Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace

in fact, highly diverse and f lourishing-according to Joseph McAleer, 50,000 magazines were published in Britain in 1900 (25)-the mass media was constructed by modernists as a monolithic entity in decline. This construction, as Morrisson notes, was a rhetorical ploy, providing them with a useful "enemy . . . against which to position their work-in effect, to promote, to market their own efforts to use modernist literature and art to reshape public culture" (9). Virginia Woolf came of age in the midst of this fray between mass culture and serious literature, and she became a part of both sides from the get-go. As a writer who took to journalism with the specific goals of making money and gaining entry into the literary world, she resembled her fellow modernists, including Joyce and Mansfield. It is significant that Woolf spent twenty years, the first half of her career, primarily as a literary journalist, and that even after she had attained fame as a novelist (and a sizable income) she continued to write essays and reviews for literary publications until the very end of her life. Leila Brosnan and other critics are right to emphasize that we should not read her essays divorced from "material circumstances of production, since most of [them] were, in fact, first produced as literary journalism in the commercial public sphere" (41). In her roles as journalist and novelist, Woolf was clearly a literary professional, but this was a title she eschewed as a woman writing in a sexist and capitalist world. Her feminist politics, the idea of publication in particular, and, more generally, the experience of exposure in the public domain, all combined in ways to make her uncomfortable. The rising consumerism that marked the modern era was typically inf lected as feminine, as Rita Felski has argued in The Gender of Modernity, and in this new consumer culture, women were defined by the commodities they bought and by the very process of consumption. 4 At the same time Woolf felt ambivalent about the association of women with mass culture, she felt uneasy about joining the ranks of professional working women who were increasingly involved with its production. 5 As Anthea Trodd notes, Woolf decidedly did not want to be a "battered hack, . . . a recognized type for defining the woman writer as professional" (44). 6 Finally, as is most evident in Three Guineas, Woolf objected to the professional sphere because of its alignment with men, and because of its exclusivity-"its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed" (74). However, Woolf also did not want to be dismissed as an amateur or dilettante (Elliott and Wallace 72). She wanted to be taken seriously, and literary journalism itself gave her "a sense of her own worth as a professional writer Woolf did encounter more informal modes of censorship, including reviewers themselves (Whitworth, Virginia 90; Gordon 262); the buying public (see Neverow's essay in this volume); and increasing censorship in the marketplace of ideas (see McVicker's essay, also in this volume). Most of all, Woolf contended with internalized censors, most famously the Angel in the House, who represented, as Hermione Lee writes, "editorial pressures, an inhibiting sense of a male tradition of essay-writing (her father's tradition), and censored self-consciousness as a woman writer" ("Virginia" 92). For Woolf, ultimately, as Lyndall Gordon writes, "Truth cannot be found on show in the literary marketplace" (262). Though a professional woman, Woolf sought a mental space away from the marketplace in which to do her work. Writing in anonymity for the first half of her literary career provided Woolf with a space, as Anna Snaith writes, "to develop a voice for the public press" (90). Other spaces include Bloomsbury itself, which can be "seen as a protective, selfperpetuating realm, . . . [preventing] Woolf from having to deal with the public world" (Snaith 3) and the Hogarth Press, which "enabled her largely to escape the demands of publicity, to perceive herself as separate from the marketplace" (Garrity 197). Even when she was at the height of her powers she fantasized, as Sean Latham writes, about the "same sort of autonomy she imaginatively fashioned for Lily Briscoe, feeling that her creativity could only be properly exercised in isolation from the pressures of the literary marketplace" (90). Collier notes that this desire to "imagine a private, decontextualized and dehistoricized space of composition" (Modernism 71) is a recognizably modernist trope, and he remarks that Woolf, more than her fellow modernists, vigorously sought out this space. 25 Yet, while Woolf may have yearned for a place separate from the market, in practice she worked in the very heart of the literary marketplace. Remarkably her own writing space, while she lived in Tavistock Square, was located in the center of a bustling business, the Hogarth Press, "in what Leonard described as 'the most frightful disordereven squalor,' surrounded by . . . big brown paper bales of books.' " 26 In addition, she used her novels-her most imaginative works-as a stage on which to dramatize her views about the literary marketplace, most spectacularly in Orlando. Orlando, as Collier writes, is "a perpetually aspiring writer" attempting "to navigate the institutions of a series of historical literary marketplaces as a sort of Gulliver who repeatedly has to learn anew each culture's valuation of art, commerce, professionalism, and amateurism, all the while wavering personally between the \* \* \* The essays in this collection consider the many versions of Woolf in, her complex attitudes to, and her relationships with a variety of marketplaces. Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace is divided into four sections: (1) Woolf 's Engagement with the Marketplace, (2) Woolf 's Relationship to the Marketplace, (3) Woolf 's Marketplaces, and (4) Marketing Woolf. "Woolf 's Engagement with the Marketplace" considers Woolf 's specific forms of involvement with the marketplace, starting with her apprenticeship as a reviewer, moving onto the way Leonard also sought to generate sales in his role as the literary editor of the N&A, to, finally, the strategies she developed to deal with the market as a patriarchal place that would censor her feminism. The second section, "Woolf 's Relationship to the Marketplace," focuses on her role as a highbrow writer and, in that role, her ambivalence toward the marketplace. On the one hand, she sought to position herself as separate from it even as she sought to define herself in relation to it; on the other, she acknowledged her role as that of a player in the market and indeed embraced it, to some extent, as