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1. Contradictory Woolf
Selected Papers from the
Twenty-First Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf

3. CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS
Contradictory Woolf
Selected Papers from the
Twenty-First Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, Scotland
9-12 June 2011
Edited by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki

4. iv
CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS
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ISBN: 978-0-9835339-5-5
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he painting on the back cover is by Australian artist Suzanne Bellamy, entitledWoolf and
the Chaucer Horse , 2011, oil on canvas; 13 ft. by 6 ft., originally created as a set canvas for
the Glasgow Pageant production, International Virginia Woolf Conference, 2011.
he Contradictory Woolf image (front cover & frontispiece) was designed for this confer-
ence by the Scottish artist Caroline McNairn (1955-2011).

5. v
Jane Goldman • Preface................................................................................................vii
Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki • Introduction to Contradictory Woolf................................ix
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................xv
List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................xvi
Judith Allen • “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”? ............................................ 1
Michael H. Whitworth • Woolf, Context, and Contradiction......................................... 11
Patricia Waugh • “Did I not banish the soul?” hinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise ............... 23
Suzanne Bellamy • “he Play’s he hing BUT We Are he hing Itself.” Prologue,
Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the
Late 1930’s and Her Vision of Prehistory ................................................................ 43
Marina Warner • Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood ............ 57
Lois J. Gilmore • “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the
Contradictions of African Art................................................................................. 66
Maggie Humm • Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf’s Writings on Art ...... 74
Amber K. Regis • “But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the
Contradictions of Biography ................................................................................... 82
Oren Goldschmidt • “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in he Years
and hree Guineas ............................................................................................... 88
Laci Mattison • Woolf’s Un/Folding(s): he Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque....... 96
Angeliki Spiropoulou • Woolf’s Contradictory hinking .............................................. 101
Sowon S. Park • he Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf ........108
Stella Bolaki • “When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics and
Contemporary Illness Narratives ........................................................................... 115
Janet Winston • Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To he Lighthouse.............. 122
Claire Nicholson • But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…: Virginia
Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction....................................................................... 129
Vara S. Neverow • Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of
One’s Own: he Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an
Calculated Cross-Dressing .................................................................................... 134
Katharine Swarbrick • Lacanian Orlando .................................................................. 142
Jeanne Dubino • he Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush .......................... 150
Derek Ryan • From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf’s Flush............. 158
Sam Wiseman • Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the
City in Woolf....................................................................................................... 166
Diane F. Gillespie • “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth
Press ................................................................................................................... 173
Madelyn Detlof • “Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of: Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust
in Woolf’s Economic Writing ................................................................................ 181
Kathryn Simpson • “Come buy, come buy”: Woolf’s Contradictory Relationship to the
Marketplace..............................................................................................................186
Makiko Minow-Pinkney • Virginia Woolf and December 1910: he Question of the
Fourth Dimension ....................................................................................................194
Table of Contents

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Jocelyn Rodal • Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition ........................ 202
Amanda Golden • “A Brief Note in the Margin:” Virginia Woolf and Annotating.......... 209
Gill Lowe • “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the
“Patron au Dedans”............................................................................................ 215
Kristin Czarnecki • Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s
Golden himble”, and the Anxiety of Authorship................................................... 222
Claire Davison • Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron ........................................ 229
Rebecca DeWald • “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”: Jorge Luis Borge’s
Translation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando............................................................... 243
Leslie Kathleen Hankins • “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films
“projected into the shape of Orlando”.........................................................................250
John Coyle • Travesty in Woolf and Proust................................................................... 259
Wayne K. Chapman • Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”............................. 265
Sara Sullam • Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf’s Rhetoric of Genres................... 271
Ian Blyth • Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act........278
Karen L. Levenback • Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf: “A Chapter on the
Future” ............................................................................................................... 285
Cecil Woolf • Duncan Grant...................................................................................... 291
Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 294
Conference Program.................................................................................................. 299

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Preface
by Jane Goldman
B
ut you may say “Why Contradictory Woolf? Why Glasgow?” Why not? For one
thing, Contradictory Woolf, the 21st Annual International Conference on Vir-
ginia Woolf (but the irst ever to be held in Scotland) opened the delicious oppor-
tunity for our assembling Woolf scholars to say “But” in the Bute Hall, that magniicent
Victorian chamber of intellect and scholarly debate at the heart of the neo-gothic ediice,
the Gilbert Scott Building, the centrepiece of the University of Glasgow, replete with
quads, lawns and gravel. But Woolf scholars take happy note: there is no law of trespass in
Scotland! And how splendid to have the rising and setting sun shining through the Bute
Hall’s stunningly beautiful stained glass windows, in which are depicted numerous ig-
ures, igures which, as the University website has it, “represent a wide range of characters
and subjects including writers, philosophers, scientists, theologians, saints, monarchs and
women [sic].” (Here we may say but doesn’t and sometimes mean but?) he women igures
in the eastern windows are personiications of seasons and virtues and other abstractions;
the men igures in the western are portraits of great men such as Plato, Chaucer, homas
Carlyle, et al. But there is one window in the Bute Hall commemorating three women
pioneers of Scottish university education, Jessie Campbell, Isabella Elder, and Janet Gal-
loway, and it is pleasing to note that there are still blank panes awaiting stains…How
gratifying to have our Principal remind us in his welcome speech that “but” in Scotland
is also an airmation, but! But how fabulous, too, to have on display, for the duration of
the conference at least, Suzanne Bellamy’s superb pageant painting depicting Woolf on
Chaucer’s horse with the sun streaming through its rich colours, its golden touches gleam-
ing, while the voices in the Bute Hall for four days sang out their buts and many other
wise and contradictory words too.
hose voices (and I have space only to mention the ive keynotes and must pass over
the plenary panels on bi, queer, war, and class as well as the numerous parallel panels
held in the Bute) included that of Judith Allen, author of an inspirational “but” paper
on Woolf, and now of the book Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language published by
Edinburgh University Press (2010). Teasing out the many valences of Woolf’s but in A
Room of One’s Own, Judith at one point reeled in the submerged pun on but meaning ish,
thereby enriching still more the contradictoriness of Woolian thought (already igured in
that work as ish). Michael Whitworth, reporting on the contradictory terrain between
text and context negotiated by scholarly editors of Woolf’s writing (he is editing, for the
new Cambridge edition, Woolf’s Night and Day, contradictory to the core and from the
very title) butted valiantly and brilliantly in recognition of Woolf’s utterly unconventional
and demanding use of allusion and intertext, observations that fuelled his dialogue with
the novelist Kirsty Gunn whose plenary reading from her stunning forthcoming novel,
he Big Music, followed his paper, and buts came thick and fast. But (…have I said “but”
too often?) it was becoming clearer with every contradictory voice that Woolf’s but is no
simple gainsaying device—argumentative yes, but dialogical, multivalent, and prolifer-
ating, and certainly not crudely reducible to the Cartesian binary—as explored by Pat
Waugh in her utterly spell-binding paper on Woolf’s engagement with concepts of the

8. viii
soul, consciousness and the extended mind. But dialogical, multivalent, and proliferating
are terms that only begin to do justice to Suzanne Bellamy’s keynote pageant-play, her
line of light out of Between the Acts, and her illuminating prefatory words, an exhilarat-
ing contradictory Woolian event of performative, participatory scholarship that raised
the buts to the very vaults of the Bute Hall at noon on the Saturday. But in the evening
the same hall took on more intimate mood and focus as we listened intently to Marina
Warner’s compelling “Report to the Memoir Club” relecting on the “ierce contrariness”
of the politics of Woolf’s but in view of the patriarchy in public and private—“the scorn
of oicial pomp, and her daughterly ambivalence towards her father”—and opening to
a reading of work-in-progress drawing on Marina’s colonial childhood in Cairo, an elo-
quent, Woolian line of light through fact and iction that brought new light to the Bute
Hall.
But how lovely, I thought, as we iled out for the bus that was waiting to take us to
dine, how serendipitous that the artist, and friend, Caroline McNairn, whom I commis-
sioned to design the Contradictory Woolf conference logo and poster (and now the image
on the front cover of this volume), was the person who irst introduced me to the work of
Marina Warner, when she took me to a gallery in Scotland in 1987 to hear her speak on
Nancy Spero’s goddess works…how she would have chuckled too to learn that Woolf’s
but may be a pun on ish…but Caroline had given us Woolf with a dog…but perhaps
she and perhaps Woolf knew that but in Spanish is pero which puns on perro meaning
dog…But here the three dots mark the three steps we climbed to board the bus which was
taking us to dine, and toast Woolf with the Baillie John McLaughlin, at a civic reception
in the marbled opulence of Glasgow City Chambers which Leonard Woolf and Virginia
Woolf once visited in 1913 and where our speaker over dinner was to be Cecil Woolf, and
we had a splendid evening but!

hank you to everyone who supported, attended and participated in Contradictory
Woolf. And very special thanks to Stella Bolaki and Derek (“I am William”) Ryan for
selecting and editing these wonderfully contradictory papers. No, but!
Jane Goldman
University of Glasgow
March 2012

