Introduction
Structure:
A Note on the Second Edition (revised), October
2006
I. General
Overview--by Wayne K. Chapman
An Annotated
Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf was designed
especially for the Clemson University Digital Press's online publishing
platform. In 2001, the South Carolina
Review On-Line Library (or SCROLL) came into being with "Virginia Woolf
International," based on "Themed" issue SCR 29.1 (fall 1996), becoming
an archive of articles and monographs in that library. Thus the Annotated
Guide joins a number of e-books and hypermedia anthologies that have been
published on the CUDP website in the past several years, including Literature and Digital Technologies: W. B.
Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and William Gass (ed. Karen Schiff,
2003), the late Douglass W. Orr's Virginia
Woolf's Illnesses and Psychoanalysis
and the Bloomsbury Group (both edited by Wayne Chapman and published in
2004), and an emergent series of Selected Papers from the annual
International Virginia Woolf conferences.
The Annotated Guide is an on-going project at the digital
press, with plans to publish notes on relevant archives in Sussex, Cambridge,
and elsewhere. Its mission, overall, is to share with a
global audience vital information about the location, nature, and extent
of primary materials widely distributed in their physical state. Initially, the
emphasis is on Leonard Woolf's signed and unsigned journalism as literary
editor at The Nation and Athenaeum newspaper (London),
based on extant files at City University, London,
and selected titles of political works by other authors in his library. For
context, brief accounts of these materials are reproduced from the appendices
of Women in the Milieu of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf (edited by Chapman and Manson), from Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: The Selected Papers from the Seventh
Annual Virginia Woolf Conference (edited by Laura Davis-Clapper and
Jeanette McVicker), and from The South
Carolina Review 31.1--all in 1998 and reproduced by courtesy of Pace
University Press and Clemson University Digital Press. Also recommended is
Chapman's article on the Rowntree political monthlies located elsewhere on the
SCROLL website. Links to related websites and online publications are also
provided on subjects related to the Woolfs and their circle.
In a way, we aim to provide on Leonard Woolf the kind of
bibliographic information sometimes found in the pages of Woolf Studies
Annual on Virginia Woolf. When complete, not only will the Annotated Guide include a finding aid to
collections of Leonard Woolf's papers, but it will also augment and improve
several such tools presently available, such as WSU's unindexed Short Title Catalog and the slightly
indexed but incomplete account of Leonard Woolf's journalism, compiled by Leila
Luedeking and Michael Edmonds in the "C" section of Leonard Woolf: A Bibliography.
As one can see, the scroll-bar at the top of the window allows
one to move back and forth at will from one section to another. After reading
the "Introduction," one might select "Context" when using the Guide
for the first time. "Context" links you to PDF facsimiles of three articles and
a review cited in the cover note. Also, one finds the listing that Pace
University Press has made for the Chapman/Manson book and its contents, should
one wish to order a copy. You'll find that links to two of the said facsimiles
are also embedded in Part One. And we are grateful to Stuart Clarke for
being the first scholar, so far as we know, to take up the challenge Wayne
Chapman set down in 1998 that one should delve into the missing volumes of the Nation
and Athenaeum for additional unsigned reviews and paragraphs by Virginia
Woolf between April 1923 and February 1930. (See Chapman, "Virginia Woolf's
Contributions....") In the May 2005 issue of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin,
Clarke established her authority for a 1927 "Books in Brief" review of The
Life of Jenny Lind and reprinted the review. Possibly, the time has come
for others to read up on these bibliographic issues and to join in the hunt for
"unidentified contributions" to the Nation and Athenaeum by both
Woolfs.
Part Two of the Guide is directed at the unsigned writings
of Leonard Woolf during his term as literary editor. We recommend that you
click on the link "About the Athenaeum" to obtain a picture of a column
written before the Nation and the Athenaeum merged. The author's
name is inscribed at the end of the piece, and the record was of value to
management because it related to payment rendered per the column inch and to
the person who earned his or her shillings paid out by the accountants.
