Woolf 'S Bloomsbury: Kathryn Simpson

Ch apter 13
Woolf ’s Bloomsbury
Kathryn Simpson
Like a kaleidoscope, Bloomsbury seems capable of ininitely varied and

nuanced interpretations – each interpretative twist bringing into view
a diferent pattern and set of relations. Indeed, as critical assessments
proliferate it would seem there are as many ‘Bloomsburys’ as there are
‘Virginia Woolfs’, the understanding of each depending on the reader’s
perspective (common or otherwise): turn the kaleidoscope as you will,
and ‘Bloomsbury’s’ shape keeps shifting. For some, the Bloomsbury group
is seen as sharing a common core of values, beliefs, and attitudes in rela-
tion to art, aesthetics, politics, war, and economics, but for others, as Jane
Goldman puts it, ‘Bloomsbury . . . thrived on dissent and disagreement’.1
It may be understood as both a literal and metaphorical meeting point
and as a multidisciplinary intellectual and artistic nexus for the sharing
and debating of modern, unorthodox, avant-garde ideas (and, of course,
the details of one another’s personal lives).
Economics was a key concern and interest of several ‘Bloomsberries’, and
several members of the group wrote extensively about the various failings,
as they saw it, of the market economy (notably John Maynard Keynes, but
also Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry). What is now apparent, however, is that
modernist artists were intent on not only marketing their wares, but also
on manipulating, exploiting, and some, as Jennifer Wicke argues, on shap-
ing the market and our understanding of it.2 Here I want to twist the kal-
eidoscope to explore how Woolf and other Bloomsbury artists negotiated
an economic context perceived by them to be inimical in many ways to
artistic and civilised development – aesthetic, political, spiritual – through
the creation of what Lewis Hyde calls a ‘gift-sphere’. As Hyde explains,
the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor to starve his belly reserves a
protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he
allows himself some contact with the market. . . . if he is successful in the market-
place, he converts market wealth into gift wealth: he contributes his earnings to
the support of his art.3
170
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Woolf ’s Bloomsbury 171
he operation of this ‘double economy’ (in which income generation can
take the form of a second job, the inancial support of a patron or making
money from royalties) facilitates ‘the conversion of market wealth to gift
wealth’,4 so that money earned can then support the real work of artistic
creativity. his means of conceptualizing the artist’s engagement with the
monetary economy so as to ‘make some peace with the market’5 efect-
ively describes what might be called Bloomsbury gift-spheres, particularly
the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press. Although obviously very
diferent in focus, the Omega can be seen as a forerunner to the Hogarth
Press, as David H. Porter and others have argued. Involving some of the
same key people, both were intended to create a market and demand for
contemporary art produced by living artists, enabling young artists to
make an income while preserving their artistic integrity and gift. As Fry
suggests, the aim of the Omega Workshops was for the artist to ‘take [. . .]
money in the hope that he may secure the opportunity for the free func-
tioning of his creative power’.6
his idea of a gift sphere is a useful way to consider Woolf ’s attempts
to negotiate the central dilemma for artists in a capitalist society: how to
make a living without capitulating to market forces and compromising
their artistic gift.7 Woolf managed this tension and the anxiety it caused
in a number of interconnected ways: she distinguished between writing
produced explicitly to make money and that not intended for speciic
commercial ends and saw her income as generating a gift-sphere so that
one publication practice facilitated the production of other more engaged,
creative, and valuable work (as Woolf would see it), such as her essays
and especially her iction. As others have noted, and Woolf herself made
clear, her position as co-owner of the Hogarth Press was a key element of
this negotiation: it created ‘a protected gift-sphere’8 which granted her the
freedom to ‘become more [her]self ’ and to act on ‘a queer, & very pleas-
ant sense, of something which I want to write; my own point of view’ as
she records in her diary in April 1921 (D2 107). he Hogarth Press also
pursued a goal central to Fry’s model of a gift-sphere at the Omega – to
cultivate an audience responsive to Bloomsbury’s creativity and politics
beyond Bloomsbury circles. his was vital to Woolf personally and profes-
sionally, as well as to the success of the Hogarth Press.
