The hallmark works of the Bloomsbury Group are as varied as its members. Each work made its unique impact on the field in which it was written. The major subjects are art theory and criticism, economic and political theory, biography, fiction, and the essay. Common elements in the works include irony and humor, social commentary, and orientation in the aesthetics of G. E. Moore, who stated that the origins of good are in the love between friends and the contemplation of beautiful objects. Though Bloomsbury members would never have claimed that they shared beliefs and theories that would make them into a “movement,” it is not difficult to find their similar preoccupations and to understand the influence they had on each other.

ART (1914), BY CLIVE BELL

According to Leon Edel, Art “set Clive Bell upon a straight path as an art critic. With Roger Fry, Clive helped create an often resented Bloomsbury hegemony over art opinion in England during the next twenty-five years—and even beyond.”¹ Clive and Roger were responsible for explaining the contemporary art movement, Postimpressionism, to the British public. At the first postimpressionist exhibition in 1910, the paintings of contemporary French artists were ridiculed and misunderstood. Impressionism had been acceptable to the audience, since its experimentation with light and color in painting was based on scientific analysis. Form, content, and story were still recognized in impressionist paintings. But postimpressionism led painting into further abstraction, in which color was considered in relation only to form and shape. The form of a painting no longer took its meaning from its content or story—these elements were often unrecognizable to the viewers.

In the preface to Art, Clive claims to have “tried to develop a complete theory of visual art.”² He acknowledges his debt to Roger, especially Roger's “Essay in Aesthetics,” which he saw as the most helpful contribution to aesthetic theory since the work of Immanuel Kant. The book is itself a record of what people like Clive and Roger were thinking about art before World War I. It should also be kept in mind that the “battle for Post-Impressionism” had just been joined.

Art is divided into five sections: “What is Art?”; “Art and Life”; “The Christian Slope”; “The Movement”; and “The Future.” This short overview looks only at sections one, four, and five, since sections two and three are mainly surveys of art history. The strength of Clive's work lies in his description and analysis of postimpressionist art, its theory, its roots, and its impact on the future of art.

In the first chapter of section one, “What is Art?”, Bell presents his aesthetic hypothesis. This section sets out the most important criteria for the entire work. To begin, “all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion” (16-17). In order to achieve this peculiar emotion a work of art must contain one quality—significant form. In each work of art lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, [Bell] call[s] “Significant Form”; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art. (17-18)

Here Clive makes a distinction between form in art and ideas in art. Ideas do not create aesthetic emotion. Art and the emotion it produces should be above morals and politics. The influence of modernist primitivism is found in Clive's theory of significant form. Primitivism is an element of modernism that finds its roots in African art, which was very popular during the first part of the twentieth century. Primitive art is also represented by pre-dynastic Egyptian, archaic Greek, and Chinese masterpieces. For Clive primitive art is a perfect example of significant form because in it no accurate representation is found, only a series of forms. Still, this art creates in viewers an aesthetic emotion.

Clive then moves on to his chapter “Aesthetics and Post-Impressionism.” Here he names Cézanne as the father of postimpressionism, an artist whom Roger also admires. Clive notes Cézanne's unceasing insistence on significant form, and it is through Cézanne that Clive describes postimpressionist art. According to Clive, postimpressionism “implies no violent break with the past” (36). Essentially “all good art is of the same movement: there are only two kinds of art, good and bad.” Good art, no matter the period, contains some kind of significant form. Cezanne helped show that postimpressionism is not about technique; it is not how something is painted, but whether it provokes an aesthetic emotion.

In his chapter on “The Metaphysical Hypothesis,” Clive attempts to answer the question, “Why do certain arrangements and combinations of form move us so strangely?” (43). His answer is that creative form expresses the emotion of its creator. An artist will perceive something in its pure forms in certain relations to each other: “Now to see objects as pure forms is to see them as ends in themselves” (45). The significance of the thing in itself is the significance of reality. Instead of looking out at a landscape and seeing it as fields and cottages, the artist sees lines and colors. The landscape, as all objects, is stripped of its associations and the meanings that come from those associations. Clive believes that the reason some combinations of form move viewers so profoundly is because “artists can express … an emotion felt for reality which reveals itself through line and colour” (46). Artists can reduce things to their purest condition of being.

The middle section of Art discusses the relationship between art and history, ethics, and Christianity. It then proceeds to trace the development of Renaissance art through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and leading into the twentieth. Clive's argument is very polemical; that is, it is clear that he wishes to prove that significant form exists throughout art history, which helps to support his explanation of postimpressionist art and its abstract nature. What appears to be nonsensical to the contemporary audience has, according to Clive, been part of art throughout history.

The final sections of his book discuss in greater detail postimpressionism and its impact on future art. Clive devotes a chapter to Cézanne, who he feels “inspires the contemporary movement” (135). Technically, Cézanne was an impressionist. As an artist, according to Clive, Cézanne was “on the right side, of course—the Impressionist side, the side of the honest, disinterested artists, against the academic, literary pests. … So in 1870 he was for science against sentimentality [Romanticism]” (140). Sometime around 1880 Cézanne found something to replace the “bad” science of the impressionists.

Cézanne set himself to create forms that would express the emotion that he felt for what he had learnt to see. Science became as irrelevant as subject. Everything can be seen as pure form, and behind pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy. (140-41)

Cézanne spent the rest of his life trying to find ways to express the significance of form. He did this because it was his way of working out his own personal expression, of finding his own salvation. Cézanne found himself in a world still full of romantics and realists. He was a radical for his time, and those who followed him imitated his search for form and the belief in things regarded as ends in themselves.

Clive also discusses the function of simplicity and design in art, concepts that are also important to Roger. By simplicity or “simplification,” Clive means the reduction of a representation into significant form. The simplification of form helps to contribute to a design that gives the spectator an aesthetic response. Realistic art also has design, but it is too dependent on its representation (the realism of the work) to provoke a feeling in the viewer. According to Clive,

Post-Impressionists, by employing forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call immediate attention to the nature of the design, have found a short way to our aesthetic emotions.