9. ix
Introduction
by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki
I
n her 1939 essay “Reviewing,” published as one of the Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets,
Virginia Woolf suggests that the growing trade in reviews—“those few words devoted
to ‘why I like or dislike this book’” (E6 204)—meant that authors in the twentieth
century were less sure than ever of the true opinion of their writing, and that readers were
less likely to go out and buy a particular novel or collection of poetry based on them: “he
clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out” (E6 198). In her letters
and diaries Woolf also expresses a frustration with the many “contradictory” reviews of her
books, leading to uncertainty on her part about her own critical reception (see for example
L2 578, L2 587, L6 116). But contradicting the view that one contradiction negates an-
other, the very “contradictory Woolf” explored by independent scholars, writers, artists,
dramatists, “common readers,” and academics from around the globe (some of whom are
also, indeed, reviewers) at the 21st
Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf
ofered a range of fascinating new approaches to, and understandings of, Woolf’s writ-
ings. Whether opposing, questioning, interrupting or “butting,” the rich variety of essays
selected for this volume represent the view shared by so many of the speakers in Glasgow
that Woolf’s writing continually refuses settled readings or closed meanings, revealing
and reveling precisely in its potential or actual, subtle or forceful, contradictions. How
appropriate then that the dialogue was opened by the call for papers which, in honor of
the irst sentence of A Room of One’s Own (1929), invited participants to make ample use
the word “but” at in their presentation!
How appropriate, too, that the irst essay in this collection is Judith Allen’s thought-
provoking exposition of the repeated diference of Woolf’s “But,” as well as her paren-
theses and ellipses, in A Room of One’s Own, and of key terms in hree Guineas (1938)
including the word “word” itself. In this irst of ive plenary addresses, all included in this
collection, Allen draws on insights by Mikhail Bakhtin, Hayden White, and Gilles De-
leuze in order to focus on the interaction between text and context, illuminating the com-
plicated and contradictory celebration of words in Woolf’s writing, and the relationship
between her “multifaceted” language and her continually multiplying readers. Michael
Whitworth’s plenary paper is also concerned with context, and he considers the stakes
involved in putting aside old copies of Woolf’s texts for the several annotated editions,
relecting on his own experience of editing Night and Day (1919) for the new Cambridge
UP edition of Woolf’s writings, as well as outlining key critical strands in Woolf scholar-
ship which relate to the question of annotation. Stressing the importance of the reader
as “maker of meaning,” Whitworth argues that the job of annotator and critic is to be
rigorous in the process of contextualization, but not to mistake such rigor with provid-
ing a deinitive context. Our readings of Woolf are always enriched, Whitworth argues,
by access to further contextual information, even and especially when this information is
potentially contradictory. In her essay Patricia Waugh explores the contradictory notion
of an “embodied soul” and “grounded” thought in Woolf’s writing, and considers con-
cepts of consciousness and the extended mind. Waugh expertly charts the ways in which
Woolf, in her novels and essays, challenges Cartesian dualism and reconceptualises the

10. x
soul “in the terms of the vocabulary of ‘nerves’ rather than spirit,” a soul that is “bodily,
nervy, gossipy, easily bruised and touchy.” Suzanne Bellamy takes us from plenary paper
to plenary pageant, and her shimmering script, irst performed in Glasgow’s Bute Hall,
is reproduced here in full, along with an account of how her pageant was created. Bel-
lamy’s accompanying painting, “Woolf and the Chaucer Horse,” was stunningly present
throughout the conference, and she has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced on the back
cover of this book. Further creative ainities with Woolf are evident in Marina Warner’s
plenary address which focuses on “contrariness” with respect to authority, class and the
British Empire, and which brings Woolf into conversation with Voltaire. Warner discusses
the background to her work-in-progress, provisionally titled Inventory of a Life Mislaid,
and treats us to some sparkling paragraphs from it. Taken together, the ideas, contradic-
tions, and contexts opened up by these ive plenary addresses reverberate through the
other essays contained in this volume.
Contradictions in Woolf’s relationship to art and auto/biography within the context
of Bloomsbury are brought to the fore in essays by Lois Gilmore, Maggie Humm, and
Amber Regis. Gilmore focuses on Bloomsbury’s relationship to the African art that was
brought to England by that “contradictory and catalytic igure” Roger Fry, and that was
“by nature contradictory when de-contextualized and viewed from within Western cul-
ture.” Focusing in particular on the responses of Fry, Woolf and Clive Bell to the 1920 ex-
hibition of African objects at the Chelsea Book Club, Gilmore demonstrates “the nuanced
contradictions about African material culture” circulating in Bloomsbury. Humm discuss-
es Woolf’s accounts of Vanessa Bell’s art in autobiographical writings including “Reminis-
cences” (1976), and in her “Foreword to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell” (1930), arguing
that these do not only provide representations of her sister’s art, but that “Woolf gains a
self-presence” by experiencing Bell’s art “as a fabric of sensations, activating Woolf’s ‘be-
ing.’” he contradictions involved in writing Roger Fry (1940) provides the focus of Regis’s
paper, which shows how Woolf’s view of biography becomes increasingly contradictory
from “he New Biography” (1927) to “he Art of Biography” (1939).
he focus on Bloomsbury also includes further consideration of Woolf and the phi-
losophy of the Cambridge Apostles. Oren Goldschmidt contrasts Woolf’s view of the
complex negotiation between personal relationships and socio-political community with
G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. Woolf’s disagreements with Moore, and her metaphorical
and syntactical play, help her “to imagine functional forms of community” which are most
importantly explored in he Years (1937) and hree Guineas (1938). Woolf is placed in
dialogue with Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the “event” and Deleuze’s concept of
the “fold” in Laci Mattison’s reading of To the Lighthouse (1927). Mattison argues that in
Woolf’s writing we ind examples of “non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque,”
which Deleuze discusses via Whitehead, and where contradiction stands not so much for
“notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital moments” where “order and art continually
de- and re-compose.” In contrast to this, and extending Woolf’s “contradictory think-
ing” further beyond Cambridge philosophy, Angeliki Spiropoulou claims that Woolf’s
thought is resolutely “dialectical,” and calls on a range of essays including “How it Strikes
a Contemporary” (1923) and “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) as illustrative of Woolf
working through “oppositions between the classics and the moderns, the present and the
past, continuity and change.”

11. xi
he relationship between mind and body continues to be an important area of ex-
ploration for Woolf scholars. Complementing Patricia Waugh’s plenary, Sowon Park asks
how the body and mind can meet across disciplinary divides between cognitive science
and literature. Taking issue with psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pink-
er’s dismissal of Woolf’s modernism, and drawing parallels between the work of neuro-
scientist Antonio Damasio and Woolf’s model of mind, Park asserts that whilst thinking
and feeling “may seem like contradictory cognitive processes” they are “reshaped into a
continuum of ‘feeling of knowing’ in Woolf.” Park makes brief reference to “On Being
Ill” (1926) as an example of Woolf writing about “mind depending upon lesh,” and
Stella Bolaki’s essay explores Woolf’s contradictory discussion of mind and body in this
essay more fully. Bolaki points out the contradictions in Hilary Mantel’s recent reading
of Woolf’s essay which repeats the clichéd criticism of Woolf as an aesthete while at the
same time continuing aspects of her aesthetic project. he legacy of “On Being Ill” is not
so much that it gives us access to Woolf’s personal endurance through illness but that it
provides contemporary narratives of illness with a workable model of “translating pain
and raw sensation into verbal form.” From mind and body to thought and movement,
Janet Winston ofers a kinetic reading of To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. Movement,
Winston writes, occurs throughout Woolf’s novel “not only as something observed or
heard but also as something felt within the body,” so that even when a character like
Mrs Ramsay is stationed in a chair “her mental processes are strikingly embodied and
frequently in motion.”
Clothes, bodily pleasure and sexuality are discussed by several essays in the volume.
Claire Nicholson concentrates on Woolf’s relationship to clothing and fashion, arguing
that “Woolf’s perception of dress is not tailored to it the neutral tones of ambivalence,
but is more properly suited to the bolder lines of contradiction.” Woolf’s observations of
dress are “subtle and sufused with meaning,” but Nicholson also suggests Woolf knew
“how to indulge in sartorial pleasure, in fabric, as well as in iction.” In her discussion of
the four Marys in A Room of One’s Own, Vara Neverow makes the case for reading the
historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the “unmentioned Mary
Hamiltons who haunt” Woolf’s text. Whilst scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish
Ballad which was narrated by Mary Hamilton, Woolf, Neverow suggests, may have also
been inluenced by Henry Fielding’s ictionalised 1746 pamphlet, he Female Husband,
in which this lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton was the protagonist. Katharine Swar-
brick focuses on sexuality and desire in her Lacanian reading of Woolf’s Orlando (1928)
and Jacqueline Harpman’s 1996 novel Orlanda. Clarifying some key Lacanian concepts,
including jouissance, and countering common misuses of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
Swarbrick seeks to avoid “the reductive impulse to characterize masculine and feminine as
phallic/not phallic” and to complicate “attempts to see the homosexual and heterosexual
as pitted against each other.”
he relationship between human and animal, culture and nature, is of growing inter-
est to Woolf scholars. Noting that Flush (1933) is populated by “a menagerie of cats and
lions and tigers, partridges and parrots and rooks, elephants and ish and fox, black beetles
and blue bottles, hares and leas, and dogs,” Jeanne Dubino highlights the interconnec-
tions between species, and considers the “coevolutionary dimensions” in Woolf’s ictional
biography. Continuing the focus on Flush, Derek Ryan brings Woolf’s canine modernist