However, the gift-sphere plays another important role for Woolf: it acts
as a testing ground to ensure that the art produced is a ‘faithful realiza-
tion’ of the artist’s gift, so as to ensure it has the currency of art before
its currency on the market is tried.9 She records the need ‘to gather in
all the private criticism, which is the real test’ rather than relying on her
172 Simpson
growing public reputation as an indicator of artistic worth (D2 107). It
was ‘being “Bloomsbury”’ (about which she mockingly congratulates her-
self, D1 106) that initially fulilled a vital role in providing Woolf with
an intimate audience of friends and relatives with whom to discuss,
contest, and develop her ideas and creativity. For Woolf, it is ‘talk’ that
actually constitutes Bloomsbury, as she makes clear in her memoir, ‘Old
Bloomsbury’ (203) and as her early short story, ‘Phyllis and Rosamund’,
suggests. However, Woolf was clearly inluenced and nurtured in diferent
ways by her close relationships, especially with women within the male-
dominated Bloomsbury Group as well as outside (Jane Harrison, Violet
Dickinson, Janet Case, Vita Sackville-West, and Katherine Mansield, for
example), and also through the wider readership she sought for her work.
In this Woolf moves towards what might be called a feminist gift-sphere
which works within and beyond Bloomsbury. Consideration of the wider
operation of the Bloomsbury gift sphere, then, simultaneously helps to
shed light on how Woolf also negotiated her place in a market economy
and within the Bloomsbury Group.
th e h oga rth pres s

Although by the time Leonard and Virginia Woolf opened the Hogarth
Press in 1917 the Omega Workshops had begun to unravel, the literal
and metaphorical space Fry’s venture created and the aims and values on
which it was based were also central to the Woolfs’ ambitions for their
press and its operation as a gift-sphere. Indeed, that the Woolfs made the
decision on Virginia Woolf ’s birthday to ‘take Hogarth [House] . . . to buy
a printing press . . . to buy a Bull dog, probably called John’ seems itting,
especially as Woolf ’s diary records these decisions as synonymous with
the other birthday gifts and treats she has received (including ‘a packet
of sweets to bring home’!) (D1 28). From the outset the Hogarth Press
was perceived not as part of a capitalist system but as operating in a dif-
ferent economic sphere. However, although it was ‘characteristic of small
and/or private presses’ to ofer early publications ‘as gifts’, the Hogarth
Press clearly set out to sell even from the irst publication of Two Stories,10
thus indicating its function as creating a gift-sphere rather than operating
within a gift economy.
Fry played an instrumental role in the success of the Hogarth Press. He
contributed articles and books and directed other important writers to
the Press, and he ofered artistic advice about (and provided) dust jackets,
paper, and printing.11 Woolf also requested his client list when beginning
to advertise the setting up of the Press (L2 115). His radical theories of art’s
relation to the market and his setting up of the Omega Workshops can
also be seen to have inluenced Woolf ’s own practices of negotiating the
market, notably through the fostering of a gift-sphere of a diferent kind
at the Hogarth Press. In a number of essays, Fry conceptualizes the idea
of a safe space for artistic experimentation and creativity as ‘havens’, as
‘interstice[s]’,12 and as an ‘enclave’,13 and in many ways the Hogarth Press
represents something similar for the wide range of young writers unlikely
to be published elsewhere.14 Indeed, John Lehmann argues that by the
time the Press was set up, Bloomsbury was synonymous with an ‘avant-
garde intellectual attitude that was naturally congenial to new writers who
felt they were making a break with the past’.15
As Laura Marcus suggests, the Hogarth Press ‘helped move
“Bloomsbury” to a more central position in intellectual and cultural
life’16 as it simultaneously opened up the opportunity to reach a much
wider audience than the ‘liminal public’ of the Bloomsbury Group.17 Like
Fry at the Omega, Woolf wanted art to be part of everyday life and to
fuel and inspire change in the ‘common understanding’,18 and, as several
critics have argued, her writing can be seen to have a socially motivated
pedagogical function. As a ‘democratic highbrow’ Woolf aimed to ‘incul-
cate good reading practices’ in her common readers in the belief that an
‘educated public is crucial to the success of democratic society’.19 Training
her readers to be ‘active, engaged readers’, ‘resilient, resistant, and dia-
logic reader[s]’ also facilitates a challenge to authorities and orthodoxies
of all kinds.20 Unlike the domestic designs produced by the Omega which
put the ‘everyday’ objects out of the inancial reach of the majority, the
Hogarth Press worked towards making their publications more afordable.