well. The essays in the third section, "Woolf 's Marketplaces," consider one of the places in which she published, the venue of the periodical, and popular forms in the literary marketplace, namely the familiar essay. The last essay in this section, on the metropolitan market, addresses Woolf 's awareness of herself as a writer in the global market. The fourth section, "Marketing marketplace increasingly regulated by British censors, Woolf turned to the practice of "positive nihilism" in her reconsideration of art, truth, and gender. Positive nihilism is the ability to persevere under the most oppressive of conditions even as one acknowledges the seeming futility of imagining change. Through literature, Woolf could speak to a future even as she witnessed the overall meaninglessness of human existence and its violence. By the 1930s, Woolf spoke from the position of an established if uncomfortably self-defined highbrow ("Middlebrow" 186). Focusing primarily on the 1920s, the three essays in the next section, "Woolf 's Relationship to the Marketplace," consider Woolf 's relationship with the marketplace in terms of her quest for literary status. In "How to Strike a Contemporary: Woolf, Mansfield, and Marketing Gossip" Katie Macnamara explores the friendship and rivalry between Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as an illustration of how writers try to gain or maintain a foothold in a competitive literary-intellectual marketplace. Just as Woolf, in her essays and fiction, practiced a form of gossip as a way to grasp the nature and complexities of the literary marketplace, so should readers of Woolf 's own writing emulate her in an effort to understand the production of literary reputation. "This inspiring new collection brings sharply into focus the consummate skill, astute expertise, and canny know-how with which Woolf negotiated, critiqued, and made use of the literary marketplace, maintaining both her 'brand' and her distance. Injecting renewed energy into this fascinating area of Woolf studies, these essays explore Woolf's unique position as writer, reviewer, and publisher, and set into productive dialogue the complex and contradictory impulses at work in her multifaceted engagement with the fluctuations of a varied and shifting economic context."--Kathryn Simpson, Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham and author of Gifts, Markets, and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf "Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace vividly presents a Woolf we've only infrequently glimpsed until now: one with printer's ink all over her hands. Dubino has assembled an impressive and diverse group of writers who, together, sketch for us a portrait of the artist as willing and savvy marketer. Woolf's writing and reputation will forever look different as a result."--Kevin J.H. Dettmar, Pomona College and Editor of the Oxford University Press Modernist Literature & Culture book series and General Editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature "Virginia Woolf is the lens through which these essays survey a rich cultural landscape, taking in periodical studies, translation, the economics and ideology of editing, entrepreneurship and marketing, the culture of censorship, and many other topics that will stimulate new conversations within modernist studies about the intersections of art and commerce. This is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection that will be of interest to anyone in modernist studies."--Mark Hussey, Professor of English, Pace University and General Editor, Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction....Pages 1-23 Front Matter....Pages 25-25 Reading, Taking Notes, and Writing: Virginia Stephen’s Reviewing Practice....Pages 27-41 Circulating Ideas and Selling Periodicals: Leonard Woolf, the Nation and Athenaeum, and Topical Debat....Pages 43-55 Woolf’s Editorial Self-Censorship and Risk-Taking in Jacob’s Room....Pages 57-71 Between Writing and Truth: Woolf’s Positive Nihilism....Pages 73-87 Front Matter....Pages 89-89 How to Strike a Contemporary: Woolf, Mansfield, and Marketing Gossip....Pages 91-106 Something of a Firebrand: Virginia Woolf and the Literary Reputation of Emily Brontë....Pages 107-120 Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein: Commerce, Bestsellers, and the Jew....Pages 121-133 Front Matter....Pages 135-135 Virginia Woolf and the Middlebrow Market of the Familiar Essay....Pages 137-149 Woolf Studies and Periodical Studies....Pages 151-165 The “Keystone Public” and Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, Time and Tide, and Cultural Hierarchies ....Pages 167-179 “Murdering an Aunt or Two”: Textual Practice and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf’s Metropolitan Market....Pages 181-195 Front Matter....Pages 197-197 The “Grand Lady of Literature ”: Virginia Woolf in Italy under Fascism....Pages 199-208 Translating Orlando in 1930s Fascist Italy: Virginia Woolf, Arnoldo Mondadori, and Alessandra Scalero....Pages 209-221 Appropriating Virginia Woolf for the New Humanism: Seward Collins and The Bookman, 1927–1933 ....Pages 223-235 Don’t Judge a Cover by Its Woolf: Book Cover Images and the Marketing of Virginia Woolf’s Work....Pages 237-252 Back Matter....Pages 253-263 Far from the lady in the modernist ivory tower, Virginia Woolf was very comfortable with the commercial side of the literary world . Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace is an exciting collection of fifteen new essays, by both renowned and up-and-coming scholars, exploring the many roles Woolf played in the world of commodity culture. As these contributors show, even after she became famous for her fiction, Woolf continued to engage with the market in its manifold facets, including marketing, production, pricing, copyright, technology, readership, reviews, and more Although best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote nearly six hundred essays and reviews for several dozen publications. These unique essays focus primarily on Woolf's nonfiction and consider her in the context of the modernist marketplace. With research based on new archival material, this volume makes important new contributions to the study of the "gift economy." These unique essays focus primarily on Woolf's non-fiction and considers her in the context of the modernist marketplace. With research based on new archival material, this volume makes important new contributions to the study of the 'gift economy.' These unique essays focus primarily on Woolf's non-fiction and considers her in the context of the modernist marketplace. With research based on new archival material, thic volume makes important new contributions to the study of 'gift economy'