When Diana Swanson and Pamela Caughie first invited me to organize this roundtable, we discussed bringing together some of the contributors to Virginia Woolf and War, the 1991 essay collection published in the Syracuse UP series, Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution. But in the more than two decades since I claimed in that volume that “all Woolf's work is deeply concerned with war; that it helps redefine our understanding of the nature of war; and that from her earliest to her final work she sought to explore and make clear the connections between private and public violence, between the domestic and the civic eff ects of patriarchal society, between male supremacy and the absence of peace, and between ethics and aesthetics” (3), there has been such an abundance of sophisticated work done on violence in its many forms, both in the context of modernist studies and of Woolf scholarship generally, extending and complicating our understanding of violence, conflict, force and aesthetics, that a retrospective look seemed likely to be less valuable than more current reflections. It is a long time since it has been possible to think of Woolf in isolation from her contemporaries or as a voice disconnected from the political currents of her time. Virginia Woolf and War played its part in that transformation of Woolf's reception.

The four scholars on this roundtable each have thought deeply about issues of violence, war, peace, conflict, force, and form in the work of Virginia Woolf. In At The Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, Sarah Cole describes Woolf as “one of the great formalists of violence in the twentieth century” (37), a description that brought home to me the vast change in Woolf's cultural presence eff ected by the past few decades of scholarship. Ashley Foster's work examines the interrelationships among pacifism, modernism, and war and tries to recuperate the lost threads of modernism's pacifist history.