Naturally, editors drew a lot of minor donkey work and were thus frequently
recorded for their contributions of the sort, unsigned and soon forgotten but
the stuff on which most papers were made and still are made today. Hundreds of
these short writings of a paragraph or more were penned by Leonard Woolf and
are now identified (sometimes equivocally) in a six-volume partial set at City
University, the rest, presumably, destroyed or lost in the war during the
London blitz.
Before joining the faculty at Clemson University, Chapman
provided a preliminary list to WSU librarian Leila Luedeking in 1990; he made
copies of all signed and unsigned journalism by Leonard in WSU open stacks, and
he began corresponding with Brownlee Kirkpatrick, who was then working on the
finishing touches, with Stuart Clarke, to the fourth edition of A
Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, published in 1997 after she reprinted 45
unrecorded Times and TLS reviews by Virginia Woolf in a delayed
special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (38.1 [Spring 1992]; pub.
January 1993). Naturally, Brownlee was more than merely interested in our
findings and the mystery of the missing volumes. Moreover, she is almost
certainly the person most responsible for starting negotiations with management
at the New Statesman and Society offices to save rather than pulp its
older archives. Today, as you will find in one of our "Relevant Links,"
that the New Statesman archive has moved to the
In Part Three of the Annotated Guide, we have
tried to do something new by building on an old friend, the archival annotated
copy of WSU's Catalogue of Books from the Library of Leonard and Virginia
Woolf (Holleyman and Treacher Ltd., 1975), though at a cross-section. As
Stuart Clarke and William Baker have said in their reviews of the printed
edition of The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog,
respectively in Woolf Studies Annual and the Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, nothing serves so well as a good index
and, in this particular case, the clumsy but still useful Holleyman and
Treacher inventory of books sold to WSU Libraries after the death of Leonard
Woolf, with the exception of books sold by Sotheby's to the University of
Texas, as noted by Elizabeth Steele, and other minor exceptions. Given our
long-range plan for an interdisciplinary study of Leonard Woolf's ideas on
international issues, we have drawn our notes together on a selection of
political books identified by Holleyman and Treacher as derived from either the
Monks House (
Monks House (MH), III -- Items belonging to or presented to Leonard
Woolf
Monks House (MH), IV -- Items belonging to or presented to Virginia
and Leonard Woolf
Monks House (MH), V -- Miscellaneous, some with slight association
Monks House (MH), VI -- Books with notes and references to text and
on end papers in the hand of Leonard Woolf
Victoria Square (VS), III -- Items belonging to or presented to
Leonard Woolf
Victoria Square (VS), V -- Miscellaneous, some with slight
association with Leonard Woolf
Victoria Square (VS), VI -- Books with notes and references to text
and on end papers in the hand of Leonard Woolf
Finally, a number of "Relevant Links" have been arranged
for your convenience. Washington State University Libraries's online catalog is
there, as well as the Short-Title Catalog by Julia King and Laila
Miletic-Vejzovic and guides to collections in
II. In the Beginning--by Janet M.
Manson
Many of us are aware that Leonard Woolf was a prolific writer
and that he championed liberal causes in many of his published and unpublished
pieces. But we still have much to learn about him as a writer. Therefore, I
began work on the Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard
Woolf by compiling entries of Woolf's signed and unsigned pieces that were
published in The Nation, The Athenaeum, The Nation and The Athenaeum, The Nation and Athenaeum, The
New Statesman, and The New Statesman and Nation. The Annotated
Guide will expand the work started by Leila Luedeking and Michael Edmonds
in Leonard Woolf: A Bibliography in that the Annotated
Guide provides information not included in the Luedeking-Edmonds volume,
most especially fuller descriptions for all entries. The online publication of
our new research tool will make Leonard Woolf's work more accessible to
scholars and globally to members of the general public, thereby creating the
opportunity for these individuals to build on our knowledge of Woolf and his
work.
The Annotated Guide is a product of the research on
Leonard Woolf that I began with Professor Wayne K. Chapman in the late 1980s.