(151)

The first concern of the artist in creating a design is to simplify. Every form is made aesthetically significant and every form has to be part of a significant whole. It is here that we find echoes of G. E. Moore's concept of organic wholes. This organization of forms into a significant whole is what Clive calls “Design.” Most pictures fail because “they correspond to no emotional vision” (153). A design should arise out of the nature of each form and its relation to other forms, both of which help express exactly what the artist feels.

Art ends with a discussion of what art can do for society. Clive follows Matthew Arnold in his belief that art can redeem society and therefore fill the role of religion. From the beginning, “art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions” (182). Art is

the one religion that is always shaping its form to fit the spirit, the one religion that will never for long be fettered in dogmas. It is a religion without a priesthood and it is well that the new spirit should not be committed to the hands of the priests. The new spirit is in the hands of the artists.

(182)

The modern age, as many critics during and after Clive's time would agree, suffered from a loss of faith, the breakdown of age-old beliefs that helped sustain culture. Art, for many, became its replacement. It seems a contradiction to many people that postimpressionist art, an abstract art initially ridiculed for its lack of meaning and sense, would be viewed as something to fill the void. But for Clive postimpressionism is the ultimate expression of man's spirit, devoid of the illusions of realism, and representing the very essence of meaning and emotion. Though perceived as radical, both Clive and the art he advocated are grounded in the traditional tenets of civilization.

VISION AND DESIGN (1920), BY ROGER FRY

Trained more thoroughly as an art historian than Clive Bell, Roger Fry wrote specific essays on particular periods, movements, and artists. Vision and Design is a collection of those essays and others he wrote for various publications and occasions. Clive acknowledged Roger's influence, and though Clive's Art was published first, it was Roger's insights and ideas that allowed Clive to frame his argument. This overview will discuss five representative essays, which reveal the influence of G. E. Moore, the role of aestheticism, and the influence of Bloomsbury as a whole.

Roger begins his collection with the essay “Art and Life.” Roger was best known by his friends and the public as a great teacher. He was most effective and dynamic in his lectures, rather than in his writing and painting. During lectures he stood in front of a screen and showed slides, talking spontaneously about the work at hand, teaching his audience to see things that the untrained eye might miss. “Art and Life” was a talk given in 1917 to the Fabian Society. It is an appropriate essay with which to begin his collection because it is an attempt to make art vital and alive, to show the uninitiated that art is directly related and reflective of their lives. He begins by explaining what he means by contrasting art with life:

I mean the general intellectual and instinctive reaction to their surroundings of those men of any period whose lives rise to complete self-consciousness. Their view of the universe as a whole and their conception of their relations to their kind. Of course their conception of the nature and function of art will itself be one of the most varying aspects of life and may in any particular period profoundly modify the correspondence of art to life.³

Roger addresses the role of mimesis, the direct correspondence of life to art. According to his definition, some artists are able to rise beyond their culture to a complete awareness of it. The artist can conceptualize the universe as a whole and his relationship to other men. But artists of various periods may conceptualize nature and the function of art in different ways, and therefore the relation between art and life is modified from period to period. Roger writes a little later in the essay that the spiritual activity of art is open to the influence of life, though in the main, art remains self-contained.

The real subject of his inquiry, he writes, is “the relation of the modern movement in art to life” (10). Like Clive, Roger views the origins of modern (postimpressionist) art in impressionism. He too sees impressionism as the product of scientific inquiry, and he describes the Impressionists as being preoccupied with “new effects of atmospheric colour and atmospheric perspective, thereby endowing painting with a quite new series of colour harmonies” (10). Ordinary men were forced to look at the world through an unfamiliar view, an unfamiliarity that continues into postimpressionism. The impressionists, as Clive had argued also, lacked “design and formal coordination” (11). Art had arrived at a critical point and there was a revolution inaugurated by Cézanne. There was a “re-establishment of purely aesthetic criteria in place of the criterion of conformity to appearance—the rediscovery of the principles of structural design and harmony” (12).

Roger's conclusion is that in the modern period, that is the postimpressionist period, art and life become more remote from each other. Modern art cuts out “the romantic overtones of life” and appeals only to the “aesthetic sensibility,” and that sensibility is relatively weak in most men. The “revolution in art seems to be out of all proportion to any corresponding change in life as a whole” (15). He notes that it is the radical break in art from the nineteenth to the twentieth century that is so much clearer than the break in life between these two centuries. Posterity might in retrospect see the break in life more easily than Roger's contemporaries can.

Roger's “An Essay in Aesthetics,” written in 1909 for New Quarterly, contains some of his most central critical concepts, and reflects the influence of G. E. Moore and Walter Pater. Roger tries to justify art for art's sake, and he does so by claiming, like Clive, that it is the emotional response to form and design that is most important. Art is “intimately connected with the secondary imaginative life, which all men live to a greater or less extent” (20). Art is the expression of our imagination, implying that morality, religion, or any kind of didacticism does not lie at the heart of artistic achievement. Art creates a “greater clearness of perception” (24), a “pure vision abstracted from necessity” (25). This “specialisation of vision” (25) goes so far that most people do not have it; they are unable to see what things really look like, unlike the artist who sees things only too clearly.

In his essay, “The Artist's Vision,” Roger pursues his description of how an artist perceives. This sense of sight gives one a “prophetic knowledge” (47) through the apprehension of the “relation of forms and colours to one another, as they cohere within the object” (48). The artist is able to see how the parts make up the whole, and this vision is based totally on the design between the forms and colors.