12. xii
aesthetics into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s “companion species” and Deleuze and
Guattari’s “becoming-animal.” Grounded in ordinary, domestic relations, but also recon-
ceptualising species boundaries, Woolf creates an “open, entangled zone of human and
animal.” he crossings between nature and culture are traversed in Sam Wiseman’s essay
which focuses on “ainities and interconnections that exist between the rural and urban
spheres.” Wiseman discusses passages from Orlando, Between the Acts (1941) and “Street
Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) in order to highlight the “modernist cosmopoli-
tan experience” portrayed in Woolf’s writing.
Several essays collected here explore Woolf’s contradictory approach to social be-
havior and class (a theme also discussed at the conference by David Bradshaw and Laura
Marcus in the closing plenary panel “Class Contradictions”). Diane Gillespie pairs hree
Guineas with Viola Tree’s Can I Help You?, published by the Hogarth Press in 1937, in
her consideration of “rules of etiquette.” Although Woolf’s writing has a much broader
intellectual scope, Gillespie suggests that Tree’s “personal, humorous touch” manages to
undermine “hierarchical rituals.” Discussing class and snobbery, Madelyn Detlof seeks to
account for that “irritating ‘contradictory’ Woolf who displays simultaneously class bias
and an acute understanding of the links between ideology, education, and material where-
withal.” Woolf’s “apparent contradictoriness” where class is concerned might be the result,
Detlof argues, of an ethical distancing rather than a straightforward elitism. Kathryn
Simpson turns to Woolf’s contradictory relationship to the literary marketplace. Simpson
complicates Woolf’s anti-Semitism in “he Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938), and argues
that this short story “can be seen to speak of both her wariness about the wolish greed of
the commercial world and her own Woolishly greedy part in it.”
Reading literature and mathematics together would seem to be a clearly contradic-
tory act, but Makiko Minow-Pinkney and Jocelyn Rodal illuminate the ways in which
these disciplinary boundaries are crossed by Woolf. Minow-Pinkney shows how ideas
circulating in 1910 of a “fourth dimension” might have inluenced Woolf’s iction as well
as her “mischievous theory of character and cultural transition” occurring “on or about
December 1910” (E3 421). In doing so, Minow-Pinkney discusses the connections be-
tween Cubism and pre-Einsteinian fourth-dimensional theory, and notes Woolf’s own de-
pictions of mathematicians in her novels. Inspired by Woolf’s practice of calculating word
count on drafts of her manuscripts, Rodal considers the “formal similarities” in Woolf’s
writing and the mathematics of David Hilbert who was “at the very center of high mod-
ernism in mathematics” and who shares an almost identical surname with Night and Day’s
Katherine Hilbery. Woolf may have depicted mathematics in opposition to literature in
her second novel and elsewhere, but her “representations of order and number parallel and
reigure Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics.”
Questions of authoriality and the writing process continue to be of interest to Woolf
scholarship. Amanda Golden assesses Woolf’s practice and views of annotation. Golden
focuses speciically on Woolf’s early essay “Writing in the Margin,” her annotations in her
copy of Agamemnon, and a depiction of annotation in the irst segment of he Years, show-
ing how Woolf’s contradictory relationship to academia is further complicated by her
encounters with marginalia. Gill Lowe explores the efects of self-censorship—the “patron
au dedans” or “invisible censor within” (E4 75)—on Woolf’s writing and editing. From
her very early experiences of this in the Hyde Park Gate News, Lowe highlights the ways

13. xiii
in which “Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf had, recurrently, to remove unwelcome
voyeurs; to eradicate the critical voices inhibiting the writing craft.” Kristin Czarnecki sees
Woolf’s “anxieties about authorship” in her discussion of Woolf’s children’s story “Nurse
Lugton’s Golden himble” (1966). Placing Woolf in dialogue with inluential essays by
Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, Czarnecki reminds us of the importance of return-
ing to the text rather than author, the creation rather than creator.
Several papers explore cultural connections and contradictions, focusing both on
translation and on the cultural travels Woolf’s writings take us on. Claire Davison focuses
on Koteliansky and Woolf’s translation of Dostoevsky, assessing what exactly Woolf’s role
in this translating process was, and how this translation difered from other English and
French versions. Koteliansky and Woolf’s translation is “double accented” and contradic-
tions are not resolved; they achieve what Davison terms “an avant-garde translation, an
oxymoron if ever there was one.” From Woolf as translator to Woolf translated, Rebecca
DeWald considers Jorge Luis Borges’s 1937 translation of Orlando. DeWald details how
the reception of the novel in Latin America difered from its Anglo-American audience as
a result of key distinctions between English and Spanish language systems, but argues that
a “mutually enriching dialogue” is created by the “presumed equality (rather than a hierar-
chy) of the original text and its translation.” In Leslie Hankins’s essay we are escorted on a
journey from literary to visual. Illustrating Orlando’s cinematic inter-texts in 1920s travel
ilms, Hankins shows that through the creation of “ilm clip portals,” Woolf “does not
simply borrow from ilm; she re-directs it,” ofering the “gift of travel” to Vita Sackville-
West, and other readers, and adding a cinematic element to her playful love letter.
Further literary encounters are also documented in essays that place Woolf in conver-
sation with Marcel Proust and W. B. Yeats, and in a consideration of Woolf’s relationship
to poetry more broadly. John Coyle reads passages from À la recherche du temps perdu
alongside Jacob’s Room (1922) and Orlando, as well as Woolf’s letters and diary entries on
Proust. Whether through a “Proustian moment” or a “travesty of one,” we ind in Woolf,
as in Proust, a fascination with time, sexuality, and “metaphorical lights.” Woolf’s en-
counter with Yeats (and Walter de la Mare) at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s in November 1930
provides the focus of Wayne Chapman’s essay. Presenting unpublished material by Yeats
alongside Woolf’s diary entries and letters recounting their meeting, Chapman contextu-
alises the conversation that led Yeats to write “Spilt Milk,” a poem that opens with a “We”
which refers to Yeats, Morrell, de la Mare, as well as to Woolf. Sara Sullam elaborates on
Woolf’s relationship to poetry, poets and poetic forms, arguing that they play “a crucial
role in Woolf’s literary achievement.” Considering a range of Woolf’s essays which discuss
“contradiction between prose and poetry,” Sullam suggests that Woolf reaches a “rhetori-
cal understanding of genres,” where distinctions between prose and poetry can never be
settled.
War continues to provide an important context for our readings of Woolf. Ian Blyth
traces some of the “darker currents” in Night and Day which reveal the conditions on the
home front during the First World War. In particular, Blyth argues, aspects of the emer-
gency legislation introduced through the “Defence of the Realm Act” ind their way into
Woolf’s second novel, evident in “all of the surveillance and subterfuge” the characters are
involved in. War also provided the theme of a plenary roundtable in Glasgow, and Karen
Levenback’s introduction is included in this collection. Levenback shows how interest in

14. xiv
Woolf and war continues to grow, and she provides a summary of the contribution made
by the other members of this panel: Stuart Clarke, Lolly Ockerstrom, Vara Neverow, Ei-
leen Barrett, and co-chair Jane Wood, whose edited collection, he heme of Peace andWar
in Virginia Woolf’s Writings (2010), was the inspiration for the roundtable.
To end the Selected Papers we are delighted to include Cecil Woolf’s talk, delivered
at the Conference Banquet in Glasgow’s City Chambers. Sharing some of his memories
of “the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group,” Duncan Grant, Cecil at one point ex-
presses disappointment that although Duncan enjoyed parties and dressing up, he never
saw him “in his national dress, a kilt and sporran.” Whilst there may also have been dis-
appointment among delegates that no kilts were on show at the irst ever Virginia Woolf
conference to be held in Scotland, we hope that the energy, creativity and intellectual
labour that was so abundantly present in Glasgow is captured in the essays collected in
this volume.
Work Cited
Woolf, Virginia. “Reviewing.” he Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 6: 1933-1941. Ed. Stuart N.Clarke. London: he
Hogarth Press, 2011. 195-209.

15. xv
W
e wish to thank all those who participated in the 21st
Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf for helping to make it such a memorable occa-
sion. hank you to the contributors for their stimulating essays, and we would
also like to acknowledge the many excellent papers we were unfortunately unable to ind
space for in this collection (the full conference program can be found at the end of this
volume). A very special thank you to Jane Goldman for being the driving force behind the
conference and for inviting us to edit this collection. hank you to Kristin Czarnecki for
her helpful advice as we embarked on the editing process. Finally, we would like to thank
Wayne Chapman and his colleagues at Clemson University Digital Press for all their work
in bringing Contradictory Woolf to publication.
Acknowledgments

16. xvi
Virginia Woolf
Standard Abbreviations
(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)
AHH A Haunted House
AROO A Room of One’s Own
BP Books and Portraits
BTA Between the Acts
CDB he Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays
CE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4)
CR1 he Common Reader
CR2 he Common Reader, Second Series
CSF he Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick)
D he Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5)
DM he Death of the Moth and Other Essays
E he Essays of Virginia Woolf (eds. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie,
6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6)
F Flush
FR Freshwater
GR Granite and Rainbow: Essays
HPGN Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe)
JR Jacob’s Room
JRHD Jacob’s Room: he Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop)
L he Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Traut-
mann, 6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6)
M he Moment and Other Essays
MEL Melymbrosia
MOB Moments of Being
MT Monday or Tuesday
MD Mrs. Dalloway
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
PA A Passionate Apprentice
RF Roger Fry
TG hree Guineas
TTL To the Lighthouse
TW he Waves
TY he Years
VO he Voyage Out
WF Women and Fiction: he Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own
(ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)