Although its early advertising ‘invoked a discourse of exclusivity’ which
‘continued to attach itself to Press publications’,21 Willison et al. argue that
the Press actually facilitated the entry of modernism into the more general
literary marketplace.22 he Hogarth ‘Uniform Editions’ of Woolf ’s novels
(begun in 1929) made Woolf ’s writing more afordable to the common
reader, ‘reaching that wide public audience of common readers, which she
found so necessary’.23
Like the Omega, the Hogarth Press occupied a liminal position eco-
nomically: in being jointly owned and informed by ‘multiply generated
private experience’ it represents a resistance to a capitalist ethos.24 It was
run initially on subscriptions, and this operated as a kind of patronage by
providing direct inancial support to enable the Press to get works into
print.25 Although later operating along business lines, it was never driven
174 Simpson
by conventional economic goals of achieving commercial success and
making a proit. In this sense, the setting up of the Hogarth Press seems,
like Fry’s venture, to be inluenced by Moorean ideas and ethics in that
it is intrinsically motivated: it was ‘something done because it was valu-
able in itself rather than being a means to something else such as making
money’.26 his is evident in the Woolfs’ refusal to sell to Constables27
or Heinemann in 1922 because, although these moves would have made
the press more lucrative, it would have compromised their freedom to
publish what they chose (D2 215). Although Lehmann was frustrated
that the press was run on a ‘shoe-string’ with sales not fully exploited,28
Rosenbaum’s point that none of the other comparable presses ‘could
have survived on the small proits that nurtured the Hogarth Press’29 (my
emphasis) is telling. Larger proits would inevitably have changed the
nature of the press, its principles, focus, and its purpose in operating
a gift-sphere; instead the Woolfs sought to avoid the corruption of the
market while working within it.30
However, Woolf was not always happy with this situation, and at times
her diary records her desire for the Press to make more money. She took
pleasure in earning money from her commercial publications, and her
publication practices can be seen as indicative not only of an astute under-
standing of the literary marketplace but also of her manipulation of this
market.31 It is also obvious that the Press did make money (Woolf ’s novels
Orlando and he Years made proits, as did the best-sellers, such as Vita
Sackville-West’s he Edwardians and John Hampson Simpson’s Saturday
Night at the Greyhounds).32 Woolf ’s conceptualization of these proits as
gifts may be seen as symptomatic of her anxiety about success on the lit-
erary market, but clearly she aimed to make money not for its own sake,
but in order to build a ‘nest egg’ in order to sustain her creativity and to
support others (D3 149).33 his balance sustains her as an artist, generat-
ing the protection of a gift-sphere in which to develop her creative gift; it
made it possible for her to negotiate the market economy without being
subsumed by it.
Woolf ’s decision to reprint ‘Kew Gardens’ in 1927 in a limited deluxe
edition aimed at a niche market might seem to be simply about manipu-
lating the market, and this ‘repackaging’ was undoubtedly intended to
capitalise on the success of the 1919 editions and on Woolf ’s increasing
reputation. It aimed at exploiting a new market in modernist art as ‘a
rarity’ with value as an investment34 and was possibly a response to Fry’s
essay ‘Art and Commerce’ (published by the Hogarth Press in 1926, just
as Woolf was entering her most lucrative phase as a writer) in which he
discusses the importance of contemporary artists inding a market for
their art in their own lifetimes. However, such practices also point to a
fundamental aspect of the gift-sphere for artists who sell their own crea-
tions: they ‘must develop a more subjective feel for the two economies
and [their] own rituals for both keeping them apart and bringing them
together’.35 It is crucial that the artist is ‘able to disengage from the work
and think of it as a commodity . . . to reckon its value in terms of current
fashions . . . . And . . . on the other hand, be able to forget all that and turn
to serve his[/her] gifts on their own terms’ (ibid.). Fry’s focus on the newly
developing art (the ‘current fashions’) of the poster as a means for artists
to make money from their art perfectly encapsulates this point.36
he publication history of ‘Kew Gardens’, I want to suggest, not only
clariies the feminist ‘terms’ (aesthetic, social, and political) fundamen-
tal to the ‘faithful realization’ of Woolf ’s artistic gifts, but also usefully
exempliies Woolf ’s development of ‘a more subjective feel for the two
economies’. he development of this sense of distinction between art as
creative gift or commodity is seemingly played out in Woolf ’s complex
and at times uneasy relationships with her female ‘collaborators’, Vanessa
Bell and Katherine Mansield, and within the story itself. Woolf ’s quar-
rels and painful disagreements with Bell over the illustrations for the irst
version of the story and her radically shifting (alternately rivalrous and
airming) relationship with Mansield signal both the dangers and cre-
ative potential of women’s talk: its generation of a gift-sphere to nurture
and test artistic worth, as well as to test the boundary of artistic endeavour
and market competition. hese tensions are represented in the exchanges
between the women in Woolf ’s story.
