Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language. Emily Dalgarno (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012) ix + 215pp. For Virginia Woolf, the means and ends of changed significantly throughout her career. What began as a pragmatic and, as she would claim, amateur reading practice--employed by a reader simply wishing to access the work of Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and others--evolved into a critical practice that transformed her work with the English language. In Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language, Emily Dalgarno argues that Woolf came to understand as opportunity to challenge and revise the dominant such that it might better accommodate diverse voices and perspectives. This revision, as Dalgarno explains, accords with Woolf's career-long desire to rethink the English at the level of the sentence order better to meet the requirements of women writers (1). Dalgarno reads scenes of in Woolf's fiction alongside her private reading notebooks in order to uncover how the writer's practices informed her composition. Pointing to Woolf's sustained fascination with French, and Russian, Dalgarno acknowledges but ultimately disputes Woolf's claims to amateurism. These self-critical attitudes, Dalgarno explains, emerged in tandem with Woolf's sense of herself as both an outsider and a critic of institutionalized learning (2). Such a strategically adopted outsider's lens would prove valuable to theorizing the role of the translator as a mediator between cultures and nations. Woolf was clearly someone for whom foreign languages redrew the map of the world (2)--almost literally, it seems, as would in fact become central to Woolf's understanding of national identity in the 1930s. In exploring how allowed Woolf to participate in debates about nation and nationalism, Dalgarno contributes to scholarship on Woolf and colonial discourse by Laura Doyle, Mark Wollaeger, Urmila Seshagiri, and Jed Esty. From the outset of her argument, Dalgarno considers Woolf's writings alongside theories of translation, lucidly introducing the writings of Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Lawrence Venuti. When read alongside Woolf's fiction and nonfiction, according to Dalgarno, these theories reveal the scope of her attempts to redesign the sentence and to recreate the dominant language (1). By forging new connections between Woolf studies and studies, Dalgarno's project contributes richly to both. Absent from this exchange, however, is scholarship on and modernism, perhaps because many such studies have focused on classical literature, with cast as a temporal leap between ancients and moderns. Dalgarno usefully varies this pattern by considering Woolf's negotiations with Sophocles as well as contemporaries Proust and Tolstoy. Beginning with the essay On Not Knowing Greek, Dalgarno contextualizes Woolf's words by tracing a longstanding cultural debate about the social role of translation. Familiar with mandates for legible translations that presume the reader's reliance on the translator's expertise, Woolf was also drawn to translations that magnify foreignness in order to approximate the experience of reading in a different language. According to Dalgarno, Woolf ultimately shaped for herself a position more like that of explorer than a university professor. Even as she advocates for the common reader, she also domesticates translation by way of intertextual references to the British literary canon (23). Woolf not only read and composed translations, but also published them. The Hogarth Press translations of Russian literature, as Dalgarno explains, appealed to the already growing British readership for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. At the same time, these translations helped transform what had been a small, insular press into operation with a discernible stake in international modernism (6). …