17. “BUT…I HAD SAID ‘BUT’ TOO OFTEN.” WHY “BUT”?
by Judith Allen
W
hy “but” indeed? Had one of Virginia Woolf’s narrators in A Room of One’s
Own (1929) “said ‘but’ too often”? And how many times is “too often” for that
dreaded word we all anticipate, the word that may make us angry? It’s a word
that interrupts, undermines our most cogent assertions, attempts to transform our thinking,
as it profers a difering point of view. But—to immediately express, enact, and perhaps con-
tradict what I have just stated—it is also the word we all rely upon to implement those some-
times subversive acts. And we treasure that opportunity! he word “but,” therefore, in its
variously resistant modes, seems to me the perfectly limited yet enormously resonant entry
point for my exploration of our richly provocative conference title: “Contradictory Woolf.”
he word “but”—in addition to its varied functions in all of our dialogues—stands
as a crucial turning point in my own complicated relationship with Woolf’s writings, and
can be traced back to my very irst reading of A Room of One’s Own. In my initial experi-
ence of this text, I was captivated by the narrator’s self-conscious questioning of her own
use of “but,” partially quoted in my title: “But…I had said ‘but’ too often. One cannot go
on saying ‘but’. One must inish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I inish it,
‘But—I am bored!’ But why was I bored?” (AROO 104). I knew that I would go back to
this passage—as I have many times over more than twenty years—for those self-conscious
references to “but” always called for further investigation. My focus on “words” began
with an earlier close reading of the beginning of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). he
equivocation was palpable as I noted the words “if,” “may,” “seemed,” “perhaps,” and “but”
in the interchange between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as they responded to their son James’s
longed for trip to the lighthouse: “Yes, of course, if it’s ine tomorrow”; “‘But,’…‘it won’t
be ine’”; “‘But it may be ine —I expect it will be ine’”; “‘No going to the Lighthouse,
James’”; “‘Perhaps it will be ine tomorrow’” (TL 9,10,11, 26, emphasis added). his ex-
emplary dialogue conveys the conlictual relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, expressed
by the repetitive equivocation and/or certainty of their responses. His parents’ dialogue
provides us with the contradictory yes/no, including the resistance of Mr. Ramsay’s “but,”
and Mrs. Ramsay’s retaliatory use of “but” in her attempt to override her husband’s nega-
tivity. My subsequent interest in Woolf’s use of the word “but,” and in the political rami-
ications of “but,” however, did not emanate from this early reading of To the Lighthouse,
although the indeterminate language seemed to jump of each page.
he irst page of A Room of One’s Own, however, was reminiscent of To the Light-
house, permeated as it was with similar terms of equivocation: “try,” “might,” “may,”
“seemed,” and, of course, “but” (AROO 3). Interrogating “what the words meant,” there
were repetitious questions about the title, “women and iction,” of what it “might mean,”
what the narrator “may have meant it to mean,” and ofering additional interpretations
of what this title “might mean,” at least six times on that irst page. he narrator seemed
to be questioning any semblance of certainty regarding “what the words meant,” for
the words “seemed not so simple” (AROO 3). But the narrator found that “the most

18. 2 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
interesting” examination of these difering options—“inextricably mixed together”—
had one caveat: “I should never be able to come to a conclusion” (AROO 3). No “nuggets
of truth” prevailed; indeterminacy ruled. And so I forged ahead, with some trepidation,
searching for a topic for my irst graduate seminar on Virginia Woolf, and kept return-
ing to the narrator’s question: “But why was I bored”? With some semblance of relief,
it was settled: “Boredom will be my topic!” Of course, being “bored” was an important
aspect of this passage, as immediately explained by a description of Mr. A’s novel, with
“the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree it casts
within its shade.” Clearly, “nothing will grow there” (AROO 104). he “creative energy”
of Mr. A’s mind was blocked, expressing dryness, a distinct lack of life, and it certainly
shared much with the compartmentalized mind of the critic, Mr. B, for “his feelings no
longer communicated,” and his sentences were “dead” on arrival. here is no Mr. C in
this text, but we are directed to a very diferent kind of sentence written by Coleridge, for
in one’s mind “it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas” and “has the secret
of perpetual life” (AROO 105).
I began to question the relationship between the lifelessness of Mr. A’s writing and the
complex functions of the word ‘but’. But more importantly, I questioned writing a paper
on the word ‘but’? As a pre-medical student, taking mostly required math and science
courses, I spent much time looking through a microscope—exploring the building blocks
of life, the structure of cells, studying DNA, chemical formulas—and had little experience
writing papers. Given my background in science—a seemingly obvious contextual force
in my life at that time—I had questions regarding Woolf’s intense interest in how “mean-
ings” are determined, who has the power to designate those meanings, and what part
“context” plays in this important endeavor. I think now about those “invisible presences”
(MOB 80) that held sway in my life, although I had not yet read Woolf’s Moments of Be-
ing, and was just beginning to think about the ininite possibilities of “context.” Always
in process—text, contexts, readers—we can only speculate about the exceptionally com-
plicated interactions, and the role of “context” in an extremely complex reading process.
Woolf is clearly interested in context and contingency, and her writings utilise multiple
points of view, difering seasons, difering time-frames, to intentionally vary contexts,
and show contingency. Ultimately, we have learned from studies by Hayden White, M.M
Bakhtin, and others—including Woolf—that context is “undecidable” (White 186). As
readers, we are pushed to be critical thinkers, to “come to our own conclusions” (CR2
258), and to accept being in a state of uncertainty. Questions abound. What contextual
forces impact “our own conclusions,” and how conscious are we of any of this? Many of
these issues will be addressed in the latter part of this paper, for it is this undecidability
that relates to the problematics of language, the multifaceted nature of words, and our in-
ability to “know” people, our world, or the words from which they are constructed, with
any degree of deinitiveness.
Looking once again at what I have come to call the “but”passage, quoted above, I be-
gan to focus on its repetitive aspects. After ive “buts” in as many sentences, I assume that
the reader of A Room of One’s Own is not so much interested in why the narrator is bored,
as why she keeps repeating “but.” Why does this essay, which, incidentally, also begins
its irst and last sentences with the word “but,” seem to reverberate with its signiicance?
Indeed, its sentences do get inished—but with enough equivocation so that “but,” along

19. 3
Why “but”?
with “perhaps” and “might,” becomes, inevitably, the expected conclusion—or rather, the
lack of conclusion. In fact, throughout this essay, Woolf’s narrators inform their readers
of their diiculties, talk about their feelings, and speculate about the forms and methods
used to express their experiences. hat the irst word of A Room of One’s Own is “but” does
not seem mere chance, for Woolf’s narrator in “he Modern Essay” declares that the essay
“should lay us under a spell with its irst word” (CR 1 211). One does wonder, however,
what kind of “spell” is cast upon the reader when “but” not only begins a text, but is also,
in the immediately established dialogue, transferred to the reader’s lips by the narrator? By
giving this line to the reader, the narrator places herself “in the position of the one asked”
(D4 361), thus transferring a sense of uncertainty, as well as resistance, to the reader.
Interestingly, the varied deinitions of “but”—including “except,” “outside,” and “on the
contrary”—to name just a few, seem to echo the marginal position of women in our
culture; and quite signiicantly, several of these words are used in A Room of One’s Own to
describe the woman “walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of
that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (AROO 101,
emphasis added). “But,” as a noun, also refers to a “ish,” which may it in with Woolf’s
ishing metaphor; a “but,” in Scotland, refers to the outer room, especially the kitchen of
a cottage. And, of course, to “but in” is to interrupt, interfere, or to thrust against. All of
these reverberate in some sense with Woolf’s usage.
With the constant intrusion of “but,” the text simultaneously resonates with the
multiple interruptions in women’s lives and the resultant openness created by these breaks.
One thinks Mary Carmichael must have been using “but” to “break the sentence” and
“break the sequence” (AROO 95), for “Life’s Adventure” surely moves in this way. It
seems, very simply, that “but” will serve to negate the state of boredom which Woolf’s
narrator both describes and questions, for “but” refuses that boredom by leaving things
open, creating new possibilities; this coincides, of course, with what Woolf considers a
necessary vitality, the essence of life. “But,” in its ambiguity, functions as a connective,
as a way of continuing and extending, although it also resists that continuity, cuts things
of, and most importantly, negates what was said before its appearance. One can assume
that something preceded the narrator’s opening word, as one always assumes with “but”
that something will follow. “But,” in its linkage with the marginality of women, serves to
enact their exclusion and oppression with its strategically placed interruptions. Leading
up to the iconic scene of refusal at the library door, the narrator’s thoughts turn to “that
wild lash of imagination” (AROO 7) in the essays of Lamb as speculation about Lamb’s
thinking regarding Milton’s possible revision of Lycidas, as well as her own thinking about
alterations of major literary works, and whether those revisions improved the style or the
meaning: “But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a ques-
tion which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must
have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way…with
black gown and not white wings” (AROO 7, emphasis added). he narrator’s quest is now
interrupted by “but,” as her path was previously intercepted and diverted by the Beadle.
“But” by interrupting the sentence as well as her entrance to the library, also interrupts
her thoughts and imaginings, her intellectual curiosity, and, most importantly, her desire.
What follows “but” is the fact of her exclusion. Her imagination shrinks into the back-
ground—as does her all-important freedom. his imaginative freedom, although negated,