he story is formed around four conversations, and Woolf ’s creative
collaboration with Vanessa Bell is an artistic conversation produced
within the typography of the text (especially the more extensively illus-
trated 1927 version) – a dialogue in which neither words nor image are
dominant but complement each other.37 It is also inspired by Bell’s famil-
iarity with the kind of conversation taking place between the two women
in Woolf ’s story,38 and Marcus suggests that Bell’s illustrations and men-
tion of her own painting, ‘he Conversation’, indicate the sense of ‘com-
munity’ women’s dialogue can create.39 Woolf ’s letters to Bell inviting her
opinions about the story indicate not only the operation of the gift-sphere
in testing the artistic integrity of her work before it went onto the market
but also attest to a reciprocal dialogue in which engagement with Bell’s art
has led to Woolf ’s ‘changed . . . views upon aesthetics’ (which hinges on
her experience/response to colour combinations) and which Bell is keen
176 Simpson
to hear (L2 258),40 echoing the experience of one of the women in Woolf ’s
story.
However, ‘Kew Gardens’ (and, indeed, Woolf ’s sense of ‘being
Bloomsbury’) was also signiicantly inspired by what Woolf described as
‘priceless’ ‘extra-Bloomsbury’ talk with her friend and rival, Katherine
Mansield (D2 45), particularly their discussion of Mansield’s description
of Ottoline Morrell’s garden at Garsington in a letter to Morrell. his let-
ter is thought to closely resemble a letter Mansield sent to Woolf which
also includes Mansield’s sketch for a story she may potentially develop
which seems to anticipate ‘Kew Gardens’: she envisaged ‘people walking
in the garden – several pairs of people’ and the impression to be created of
‘a slight touch of enchantment’.41 One of Mansield’s earliest biographers,
Anthony Alpers, sees a powerful inluence at work: ‘the evidence is very
strong that Katherine Mansield in some way helped Virginia Woolf to
break out of the mould in which she had been working hitherto’.42 Angela
Smith, however, stresses that this is one of several examples of the ainity
between Woolf and Mansield, a connection premised on their shared
artistic goals and fostered via the conversation they both prized so highly
about their work as innovative women writers.43 Mansield’s talk, her
willingness to share ideas, and her encouragement of Woolf seem to con-
irm this sense of ainity as well as acting, at this crucial point in Woolf ’s
career, as a gift-sphere in which Woolf could test her newly emerging
experiments with form. hat this was reciprocated is suggested by the fact
that at this time the Woolfs were in the process of typesetting Mansield’s
Prelude, and Mansield’s visit to Asheham in August 1917 seems to have
involved both discussion of Woolf ’s new story and Mansield’s progress on
her own story.
here is much about Mansield’s experience of publication by the
Hogarth Press that mitigates the sense of a gift-sphere at work, not least
that only 300 copies of her story were printed and, due to very limited
marketing, sales were largely to a ‘Bloomsbury’ audience, the running
head for several pages was inaccurate, and the Woolfs only begrudgingly
accepted Mansield’s choice of cover designed by J. D. Fergusson, repro-
ducing it on only a small number of copies.44 However, critics agree that
in radically revising her much longer story ‘he Aloe’ for publication as
Prelude Mansield succeeded in honing her distinctive narrative technique
and developing her modernist aesthetic. Woolf recognised this and, despite
a few failings as she saw them, declared that Prelude ‘has the living power,
the detached existence of a work of art’ (D1 167). his ‘breakthrough
story’, McDonnell also persuasively argues, ‘marks a turning point in her
[Mansield’s] attitudes to the publication of her iction and . . . in her per-
ception of her role as an author’.45 It also consolidates the name ‘Katherine
Mansield’, one of a number of pennames Kathleen Mansield Beauchamp
had written under and so established her authorial identity.
