Vanessa Bell Research Articles

From one room to the other: A story of contamination. The relationship between child and adult analysis

Does the analyst who works with both children and adults using ostensibly the same theoretical model perform similar mental operations in these two fields? The author suggests that child analysis is rooted in a different creative process from that of adults. Comparing the analysis of children to painting and that of adults to writing, and making use of the debate between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell on the relative merits of words and images, the author explores the psychoanalytic debate on the role of child analysis in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Child analysis, initially regarded as an application of psychoanalysis, ended up acting as a catalyst for a true epistemological revolution in the 20th century through the work of Klein and Bion. Playing is not only an alternative medium to words for representing the unconscious but a different method for giving shape to representations through a specific creative process. The reverie which is born in the child analyst’s consulting room reproduces itself through the body’s actions during play, whereas in the adults’ consulting room the analyst’s capacity to dream presupposes the suspension of action. Child analysis, deploying a distinctive creative process that makes use of the body and serves itself of action in its development, may be said to rest on a similar creative process to that of figurative art. For this reason, the child analyst’s mind relates to objects in a different way, being in a more prolonged state of fusion with these as a result of ‘concentration of the body’. The significance of the unspeakable things that take place can often only be conceptualized in après‐coup. Although this difference in the development of the process suggests a significant distinction between the two ‘arts’ of child and adult analysis, the aesthetic sensitivity acquired through child analysis can be profitably used with adults, as will be demonstrated with the help of several clinical examples.

The Edinburgh companion to Virginia Woolf and the arts

The most authoritative and up-to-date guide to Virginia Woolf's artistic influences and associations In original, extensive and newly researched chapters by internationally recognised authors, the Companion explores Woolf's ideas about creativity and the nature of art in the context of the recent 'turn to the visual' in modernist studies with its focus on visual technologies and the significance of material production. The in-depth chapters place Woolf's work in relation to the most influential aesthetic theories and artistic practices, including Bloomsbury aesthetics, art and race, Vanessa Bell and painting, art galleries, theatre, music, dance, fashion, entertaining, garden and book design, broadcasting, film, and photography. No previous book concerned with Woolf and the arts has been so wide ranging or has paid such close attention to both public and domestic art forms. Illustrated with 16 colour as well as 39 black and white illustrations and with guides to further reading, the Companion will be an essential reference work for scholars, students and the general public. Contributors: Tony Bradshaw, Liz and Peter Brooker, Pamela L. Caughie, Patrick Collier, Colin Dickey, Kate Flint, Jane Garrity, Maggie Humm, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Diane F. Gillespie, Jane Goldman, Evelyn Haller, Nuala Hancock, Leslie K. Hankins, Benjamin Harvey, Elizabeth Hirsh, Joyce E. Kelley, Laura Marcus, Vara S.Neverow, Merry M. Pawlowski, Linden Peach, Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Steven Putzel, Victoria Rosner, Brenda R. Silver, Anthony Uhlmann

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (review)

