Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury. Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice

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Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury. Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari (London: Palgrave, 2010) xvii + 188pp.

The essays in Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury grew out of the 14th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, held in London in June 2004, whose theme was "Back to Bloomsbury." Volume 1 of the two-volume set clusters papers under the heading "Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice." (A second volume centers on "International Influence and Aesthetics.") The collection conveys the sense of a lively conversation and the excitement of the peripatetic conference's return to Woolf's hometown. An interest in situating Woolf within London marks several of the papers, though the focus on the city tends, surprisingly, more toward the insides of houses and the shelves of their libraries than street haunting. The rubric "Aesthetics and Literary Practice" is broadly defined, with essays engaging topics from painting, architecture, and photography to less expected subjects like natural history and Leonard Woolf.

Indeed, following Gina Potts's introduction, first among the essays comes Cecil Woolf's warm recollection of his uncle and aunt, an affectionate corrective to accounts of a mean, authoritarian Leonard and melancholy, dispirited, even sadistic Virginia who haunt the biographical record. The fascinating essay that follows, by Suzanne Raitt, also centers on revision and return, though of a different sort, in Woolf's composition practices and as …