he publication of Woolf ’s ‘Kew Gardens’ seems to have had a similar
efect for Woolf: as Leonard Woolf puts it, this story marked ‘a decisive
step in Virginia’s development as a writer’ as well a turning point for the
Press itself.46 Following Harold Child’s exuberant (unsigned) review in
Times Literary Supplement in May 1919, there was a signiicant increase
in sales and new subscribers to the Hogarth Press prompting a reprint of
the story: from this point Lee airms, ‘they had a business, and Virginia
Woolf had a name’.47 Mansield also wrote a less publicly inluential but
nonetheless important and perceptive review in the Athenaeum in June
1919, demonstrating her awareness that this story anticipated something
new in Woolf ’s writing.48 In this sense, the working of the Hogarth Press
as (feminist) gift-sphere would seem to have been successful: Woolf,
Mansield and Bell were able to engage in dialogue and discussion to ensure
that the art they produced was a ‘faithful realization’ of their artistic gifts,
they could try the currency of their art on the market and generate some
proit (monetary, aesthetic, market understanding and authorial identity)
so as to create a safe space for further creativity. Importantly, what these
details also suggest is that not only was the gift-sphere vital to the creative
process for Woolf and Mansield, but that inluences typically perceived
as extraneous to the elite circle had a clear role to play in the shaping of
Woolf ’s Bloomsbury, notably at this turning point in her career.
his collaborative or co-operative creativity chimes with Woolf ’s desire
to not only expand the gift-sphere beyond Bloomsbury but also to rede-
ine her relationship with her readers and with the literary marketplace.
Woolf was well aware that her own rivalrous feelings and sense of com-
petition on the market with Mansield and others ran counter to the idea
of a gift-sphere, and her story signals the dangers of a capitalist ethos. As
well as indicating the creative potential of women’s talk, ‘Kew Gardens’
also points to a central concern for Woolf, which is the danger inherent
in words and relationships becoming subsumed by the values of a market
economy in which acquisition and possession are equated with success.
Although the ‘two elderly women of the lower middle class’ are ‘energeti-
cally piecing together their very complicated dialogue’ (CSF 93), a section
of the story omitted from the typescript indicates that a focus only on the
number of commodities, words, and people’s names that form one wom-
an’s speech means that both women are oblivious to the aesthetic qualities
178 Simpson
of the colourful, mosaic-like whole that the fragments of their conversa-
tion are forming.49 Finally, this has only a soporiic efect on one of them,
and she ‘ceas[es] even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was
saying’ (CSF 93).
However, as Woolf makes clear elsewhere, and as this omitted section
of ‘Kew Gardens’ implies, the responsiveness she aims for in her read-
ers cannot be characterised as a simple transaction, nor does she want
her work to simply evoke a disinterested aesthetic response. Rather, her
story has an intended social and political impetus which circles around
the connections between marriage, patriarchal social structures, and war.
Although the women will conform to convention and go for tea, the story
itself ends with an echo of the women’s mosaic-like creation – an explo-
sion of colour and shapes, ‘the petals of myriads of lowers lashed their
colours into the air’ metaphorically illuminated by candlelight (CSF 95).
Although Woolf was anxious about how her story would be read, particu-
larly on the grounds of it seeming to demean women of the lower-middle
and working classes (D1 284), critics have amply demonstrated that the
conversation Woolf constructs within and through the production of this
story signals a feminist intent,50 and the process of its creation simultan-
eously generates a feminist gift-sphere.
Woolf clearly plays the market with the deluxe reproduction of her
story, but its prioritising of conversation in other ways indicates a means
of side-stepping the publicity machine of the literary marketplace which
Woolf saw as detrimental to the relationship between reader and text and
as a threat to artistic creativity and integrity. Within her story Woolf mod-
els the efect she aims for with her real readers – that a new attentiveness
to the quality of words will engender a co-creative reading, a productive
alliance. Her idealised reader is envisaged as ‘accomplice’, and her pre-
ferred reader as a ‘common reader’: ‘guided by an instinct to create for
himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of
whole’, ‘run[ning] up some rickety and ramshackle fabric’ (1984, 1), sug-
gesting perhaps another version of a mosaic of words/ideas. In this way,
Woolf ’s writing can be seen to reach out beyond the gift-sphere created
by Bloomsbury ‘talk’ (as did her story’s production) to a wider audience.