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Christine Froula The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Maggie Humm, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 500. $225.00 (cloth). On the Half-Way Landing of London's National Gallery, a visitor may find herself standing on a Clio fashioned in Woolf's unmistakable image (detail, plate 8), who, with Thalia chortling on her right, holds a quill pen toward a Clive Bell-like Bacchus while beyond him a diagonally counterpoised Melpomene/Greta Garbo gazes into the distance with her back turned, as if, even in this extraordinary company, she'd rather be alone. Boris Anrep's marble mosaic The Awakening of the Muses (1933) melds cultural capital with kitsch and overlays classical myth with glamour girls of modern print culture and the silver screen as it enshrines semibohemian Bloomsbury permanently, if ambivalently, underfoot. Woolf, who liked both fame and anonymity, had meant "to be Clio: not V.W." in Anrep's mosaic (157). In any case, throughout her life she was in direct and indirect colloquy with muses classical and modern. Centered in the metropolis of an empire on which the sun was just beginning to set; enmeshed from birth in a vast, intricate, vibrantly communicative network of writers, artists, intellectuals, politicians, editors, family, friends, acquaintances, servants, children, associates, and everyday urban and village social life; writing in many genres from public novel, essay, and biography to private diary, letter, memoir, and playscript while co-owning and -operating the Hogarth Press, Woolf left one of the richest, most extensive and resonant archives in English literary history. These twenty-five essays by various hands trawl the deep waters of "Woolf and the arts" with a broad net that catches galleries and exhibitions, domestic arts and architecture, bookmaking, publishing and broadcast technology, cinema, photography, music, theatre, dance, popular culture, gardens, entertaining, journalism, and more. They illuminate their findings with thirty-nine black-and-white figures and sixteen color plates. As befits its companionable purpose, much of this hefty book retreads familiar ground and some essays reprise established scholarship. But Maggie Humm has done welcome work in [End Page 480] gathering into one kaleidoscopic compendium these myriad sightings of Woolf at galleries and museums, in concert and music halls, hearing Parsifal at Bayreuth, comparing the Ballets Russes with Henry Tate or Shaw with Chekhov, participating in early Bloomsbury's Play Reading Society, reading Pound's memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska over tea in an A. B. C., coming home wet and tired to listen to a Mozart or Beethoven quartet on the miraculous new gramophone, writing about Vanessa Bell's or Walter Sickert's paintings, commissioning Hogarth book jackets from Vanessa or a French couture ensemble with the help of Vogue's Madge Garland, compiling homemade scrapbooks of snapshots and documents, choosing pictures of Orlando. Turn a kaleidoscope, and the same elements compose different designs; so many of these essays offer fresh discoveries, hypotheses, perspectives, and insights along with some wonderful images. Jane Goldman unearths a 1914 photograph of Millais's portrait of Carlyle in the Museum of London, its glass shattered by a suffragist (42, figure 2.1). Linden Peach proposes that Rudolf Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (which Woolf thought "rather feeble") inspired Flush. Diane F. Gillespie reproduces in black and white a remarkable 1920 painting by Vanessa Bell now titled Mrs Dalloway's Party (130, figure 7.2). Elizabeth Hirsh looks at actual and virtual portraits in Woolf's writings as an index of historical changes in representation. Ben Harvey finds that Woolf heard a lecture on the Grafton Gallery's 1905 exhibition of impressionist paintings, which she therefore must have seen (153); he probes Clio's proximity to Thalia/Lesley Jowitt on the National Gallery floor and notes Woolf's demurral from Churchill's praise of Sargent's Gassed (plate 7) as a work of "brilliant genius and painful significance" (148). Laura Marcus discusses hand printing and Russian translations at the Hogarth Press, and Tony Bradshaw explores book design from Virginia's bookbinding accomplishments to the Woolfs' library at Washington State University and, of course, the Press. Illustrating both essays...

Studland Beach and Jacob’s Room : Vanessa Bell’s and Virginia Woolf’s Experiments in Portrait Making 1910–1922

This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room in terms of post-impressionist influences of Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. It demonstrates compositional similarities between Bell’s painting Studland Beach and Woolf’s novel. Both works use formal design to elicit elegiac emotion in the audience. Jacob’s Room is Woolf’s first novel that exemplifies her attention to design as a vehicle for emotion, the idea to which she had been exposed by Vanessa Bell’s and other Post-Impressionist paintings since 1910.

Remembering lost paintings: Vanessa Bell’s The Nursery

During 1930—1932, Vanessa Bell worked on a large-scale, ambitious painting called The Nursery, a nostalgic delineation of childhood and motherhood. The subsequent loss of the painting has tended to curtail rather than to colour interpretation; in contrast, my reading interrogates The Nursery’s status as a piece of lost art. The work survives hauntingly through a multiplicity of related visual and textual objects, including contemporary photographs, personal correspondence, criticism and fiction. I analyse these as memorials, questioning the kind of nostalgia required to see the lost Nursery , and setting up an interaction between two sites of nostalgia in operation here: within the lost painting, and around it.

Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, the maternal and photography

Photographs preserve relationships. Any photo album's sequencing of photographs creates meaning out of random events. In this respect, albums are memories constructed in the present, but the principles of selection, montage and tableau in albums are the skeleton of a story. Psychoanalytically speaking, albums are often a testimony to our unconscious pasts rather than the pasts we consciously choose to remember. All photographs are a language and Woolf's language was maternal. `She has haunted me', Woolf wrote many years after her mother Julia’s death at 49, when Woolf was 13. I will argue that the death of her mother gave Woolf a visual blueprint. In Moments of Being, Woolf describes how it was her mother's death that `made me suddenly develop perception'. Woolf’s sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, also used the maternal as a `framing-structure' in her paintings and photographs. As Andre Green argues, a child can project its feelings back onto the mother through `revivifying repetitions'. Vanessa’s paintings taught Woolf that representations can resist death. In 'Vanessa Bell', a review of her sister’s exhibition, Woolf spoke of `this strange painter’s world, in which mortality does not enter and psychology is held at bay'. The photomontages in both sisters’ albums similarly suggest the pressure of the ‘matrixial’, as Ettinger suggests. I will argue that both sisters 'refuse' their mother’s death by constantly revivifying the maternal in art.

A Room of their own: the Bloomsbury artists in American collections

Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current: international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women's rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections examines the group's responses to these issues, providing a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today. A hundred years after the Bloomsbury group was established, their story still resonates and brings together a variety of interests across many artistic and intellectual pursuits. This catalog, the companion catalog to an acclaimed exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 2008, is illustrated with full-color plates of the two hundred exhibited works, as well as numerous color figures of comparative works and documentary photographs. It also features essays by several leading Bloomsbury scholars. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of a major 1995 Carrington biography, provides a personal overview of artistic Bloomsbury. Nancy E. Green, the Johnson Museum curator and organizer of the exhibition, explores the Victorian-era influence on sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Mark Hussey's essay discusses the cultural differences behind how British and American audiences experience Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. Benjamin Harvey offers An Appreciation of Bloomsbury's Books and Blocks. Christopher Reed presents personal stories behind many of the prominent Bloomsbury collectors in North America.

Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (review)

Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (review)

From Victorian to modern: innovation and tradition in the work of Vanessa Bell, Gwen John and Laura Knight

The book examines the impact of modernism on the work of three women artists - Laura Knight (b. 1877), Vanessa Bell (b. 1879) and Gwen John (b. 1876) - whose training and early artistic careers were rooted in the Victorian tradition. The book ranges them alongside each other to examine and compare their development, their work and the positions they took in the crucial years of their careers between 1890 and 1920. Gerrish Nunn casts a new light on each artist, putting their works into a comparative context and other neglected works into a critical conversation which illuminates women's participation in the important question of how British art negotiated the challenge posed by Post-Impressionism, abstraction, significant form and the demise of narrative anecdote at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Book Review: Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Book Review: Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Hyde Park Gate News: the Stephen family newspaper

As children, Virginia Woolf, elder sister Vanessa Bell, and brother Thoby Stephen collaborated on their very own family newspaper. Published here, Hyde Park Gate News includes the original drawings as well as previously unpublished photographs from the family albums. Ingeniously mimicking the style of the leading newspapers of their day, the Stephen children present a charming and candid portrayal of the day-to-day events at their family home in London and at their holiday home in St Ives. Gossipy, playful, and at times irreverent, they record the comings and goings of a host of figures, George Meredith and Henry James among them, while also proffering their own fictional, poetic, and artistic creations. Acclaimed for her innovative style, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most important figures of the Modernist movement; her sister Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) was a painter and a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group.

Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf: an Artist and a Critic?

Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf: an Artist and a Critic?

The Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon

The Making of a New Virginia Woolf Icon Black, Naomi. 2004. Virginia Woolf Feminist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. $47.50 he. $19.95 sc. xiv + 247 pp.Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 2003. Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $60.00 he. x + 237 pp.Humm, Maggie. 2003. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. $60.00 he. $24.00 sc. xii + 244 pp.Virginia Woolf achieved a level of public recognition and popular success in her lifetime; her novel The Years was a 1937 bestseller in the United States and she appeared in the same year on the cover of Time magazine. It was not until the 1960s, however, that Woolf became a celebrity, even a household name, thanks in large part to Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As readers of Brenda Silver's richly detailed study of Woolf s emergence a cultural icon have been made aware, Albee's play managed to create a public image of Woolf largely independent of her life and writing, an image that has given rise to a proliferation of multiple and often hotly contested other images that link Woolf to social anxiety and fear about the changing significations of gender, class, art, and sexuality. One of the most important stories that Silver tells about Woolf s debated status an icon is the way the intellectual media responded to 1970s academic feminists who succeeded in canonizing Woolf an opponent of patriarchal society. During the wars of the 1980s, the New York Review of Books, among other media that critiqued the academy and feminism, laid claim to Woolf a representative of Western civilization. In this version, Woolf circulates a priestess of the power of great books and universal values; she is made to appear, in Silver's words, as a preserver of a high threatened by both the academy and popular/mass culture (1999, 25). Silver is certainly right in arguing thatWoolf's ability to cross borders defies any effort to limit or fix her image in a story that has far from ended, and whose latest chapters render her fashion icon, postfeminist, and emblem of queer culture. Nevertheless, the representation of Woolf that has proven most resistant to revision both inside and outside the academy may well be the image of a cultural highbrow whose literary achievements are thought to be immune from ideological, political, and commercial contaminants.It is this lingering construction ofWoolf an rarified aesthete, an image recently reiterated by Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Woolf in The Hours, marvelous that portrayal may be, that three well-established Woolf scholars variously seek to challenge. In contesting the characterization ofWoolf an ivory-tower elitist, these critics move away from a study of the literary works that limit her to high modernism and focus, instead, on a number of her other personal and public projects. They offer diverse accounts: Woolf appears in Humm's book an enthusiastic participant in the popular cultures burgeoning around photography and cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, in Black's account a radical feminist connected in important ways to British women's political and social organizations, and in Cuddy-Keane's analysis a public intellectual engaged in widely debated issues about highbrow intellectualism, reading, and education. These studies do more than contribute to our knowledge of the extra-literary facets of Woolf's life and work; when considered together, they create a remarkably uniform image, a Woolf icon for our time that reveals a much more democratic and socially engaged woman than has previously been thought, a writer committed not only to aesthetic pursuits but also to the most pressing domestic and political issues of her day.Of the three studies, Humm's Modernist Women and Visual Cultures has the most relevance for our understanding of Woolf s fiction; her account of the way that Woolf and other women participated in early twentieth-century visual cultures offers nothing less than a challenge to reigning accounts of modernist aesthetics. …

The Art of Conversation, Conversation as an Art. ‘The Sisters’ Arts’

The issue of the visual, of the interrelationship between language/literature and painting appears to be central to Woolf’s aesthetic interrogation. She tried to find a satisfying solution to the inter-art dialogue but it was to no avail. She constantly found herself confronted with the wall of what she called the reticence of painting. Her response then was to accumulate words detailing the experience of the reception of the pictorial work. The question of meaning, of making sense of a picture prevented her from envisaging another way of looking at painting, seeing it as an experience, an event, engaging the viewer in another kind of aesthetic intercourse resisting language. The silence and the reticence of painting which, for Woolf, represented a mystery, sent her back to her own activity, to her work and what it was worth via the mirror-image of the sister art.Apart from ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ and ‘Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’, the multiplicity of essays dedicated or referring to painting shows that Woolf was deeply inspired and moved by this art which she thought of in terms of the unreachable and much desired medium, at the same time feeling the need to reassert the superiority of language. This was grounded in a primary experience, that of her relationship to Vanessa and the sharing of the arts between the two sisters on the conversational mode.

AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (review)

Reviewed by: AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States Maggie Humm AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States. Janet Wolff. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 172. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). A new book of essays by Janet Wolff is always a welcome event. This one was written over a long time scale ("The 'Jewish Mark' in English Painting" is 1993-1994), and four of the six essays are published elsewhere; hence, AngloModern is less a unified argument than a collection of stimulating pieces. Wolff's focus is on the "social coordinates of the production of 'modernism,'" rather than on the dismantling of the canon (6). But her book does add additional and important arguments for re-envisioning constructions of modernism. Wolff's own lens is explicitly gendered as she explores constructions of masculinity and ethnicity, and engagingly clarifies her own class, gender and ethnic locations as a "resident alien" (the title of her 1995 book). The first of the six slim chapters, "Women at the Whitney: 1910-30," describes an exhibition which Wolff was invited to propose to the Whitney (a proposal later abandoned). The invitation encouraged Wolff into detailed reflections about modernist aesthetics and the "complex social networks of friendships, patronage and personal relationships and exhibition histories" (17-8). Wolff's deft handling of a range of information is stimulating; my guess is that she is an inspiring teacher. Chapter two is a case study of the American artist Kathleen McEnery, who exhibited at the key 1913 Armory Show in New York. She was later "rediscovered" and included in the 1987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC. Wolff situates McEnery in her historical context, interweaving issues of class, gender and geography [End Page 188] to arrive at a nuanced conclusion that "the questioning of aesthetic evaluations is merely raised and not answered by the critical questioning of the canon and its exclusions" (67). I agree with Wolff that re-envisioning has to be a much more complex process than simply one of "rediscovery." During my own visit to the National Museum in Washington, the docent certainly chose to privilege "canoninic" women artists—such as Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun and Mary Cassatt—rather than rethink the terms by which women's art is defined. In chapter three, Wolff revisits her oft-cited work on the invisible flâneuse, and addresses the recent work of Parsons, Nava and Wilson on women's use of public space (omitted in Wolff's earlier revisiting in Resident Alien).1 Wolff proposes that rather than validating hitherto marginalized feminine practices (shopping) as flânerie, we acknowledge the city's more indeterminate discourses. Although this is a sophisticated approach, if Wolff had consulted working class women's autobiographies she might have favored a more positive feminine geography of modernism.2 Chapter four attempts the conceptually difficult task of producing a non-essentialist concept of the feminine through an examination of Simmel and Benjamin and an excellent reading of the work of Gwen John. Other fruitful dialogues could take place with feminist philosophers of "femininity"—see for example Sandra Bartky's attack on the centring of women's bodies in "normative" femininity (a key theme for art historians) and Biddy Martin's work on lesbian performativity, a discussion replete with possibilities for any rethinking of the gaze.3 The final chapters focus on the English artist Mark Gertler, Bloomsbury and discourses of the Jew as Other in modernity. Wolff claims that Bloomsbury's decorative art shows that the "influence of the avant-garde movements elsewhere in Europe was nonexistent here"; I find this comment odd, given that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant worked with the most technically innovative textile designer, Allan Walton, in the 1930s, and that Bell's earlier (1913) Painted Omega Screen (Tents and Figures) reflects the work of several French artists including Derain. While it might be true, as Wolff claims, that Bloomsbury's "friendship networks worked on a system of patronage and brokerage" it is worth remembering that one obvious reason for Bloomsbury solidarities was to protect its many gay, bi-sexual and pacifist...

