Virginia Woolf in Context

Virginia Woolf in Context. Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, eds. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2012) xi + 502 pp.

In the late 1990s Cambridge University Press began issuing the Cambridge Companion series of guides to literary periods, movements, and individual authors. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf first published in 2000, was a particularly successful volume in the series, with twelve article-length essays on large aspects of Woolf's work by some of the most eminent Woolf critics. Addressed to students and common readers, the Cambridge Companion was a cross between a reference work and a collection of critical articles providing intelligent, often provocative contexts for Woolf's writing.

If a Companion provides contexts, what does an In Context volume do? Virginia Woolf in Context, part of a new major authors series from Cambridge called Literature in Context, covers some of the same ground as the previous Cambridge volume and features some of the same writers. But there are key differences in format, which make the new collection more of a grab bag than the previous one. The essays are shorter, around eight pages apiece, and there are 37 of them. Perhaps inevitably, they differ in quality and usefulness. More intriguingly, however, they display different understandings of what "context" means.

In putting together this collection following Cambridge's general guidelines, the editors, Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, had to wrestle with this question. The answer initially might seem easy. A context is information that helps us interpret a literary text. But this definition is unhelpfully broad: what writing about a literary text is not a context? In the range of topics, from Michael Whitworth's "Historicizing Woolf: Context Studies" (which opens the book by suggesting, against the assumptions of many other entries, that "context" means historical circumstance), to Darya Protopopova's "Woolf and Russian Literature," to Carole Boume-Taylor's "Woolf's Mediterranean Experience," to Ruth Hoberman's "Woolf and Commodities," to Clare Colebrook's "Woolf and 'Theory,'" to Margaret Homans's "Woolf and the Victorians," to Linden Peach's "Woolf and Eugenics," to Pam Morris's "Woolf and Realism," to Ian Blyth's "Woolf, Letter Writing and Diary Keeping," we encounter context as critical practice, literary influence, biographical background, reference, approach, analogue, and genre. "Context," thus construed, is elastic enough to comprehend various kinds of...