Vico, Virginia Woolf and Adrian Stokes's Autobiographies: Fantasy, Providence and Isolation in Post‐War British Aesthetics

Abstract

After making his mark as an innovative critic of Renaissance art, contemporary sculpture and ballet in 1930s London, Adrian Stokes came under pressure to accommodate his aesthetic outlook to the collective imperatives of post-war Britain. His two great autobiographies, Inside Out (1947), and Smooth and Rough (1951), were written in Cornwall in retreat from the urban intelligentsia as a rallying cry for the values of organic community in opposition to the privatized aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Roger Fry’s Signifi cant Form. This essay uses previously unpublished letters by Stokes, Herbert Read and others to show how the autobiographies refashioned previous affi nities with Ruskin, Pater, Ezra Pound and Melanie Klein to champion the collective fantasy, providential outlook and radical isolationism of Giambattista Vico’s eighteenth-century New Science in the service of ‘the giant structure of substitution itself’.