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Woolf as a Moment of Vision Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections. J. H. Stape, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. xvi + 195 pp. $19.95
MR STAPE'S BOOK offers a pocket library of Woolf sightings, Woolf as a moment of vision in the lives of others. Although much of the material has been previously published and hence is available, it is not readily available. Or rather, the non-specialist is not likely to know that it is available, and Stape thus provides a valuable service by giving us an intriguing field guide to this writer's habitat.
The diverse collection widens the perspective somewhat beyond the only similar collection, Joan Russel Noble's Recollections of Virginm Woolf (1972). As Stape notes in his preface, only two of his selections (pieces by Clive Bell and William Plomer) were also included in Noble's book. Except for the material in the section "Pen Portraits," and some of the 1941 eulogies, the voices gathered here tend to be less reverent and less self-conscious than those in the Noble collection. There is occasionally an edged judgment or some very faint praise. Drawing mostly upon published autobiographical writings, Stape offers many brief sketches of Woolf, and some extended responses to daily encounters with...