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Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Lorraine Sim (Famham: Ashgate, 2010) viii + 220 pp.
Such is the pace of academic publishing, and indeed reviewing {mea culpa), that when a book identifies its contribution to a neglected field, by the time the book comes to be reviewed, said field often no longer looks quite so neglected- if, that is, the book is correct in identifying it as ripe for further investigation. This is very much the case for Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Lorraine Sim observes in her introduction that "The ordinary and everyday in modernism remain relatively unexplored topics" (3), but since the book's publication this situation has shifted. Indeed, the topic of the 2013 Modernist Studies Association conference is to be "Everydayness and the Event"; much exploring of the ordinary and the everyday in modernism is now underway. Thus Sim's book makes an important contribution both to Woolf studies, and to our developing understanding of the fertile relationship between the everyday as critical and theoretical tool, and modernist studies more generally.
Sim is not the first to address the everyday in Woolf's work, but this is the first monograph on the subject concentrating entirely on Woolf. The terms of her title alert us to Sim's approach to the everyday, helpfully carving out a position in relation to what can be an unmanageably vague concept. Sim insists on the particular appropriateness of the term "ordinary" in relation to Woolf, as a term Woolf herself uses more frequently than "everyday." Sim also prefers it because, she argues, it signals Woolf's "keen interest in things" (2), as well as lacking the "degree of repetition and, potentially, monotony" which is implied in the "everyday." She makes the distinction thus: "illness, celebrations and falling in love are a part of ordinary experience and life but are not typically a part of everybody's everyday life" (2). But despite setting up an apparent distance from the regular temporal aspect of the everyday, Sim also prefers "ordinary" precisely because it is etymologically linked to the "pattem" which Woolf, and Woolf's work, recognizes.
The other notable aspect of Sim's approach to the everyday is that, rather than Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, or even Georg Simmel and Walter...