Alice Wood

Made to Measure: Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping Magazine.

Virginia Woolf welcomed not only the economic rewards of her 37-year career as book reviewer and critic but also the multiple opportunities journalism presented for traversing and challenging the cultural boundaries of the literary market. This article focuses on a series of six articles Woolf contributed to the British edition of Good Housekeeping in 1931. Inconsistencies in the social critique of these essays, posthumously collected as The London Scene, are often explained with the supposition that Woolf was forced to trivialize her writing in anticipation of her middlebrow Good Housekeeping audience. Careful examination of Good Housekeepings origins, outlook and routine content in the 1920s and early 1930s reveals, however, that Woolfs feminist analysis of patriarchal London in this series was pertinently addressed to the predominantly female, middle-class readers of this popular womens magazine, whose interests and concerns were far more diverse than are often assumed.

Review of Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist (Edinburgh UP, 2015)

itself, and thereby to restore credibility in the colonial government’s legal process. Rizzuto argues that in their very different ways both de Lisser and Reid also attempt ‘to vindicate English law in their representation of the rebellion’ (p. 130). Chapter Four concludes the book with an extended discussion of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat. This creates a neatness to the structure of Insurgent Testimonies in respect of its literary examples, since A Grain of Wheat is commonly read as a rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, a connection which Rizzuto draws our attention to from the start. The connection between the two books is not laboured in her discussion, but it provides a welcome sense of literary comparison between the first and last chapters that is otherwise not sustained across the other portions of the book. This chapter, like Rizzuto’s discussion of The Meaning of Treason in Chapter Two, is also particularly productive in its integration of historical and literary materials and approaches. Importantly, in her early discussion of the relationship of A Grain of Wheat to Under Western Eyes, Rizzuto pushes back against a simple reading of the former as ‘‘‘belated’’ modernism’ (p. 182), acknowledging the different aesthetics at work in a text that responds not to Conrad, but which rather uses Conrad to take its bearings to respond to the political trauma of its own postcolonial moment. Insurgent Testimonies thus covers tremendous ground: geographically, temporally, culturally and critically. The range of Rizzuto’s matter is held together less by comparative study – the chapters are structured as discreet readings of individual authors – than by a continuous attention to the ways in which these various fictions and non-fictions dramatise moments of formal and informal testimony and witnessing (applying these terms capaciously). This attention to the representations of testimony allows Rizzuto, in turn, to unpack the ways that literary texts themselves bear witness to that incongruence of the law, which Agamben, Judith Butler and others have explored from philosophical and jurisprudential angles in recent years. Consequently, Insurgent Testimonies makes a stimulating contribution to the field of law and literature studies.

Clara Jones, Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist

itself, and thereby to restore credibility in the colonial government’s legal process. Rizzuto argues that in their very different ways both de Lisser and Reid also attempt ‘to vindicate English law in their representation of the rebellion’ (p. 130). Chapter Four concludes the book with an extended discussion of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat. This creates a neatness to the structure of Insurgent Testimonies in respect of its literary examples, since A Grain of Wheat is commonly read as a rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, a connection which Rizzuto draws our attention to from the start. The connection between the two books is not laboured in her discussion, but it provides a welcome sense of literary comparison between the first and last chapters that is otherwise not sustained across the other portions of the book. This chapter, like Rizzuto’s discussion of The Meaning of Treason in Chapter Two, is also particularly productive in its integration of historical and literary materials and approaches. Importantly, in her early discussion of the relationship of A Grain of Wheat to Under Western Eyes, Rizzuto pushes back against a simple reading of the former as ‘‘‘belated’’ modernism’ (p. 182), acknowledging the different aesthetics at work in a text that responds not to Conrad, but which rather uses Conrad to take its bearings to respond to the political trauma of its own postcolonial moment. Insurgent Testimonies thus covers tremendous ground: geographically, temporally, culturally and critically. The range of Rizzuto’s matter is held together less by comparative study – the chapters are structured as discreet readings of individual authors – than by a continuous attention to the ways in which these various fictions and non-fictions dramatise moments of formal and informal testimony and witnessing (applying these terms capaciously). This attention to the representations of testimony allows Rizzuto, in turn, to unpack the ways that literary texts themselves bear witness to that incongruence of the law, which Agamben, Judith Butler and others have explored from philosophical and jurisprudential angles in recent years. Consequently, Insurgent Testimonies makes a stimulating contribution to the field of law and literature studies.

Facing Life as We Have Known it: Virginia Woolf and the Women's Co-operative Guild

This article explores Leonard and Virginia Woolfs early interactions with the Womens Co-operative Guild and supplies a contextualised analysis of Virginia Woolfs preface to Life as We Have Known It (1931). Written to introduce a volume of autobiographical sketches by Co-operative Guildswomen and published in a variant form in the Yale Review, this essay has generated conflicting debate in Woolf studies. In this article I argue that the essay fictionalises Virginia Woolfs relationship with the Guild, concealing her familiarity with Guild activities to better engage an anticipated middle-class readership and promote frank interrogation of class prejudice.