When viewers look at a work of art, their sensations demand order. It is not the kind of order that comes from viewing something realistic, but rather the sense of order that comes from unity in design. This purposeful order creates what is often called “beauty.” Beauty becomes “concerned with the appropriateness and intensity of the emotions aroused” (31). Most important, Roger lists what he calls the “emotional elements of design” (33): rhythm (of lines), mass, space, light and shade, color, and plane. All these elements are connected to “essential conditions of our physical existence” (34), that is, we can relate our own physical sensations to those represented in design. Painting arouses our emotions by playing on our physical sensations. In “An Essay on Aesthetics,” Roger concludes that likeness to nature or reality is not necessary when evaluating art. Rather we need “consider only whether the emotional elements inherent in natural form are adequately discovered” (38).

Other essays in Vision and Design elaborate the ways in which form functions in different periods in art. Roger seems to agree with and use Clive's concept of significant form without directly addressing it. He describes how form operates in Ottoman Empire artworks, art of the Bushmen, and the art of the ancient Americas. Also important to Roger, as it was to Clive, is the art of the Italian Renaissance, which is represented in Roger's essays “Giotto” and “The Art of Florence.” Finally, there are the impressionists, who are the forefathers to Roger's contemporary postimpressionism. He writes on “The French Impressionists” and “Renoir.” But most important to him is Paul Cézanne, to whom he devotes an essay.

Since Vision and Design is a collection of essays brought together by Roger after their original publication, he allowed himself in 1920 to write a final “Retrospect” for the book. This final essay is the most insightful, showing his views on contemporary art and his connections to Bloomsbury. Unlike Clive, Roger was also a painter, and in his final chapter he tries to reconcile his art with his criticism. He begins by presenting this conflict, but immediately admits that his “aesthetic has been a purely practical one” (285). He recognizes the subjectivity in what he does, “the critic must work with the only instrument that he possesses—namely, his own sensibility with all its personal equations” (285). In tracing the history of his taste and ideas, Roger describes the time he realized that the impressionists lacked “structural design” (287). Only later was he introduced to Cézanne's work, “who had already worked out the problem which seemed to me insolvable of how to use the modern vision with the constructive design of the old masters” (289). With the postimpressionist painters “art had begun to recover once more the language of design and to explore its so long neglected possibilities” (289).

Roger acknowledges his debt to Bloomsbury, especially Clive Bell. His first postimpressionist exhibit aroused interest in the younger generation of English artists and their friends, and with them he “began to discuss the problems of aesthetic that the contemplation of these works forced upon us” (292). It was Clive who put forth the hypothesis that for Roger is essential to understanding contemporary art. Clive advanced the idea that

however much the emotions of life might appear to play a part in the work of art, the artist was really not concerned with them, but only with the expression of a special and unique kind of emotion, the aesthetic emotion. A work of art had the peculiar property of conveying the aesthetic emotion, and it did this in virtue of having “significant form.”

(295)

The transformation of personal emotion into aesthetic emotion marks postimpressionist art and the art that follows. In their criticism, Roger and Clive try to explain the aspects of modern art that appear nonsensical and foreign to the untrained eye. There is emotion in art, but it is an emotion we experience from the structure and organization of forms, whether forms in Italian Renaissance painting or the paintings of Cézanne. This kind of aestheticism, which takes content for granted and focuses on a certain concept of beauty, is a development of the theories of Walter Pater and G. E. Moore. In discussions of Bloomsbury's fiction and prose, the reader discovers the same emphasis on the form rather than the story of the work.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE (1919), BY JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

In 1919 John Maynard Keynes left the Paris Peace Conference in utter despair. Disappointed with the conference's main players—President Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and Prime Minister Lloyd George—John suffered what would be called a nervous breakdown, and returned to London. During his recovery he wrote The Economic Consequences of Peace, which explained his positions and frustrations with the process. This treatise on economics is literary in style. Most profound about the work is its ability to predict the circumstances of World War II and the development of the League of Nations. John recognized that the retribution that Germany received would only perpetuate its dire economic circumstances and eventually cause discontent among the population.

In many ways the tone of the first two chapters of his book remind the reader of the satire and irony that colored Bloomsbury rhetoric. He states the thesis of his book in the first paragraph:

Moved by an insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, which it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.⁴

As an Englishman who took part in the Paris Peace Conference and who was part of the Supreme Economic Council of the Allied Powers, John claims to have a fresh perspective on conference events. His fellow Englishmen, he claims, are detached and out of touch with the real issues, since their country remained in prosperity, and they were in essence separated from the European community. In the book he calls on his countrymen to have more compassion for their defeated foes, but he does this by using a purely economic argument—what affects the economy of Europe will eventually affect the economy of Britain.

In order to explain the impact of the Paris Peace Treaty, John begins the book with the economic history of pre-war Europe. Economic progress in Europe and Britain experienced an “extraordinary episode” of growth at the beginning of 1914. Everyone, relatively speaking, was prosperous. But there were already some unstable elements present when war broke out, and John describes those elements in the remainder of the chapter. Circumstances that lead to the First World War were: increased population growth, the dynamics of Europe's organization and infrastructure, the psychology of society, and the relation of the old world economic order to the new.

John describes the character of the conference in the third chapter—the most frequently discussed among critics. John's writing, in general, is very literary and accessible; in this chapter his style ascends to the level of fiction while he creates the characters of the conference through his descriptions of President Wilson, French leader Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando. The descriptions of these leaders have been compared to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and his satirical sketches of revered Victorian figures. There is a great deal of irony in John's portraits of major political figures, and in many ways these leaders are deflated to look like inept buffoons.

John's descriptions include what each leader wore, where each sat, and, most important, individual psychological sketches. For example, Clemenceau wore a “a square-tailed coat of very good, thick black broadcloth, and on his hands, which were never uncovered, grey suede gloves; his boots were of thick black leather, very good, but of a country style” (26). Clemenceau's fashion reflected the distinguished quality of his character. He sat on a “square brocaded chair in the middle of the semicircle facing the fire-place” (29) with the other leaders flanked to his right and his left. He was aloof and focused. John describes Clemenceau's principles for peace:

In the first place, he was a foremost believer in the view of the German psychology that the German understands nothing but intimidation, that he is without generosity or remorse in negotiation, that there is no advantage he will not take of you, and no extent to which he will not demean himself for profit, that he is without honour, pride, or mercy.

