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Return to Bloomsbury

THESE two volumes from Palgrave derive from the proceedings of the 2004 conference, ‘Back to Bloomsbury’, but the collection does much more than bring an otherwise rather inaccessible set of papers into university libraries. Palgrave have produced handsome editions of these books, and the editors, Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari, have brought a correspondingly high standard of editing and selection to bear, as well as incorporating substantial new essays from Suzanne Raitt, Morag Shiach, Christina Alt, Gillian Beer and Anna Snaith. The result is a collection which presents important essays not available elsewhere, some of which promise to have a lasting impact on the field. Woolf scholars have been rightly wary of the term ‘Bloomsbury Group’, particularly of the implication that there was a unitary set of ideas and values that would fit under such a rubric. Yet Woolf’s formative years as a writer were spent in Bloomsbury, among a set of people who provided a fertile and stimulating intellectual milieu. As the title ‘Back to Bloomsbury’ implies, and ‘Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury’ also hints, a return to Woolf’s Bloomsbury contexts, one that carefully avoids caricaturing Bloomsbury as the hub of a unified intellectual movement, is timely and potentially very productive. The essays in these volumes take various routes in making their returns. A few, like Benjamin Harvey’s, find valuable material by moving back along the well-travelled lines of Bloomsbury’s intellectual networks; others find new directions from which to approach the confines of Bloomsbury. Anna Snaith’s paper is notable in this regard. Snaith is interested in drawing out Bloomsbury’s intersections with colonial writing and politics in a way that promises to reconfigure critical perceptions of the group’s relationship with empire. In this important essay she highlights links between Leonard and Virginia Woolf and two colonial writers, the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand and the Trinidadian historian and cultural critic C. L. R. James. Snaith not only elaborates the Woolfs’ surprising links with these two writers, developed mainly Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari, eds, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, vol. 1, Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £52.50 hardback 978 0 230 51766 0. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari, eds, Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, vol. 2, International Interest and Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £52.50 hardback 978 0 230 51767 7. Theodore Koulouris, Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf, Ashgate, 2011, £60 hardback 978 1 4094 0445 3. R E V I E W . .......