20. 4 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
is, as Wolfgang Iser asserts in another context, still on the page—still visible to the reader,
and thus, still a viable option (Iser 169).
Also visible to the reader, and explicitly foregrounded by Woolf’s various narrators
throughout the text, are ellipses and parentheses; interrupting and intruding themselves
into sentences, they call attention to the constructed nature of the text, and to the process
of writing. As the narrator poses a question regarding truth and illusion, the ellipsis takes
center stage: “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that
destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For truth…those dots mark the spot where,
in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham” (AROO 15).
his questioning of truth and illusion is also replicated as the ellipsis blurs textual
boundaries. his mark of punctuation, the ellipsis, is talked about as if the dots which
structure it were really marks on “the road to Headingley.” hat no conclusion was found
on the road to Headingley similarly blurs boundaries and calls attention to the text as a
construct. he narrator’s pursuit of truth continues with a trip to the British Museum
Library; here the narrator designates a diferent meaning for this particular ellipsis, this
time equating it with time, surprise, and confusion: “…the ive dots here indicate ive
separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment” (AROO 26). Readers may
also experience surprise at this confusing interruption of the action, for it also foregrounds
a direct question to women: “Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed ani-
mal in the universe?” (AROO 26). his direct question, albeit qualiied, serves to distance
her readers in order to gain their attention as the narrator continues to investigate her
inability to capture the “truth” about women. he clearly contradictory aspect is that “the
most discussed animal in the universe” is essentially indescribable, since “there is no mark
on the wall to mark the precise height of women” and that women are “almost unclassi-
ied” (AROO 89)—“almost” meaning “all but.” his is an important term for Woolf, as
her readers try to ascertain deinitions, question deinitions, and applaud the resistance
to deinitions. I will add more on the problematics of “deining”—as it appears in hree
Guineas (1938) —in a latter section of this paper.
Another device which functions to distance readers by its intrusion into A Room of
One’s Own is the parenthesis. Working as an aside, it can add something new that may
seem out of place, or abruptly change the direction of the thoughts being conveyed; in
another sense, it makes what had been contextualized in a certain way suddenly become
the context for the newly added parenthetical statement. his sometimes self-conscious
disruption of the narrator’s “train of thought” also serves to disrupt the thinking of her
readers; it moves the reader of the path, as the narrator was moved of the path by the
Beadle. One is reminded of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse where catas-
trophes are scattered, parenthetically, to place them in the context of another kind of
destruction; that they are mentioned as Kafka might mention them—so very noncha-
lantly—also serves to foreground them, to empower them. hese interruptions by “but,”
and by the ellipses and parentheses, serve as a partial solution to the narrator’s boredom
with the discourse of Mr. A’s and Mr. B’s writings. Mr. B’s mind “seemed separated into
diferent chambers…” (AROO 105), and this lack of connection seemed to deny access
to his feelings, and in his sentences, “it is the power of suggestion that one most misses”
(AROO 105); this suggestiveness is a call for openness, for contradictions, and a certain
wildness. he “smooth lawns” (AROO 9) of the men’s colleges, perceived as lacking this

21. 5
Why “but”?
wildness, are compared to the “wild unkempt grasses” (AROO 20) of the women’s college
at Fernham, for the roughness and disorder hold more interest. he narrator’s boredom is
also a critique of this smoothness, of the hard and the barren; these qualities are aligned
with cultural traditions that exclude women, with language and forms that cannot express
women’s lives, and with a rigidity that negates creativity; it is also a critique of an age of
“pure, of self-assertive virility” (AROO 106), of Fascism.
here is much that acts to counter the rigidity and ixity of patriarchal institutions,
the lifeless inscriptions of members of those institutions, and the “spirit of peace” which
prevails when one stays “on the paths,” or “in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge”
(AROO 6). For the narrator, trespassing, crossing boundaries, or stepping on the forbid-
den turf are precipitated by a degree of excitement, and by “the mysterious property” of
ideas; these thoughts “lashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas
that it was impossible to sit still” (AROO 5). When intercepted and chased from the
turf onto the gravel, however, these thoughts and ideas, imaged by Woolf’s narrator as
“my little ish”—with ish being another deinition of “but”—are sent into hiding. Us-
ing “but” in exchange for “ish,” and sending it “into hiding,” reiterates the banishment
of the imagination, for in getting rid of this mode of interruption one smoothes out the
text as one smoothes out the turf. his sequestering of ideas, of imagination, where “the
roughness of the present seemed smoothed away” (AROO 6), is equated with a dull and
lifeless quality. he smooth, irm, and polished surface is reminiscent of F.T. Marinetti’s
Futurist Manifesto of 1909—with its “dreamt of metalization of the human body,” and is
equated with speed, violence, contempt for women and a repetition of the past, with war
as necessary for the health of the human spirit (Benjamin 241). To counter this stiling of
ideas, imagination, and creativity, A Room of One’s Own performs the essayistic, privileging
mobility, wandering, and the crossing of boundaries. “But” enables this activity by open-
ing up possibilities. he desire for movement, and all that that engenders is evident in the
deprivation of this activity; even the fact that there was no “walking tour” (AROO 54) for
women contributed to the stiling of their thoughts and imaginings. And if one returns to
the varied meanings of the “gravel”—the place of her exclusion—one inds both “bewil-
dering” and “mysterious” amongst those meanings; by making the statement, “the gravel
is the place for me” (AROO 60), she has assertively taken back—owned—her designated
place of exclusion, with its rough mystifying surface.
he privileging of movement echoes in the oscillation between the “rambling”
(AROO 83) and “strolling” (AROO 6) of the narrators and the constraints that try to
maintain the nineteenth century’s notion that women be silent and still. Subverting soci-
ety’s rules, these women must take the wrong turn—as the use of “but” was responsible for
the wrong turn to Headingly—duck around the corner, and let the line of their thoughts
“dip into the stream” (AROO 5). his activity is both their resistance, and their tactic for
survival. he desire of a narrator to “expose what was in her mind to the air” (AROO 19)
expresses her need for freedom. As the narrator thinks about the mysterious qualities of
the mind, and just how it functions, she simultaneously enacts this process before her
readers; her readers/audience watch her as she thinks about the mind thinking, and her
tentative conclusion regarding this state of the mind is “that it seems to have no single
state of being.” Most importantly, it “is always altering its focus, and bringing the world
into diferent perspectives” (AROO 101).

22. 6 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Woolf’s narrator constantly speculates about the reader’s response to her assigned
topic, and her own efectiveness with the assignment. In her attempt to “show how one
came to hold the opinions one holds” (AROO 4), to show the process of her thinking,
Woolf’s self-consciousness regarding language, punctuation, changes of narrative voice,
and changes of scene becomes a prominent strategy. his self-consciousness produces an
interesting efect on her readers, for it both engages them and distances them, continuing
the oscillating movement that repudiates—in yet another way—the rigidity and ixity of
forms, institutions, people, and the language used to construct them.
his distancing of the reader has some resonance with Bertolt Brecht’s “estrange-
ment efect.” One of the important goals of Brecht’s “Epic heatre,” which relates to
many of Woolf’s novels1
—and particularly to A Room of One’s Own and hree Guineas—is
to have her audience discover the conditions of life. Sallie Sears sees aspects of Brecht’s
“Epic heatre” in the context of the audience of Miss La Trobe’s play in Between the Acts
(1941), and inds that “it is predicated upon the assumption (so crucial to modernists like
Brecht, Artaud, Peter Weiss) that an audience that sees deplorable truths, hitherto uncon-
scious, hidden, or denied, will not only deplore, but seek to abolish the circumstances that
brought them into being” (Sears 229). his takes place through an interruption of hap-
penings (as Woolf’s narrator is interrupted when she opens the door of the library, or the
text is interrupted by “but,” by a parenthetical comment, or a reference to punctuation).
he narrator also periodically interrupts her own narrative in order to undermine the il-
lusion her audience has accepted. To accomplish this, the narrator simply points out to
the reader that she is creating scenes and ictionalizing, thus causing them to acknowledge
that the impervious boundary between fact and iction is not so easily discernible. Like the
songs, captions, and exposed stagecraft of Brecht’s “Epic heatre,” Woolf’s use of “but,”
the ellipses, the parentheses, and the other self-conscious references to the text function
to impair the illusion.
Calling attention to the constructed nature of the text, to words as words, and to
what may have been withheld, serves to distance the readers—to make them, at times,
spectators or outsiders—thus enabling them to critique those institutions which continue
to structure and have power over their lives, and perhaps to enact some necessary resis-
tance. In their repeated use of “but,” Woolf’s narrators did enact this necessary resistance,
and it was interesting to explore the manuscript versions of A Room of One’s Own, along
with the Typescript excerpts from Women & Fiction, when inally published in 1992.
Referring to Kipling’s books which “puzzled” Woolf’s narrator, she went on to call him “a
man of undoubted genius,” and stated that “nothing can surpass his vividness,” but she
deinitely had a “but” to intrude on this positive description: “But—were ‘buts’ beginning
again? What did I mean by ‘but’ this time?” (Women & Fiction 189). hese questions
about “but” are clariied as the narrator continues to discuss the works of Galsworthy as
she inds that “it was precisely the same ‘but’ that had interposed itself between me and
Mr. Kipling” (189). She found that she was “saying ‘but’ then to the emotional values. he
sentiment of these famous writers seemed to me sentimentality; their reality to me was
unreal” (189). She was clearly an “outsider” to these works, and found that “it is no more
possible for me to write an intelligent criticism of their books than to write intelligently of
the Boat race, when I do not know bow from stern or cox from stroke” (190). Diference
was paramount, and this is clearly established in hree Guineas as the need for resistance

