Cecil Woolf Publishers: 2015 Bloomsbury
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Catalogue May 2015_Son of Heaven.qxd 20/05/2015 17:50 Page 1 CECIL WOOLF PUBLISHERS 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP, England Tel: 020 7387 2394 [email protected] Monographs General Editor: Jean Moorcroft Wilson Thoughts of the Common Reader ‘I recently discovered the Bloomsbury Heritage Series, which is a series of short books about all things Bloomsbury and the people that were part of this group. It was set up by Leonard Woolf’s nephew Cecil Woolf and it is a really delightful collection of books. The series is published very much in the spirit of the Hogarth Press, each book is bound in card and the front cover has a design similar to those that Vanessa Bell designed for the Hogarth Press. ‘The idea of the series is to bring together pieces of writing about and around the Bloomsbury group. It explores all aspects of their lives and has many contributors. There is something very charming about them and I love that you send them by post. It is a real pleasure to wait for its arrival through the letter box, the anticipation, something we have lost in the age of the internet, download it now, next day delivery… I had ordered a catalogue by e-mail and was pleasantly surprised when I had a reply from Cecil Woolf to say that it was in the post. When I placed my first order for the first book in the series A Cockney’s Farming Experiences . [I received from Cecil Woolf] by far the best customer service I have received in a long time.’ &c – thoughtsofthecommonreader.blogspot.co.uk Catalogue May 2015_Son of Heaven.qxd 20/05/2015 17:50 Page 2 JUST PUBLISHED Bonnie Kime Scott Natural Connections: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield made striking representations of the natural world that bear comparison, particularly in registering details, rendering character and perception, and serving a concern for the politics of gender and sexuality. These qualities, together with their challenge to traditional divisions between nature and culture, make their work highly suitable for the eco-feminist approach employed here. This study compares the natural and intellectual connections available to them at various stages of their lives, starting from the contrasting sites of Wellington, New Zealand, and London, and intersecting briefly as contributors to the making of modernism. This monograph identifies differences in the relation Mansfield and Woolf strike with their natural subject matter that are consistent with their modernist criticism of other writers, including one another. Dr Scott’s study of the natural aspect of Woolf’s and Mansfield’s writing makes a substantial contribution to the greening of modernist studies that has emerged in the last decade. Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 71, card wrappers, 48pp., ISBN 978-1-907286-34-6, price £7.50 Hilary Newman ‘Eternally in yr Debt’: the Personal and Professional Relationship Between Virginia Woolf & Elizabeth Robins Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952) was an expatriate American actress turned author, who lived with Octavia Wilberforce. Her outstanding achievement was the bringing of Henrik Ibsen’s plays to the London stage and playing his leading female roles. She became President of the Women Writers Suffrage League and was a close adviser to Mrs Pankhurst. Woolf inherited Elizabeth Robins’s friendship from her parents, but it did not initially endure. Robins described Woolf as ‘probably the greatest living writer of English prose’ and attended the function at which Woolf received the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for To the Lighthouse in 1928. Here their friendship was renewed and intermittently continued until Woolf’s death, though they never became intimate. Woolf was not so complimentary about Robins’s work, finding her novels and short stories conventional and ‘pre-war’. However, she admired Robins’s autobiographical writings, two of which were published by the Hogarth Press. In this study, which incidentally casts new light on Woolf’s half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, Hilary Newman also argues that Robins’s two feminist treatises throw a new light on Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas . Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 72, card wrappers, 28pp., ISBN 978-1-907286-38-4, price £6.00 Catalogue May 2015_Son of Heaven.qxd 20/05/2015 17:50 Page 3 Todd Avery Saxon Sydney-Turner: the Ghost of Bloomsbury Who was Saxon Arnold Sydney-Turner (1880-1962), what manner of man was he and what was his place in Bloomsbury? Variously characterized as silent, vague, obscure, shadowy, and spectral, Sydney-Turner nevertheless occupied a central place in Bloomsbury, especially during its Cambridge and early London years. He was, for example, one of the few guests at the Stephen siblings’ first Gordon Square at-homes in 1905, and later he starred in Carrington’s 1929 short film, ‘Dr Turner’s Mental Home’. This fascinating portrait study approaches Sydney-Turner in the spirit of the imaginary reader who, in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Lives of the Obscure’, searches out ‘some stranded ghost … waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom’, a ghost who yearns to speak ‘old secrets’ and to experience ‘the divine relief of communication’. Drawing on dozens of published accounts, as well as on scores of unpublished letters and photographs from major English and American archives, and on the twenty or so poems that he contributed to Euphrosyne (1905), the ‘first book of Bloomsbury’, Saxon Sydney-Turner : the Ghost of Bloomsbury draws this ghost out of a surrounding obscurity and gives flesh to the man whom Lytton Strachey once called (in their 38 th year!) ‘a withered old man – ce veillard ratatiné .’ Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 73, card wrappers, 32pp., ISBN 978-1-907286-39-1, price £6.00 Alice Lowe Virginia Woolf as Memoirist: ‘I am Made and Remade Continually’ Hermione Lee referred to Virginia Woolf as ‘an autobiographer who never published an autobiography’, at the same time acknowledging Woolf’s considerable body of self-writing. ‘A Sketch of the Past’ is said to be incomplete in that, unlike her husband, Woolf never completed a full-length volume of formal autobiography, yet it is notable for her insights and reflections not just about her life, past and present, but about the memoir form itself. Using ‘A Sketch of the Past’ as a primary text, along with the personal essays accompanying it in Moments of Being and relevant illustrations from Woolf’s diaries, letters, essays, stories and novels, this absorbing monograph explores in depth Woolf’s contribution to memoir as a unique genre, distinct from autobiography. This study recapitulates the form, from its history to Woolf’s work and that of her contemporaries, to the legacy evident today. Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 74, card wrappers, 32pp., ISBN 978-1-907286-40-7, price £6.00 Catalogue May 2015_Son of Heaven.qxd 20/05/2015 17:51 Page 4 Suellen Cox Mistress of the Brush and Madonna of Bloomsbury, The Art of Vanessa Bell: a Biographical Sketch and Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Writings on Vanessa Bell Vanessa Bell occupied a central place in the Bloomsbury group and has been described as ‘the pivot on which every important development’ in the group turned. Over the years, exhibitions celebrating Bell’s work and the other Bloomsbury artists have been numerous, well attended and positively received in critical circles. As to the place and importance of her work within the context of 20th century and British post-impressionism, however, there continues to be a lively debate. Due to the plethora of published material – books, monographs, articles, exhibition catalogues and reviews – historians, critics, researchers and students have had a difficult and time- consuming task in discovering all that exists. This book brings together in one source, a comprehensive listing and description of the formidable body of material relating to Vanessa Bell. Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 75, perfectbound paperback, 80pp., ISBN 978-1-907286-42-1, price £13.50 Vara S. Neverow Septimus Smith, Modernist and War Poet: a Closer Reading Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked war veteran in Mrs Dalloway , has been viewed by scholars more as a victim suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the Great War than as an unpublished modernist or war poet. Woolf, in her notes for drafting of the novel, considers the possibility of ‘S’s character … founded on me?’, partly because of his mental illness, but the parallel also suggests that Woolf may have intended for his ruminations to be read as sophisticated acts of creativity. Septimus’s poetic rhapsodies have not hitherto been directly linked to the daring experimental literary expression of such modernist poets as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound or of war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, nor have his drawings been aligned with the work of post-impressionist artists whose works were shown at the 1910 Grafton Galleries Exhibition. Bloomsbury Heritage series No. 76, card wrappers, 32pp., ISBN 978-1-907286-43-8, price £6.00 Catalogue May 2015_Son of Heaven.qxd 20/05/2015 17:51 Page 5 RECENT SUCCESSES Paula Maggio The Best of Blogging Woolf, Five Years On The plethora of interest in and commentary on Virginia Woolf available on the internet continues to grow. New references to Woolf and her work appear online every day. Blogging Woolf, which began publishing in July 2007, is an invaluable online resource that melds the personal and academic approach to Woolf, while providing documentation of her growing iconic popularity. This work collects some of the site’s most popular and enduring essays, as well as those that introduce new research or focus on Woolf’s relevance to the twenty-first century. The collected pieces in this volume emphasize the fact that Woolf scholars, general readers and fans can enter the common ground of the virtual public square to engage in conversation as equals while applying Woolf’s philosophy of democratic inclusiveness to the online world.