The personal library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf is a treasure trove of clues for scholarly detectives. We can locate evidence to illuminate Virginia Woolf's work, or to support or amplify something we have already discovered there. For example, of several books that focus on London, two especially create biographical and cultural contexts for sculptural metaphors she devised for her characters and for specific London statues that appear among the characters’ rapidly shifting thoughts and feelings. The first is an edition of London Revisited (1916) by E[dward]. V[errall]. Lucas (1868–1938), a popular author who wrote for Punch and produced, under several pen names, nearly 100 books. The second, The People's Album of London Statues (1928), is a collaborative effort between writer Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) and artist Nina Hamnett (1914–1953). Their book reflects controversies about traditional versus modern statuary, parallel to those about painting, that Virginia Woolf no doubt had already read about and discussed, given the artistic and social networks in which she moved. Ultimately, observing London statues was part of her ongoing examination and disruption of social hierarchies.

Although I find no evidence that Woolf knew E. V. Lucas personally, she did review London Revisited for the Times Literary Supplement (9 November 1916). Lucas's book, she says, is for readers who want “to contemplate London” from the perspective of the author's interests (E2 50). One of these interests is outdoor statues to which he devotes five chapters. Lucas writes that London is less prone than Paris to outdoor statuary, partly because “the English mind does not tend much to this kind of celebration,” and also because marble in Paris “continues to dazzle” while in London it becomes “dreary and dingy” (70). Although much of London's statuary is therefore “under cover,” Lucas writes for “the pious pilgrim in the streets” (71).

In her review, Woolf generally agrees with Lucas's London/Paris contrast. She also confesses she is not “quite reconciled” to the imitative “attempt which has been made of late to comb out [… London's] huddle of little streets and substitute military-looking avenues with enormous symbolical mounds of statuary placed exactly at the wrong spot” (E2 50–51).