23. 7
Why “but”?
becomes evident as the “daughters of educated men” (a term deining women in relation
to men, which in this and its variant forms is repeated over 100 times) work to transform
the language of patriarchy, assess their need to stop repeating the words and methods of
their brothers, following the procession of their fathers and brothers, or being educated
in their brothers’ schools.
Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own both expresses and enacts its cultural critique by mak-
ing certain that its readers not only see the signiicance of the women of their culture as
“outsiders,” but also appropriate that position for themselves. In Woolf’s 1938 feminist
anti-war polemic, hree Guineas, she also utilizes her textual strategies for this purpose,
but also has her narrator create an “Outsiders’ Society.” here is no desire to “merge our
identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which soci-
ety, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity
‘hree hundred millions spent upon arms’” (TG 105). Staying “outside,” they infuse that
society with their values, for the “Outsider’s Society” will not “ight with arms.” We ind
that “the very word, ‘society’ sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall
not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you
shall not—such was the society relationship of brother and sister for many centuries” (TG
105). As the word “society” is repeated eleven times on this page, and the word, “inevi-
tably” is also repeated, we gain a sense of the certainty—the rigidity —of society’s sanc-
tioned operation: “Inevitably, we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomera-
tion of people into societies that releases what is most selish and violent, least rational and
humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you,
so harsh to us, as an ill-itting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the
will” (TG 105, emphasis added). I certainly noticed the repetition in hree Guineas with
my irst reading, but it took many close readings to gain a sense of the extent of Woolf’s
use of the rhetorical device of repetition in this text (Caughie 116).
Interestingly, this ongoing discovery of repetitive words and phrases—after multiple
readings—is responsible for my decision to focus my latest paper on an iconic passage, the
contested scene of the burning of the word “feminist.” What was so interesting about my
latest re-reading of hree Guineas was the realisation that Woolf’s narrators do not simply
allude to and repeat many signiicant words deined by those in power, but repetitively
refer to these words as “words”: “the word ‘patriotism’” (TG 9), the “word ‘inluence’”
(TG 17), the “word ‘free’” (TG 101), and the “word ‘society’” (TG 105). his distinction
is signiicant—in ways reminiscent of Rene Magritte’s “Pipe” painting—as it interrogates
the problematics of representation, of deinition, addressed so self-consciously in hree
Guineas. As Laura Marcus notes, Woolf “emphasises the written nature of her text and the
politically loaded nature of words” (Marcus 227), for these words convey the multifarious
constructs we designate as “meanings.” Within this framework, the burning of the word
“feminist” remains, not surprisingly, fraught with controversy—and perhaps, like so many
words throughout this text, diicult to “deine.” Interestingly, the word “deinition” also
permeates this text, for there are repeated attempts to “deine” words, and to express the
complex diiculties of such an endeavor.
After multiple readings of this scene of burning the word “feminist,” I was struck by
the heretofore “unseen” repetition of the word “word,” twenty-ive times in this paragraph;
the word “feminist” is to be destroyed because it is “an old word, a vicious and corrupt

24. 8 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
word,” a “dead word” that is now “obsolete” and “without a meaning” (TG 101). As I
explored the various words that were repeated, I read the narrators’ commentary about
“repetition,” “education,” “history,” as these subjects were interrogated. It was not surpris-
ing that many of these repeated words such as “education,” “society,” “inluence,” and “at-
mosphere,” resonate and interact with each other, and with what is generally construed as
“context,” as they each serve to illuminate the gendering of “diference.” In my exploration
of “diference,” I examined the interaction between “context,” “diference” and “repetition.”
heorists of language, culture, and history, such as Bakhtin, Hayden White, and Woolf, to
name a few, have ofered interpretations of “context” that serve to illuminate the relation-
ship between “diference” and “context,” and are so important to their mutual interaction
with “repetition.” Before I elaborate on this signiicant relationship, I will briely review
some approaches to “context” that elaborate on this term’s ininite possibilities.
As Mikhail Bakhtin asserts: “he meaning of a word is determined entirely by its
context; in fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.
And importantly, contexts do not stand side by side…as if unaware of one another, but
are in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction and conlict” (Bakhtin 79).
Woolf’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” begun in 1939, delves into the perceived contexts
that have shaped the writer we have come to know as “Virginia Woolf,” and highlights
those “invisible presences”; these include the inluence of her mother, along with “public
opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to
be like that, or repel us the other and make us diferent from that.” Seeing herself “as a ish
in a stream; delected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream” (MOB 80), resonates
with both the power and the inscrutable nature of “context.”
hat Woolf’s narrator speaks of “invisible presences” and “cannot describe the
stream” is not far from the tagline of the web-site, “War in Context.”2
he tagline, “With
Attention to the Unseen,” also resonates with Hayden White’s view of the changes tak-
ing place in our ongoing reinterpretation of the conception of context: “he text-context
relationship, once an unexamined presupposition of historical investigation, has become
a problem…in the sense of becoming ‘undecidable’, elusive, uncreditable…And yet this
very undecidability of the question of where the text ends and the context begins and the
nature of their relationship appears to be a cause for celebration, to provide a vista onto a
new and more fruitful activity for the intellectual historian, to authorize a posture before
the archive of history more dialogistic than analytic, more conversational than assertive
and judgmental” (White 186). Repetition is intricately connected with context and hence
with diference. With each repetition, an incremental change takes place, altering the
meaning in some substantial way—creating diference. It revitalizes and reinvents the
word—as it is simultaneously interpreted by diferent readers in diferent ways; it is this
aspect of language—its multifaceted nature—that Woolf’s writing enacts. Repetition en-
acts a sense of continuity, of movement, even as the contextual changes interrupt with dif-
ference. Gilles Deleuze, in introducing “repetition” in Diference and Repetition inds that
“repetition and resemblance are diferent in kind—extremely so” (Deleuze 1), as he begins
a study that relects on the works of many well-known thinkers on this complex subject.
In this mode, Deleuze provides a signiicant part of David Hume’s thesis: “Repetition
changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contem-
plates it.” He inds that “Hume’s famous thesis takes us to the heart of the problem,” for
repetition “does change something in the mind…and this is the essence of modiication”

25. 9
Why “but”?
(Deleuze 90). For Deleuze, “repetition” encompasses “diference,” and “is not the same
thing occurring over and over again” for there is “variation in and through every repeti-
tion.” Relating to the mysteries of context, repetition also functions “to airm the power
of the new and unforeseeable.” As “a creative activity of transformation,” it aligns the
“new” with creativity, and, importantly, inds “convention and habit destabilized” (Parr
223-25). For Nietzsche, according to Deleuze, “heterogeneity arises out of intensity,” and
calls forth “a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity” while it “works as a possibility for rein-
vention” (Deleuze 136). Within this repetitive mode, words placed in new contexts are
continually transformed, reinvented, and have new life.
he “ashes” from the “cremation” of the word “feminist”—a Phoenix-like symbol of
regeneration—to be stirred with a ‘goose-feather pen,’ clearly suggests the possibility of
creating “new words” (TG 101-2). But the suggestion that women “follow your methods
and repeat your words…is not true. he two classes difer enormously” (TG 17). Clearly,
“though we see the same world, we see it through diferent eyes” (TG 18), and construct
diferent answers. In ways similar to the function of the word “but,” Woolf’s narrators can
suddenly undermine a statement made within a sentence, or a few paragraphs down, or,
as in the case of hree Guineas, about 34 pages later. As “but” undermines and resists, so
Woolf’s narrators remain unreliable and surprising. Perhaps Woolf likes them to be a little
wild. Irony frequently rules. In this case, it relates to the burning of the word “feminist,”
why this word needs to be destroyed, and Woolf’s narrator’s statements regarding her
suspicions of labels, for “they kill and constrict” (TG 137-8).
As we look back from the vantage point of 2011, we are still grappling with the prob-
lematics of language, the dissemination of information from television, radio, newspapers,
blogs, social media, mainstream media, alternative media, wikileaks and government leaks
(which may be newspaper leaks). Virginia Woolf’s writings about words both express
and enact her politics, while questioning the language used to communicate to the pub-
lic. Woolf, like Walter Benjamin, looked back, and as Angeliki Spiropoulou makes clear:
“Woolf is well aware that how the past is represented is a major stake in the feminist and
wider political struggle,” and “leads her to criticize oicial historiography for its exclusion-
ist and silencing efects” and seeks to develop “an alternative historiography which would
do justice to the oppressed and the defeated” (Spiropoulou 3).
In the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, the uprisings known as the “Arab
Spring,” the “Occupy Wall Street” and worldwide “Occupy movements,” and too many
wars and struggles to mention, we look back to Woolf’s narrative commentary regarding
the “300,000,000 British Pounds” (TG 8) for arms, repeated seven times in hree Guineas,
and the repetition of the unseen photographs of “dead bodies and ruined houses” (TG 11)
of children killed in the war in Spain (1936-39), and speaks of the “horror and disgust”
(TG 11) of these photos. Woolf’s relevance to the world today is always coupled with the
question of how she would respond to the drone strikes, the new weaponry, the violence,
and the language used to communicate these horrors. What would she think of social
media? Blogging? With the “Occupy” protests, would she ind that “remaining outside,
but in co-operation with its aims” (TG 143) the best answer? Of course, “answers” are
problematic—as Woolf’s narrator expresses on the irst page of hree Guineas.
Looking back to Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, a work written in 1922, and in
Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s library, I think his words would echo today: “Words, like

26. 10 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images today, another tomor-
row. here is no certainty whatever that that the same word will call out exactly the same
idea in the reader’s mind as it did in the reporter’s” (Lippmann 42). We can say, as Woolf’s
narrator says in hree Guineas: “hings repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are
the same today as they were 2,000 years ago” (TG 141). As I relect on Virginia Woolf’s
expression and enactment of her important ideas regarding language, I think she would
simply echo the words the late Tony Judt conjured up when asked about his epitaph: “I
did words.”3
Notes
1. For other discussions relating Brecht’s “Epic heatre” to Woolf’s novels, see Bishop; Johnston.
2. See warincontext.org
3. Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt died 6 August 2010 at age 62. In an obituary in he Guardian
on 7August 2010, entitled: “Tony Judt: the captivating wit and intellect of my friend and teacher”, Saul
Goldberg related Judt’s answer to a question regarding his choice for his epitaph. Tony Judt simply said he
would want it to read: “I did words.” I thought of Woolf.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Boston: Harvard UP, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Bishop, Edward L. “he Subject in Jacob’s Room.” Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (1992): 147-175
Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. Diference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press,1994.
Foucault, Michel. his Is Not A Pipe. Illustrations and letters by Rene Magritte. Trans. and ed. James Harkness.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
Iser, Wolfgang. he Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Johnston, Georgia. “Class Performance in Between the Acts: Audiences for Miss LaTrobe and Mrs. Manresa.”
Woolf Studies Annual 3 (1997): 61-75.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Marcus, Laura. he Cambridge Companion to Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Parr, Adrian, ed. he Deleuze Dictionary. New York: Columbia UP, 2005
Sears, Sallie. “heater of War: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Ed. Jane
Marcus, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London:
Palgrave, 2010.
White, Hayden. he Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
——. he Common Reader First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
——. he Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-
1984.
——. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
——. hree Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc, 1966.
——. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955.
——. Women & Fiction. he Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. Oxford:
Shakespeare Head, 1992.