Although the tension Mark Morrisson perceives between the modernists’
desire for wider audience and a rejection of common tastes of this wider
audience is evident for Woolf as well,51 her privileging of dialogue and
conversation in her non-iction and literary texts works to undo hierar-
chies of authority. Instead she aims to develop a collaborative approach
that sustains heterogeneous possibilities for interpretation in the face of
the control exerted by marketing forces, ‘the traps and compromises of
the literary marketplace’.52 hrough the Hogarth Press’s function as a gift-
sphere within and beyond Bloomsbury, Woolf was able to foster her artis-
tic gifts and to protect her integrity as a writer as well as to manage her
anxiety about commercialism and its potentially detrimental impact on
her art. She also found a new way of ‘being’ Bloomsbury as a woman and
a feminist.
N ot es
1 Jane Goldman, ‘Desmond MacCarthy, Life and Letters (1928–35), and
Bloomsbury Modernism’ in Peter Brooker and Andrew hacker (eds), he
Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume 1, Britain
and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 428–5, p. 435.
2 Jennifer Wicke, ‘Mrs Dalloway goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern
Markets.’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28.1 (Fall 1994): 5–23, 5. See also Lawrence
Rainey, Paul Delany, Ian Willison, et al. and Mark Morrisson for example.
3 Lewis Hyde, he Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (London:
Vintage, 1999), pp. 274–5.
4 Hyde, he Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, p. 275.
6 Roger Fry, ‘Art and Socialism’ (1956); repr in Crauford D. Goodwin, Art and
the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce in Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999; repr 2001), pp. 181–193, p. 184.
7 See Jane Garrity, Leslie Hankins, in Caughie, and Leila Brosnan for further
discussion of Woolf ’s negotiation of these tensions.
10 Elizabeth Willson Gordon, ‘How Should One Sell a Book? Production
Methods, Material Objects and Marketing at the Hogarth Press’ in Lisa
Shahriari and Gina Potts (eds), Virginia Woolf ’s Bloomsbury, Volume 2:
International Inluence and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan),
pp. 107–123, pp. 109–10.
11 Crauford D. Goodwin, Art and the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce in Art
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999; repr 2001), p. 50; David H.
Porter, he Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press: An Artful Fugue (London:
Cecil Woolf Publishers, 2008), pp. 14, 30.
12 Roger Fry, ‘Culture and Snobbism’ (1926); repr. in Goodwin, Art and the
Market, pp. 97–106, p. 106.
13 Roger Fry ‘Art and Socialism’ (1916); repr. in Goodwin, Art and the Market,
pp. 171–180, p. 173.
14 See Southworth, and Snaith in Potts and Shahriari, for example.
15 John Lehmann, Virginia Woolf and Her World (London: hames and Hudson,
1975), p. 42.
180 Simpson
16 Laura Marcus, ‘Virginia Woolf and he Hogarth Press’ in Ian Willison, et al.
(eds). Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996),
pp. 24–50, p. 129.
17 Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 19.
18 Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, p. xiii.
19 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf: he Intellectual, and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 13, 2.
20 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Virginia Woolf ’s Pedagogical Scenes of Reading:
he Voyage Out, he Common Reader, and Her “Common Readers”’. Modern
Fiction Studies 38.1 (Spring 1992), 101–125, 105, 116.
21 Gordon, ‘How Should One Sell a Book?’, p. 109.
22 Ian Willison, Warwick Gould, and Warren Chernaik (eds). Modernist Writers
and the Marketplace (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. xv.
23 Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke and
London: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 45.
24 Michael Tratner, ‘Why Isn’t Between the Acts a Movie?’ in Pamela L. Caughie
(ed), Virginia Woolf and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 115–34, p. 132.
25 Gordon, ‘How Should One Sell a Book?, pp. 120–1.
26 S. P. Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury: Studies in Modern English Literary
and Intellectual History (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, Ltd. 1998), p. 154.
