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BARRETT, EILEEN, and PATRICIA CRAMER, eds. Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings (New York: New York University Press,1997). 352 pp. $ 55.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.
New York University Press's "Lesbian Life and Literature" series has added another title to its excellent list of works of lesbian modernism. Joining books on and by Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, H. D., and Elizabeth Bowen, and important critical works by Marilyn Farwell and Elizabeth Meese, is Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, a ground-breaking volume of essays on Woolf's diverse lesbian affiliations.
These essays fall into two categories: "Lesbian Intersections"-or discussions of Woolf's relation to other lesbian readers and writers-and "Lesbian Readings" of Woolf's novels and stories. "Intersections" includes personal accounts of Woolf's influence by Toni McNaron and Suzanne Bellamy, and essays that draw biographical and intertextual connections between Woolf and Violet Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. The readings of Woolf's fiction include discussions of lesbian panic in The Voyage Out, homoerotic alliances in To the Lighthouse, submerged lesbian memoir in The Years, and the lesbian "field of vision" projected in Between the Acts. As this brief list indicates, one of the strengths of Lesbian Readings is its capacity to find diversity within a well-defined rubric: it includes lesbianisms as different as those of Bronte, Larsen, and the contemporary woman artist, and lesbian modes as various as panic, memory, and vision.
Some of the essays in the volume are more convincing than others, but collectively they clear the critical air so bracingly that I wonder how we ever read Woolf without them. It is a delightful shock to discover what academic criticism has tended to hide; it is delightful to see Woolf's celebrated ambiguities give way to lesbian clarities, and to see her celebrated "universality" give way to the particularity of a very different kind of writer. Woolf's characters, as David Lodge has joked, "always think of eternity while serving potatoes," but the essays in Lesbian Readings prove that very often this only seems to be the case. As Woolf's women serve potatoes, it may be love for women that they think about-a love that is by necessity rendered ambiguously, and only sounds like eternity to the ear not trained to listen for lesbian meanings.
This new clarity,...