27. WOOLF, CONTEXT, AND CONTRADICTION
by Michael H. Whitworth
T
wenty years ago Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre expanded signiicantly. Of course be-
tween her death and 1992, many essays had been published posthumously, as
had letters, diaries, and autobiographical writings. But 1992 saw the arrival of
ten new novels by Woolf, maybe twenty. In addition to the plain, unannotated editions
that many of us had irst read, whether published by the Hogarth Press, Penguin, Grafton,
or Harcourt Brace, there appeared afordable annotated editions from Oxford University
Press, in their World’s Classics imprint, and from Penguin, as Twentieth-Century Clas-
sics. (Excellent annotations have also appeared in the Shakespeare Head and the Hogarth
Deinitive editions, but, as editions intended for the scholarly library market, these did
not have the same impact as their paperback counterparts). In addition to Mrs Dalloway
(1925), by Virginia Woolf, we discovered two new novels, Mrs Dalloway with annotations
by Elaine Showalter, and Mrs Dalloway with annotations by Claire Tomalin; in 2000
followed a fourth new Woolf novel, Mrs Dalloway with annotations by David Bradshaw.
I suspect I was not alone in having mixed feelings when I began to teach and to write
using the new texts. While the dominant feeling was one of delight and excitement at hav-
ing such a resource to use and to share with students, there was also a sentimental regret at
the practical nuisance of having to lay aside familiar copies, unannotated by any scholarly
editor, but full of one’s own underlinings and marginal comments. here was also embar-
rassment at realising that one had not asked the kinds of questions that the annotators had
asked, that one had not read Woolf’s novels as carefully and as thoroughly as they deserved.
But more importantly, there was a worrying suspicion that annotation was not pure gain;
that there was a more complicated economy at work in which, by gaining a sharper sense of
Woolf’s historical referents, particularly in relation to the topography of London, one lost,
or at least found it harder to focus on, Woolf’s artistry, her formal patterning. he older
Mrs Dalloway could be understood in the terms of high modernism, or the New Critical
construction of it: it was characterised by echoes and anticipations woven through the text,
producing a complex spatial form, and that spatial form served to remove the events of the
novel from the concerns of the everyday world. he newer Mrs Dalloways seemed to be
closer to realist or naturalist masterpieces, characterised by intense attention to the speciic
details of urban life, particularly topography and toponymy. Should annotators in some
way restrain themselves, or alter their focus, in order to preserve those formal qualities? Or
might the palace of wisdom be reached via the road of excess?
In thinking about annotation, I would like to emphasise three major strands in Woolf
criticism. One, text-focused, is concerned with formal patterns within the text; New Criti-
cal. Woolf was accepted so late into the canon that her novels were not worked over to the
extent as Eliot’s poems or Joyce’s ictions, but there are nevertheless signiicant examples of
critics working within a largely formalist framework, and some were very perceptive readers
of Woolf. In the period 1941 to 1975 the relative paucity of background material (diaries,
letters, etc.) forced them to focus on the text. Another strand, starting later, is concerned

28. 12 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
with Woolf’s political objectives: primarily feminist, but also, slightly later, taking in broader
social politics and anti-imperialist agenda. A third, later still, attempted to return her texts to
their historical contexts. A signiicant moment for this strand was Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia
Woolf and the RealWorld (1986), though of course the earliest of its chapters had appeared in
the late 1970s. hese strands are not mutually incompatible—one can be formalist-feminist-
historicist, for example—nor is this analysis intended to be comprehensive.
While the three approaches need not be incompatible, institutional politics has meant
that in practice they often are. One phase of such disputes came in the 1970s and 80s
when those who subscribed to the idea of the transcendent art-work were confronted with
critics who saw literature as having political motivations and immediate political relevance.
he dialectic between political relevance and historicism has been very neatly described by
Jonathan Dollimore in his Radical Tragedy: the demand from students in the late 1960s
that literary studies be made “relevant” to the pressing political issues of the moment raised
the problem of whether, if the historical and cultural otherness of literary works were dis-
solved in “relevance,” there was any merit in studying them; the rise of historicism, in
Dollimore’s account, is the next turn of the dialectic (Dollimore xlviii-l). For the last ten
or ifteen years, various kinds of historicism appear to have been in the ascendant; going
further back, the New Historicism in early modern studies paved the way for the return of
less-theoretically inspired historicisms, including some that were explicitly opposed to liter-
ary theory and new historicism. It is notable in early modern studies that, while historicism
still appears to be an immensely productive critical mode, there has been a reaction against
it. his is apparent in the book series “Shakespeare Now,” published by Continuum, and
in the attempted recuperation of the pejorative term “presentism” as a label for a critical
project (Fernie). Even as a fully annotated edition of Woolf appears, in the form of the
Cambridge Edition, there are signs of a reaction against historicism in Woolf studies.
In this context, what does contextualisation mean as a practice in editing and in criti-
cism? I would like to consider some of the choices faced by the annotator and critic, and
how they relate to the possible conlict of critical modes. I will give ive examples, three
drawn from my editing work on Night and Day (1919), and two from critical consider-
ations of Mrs Dalloway.
he irst instance concerns what looks like a topographical allusion. In chapter 18
of Night and Day, as William Rodney and Katharine Hilbery return from Lincoln to the
village of Lampsher, they decide to stop the carriage and walk the last two miles.
About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of the
heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth the gratitude
of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been set upon by highway-
men at this spot and delivered from death just as hope seemed lost. In summer
it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods on either side murmured, and the
heather, which grew thick round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste
sweetly; in winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and
the heath was as grey and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds
above it.
Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. (ND
249)

29. 13
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
Is there a deeper reason why Woolf has her characters alight at this particular monument?
Were her readers in 1919 supposed to recognize the obelisk of granite as a reference to a
particular place or to a type of place? he topography is that of classic realism, mingling
actual places (Lincoln) with imaginary ones (Lampsher), and at this point on the road
between the two we may not know whether we are in the actual or the imaginary.
Readers who have used Julia Briggs’s 1992 edition of the novel may feel they know the
answer, but for my own annotations I decided to begin as if I were the irst person doing the
job. Various internet searches led me to a monument in Wiltshire known as the Robbers’
Stone. he monument has an inscription explaining its origins: the stone commemorates
the occasion when a man, Mr Dean of Imber, was attacked by four highwaymen; during
the pursuit of the highwaymen, one of them dropped dead, and the other three were cap-
tured and sentenced to transportation. Another lesser-known monument marks the place
where the highwayman died, and while the irst cannot be called an obelisk, the second
has at least the right proportions (Bradley 256). Clearly, however, the narrative inscribed
on the Robbers’ Stone does not exactly correspond to that on Woolf’s Lincolnshire obelisk.
he Robbers Stone is also not in Lincolnshire, and it seems that Briggs, in making her
annotations, felt that if there were a real precedent for the granite obelisk, it ought to be
in that county. Her annotations suggest that the model is the Dunston Pillar, a so-called
“land lighthouse” built by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1751, about six miles south of Lincoln
(Briggs 446). When irst built it was 92 feet high with a 15 foot lantern on top; in 1810
the lantern was replaced by a statue of George III, itself later removed. hough the Dun-
ston Pillar did not mark the gratitude of any person for deliverance from highwayman, an
early twentieth century guidebook describes the heath as “a lonely tract where inhabitants
had not only been murdered by highwaymen, but had even been lost in the storms and
snow-drifts on the desolate and roadless moor” (Rawnsley 167) ; the Pillar provided trav-
ellers with a much-needed point of orientation. Again, the Pillar fails to match Woolf’s
obelisk in several respects: it is not a memorial to a speciic incident of robbery; it is not
an obelisk in form, and it is far taller than anything we might call an obelisk. Its status as a
land-lighthouse, however, is suggestive when we consider Ralph Denham’s later image of
the Hilberys’ house as a lighthouse, a beacon of culture in the “trackless waste” (ND 418).
However, while that association may have been in Woolf’s mind, her transformation
of the Dunston Pillar completely obscures it. Moreover, so far as I can see, neither the
Stone nor the Pillar relate to a story that might inform the narrative at this point. Both
might be sources, but Woolf isn’t alluding to them in the conventional sense. Nevertheless,
I would argue that it is valuable to have an annotation pointing to both of them, because
it prevents the text being tied too rigidly to either.
But, while disconnecting the ictional pillar from any single referent is interpreta-
tively liberating, the implicit decision—that the real-world referents are the focus of in-
vestigation—needs to be called into question. he dominant expectation of annotations
is that they will relate a particular phrase to a particular phrase, event, place, person, or
object. What’s harder to annotate, though not impossible, are the passages where a whole
narrative unit resembles one in another novel; or, even more abstractly, where it suggests a
general type of narrative unit. I wonder if readers unfamiliar with Night and Day might be
persuaded that the passage above came from an obscure novel by homas Hardy. he ele-
ments are all distinctly Hardyean: a heathland; a couple whose relationship is in trouble;