27 Gordon, ‘How Should One Sell a Book?’, pp. 116–7.
28 Lehmann, Virginia Woolf and Her World, p. 75.
29 Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury, p. 156.
30 Gordon argues a similar point in her detailed and persuasive discussion of
the astute ways in which the Hogarth Press utilised ‘multiple discourses and
types of appeal’ to position itself ‘in the market but not of it’, to make sub-
stantial proits yet to sustain a stance which was antithetical to a capitalist
ethos (108).
31 For example, by commanding increasingly high fees for her journalism as
her reputation grew in the late 1920s and by submitting the same piece
for publication more than once and so ‘making a double income’ (Lee,
1996, 559).
32 See Gordon and Southworth for discussion.
33 Proits from To the Lighthouse are perceived as a gift-reward, and the record
sales of Orlando prompt her to distinguish the diferent aspects of her gifts
(the business and ‘unapplied gift’) so that ‘one relieves the other’ and ‘books
. . . relieve other books’ (D3 203).
34 Lawrence Rainey, ‘he Cultural Economy of Modernism’ in Michael Levenson
(ed) he Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press,
1999), pp. 33–69, p. 43.
36 Fry, ‘Art and Commerce’, pp. 122–3
37 Woolf wrote to Bell that her woodcut frontispiece for the irst edition was ‘a
most successful piece; and just the mood I wanted’ (L2, 258).
38 At this point Woolf and Bell were involved in some complex sharing of serv-
ants, and Bell makes reference to hearing conversations between the two
cooks – Nelly Boxhall and Trissie Selwood (VB Letters, 214).
39 Marcus, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press’, p. 140.
40 Vanessa Bell, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Ed. Regina Marler (London:
Moyer Bell, 1998), p. 215.
41 Katherine Mansield, he Collected Letters of Katherine Mansield. Volume 2.
Ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),
p. 325.
42 Anthony Alpers, he Life of Katherine Mansield (London: Jonathan Cape,
1980), pp. 251–2.
43 Angela Smith, Katherine Mansield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 137.
44 Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansield and the Modernist Marketplace: At
the Mercy of the Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 103–4.
Kate Macnamara’s discussion of Mansield’s anger and jealousy about Woolf ’s
adoption of Mansield’s story idea for ‘Kew Gardens’ also puts the ‘gift-sphere’
into question.
45 McDonnell, Katherine Mansield and the Modernist Marketplace, p. 8.
46 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way. An Autobiography of the years 1919 to
1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), pp 60, 66.
47 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), pp.
367, 368.
48 Katherine Mansield, ‘A Short Story,’ Review of ‘Kew Gardens’ (Athenaeum
13th June 1919), in Clare Hanson (ed), he Critical Writings of Katherine
Mansield (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 52–4.
49 he omitted section of the typescript contains the following: ‘hey [the
women] made a mosaic around them in the hot still air of these people and
these commodities each woman irmly pressing her own contribution into
the pattern, never taking her eyes of it, never glancing at the diferently
coloured fragments so urgently wedged into its place by her friend. But this
competition, the small woman either from majority of relatives or superior
luency of speech conquered, and the ponderous one fell silent perforce. She
continued: Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa. He says, I says, She says, I says I
says I says –’.
50 Staveley in relation to narratological strategies and Goldman in relation to
Woolf ’s ‘feminist deployment of colour’ (1998, 188), for example.
51 Mark S. Morrisson, he Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences,
and Reception 1905–1920 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), pp. 5–6.
Woolf ’s ‘common’ reader is well-read, her envisaging of common reader dis-
cussion is at ‘tea-tables’ extending Bloomsbury but on its own terms, and not
taking into account the lack of money for library membership or bus fares to
182 Simpson
a space to read (see Steve Ellis’s discussion of ‘he Leaning Tower’, in Virginia
Woolf and the Victorians (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 147–50), and
she presided over the ‘clique politics’ of the Hogarth Press (as Patrick Collier
suggests in ‘Virginia Woolf in the Pay of the Booksellers: Commerce, Privacy,
Professionalism, Orlando.’ Twentieth Century Literature 48.4 (Winter 2002),
363–392, p. 382).
52 Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 559.

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Ch apter 13

Like a kaleidoscope, Bloomsbury seems capable of ininitely varied and

th e h oga rth pres s

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