(29)

Therefore it was not possible to negotiate with a German, according to Clemenceau, “you must dictate to him” (29). There was no place in Clemenceau's philosophy for sentimentality in international relations, a point that clashed with Wilson's goals of humanitarianism and democracy in his Fourteen Points. Germany was not to be trusted, and the French viewed the possibility of European civil war as the norm. It was the policy of France to “set the clock back and to undo what, since 1870, the progress of Germany had accomplished” (32). John saw Clemenceau's vision as one of an old man who insisted on living in the past rather than the present. However, the French leader's mind was quick and sharp, sharper than the other delegates, and in the end his point of view triumphed.

President Wilson appears to be John's greatest disappointment at the Conference. Wilson, from afar, seemed to be a decisive and clear thinker. However, John's view of Wilson after Wilson came to France changed drastically:

The President was not a hero or a prophet; he was not even a philosopher; but a generously intentioned man, with many of the weaknesses of other human beings, and lacking that dominating intellectual equipment which would have been necessary to cope with the subtle and dangerous spellbinders who a tremendous clash of forces and personalities had brought to the top as triumphant masters in the swift game of give and take, face to face in Council—a game of which he had no experience at all.

(36)

Wilson's thought was “essentially theological not intellectual” (38). At the beginning of the conference it was believed that the U.S. president had thought out a comprehensive scheme for the League of Nations as well as for the embodiment of the Fourteen Points in an actual peace treaty. However, the president “had thought nothing out.” His ideas were “nebulous and incomplete,” and he had “no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever.” Not only did his ideas lack detail, but he was “ill-informed as to European conditions” and his mind “was slow and unadaptable” (39). John's description of the president is harsh and irreverent. Wilson comes off as a clod and an idiot, and it becomes his inability to keep up intellectually with Clemenceau and George that leads to a flawed and problematic treaty. Forced to work off the British and French drafts of the treaty, Wilson allowed implementation of Clemenceau's proposal that the Germans not be heard. Wilson's Fourteen Points turned into a “Carthaginian Peace.”

The middle part of The Economic Consequences of the Peace details the treaty itself. More interesting to the reader is the final chapter, “Remedies,” which contains a visionary element. In this chapter John predicts both the disastrous outcome of the treaty and the remedies necessary to recuperate Germany and the rest of Europe. It is clear he is addressing a British audience. Britain was relatively untouched by the war and flourished economically; it was detached from the events and reparations because it perceived itself as not being directly affected. John warns Britain that now is “the dead season of [their] fortunes” (278) and great care must be taken.

John announces the end of nineteenth-century economics: “The economic motives and ideals of that generation no longer satisfy us: we must find a new way and must suffer again the malaise … of a new industrial birth” (238). He calls on the more affluent and stable Britain and the United States to turn their attention to Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Austria. He proposes a program, “for those who believe that the Peace of Versailles cannot stand,” which includes a revision of the treaty, the settlement of inter-Ally indebtedness, an international loan and currency reform, and improved relations between Central Europe and Russia (240). Revision of the treaty, he argues, must take place through a League of Nations.

What is most profound about John's insights is his ability to predict the causes of the Second World War. Peace that does not allow Germany to take care of itself will keep Germany impoverished. Deliberate impoverishment will inevitably cause conflict:

Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is the victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.

(251)

And in fact John was correct. Germany's debilitated economic condition allowed for the vulnerability that made Hitler's Germany possible. Finally, John predicts the depression that follows: “There may … be ahead of us a long, silent process of semi-starvation, and of a gradual steady lowering of the standards of life and comfort” (277). The Allies revenge on Germany neglected to consider the interconnectedness of international economic relations.

Like the rest of Bloomsbury, John applies reason and logic to argue against the status quo and to reject the economic values of the nineteenth century. Also like the other Bloomsbury members, his writing is rhetorically powerful and adds an engaging element with its use of irony. John's portraits of the various players at the Treaty of Versailles are humorous and satirical, and they show his ability to give psychological insight. Overall, however, it is his reasoned understanding and belief in economic structures that allow him to argue against what he sees as a destructive peace.

EMINENT VICTORIANS (1914), LYTTON STRACHEY

Lytton Strachey came into his own relatively late compared to the other Bloomsbury members, but when he came out with Eminent Victorians he was an immediate overnight sensation. He was recognized as a pioneer in the “new biography.” Influenced by the psychology of Sigmund Freud, Lytton wrote a biography mixed with fiction and colored by his ironic view of the world. After Eminent Victorians he wrote two other popular biographies, Queen Victoria (1920) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928), which helped solidify his reputation and brought him great financial wealth.

Eminent Victorians is best recognized for its satirical attack on the Victorian culture in which Lytton was raised. Many critics find fault with his work because of its lack of scholarly accuracy—he takes quotations out of context, neglects to cite sources, and sometimes makes up quotations and events that did not exist. Nevertheless it is not an objective view of the Victorian figures he hopes to pen but rather an analytical and critical perspective. Like much of the work of Bloomsbury members, Lytton's work acknowledges the subjective element in all communication.

Lytton's book contains the biographies of four revered Victorian personalities: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon. His preface reveals a great deal about his intentions and is no less controversial than the rest of the book. The first sentence states that his goal of telling a Victorian history is impossible: “The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”⁵ To try to explain everything in detail is impossible because the massive energy and volume of Victorian culture is too great. Instead, Lytton takes the approach of the more subtle biographer:

He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

(vii)

Through Lytton's metaphor of fishing, he demonstrates first the literary quality of his biography and second the arbitrary process with which he decides about what to write. He picks pieces of material “here and there” that bring light to some aspect of his subject. He does not know what he is choosing because the information is found in the “far depths” of the vast lives about which he writes. He deals with fragments of information that he eventually makes whole through his narration. He ends by telling us that his “choice of subjects has been determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience and art” (viii). Lytton does not approach his subjects with a preconceived idea, but rather works with information that conveniently comes to him. Ultimately the form and structure of each biography is determined by art, the creativity with which one makes something coherent and whole. For all of these reasons Lytton's critics find his biography lacking in formal scholarship.