30. 14 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
a place or object that carries strong associations with the past; a melodramatic narrative
recalled at an awkward moment. Even the pathetic fallacy of woods that murmur and
trees that sigh recalls Hardy, most obviously he Woodlanders. It is possible to point out
this sort of family resemblance between narrative units, but in scholarly annotation it is
not frequently done. he reasons why not are obvious enough: there is a potential loss of
rigour; annotation could turn into a belle lettristic compendium of resemblances which
seem insigniicant to all but the annotator. But the consequences are a schism within
criticism: those who read with an eye for literary lines of descent might feel that they are
reading a diferent book from those who annotate with an eye on the particular.
he problem of annotating a single phrase in isolation may also be brought into fo-
cus by my second illustration, Night and Day’s single allusion to the idea of the unearned
increment, and its more dispersed references to notions of national eiciency. he phrase
arises as Katharine Hilbery relects on the family’s failure to complete a biography of Rich-
ard Alardyce. In a subtle and condensed metaphor, it seems to Katharine that “heir incre-
ment became yearly more and more unearned” (ND 35). he concept of the unearned
increment dated back to the political theory in the 1870s, and became more prominent in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the state became more involved in cre-
ating infrastructure such as gas supplies and sewerage systems (Whitworth, Virginia Woolf
37-8). In 1891 J. A. Hobson provided a pointed example from the Lancashire town of
Bury: the municipal authorities had wanted to raise sixty thousand pounds from the rates
to provide sewage-works; although such improvements would have provided some beneit
to all the town’s inhabitants, the beneit would have been felt disproportionately by the
dominant local landowner, Lord Derby, because the “ground value” of his land would
have greatly increased (Hobson 195). What Katharine implies, then, is that the value of
Richard Alardyce’s poetry has continued to rise, in spite of the his daughter’s neglect of
the estate; the value of literary works might rise because of the work of other authors who
continue the tradition, or because of the works of critics who maintain interest in them.
One could annotate this passage in several diferent ways. here is a personal, familial
aspect to the phrase. When Adeline Virginia Stephen was born, her god-father, James Rus-
sell Lowell, had sent Leslie Stephen the following doggerel verses; they were later quoted
by Maitland in his Life and Letters. Having wished the newborn girl health, wealth, and
wisdom, and her father’s wit, Lowell wishes that he inherit her mother’s beauty:
Now if there’s any truth in Darwin
And we from what was, all we are win,
I simply wish the child to be
A sample of Heredity,
Enjoying to the full extent
Life’s best, the Unearned Increment,
Which Fate, her Godfather to lout,
Gave him in legacies of gout.
(Lowell, qtd. Maitland 319)
If I have understood the verse correctly, Lowell is not particularly discriminating about
the concept of Unearned Increment. He seems to conlate one’s ancestral inheritance

31. 15
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
with one’s inheritance from the wider community, as if one’s Darwinian heredity were
not diferent from one’s social and cultural inheritance. While it is true that one has not
earned what one inherits from one’s parents, that inheritance is not the same as the un-
earned increment. However, Lowell’s misunderstanding is not so much the problem as
the danger that the biographical annotation might seem suicient. Yet really at this point
annotation, being tied to the particular annotated item, cannot give a full sense of how
many diferent elements in the text tie together. I have discussed the unearned increment
in relation to the novel elsewhere (Virginia Woolf 37-38), and at an earlier Virginia Woolf
conference (“Night and Day and National Eiciency”). here are several other phrases in
the novel, and semantic ields that are in themselves unworthy of annotation, that gain
in signiicance once the unearned increment comes to light. It is signiicant that Mary’s
conversations with Ralph dwell on such topics as “the taxation of land values,” because
such taxation was often proposed as a corrective to the unearned increment. Behind this,
it is worth noting that one of the models for Mary may have been Margaret Llewelyn
Davies, and that her brothers were all involved to some extent in he United Commit-
tee for the Taxation of Land Values, formed in 1908; in 1910 her brother Crompton
was one of its secretaries. he language of organization and eiciency in the novel also
becomes more signiicant in the light of the unearned increment theme, the two being
linked by the theme of national eiciency. Mrs Hilbery’s unco-ordinated attempts to
write the biography without a central plan resemble the unco-ordinated institutions of
the decentralized or small state. Katharine, on the other hand, is “resolved on reform”
(ND 36). Ralph Denham is also characterized in terms of eiciency: when he decides to
discourage Katharine by inviting her home to meet his family, and he justiies the move
by seeing it as a “courageous measure” that might “end the absurd passions which were
the cause of so much pain and waste” (394). It is unlikely that any annotator would
annotate “reform” and “measures,” but their derivation from political discourse is not
without signiicance. I would hope that by annotating “unearned increment” I might
sharpen a reader’s awareness of the political dimension, and that political associations in
other words would thereby become clearer; but in this territory the annotator and the
contextualizing critic part company.
My third set of examples raises the question of whether annotation can ever be a
systematic activity, and of what its limits might be. In the United Kingdom, the require-
ments of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) are that research projects be
articulated in terms of a key research question which is to be investigated in the light of a
research method and a research context. In this context, compared to projects that have a
sophisticated argument to advance, the practice of annotation can look unsystematic and
unscholarly. On every page the annotator needs to respond to whatever diiculties the
text has to ofer, and to be wary of apparent simplicities that conceal underlying obscuri-
ties. When I applied for a grant for my work on Night and Day, the best I could ofer the
AHRC was to say that I would be examining every phrase in the novel, and asking what
associations it might have held for Woolf’s earliest readers. However, such a proposal
sounds impossibly unfocused and open-ended when confronted with a quasi-scientiic
demand for method, and so I humbly suggested that proper names and place names
would be priorities. In practice, I have found that one also investigates places that are not
named but which might have been recognisable to the original audience: so, for example,

32. 16 CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
when Katharine goes to buy a map on Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields (ND
465), one needs to determine if there were any such map shops. (In fact there were not,
but there were on nearby Long Acre.) he investigation of the granite obelisk, while not
beginning with a speciic place name, is a related kind of investigation.
Speciic places, phrases, and events are important to the way that Woolf makes
meaning, but they are by no means the whole story. Any realist novel makes meaning
by reference to known social semiotics, and this remains true even for modernist novels
which have shattered the stable perspectives of realism. Night and Day, for example,
is full of references to clothes. What does it signify that one character wears a plum-
coloured velveteen dress (78), that another is dressed like a Russian peasant girl (376),
that another has a yellow scarf twisted round her head (60)? What does it signify that
William Rodney wears a faded crimson dressing-gown (70), and later wears light yel-
low gloves (179)? Night and Day is also full of references to other forms of domestic
decoration and display: what does it signify that the Hilberys do not have a tablecloth
on their table (97) and the Denhams do (399)? Why is there so much attention to the
physical fabric of books, and what do the diferent bindings signify? Our attention is
drawn to this by Mrs Hilbery’s complaint that the present generation don’t print books
as well as the Victorians (13), and we see at various points William Rodney’s Baskerville
Congreve (70), and hear remarks about cheap classics, gold-wreathed volumes, pocket
Shakespeares, and lemon-coloured lealets (19, 103, 157, 269). Such references point
not to another text, nor to a place or place name, but to a cultural system of signs:
what matters here is not the text of Shakespeare, but the cultural practice of producing
and carrying pocket-sized editions of his works. We are all aware what it might mean
in a Victorian novel for a respectable person not to wear a hat out of doors; or, more
scandalously, for a woman to have her hair down; and we are sometimes aware that less
practiced readers might need reminding of it. But there are codes in Victorian novels
that are more obscure, and when we come to early twentieth century iction, the process
of recovery becomes still harder: social codes were less rigid, they were, quite probably,
faster changing; and we have had less time to undertake the work of reconstructing
them. Roland Barthes once wrote of “the reality efect” being created by any of those
descriptive elements within a novel which could not be subsumed under one of his
analytic codes (Barthes 141-8). he reality efect is a concept which is very reassuring to
the exasperated and exhausted annotator. It raises the possibility that the yellow gloves
might be nothing more than gloves that happen to be yellow. But until one has explored
every last possibility of there being some lost social semiotic at work, one cannot ascribe
the yellow gloves to the reality efect.
In the case of William Rodney’s light yellow gloves, it is possible to note Alexandra
Orr’s 1891 biography of Robert Browning, in which a description of the young poet
is quoted which describes him as “just a trile of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured
kid-gloves and such things” (Orr 92-3); Woolf was later to draw on this biography for
Flush (1933), though it is not essential to a note to assume that Woolf had read it. he
diiculty with stopping there is that Orr’s association of lemon-coloured gloves and dan-
dyism might have been peculiar to the 1830s and no longer valid in the 1910s; moreover,
lemon-coloured might not signify the same as light-yellow. And, even if those problems
could be ignored, to provide only one annotation risks implying that the gloves create