Thus, we are creating the Annotated Guide from materials that we have
gathered at many archives and libraries, including the Leonard Woolf Papers,
the University of Sussex; the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Washington
State University; the British Library; Senate House, the University of London;
and City University, London. We have
also been working in consultation with a number of scholars and experts on
Leonard Woolf, including Diane F. Gillespie, Leila Luedeking, B. J. (Brownlee)
Kirkpatrick, Cecil Woolf, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, S. P. Rosenbaum, Elizabeth
Inglis, and others.
There is, of course, more information out there on Leonard's
signed pieces. But even with the resources of the Library of Leonard and
Virginia Woolf,
As luck would have it, the subject came up in 1990 over wine and
snacks in a
Deirdre advised me to call Pamela Lighthill to make an
appointment to work in City University Special Collections.
A partial set of The Nation and Athenaeum marked
files (Vol. 35, 5 April-27 September 1924; Vol. 37, 4 April-26 September 1925;
Vol. 38, 3 October 1925-27 March 1926; Vol. 43, 7 April-29 September 1928; Vol.
45, 6 April-28 September 1929; and Vol. 47, 5 April-27 September 1930) were
temporarily moved to City University when The New Statesman offices no
longer had space for them. Subsequently, the marked files have apparently found
a permanent home there, in as much as they are now listed on the
My journey to
After working with the correspondence files, I turned to the
marked files, which thankfully took up much less space--a factor, undoubtedly,
in
After John Maynard Keynes and others gained a controlling
interest in The Nation and merged it with The Athenaeum in March
1923, Keynes asked Leonard to become the paper's literary editor. As many of
you know, Leonard had done quite a bit of reviewing for both journals, and he
had filled in as the political editor for The Nation in 1920 and then
took over that post in 1922.
He began to do even more reviewing for The Nation and
Athenaeum after he became the literary editor. For example, Woolf wrote
signed pieces for "The World of Books" column, starting on 5 May 1923; and most
of the unsigned pieces identified by entries from the marked files are review
columns. (His last "World of Books" column appeared on 15
February 1930.) Unsigned columns included "Books in Brief," "From Alpha
to Omega," and "Things to see or hear in the coming week," "On the Editor's
Table," "New Gramophone Records," and short items in the "Reviews" section of
the journal.
In short, Woolf reviewed a wide-range of books, plays, concerts,
performances, and events, and records. In his unsigned pieces, we see instances in which he
reviewed books or discussed topics that were close to his heart. For example,
he reviewed his sister Bella Sidney Woolf's book From Groves of Palm on
30 January 1926. He also plugged Sigmund Freud's The Future of Illusion
(Hogarth Press) in the "On the Editor's Table" column of 21 July 1928. And
Woolf critiqued a performance of George Bernard Shaw's play Caesar and
Cleopatra in the ubiquitous column "From Alpha to Omega" on 2 May 1925. Moreover, he took special
interest in political subjects such as the Native Reserves in
*********************
A Note on the Second Edition (revised), October 2006
Citations for Leonard Woolf's books and monographs have now been
added to Part 1: Signed Works, as well as annotated entries for all of his
signed pieces in The Political Quarterly.
To Part 2: Unsigned Articles, we have incorporated his unacknowledged editorial
contributions to The Political Quarterly,
as well. Internal links have been added to both Parts 1 and 2 for greater ease
in navigating these long, roughly chronological lists. We have also made
provision in the organization for "Other Periodicals," bibliographic work for
the Third Edition, which will also include notes on the chapters and
contributors to books listed in Part 1. Finally, in the Relevant Links section
of this revised edition we now refer the reader to the following useful
websites: to that of King's College, Cambridge (Modern Archives); to the John
Maynard Keynes Papers, King's College, Cambridge; to the Virginia Woolf and
Lytton Strachey collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas Libraries; to the Archives of the Hogarth Press
(1917-1955), University of Reading; and to the Location Register of
20th-century English literary manuscripts and letters, University of Reading
Libraries. Thus, our 11 original links have increased to 17, with more
expected.