The first biography, “Cardinal Manning,” is the longest in the collection, taking up almost half the book. Like the other biographies, it is irreverent and satirical. True to Bloomsbury's agnostic view of the world, Lytton attempts to show the contradictions and hypocrisies in the Victorian view of religion. He depicts Manning as a man who used religion to satisfy his worldly ambition. It is an attack on both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England in its Oxford Movement phase.

In introducing Manning to the reader Lytton says that his life is interesting for two reasons, “the light which his career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems suggested by his inner history” (3). From the first paragraph Lytton suggests that Manning is unstable and that readers will discover how his religious ferocity is the product of a conflicted individual. The essay as a whole is a searing attack on Manning's monomaniacal devotion and his insistent denunciation of “the rights of democracies, the claims of science, the sanctity of free speech, [and] the principles of toleration” even though the modern world proceeded without him (72).

Lytton demonstrates piety and good works cloaked in worldly ambition in his portrait of Florence Nightingale. Unlike the negative portrait of Manning, Lytton admires Nightingale's strong and ambitious mind, reflecting his admiration of strong women in general. Surrounded by his independent and intelligent sisters and mother, Lytton was in a sense a feminist, as he demonstrated later in his career with his biographies of the queens Victoria and Elizabeth. “Florence Nightingale” also demonstrates Lytton's view that biography should not idealize its subject, that real human beings are flawed and imperfect. We learn this immediately as he introduces Nightingale:

Everyone knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succour the afflicted … the vision is familiar to us all. But the truth was different. … A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one.

(135)

The reader is given a portrait of Nightingale's zealous earnestness. Ultimately, he respects her creation of the nursing profession, whereas Manning's philanthropic works left him cold. The worst with which Lytton can charge Nightingale is working too hard and suppressing her sexual energies into her obsession with organization. His satire, in the end, moves away from her and is directed against the government and its bureaucratic inefficiency. His attitude toward Nightingale was ambivalent; he found her energy and intensity frightening and her accomplishments admirable.

The biography of Dr. Thomas Arnold is the shortest of the collection. Arnold, father of poet and critic Matthew Arnold, is famous for his reform of the English public school system. Public schools in England, unlike the United States, were actually private. The role of the public school system was to instill strong Christian values. In order to take his position as the headmaster of Rugby school, Arnold received priest's orders and became a doctor of divinity. Lytton's irony and satire is consistent throughout. He says that Arnold's letters home when he was a child suggested “to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig” (208). The description of Arnold as an adult reveals, at least from Lytton's perspective, that he did in fact become the prig his family feared. Though he had the look of a person of eminence, Lytton asks, “And yet—why was it?—was it in the lines of the mouth or the frown on the forehead?—it was hard to say, but it was unmistakable—there was a slightly puzzled look upon the face of Dr. Arnold” (210). Arnold achieved his goal to reform the educational system, but not without the enforcement of a stifling and rigorous structure that turned boys against boys.

Lytton's last essay in Eminent Victorians is titled “The End of General Gordon,” reflecting his interest in the deaths as well as the lives of his subjects. Like the other essays, this one is concerned with deflating Victorian religious fanaticism and inefficient government bureaucracy. This essay also attacks the absurdity of imperialism. In addition to satirizing Gordon, the man of action and religious fervor, Lytton includes William Gladstone, Sir Evelyn Baring, and Lord Hartington, all government servants. Gordon becomes a pawn for these men and their imperial goals in the Sudan. His flaw is his religious nature, which keeps him from recognizing the self-serving actions of his government. Lytton is both sympathetic and ironic in his portrayal since it is the mixture of Gordon's religion and his patriotism that cause Gordon to lose his life when the natives of his colonial port revolt. The irony is brought home by Lytton who ends the portrait describing how Queen Victoria sent a letter of sympathy to Gordon's sister who in return sent the queen her brother's Bible.

Lytton developed his talent for satire and his new approach to biography in his later works. Like the other Bloomsbury members, his writing contains wit and irony. His rejection and criticism of his Victorian fathers and mothers is the most explicit of any of the Bloomsbury members, which may be due to the fact that his lifestyle was the farthest beyond the norms of culture. Always playful and engaging, the work of Lytton gives the reader insight into the icons of history.

THE WISE VIRGINS (1914), BY LEONARD WOOLF

Though Leonard Woolf wrote two novels, the majority of his writing is political prose. He also wrote a five-volume autobiography near the end of his life. In his political writings, Leonard carried the scars his generation suffered in World War I, and his desire to keep war from happening again marks almost all his writing. He was preoccupied with the reformation of capitalist and imperialist systems, and he articulated the groundwork for international tribunals, such as the League of Nations. The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions, and a Few Emotions (1914) is most interesting in regard to Bloomsbury since it is modeled on his own Bloomsbury experiences. He treats fictionally a young Jew who falls in love with the daughter of a well-established Victorian intellectual. It is a class satire that clearly represents many of the characteristics of his wife Virginia and her Bloomsbury friends.

The range of Leonard's political writing is too vast to address in full, though a brief survey of his work illustrates his social conscience as well as his ability to reason through complicated international problems. In this way his work resembles that of J. M. Keynes. His years in Ceylon as a British colonial administrator made him sensitive to the issues of economic imperialism. He attempted to address these issues in his first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), which was written from the perspective of the natives. This book is based on his Ceylon experiences in Ceylon and is an account of a small village and the natives' fears in the face of a hostile and alien administration. The book contains footnotes throughout the text that explain Sinhalese words, customs, and relationships, and which help Leonard add authenticity and authority to his story. However, Leonard found his true voice against imperialism in the various pamphlets and books he later wrote on the subject.

