Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
5 - ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
Summary
As Eleanor Pargiter walks through Bloomsbury, glancing automatically into the basements, she notices
… a man in an apron … working at a case of type. She watched him … fascinated by the way he flicked type into a great box with many compartments; there, there, there; rapidly, expertly; until, becoming conscious of her gaze, he looked up over his spectacles and smiled at her. She smiled back. Then he went on, making his quick half-conscious movements. (Y, appendix, 390)
Can the man who smiles back at her be Leonard, in a uniquely framebreaking moment? In the first draft of this scene, Eleanor had glanced into a carpenter's shop. Woolf had deliberately changed this to a printing shop, although it is uncertain whether Leonard's trembling hand would have allowed him to ‘diss’ (distribute) type. This moment occurs in the ‘1921’ sequence, one of the ‘two enormous chunks’ that Woolf cut from The Years before publication. The passage is exceptional in several ways, not least in being one of the rare references to printing in Woolf's writings; yet, though she seldom discussed it, the impact of the Hogarth Press on her sense of what writing might be, as well as on her material practice of it, is widely acknowledged. Moreover, the Press introduced her to several key modernist writers, notably Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot: their work was among the first to be published by the Woolfs.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Virginia Woolf , pp. 80 - 95Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006