it is just as likely that Woolf was halfrecalling , half-fabricating a lunch she had enjoyed in the rooms of her friend Dadie Rylands in King’s College, Cambridge. e inputs are surely multiple, and if they may include the connections Lounsberry proposes, Woolf does not simply ‘take’ from what she reads but exercises her own (considerable) powers of imagination in reworking what she has absorbed, consciously or not. Lounsberry’s book will then be of interest to a range of readers, who, however, may be tempted to have recourse to the index and to dip, as they dip into the diaries, rather than reading from cover to cover. But if they yield to the temptation they will miss the sense of history, especially the build-up to the Second World War, as lived by Woolf and her circle, which Lounsberry captures well. ey might also miss some of the (well-chosen) diary entries she includes, which exemplify Woolf’s brilliant wit, her descriptive powers, or the complexity of her reflections on the ‘war within’ and the imminent ‘war without’. U N M T-C e Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. : –. Ed. by S S and M B. M, in association with J. G K, R S- , and A J. DF III. Intro. by S D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . lxxxv+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. e fourth volume in Cambridge University Press’s monumental Ernest Hemingway Letters Project covers the period April to December , substantive years when Hemingway firmly established his literary reputation with the publication Reviews of his third novel, the critically praised and commercially successful A Farewell to Arms. e author’s artistic integrity and devotion to his cra are highlighted in the correspondence, particularly in the light of the strain placed upon Hemingway between his father’s suicide in December (a focus of Volume ) and the novel’s appearance in September . As the eldest male child in a family of five, he took over the major financial responsibility for a disparate household, nominally led by his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway. Using royalties from the novel, he established a $, trust fund to support her and the younger siblings still living at home. at personal concern followed his professional contentions with the American book trade: threats of censorship over obscene words in A Farewell to Arms caused Hemingway to compromise with his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, and substitute dashes, the standard solution to censorship issues in s mainstream publications. In subsequent letters Hemingway fills in the blanks for his correspondents and rationalizes the need...
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