Leonard's career as a political writer began when he met Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were the leaders of the Fabian movement. They put him to work writing two reports that were published in 1916 as International Government: Two Reports. In this book Leonard argued that hostile nations should be restrained through international law. He felt that there must be open internationalization of law, information, society, and standards, and that specific organizations must oversee such things as public health, industry and commerce, maritime law, and labor legislation. He was editor of The Framework of a Lasting Peace (1917), and wrote The Future of Constantinople (1917) and Mandates and Empire (1920) to follow up on this theme.

During the 1920s he continued to write for the Fabian movement, as well as penning a considerable amount of journalism for New Weekly, Co-operative News, the Times Literary Supplement, Contemporary Review, the International Review, the New Statesman, and Nation and Athenaeum. The 1930s saw Leonard continue his antiwar writing. He published a series of essays in the Political Quarterly; edited The Intelligent Man's Way to Prevent War (1933) and Labour's Foreign Policy (1934); and wrote The League and Abyssinia (1936). His political writing continued through the 1940s and 1950s, and his theme—the prevention of war, and international economic development—remained the same.

Leonard's political works stem from his personal experience with colonialism, and his empathy for the outsider and the oppressed existed on levels he himself perhaps was unaware. The Wise Virgins is a highly autobiographical novel about a Jewish protagonist burdened by his lower-class status in relation to the cultural aristocracy he encounters. Virginia Woolf did not like the book and probably sensed Leonard's criticism of her background and world. None of the journals, diaries, or letters show that the book was something about which Virginia or Leonard Woolf ever talked.

Leonard began writing The Wise Virgins in 1912, during his honeymoon in Spain. The novel makes little attempt to disguise it is based on his experience, and Leonard spared no one. The plot concerns the Davis family, who is Jewish and live in the middle-class suburb of “Richstead,” modeled on the suburb of Putney, where Leonard was raised. Harry Davis, who is Leonard himself, is the cynical, aloof, and discontent son. He meets Camilla Lawrence, modeled on Virginia Woolf, at an art class. Camilla's sister Katherine is modeled on Vanessa Bell, while Mr. Lawrence is modeled on Leslie Stephen. The Lawrence family is made up of artists and intellectuals who, like the Stephens, value time spent discussing ideas. Other characters are also based on people Leonard knows: Arthur Woodhouse is Clive Bell, and Trevor Trevithick is Saxon Sydney-Turner.

The Davises become friendly with their neighbors, Mrs. Garland and her four unmarried daughters. Harry finds himself attracted to Gwen Garland, who is naive and unsophisticated, and sets about to educate her by loaning her the works of George Meredith and Henrik Ibsen. Gwen begins to fall in love with Harry, though Harry is busy pursuing Camilla Lawrence. Camilla is distant and cold with Harry and tells him that she would just like to remain friends with him. Harry is invited to join the Lawrences for a weekend in the country. It is here that we get a description of Leonard's most profound sense of isolation. Harry is acutely aware of the anti-Semitism of the Lawrences and their friends:

He thought of himself standing up on some raised platform above a crowd threatening him. Stones were thrown, there was blood on his face, but he stood there shielding—someone, from the stones. … They were all strangers to him; there wasn't a soul up there of all the four to whom he could talk of what he was feeling or of what he wanted.⁶

This scene in the country is reminiscent of weekend retreats Bloomsbury members took. Sitting on a hillside slope looking at his hostess and her other guests, Harry feels persecuted and alone. He, like Leonard, is aware of his difference and the inability of his companions to understand. It is unlikely that Virginia and the other Bloomsbury members ever expressed their dislike of Jews to Leonard. However, Virginia, for example, apologized in letters to her friends for marrying a Jew. Others knew there were certain topics, such as Jewish immigration, that could not be discussed in front of Leonard.

In the novel, Harry also finds himself strongly drawn to Camilla's sister Katherine, in the same way that Leonard found himself attracted to Vanessa before his marriage to Virginia. In spite of this, Harry proposes to Camilla and she refuses, just as Virginia had done when Leonard first proposed to her. He finds the Lawrence women cold and passionless. Talking to Trevor he says: “There's no life in you, no blood in you, no understanding. Your women are cold and leave one cold—no dark hair, no blood in them. Pale hair, pale souls, you know” (52). Again, Leonard's view of his aristocratic friends emerges, especially his view of the Stephen women. His relationship with Virginia and her inability to experience sexual passion is also reflected here.

The novel, however, ends on a much darker note than Leonard's actual life story. The Davises, including Harry, take a vacation with the Garlands. One night at the hotel Gwen comes into Harry's room and they become intimate. Her nocturnal visit becomes known to the families who become distraught. Though he does not love Gwen, Harry agrees to marry her. He visits Camilla one more time before his marriage and sees that nothing has changed—the Lawrences still sit around in their armchairs talking. He finds himself railing at the Lawrence family. The novel ends with the despondent Harry getting married to Gwen.

Louise DeSalvo called The Wise Virgins a “viscous novel,” writing it was “the most sadistic act, with the most tragic consequences, of Leonard Woolf's life.”⁷ First, he portrayed his own family in a most unflattering way. He sent drafts of his novel to his family, and his sister Bella was very distressed by the novel, while his mother Marie warned him that publication would cause a breach between them. Even Lytton Strachey recommended that he let the draft sit for some time before he attempted to revise it, and that he consider his mother's feelings. DeSalvo argues in her book that Virginia's suicide attempt right before publication of the novel was due to Leonard's portrayal of her.