Virginia Woolf: The Ironic Feminist

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere . Melba Cuddy-Keane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 237. $60.00 (cloth). Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 244. $62.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper). Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Naomi Black. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 247. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Ever since Woolf's recuperation by feminists in the 1970s, critics have attempted to overcome the powerful stereotype of her as a fragile genius, unconnected with the world. This view, so dominant in Recollections of VirginiaWoolf by Her Contemporaries, and more recently in the book and movie The Hours, has been difficult to dislodge. Fortunately, these three books confirm Woolf's deep engagement in the social and political world of her times. Black and Cuddy-Keane concentrate on Woolf as a professional writer, as someone who had to meet deadlines, work with editors, and persuade readers. Cuddy-Keane examines how Woolf responded to specific political events, while Black integrates Woolf's lifelong feminism with her anti-war arguments. Humm concentrates on Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, as amateur photographers, showing how their fascination with contemporary visual technologies affected their work. All three would agree that this quintessential modernist appeals to a post-modern sensibility in her insistent creation of multiple layers and points of view. Like Woolf, all are very aware of their own critical biases. These authors acknowledge a characteristic that either endears or annoys readers: Woolf's repeated use of ironic fantasy, or what Black [End Page 809] calls her "dense, whimsical, and semi-academic style" (145). Each effectively defends Woolf's idiosyncratic style for its effective balancing of different arguments and positions. To paraphrase Woolf, they see her as one of the few English writers writing for grown-up people. Black notes how Woolf insisted that readers undertake an imaginative engagement with her argument by the use of provocative asides, digressions from the subject at hand, and a discordant combination of anger and humor. Cuddy-Keane concludes that Woolf's elliptical style encouraged her readers to think for themselves. Humm compliments Woolf's sophisticated use of "photographic tropes of illumination and reflection" (221), which draw attention to the elusive, evanescent nature of reality. These critics each provide such good close readings of Woolf's essays that I wish they had considered more fully the stylistic relationship between her nonfiction and fiction. Woolf's unique critical voice combines fact and fiction in psychologically and politically unsettling ways that are well worth exploring. There is surprisingly little overlap in these three studies. Woolf was so prolific that each author emphasizes different works. The most broadly based book is Cuddy-Keane's careful dissection of Woolf as a public intellectual. Her opening chapter on the interwar debate about education, mass culture and politics is especially strong. She documents Woolf's carefully argued position on the value of independent learning, of an individual's thoughtful engagement with books, ideas and ideologies. Cuddy-Keane labels Woolf a "democratic highbrow," which seems to me a perfect description of Woolf's mixture of elitism and social responsibility. Woolf had no illusions that everyone could be a sophisticated reader, but she always believed this to be a politically important goal for modern British citizens. Moreover, she especially wanted women of all social classes to benefit from a proper education. Woolf vehemently opposed any curriculum that was a watered-down version of middle-class culture; for her it was a repugnant perpetuation of second-hand ideas. A later chapter explores why Woolf always loathed honors, awards and hierarchies, whether for persons or for books. She opposed, for example, F. R. Leavis's creation of a canon of English literature, but she urged her readers toward specific English masterpieces. Especially during the 1930s, when literary commentators on all sides used a hard-edged political style, Woolf...

Lily Briscoe's Chinese eyes: Bloomsbury, modernism, and China

Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communities - Bloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalances - and thus the architecture of modernist, post-colonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studies - by placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.

Virginia Woolf's women

A work of original and detailed research this is the first biography to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational female friendships with the key women in her life. Vanessa Curtis looks both at the effect of these relationships on her emotional life and the inspiration that each woman provided for the female protagonists in her fiction. Women inspired and fascinated Woolf until the day she died, evoking not only her loyalty, love and wit, but also anger, envy and insecurity. The author begins by exposing the lesser-known details of Woolf's Victorian childhood, spent underneath the suffocating wings of the 'angels in the house' who instilled in her a lifelong battle between creativity and convention. The journey continues with a study of the other unique women in Woolf's life: her silent sister, Vanessa Bell; enigmatic artist Dora Carrington; complex writer Katherine Mansfield; aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West and riotous, militant composer Ethel Smyth. Virginia Woolf's Women takes the reader on an intimate journey through the most important female relationships of Woolf's life, drawing on much previously unpublished archive correspondence and photography, ultimately revealing an honest portrait of Virginia Woolf as writer, daughter, sister, lover and friend.

Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema

1.Modernism,gender,photography and Woolf's 'Portraits' 2. Matrixial Memories: Virginia Woolf's Photo Albums 3. Modernism, the Maternal and the Erotic: Vanessa Bell's Photo Albums 4. Modernism, cinema, gender and Borderline 5. Modernist women and cinema 6. Memory, photography and modernism: Woolf's Three Guineas 7. Afterword and Woolf's essays on modernism Bibliography Index.

Modernist women and visual cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, photography, and cinema

Modernist women and visual cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, photography, and cinema