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Modernist Lives Biography and Autobiography
at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press
Claire Battershill
Historicizing Modernism Series London: Bloomsbury, 2018 Hardcover. xiii+231 p. ISBN
978-1350043817. £85
Reviewed by Cécile Beaufils Sorbonne Université (Paris)
Modernist Lives, an in-depth study of a specific aspect of the
publishing house The Hogarth Press, proposes a new, innovative outlook on a
well-known and documented topic: the impressive popularity of biographical
writings from the 1920s. The methodology which is developed in this book
tackles the conditions of publishing in its material context, thanks to its
archival dimension, as well as its generic, literary aspect. Claire
Battershill, after an extensive work on The Hogarth Press archives, maps out
the publishing house's relationship with biographies in an extremely detailed
manner, which always includes new findings in a more general context. The book
is divided into six chapters, followed by two extremely useful appendixes: the
first one is a list of biographies and autobiographies and genre categories,
and the second one is a list of prices, sales figures, etc. These two addenda are quite reader-friendly, and showcase a
commendable attention to the reading experience and practical aspect of the
text. One of the
main directive questions of the book is the issue of how literary categories
are established and managed on a pragmatic level, and Claire Battershill leads
her reader to question these pre-established categories in an extremely logical
and progressive manner, with a constant attention to chronology which will be
much appreciated by specialists and novices alike. The first chapter, entitled “ ‘Works of Merit’ : What the Hogarth Press
Published (1917-1946)”, delves into the representation of literary genres in
the publishing industry according to issues of revenue and literary prestige.
Battershill immediately offers a panoramic view of the publishing house's
profile, and seeks to establish the place biographies took during the period,
using quantitative analyses of the various categories published by The Hogarth
Press (translations, medical texts, travel, poetry, literary criticism, etc.) as well as nuances of said
categories, by bringing together texts that may seem to belong to different
genres like Vita Sackville-West's memoir, Pepita, and Virginia
Woolf's Orlando. The second
chapter is a case study devoted to a specific category of books published by
The Hogarth Press between 1920 and 1924, "Books on Tolstoi". As
Claire Battershill argues, the publication of several biographies of the same
author belongs to the modernist project: "in order to gain a real sense of
a person, it is necessary to look at that life from a variety of different
perspectives and to tell the life story using a variety of narrative
methods." [16] In this case study, the author provides a detailed insight
on these texts by several authors, often in translation. The third chapter covers
the theoretical core of this investigation, which Claire Battershill calls
"Elastic Categories : Debates about Biography and Autobiography (1923-1929)": she studies the impact of
literary biographies in the literary world of the time. Battershill argues that
current studies of the modernist publishing ecosystem would be "augmented
by further examination of biography and its role in constructing the book world"
[62], and such an outlook would shed light on present cultural hierarchies.
Arguably the strongest argument of this study, this chapter focuses on a
modernist trope, the "new", then on the impact of the reviews and
essays written by Leonard Woolf, and finally Harold Nicolson's 1927 The Development of English Biography. The author provides evidence of the popularity of biographical writing
by creating a dialogue between several critics of the period, in a comparative
analysis that would have deserved more development, especially insofar as
Battershill argues very convincingly that the Hogarth Press biographies have
been crucial to our understanding of what constituted the "new
biographies" of the period. Several case
studies are developed in the fourth chapter, with three emblematic works by
Virginia Woolf: Orlando, Flush, and Roger Fry. Battershill examines
the complex relationship between literary projects (and notably the precarious
balance of fiction and biography), and the literary marketplace. Most
convincing is the author's analysis of the marketing of Orlando: a work of
fiction on occasion considered as biography, by certain booksellers. This
chapter tackles theoretical issues like genre hybridity and the hierarchy of
culture (wondering about issue of "seriousness" of certain works like
Flush) in a convincing way. The last two chapters are devoted to later years
of the publishing house, and respectively to their Biography Series, and to
what Claire Battershill calls "Reticent Autobiografictions of Henry Green
and Christopher Isherwood". She sees in particular how biographical texts
were included in a general marketing strategy, how they were intended as
didactic tools for children, and finally, how authors might walk a fine line
between fiction and "truth-telling" [147]. Modernist Lives is then concluded by a helpful reflection on methodology, and the
potential use of Digital Humanities to help work on archival material. All in
all, this is an innovative outlook on The Hogarth Press, with which will
interest both specialists of Modernism, book historians, and any researchers
interested in new methodologies of archival analysis.
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