The Wise Virgins probably gives the most intimate portrait of Leonard's inner life, though technically it is a weak novel. It is probably one of Leonard's lesser read works. His political writings reflect his true genius and reveal Leonard's social conscience, which stems from his own background as well as Bloomsbury's intellectual environment.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) AND A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929), BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse is probably Virginia Woolf's most widely read and written about work, with Mrs. Dalloway (1925) coming in a close second. Unlike her early novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), the narrative is nonlinear and experimental. Beginning with Jacob's Room (1922) and continuing through Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia began to experiment with what has come to be called the stream-of-consciousness technique. More accurately, her style strives to represent a reality Virginia believed exists below the surface of what is seen and known. Many people see this as a psychological reality; others view it as a spiritual or metaphysical world. In any case, Virginia's experimental novels can be overwhelming and difficult for readers who approach her work for the first time, since they challenge conventional reading strategies.

A few critics argue that Virginia's narrative experimentation has its roots in Clive Bell's concept of significant form, in which the strength of a piece of art is found in its form rather than its content. This point of view helps connect Virginia's aesthetic to the Bloomsbury Group as a whole and to the initial influence of G. E. Moore. Though she read G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica when she participated in Bloomsbury Thursday evenings, it is doubtful that her approach to art relies completely on that philosophy since she never had the connection to Moore that the Apostles did.

To the Lighthouse is divided into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” Though there is a plot to the novel, it crosses generic boundaries by combining conventions of the novel with poetry. There is a lyric quality to Virginia's prose, and those looking for action in the novel will be disappointed. Even Virginia knew that the form of her novel was unconventional and she had a difficult time labeling what she was writing: “I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’. A new—by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?”⁸ Readers may have an easier time if they approach the novel as a large prose poem rather than looking for plot, character development, and setting.

There is a minimal, though important, plot structure that helps to keep the novel together. It concerns a large Victorian family, the Ramsays, seen before and after World War I in their vacation home on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. Their home is full of people, including their eight children and various other guests. The children—Andrew, Cam, James, Jasper, Nancy, Prue, Roger, and Rose—participate in the novel to various degrees. The guests include William Bankes, Lily Briscoe, Augustus Carmichael, Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley, and Charles Tansley. These characters help Virginia incorporate other important relationships and issues into her work through fictional representations.

The children are to some degree modeled on the Stephen children and their relationships with their parents. Andrew is the oldest male, in whom great hopes are placed; he dies in the war during the “Time Passes” section, his potential unfulfilled like Thoby Stephen. James, who plays a central role in both “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” sections, like Adrian Stephen is the youngest child, with a strong bond to his mother and a resentment toward his father that lasts into adulthood. This resentment is resolved in the last part of the novel. Prue, the oldest girl, is modeled on Stella Duckworth. Like Stella, Prue is the typical product of a Victorian upbringing and is much like her mother, caring and mothering those around her. Prue dies in the “Time Passes” section of the novel from some illness associated with childbirth.

Virginia consciously modeled the Ramsays on her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen. In fact, she remarked in letters and in her diary how this novel helped her in a Freudian sense work through her relationships with her parents. Virginia writes in her diary that she “used to think of him & mother daily; but writing To the Lighthouse, laid them in my mind” (208). Her memories of her father are mingled with her representation of Mr. Ramsay, his tyrannical behavior toward women, his feelings of being second rate, and his guilt over his wife's death. Mr. Ramsay demands acknowledgment from his wife in his most insecure moments, moments when his expectations for himself are completely unrealistic. As a philosopher he sees his achievement on a scale that resembles the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. He was at “Q,” and knew he could not achieve “R”:

A shutter … flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R.⁹

He turns to his wife demanding sympathy. After indulging in his self-pity he interrupts Mrs. Ramsay while she reads to James. James hates him for the interruption. Mrs. Ramsay looks up and feels “the fatal sterility of the male plunge itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.” She knew “[h]e wanted sympathy” and that he wanted “to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life … his bareness made fertile” (37). Leonard Woolf wrote in his diary that Virginia's representation of her father was harsh and mixed with her own complicated feelings toward him. Still, it is clear that Mr. Ramsay, like Leslie Stephen, was typically Victorian in his expectations and never-ending in his demands for emotional support.

Julia Stephen is also omnipresent in the novel. Unlike the anger toward her that father Virginia tries to work out in the novel, Virginia's feelings for her mother are ones of loss. Mrs. Ramsay is, like Julia, a typical Victorian matron, whose identity and goals are based purely on the needs of others. In one of the few moments when Mrs. Ramsay is found alone, she is described as a “wedge-shaped core of darkness” (62) with no identity of her own. Vanessa Bell was overwhelmed by Virginia's description of Mrs. Ramsay. She wrote to her sister in 1927 that Virginia had “given a portrait of mother which is more like her than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.”¹⁰

Lily Briscoe, the artist friend of the Ramsays, is a significant character in To the Lighthouse. She is introduced in the first part of the novel as a guest at the summer home. Her painting of Mrs. Ramsay is mentioned throughout the novel and is one symbol or image that maintains unity in the narrative. As an artist, she is contrasted to Mrs. Ramsay. Lily must struggle against Mrs. Ramsay's words that “one could not take her painting very seriously” (17) and Charles Tansley's words that “women can't write, women can't paint” (48). A number of critics have pointed out that Lily and her painting are analogous to Virginia and her novel, both concerned with the relationship of women to art. Lily's painting has also been likened to the work of the postimpressionists, and her aesthetic problems have been seen in terms of the formalist theories of Roger Fry, and in Clive Bell's concept of significant form. The completion of Lily's painting at the end of the novel, at which time she has her “vision,” brings closure to her relationship with Mrs. Ramsay; James's and Cam's relationship with their father; and to the novel as a whole.

There has been so much written on Virginia's To the Lighthouse it is difficult to summarize, though there are some common themes and preoccupations that can be noted. Other members of the Bloomsbury group felt that the novel was the best thing she had written. Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey commented on its symbolism, psychology, sadness, and lack of sexuality. The novel brought her the only prize she ever accepted, the Femina-Vie Heureuse in 1928; it was awarded to her by the French government. There were a number of reviews in various journals, including the Nation & Athenaeum and the New York Times, but they were less appreciative. They complained of the lack of character development and plot. In 1953 Erich Auerbach's Mimesis discussed the novel as a classic modernist text by looking at its narrative development. More current critics are concerned with the novel's representation of masculine and feminine principles, along with the author's use of symbol, myth, and archetype; Victorian ideology; and comedy. Specific attention has been paid to the “Time Passes” section, which continues to mystify many of its readers. To the Lighthouse is biographical and aesthetic, and it gives readers a sense of Bloomsbury's origins and identity.

The Bloomsbury Group's critique of Victorian roles for men and women is not only reflected in To the Lighthouse but also in Virginia's A Room of One's Own (1929), which gained a reputation later in the twentieth century as a seminal feminist text. In the novel, Virginia argues that a woman must have a room of her own and £500 a year in order to write fiction. Other members of Bloomsbury were by no means feminist; in fact E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey thought Virginia's work was weakened by her ardent feminism. However, they allowed traditional gender boundaries to be broken, and assumed that women had a right to education and creative expression. Bloomsbury's characteristic irony is also found in Virginia's attack on patriarchy.

A Room of One's Own is structured as a talk given by Virginia at Oxbridge (based on the universities of Cambridge and Oxford), where she has been invited to talk on women and fiction. There are six chapters that trace Virginia through Oxbridge and London as she explains to her audience the impact of money and patriarchy on the creativity of women. The first chapter poses the question of how the words “women” and “fiction” are related. It is here that she states that a woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction. In order to give her argument a more universal application, Virginia asks that her audience call her Mary Beton, Mary Seton, or Mary Carmichael. It does not matter what her name is because the conditions she is going to describe apply to all women. She visits a men's and a women's college and wonders why the meals and material conditions of the men's college are so much better. It is because, she answers, women have focused on bearing children, not making money, and therefore they have no means to endow a college in the way men do.

In chapter two the scene moves to London, where the narrator visits the British Museum to begin her research on women. She is overwhelmed by the number of books that have women as a subject, and is shocked that all of these works are written by men. She finds herself with many more questions than answers, and her anger peaks as she realizes it has been men who have described women throughout history. She takes herself out to lunch with money that has been left by her namesake aunt. Her economic independence allows her to act without attention to men and it calms her anger and bitterness.

Chapter three turns to history and the opportunities that have been open to women writers. It is in this chapter that we get Virginia's famous reference to “Judith Shakespeare,” William's fictional sister. Unlike her brother William, Judith is not educated but she has the soul of a poet. She runs away from her family and tries to join the theater, though she is ridiculed and laughed at. Nick Greene, a theater manager, takes her in and she becomes pregnant. At a loss and in despair, Judith commits suicide. This is a cautionary tale, and Virginia wonders how many Judith Shakespeares history has seen.

Virginia addresses the impediments found in the consciousness of the poet in chapter four. In this chapter Virginia looks at women writers of past centuries. The narrator takes down the works of Anne Finch, Margaret Cavendish, and Dorothy Osborne from her shelves. These writers she finds embittered and unable to write literature. When she pulls down the work of Aphra Behn, she finds what she feels is the first woman writer. Behn, an eighteenth-century writer, is the first woman to earn a living by writing. The narrator notes that women did not begin to write until the end of the eighteenth century. Many feminist critics have taken Virginia's literary history as truth, but time has shown that Virginia did not have access to material that would have made A Room of One's Own more historically accurate. The chapter then discusses the nineteenth-century women writers Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, who have carved a way for other women. Finally, the narrator states that “we think back through our mothers if we are women,” setting the tone for the discussion of a female literary canon.¹¹

Chapter five addresses the issue of friendship between women, and chapter six moves the reader to Virginia's crucial concept of androgyne. The narrator looks out her window and sees a young man and a young woman get into a taxi together and this sets her into a train of thought on “the unity of the mind” (97). A writer's mind, to be “incandescent” as Shakespeare's, must be balanced between the masculine and feminine and must be free of all anger. The narrator feels “it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex” (104). It is at this point that the narrator, Mary Beton, ceases to speak and Virginia enters the narrative again. Virginia ends the essay with an exhortation to her audience that they should write all kinds of books and enter all kinds of professions. She states that behind every woman writer is a history of all women and that women should work, even if anonymous and unknown, to create a moment when a female Shakespeare can come into her own.

Virginia's contemporaries found the feminism in A Room of One's Own too radical, except other feminists such as Rebecca West. It was mainly the U.S. feminist critics of the 1970s who helped give the work the canonical status it has. A Room of One's Own has been discussed in terms of its pedagogical influence in the classroom, as a political work with socialist implications, as a precursor to a matrilineal literary canon, as a rhetorical model for feminist argumentation, as a text about women's anger, and as a critique of patriarchy.

By the end of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf emerged as the most significant Bloomsbury figure (along with J. M. Keynes). The Bloomsbury members' rejection of the conventions of their Victorian predecessors is found in the innovative narrative style of To the Lighthouse, in which she rejects the conventions of linear plot, traditional character development, and a strict adherence to genre. A Room of One's Own was ahead of its time in its critique of patriarchy, the role of women, and the nature of art and creativity between the sexes. These two texts illustrate the impact of Bloomsbury members far beyond the boundaries of their own historical place and moment.

Notes

1. Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (London: The Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 194.

2. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), p. 6.

3. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), p. 3.

4. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 1-2.

5. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, no date), p. vii.

6. Leonard Woolf, The Wise Virgins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1914), pp. 100-1.

7. Louise DeSalvo, Conceived with Malice (New York: Dutton, 1994), p. 75.

8. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984) 3: 34.

9. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 62.

10. Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980), p. 572.

11. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 76.