Virginia Woolf

Profession and Performance

Edited by Benjamin D. Hagen and Taya Sazama

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Contents

Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance studies the intersection of Woolf’s repeated critical and creative engagements with literal and figurative stagings (i.e., performance) and declarations and occupations (i.e., profession). In chapters that range from a comparative study of Woolf and Sylvia Beach as publishers and booksellers to studies that situate Woolf’s life and work in relation to the culture of cosmetics, the theater, journalism, photography, printmaking, as well as career politics, contributors disclose how critical attention to this entanglement of “profession” and “performance” expands and enriches our understanding of modernist networks, women’s labor in literary and other aesthetic fields, and gender politics that reward the reproduction of professional status quos. As an extension of the feminist turn in modernist studies, this volume contributes focused and nuanced studies to the collective project of understanding modernism as something women have made, professed, and performed.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

About the Editors

Benjamin D. Hagen teaches at the University of South Dakota. He is a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, a past organizer of the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, the current editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and the author of The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Clemson University Press, 2020). His research has appeared in the journals Age, Culture, Humanities; Comparative Critical Studies; Modernism/modernity; PMLA; Twentieth-Century Literature; and Virginia Woolf Miscellany as well as in book collections focused on Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, and Louise DeSalvo.

Taya Sazama is an Assistant Professor at Dakota Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in British literature. Her review of Karen Bourrier’s Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (2019) appeared in the 2021 spring issue of Victorian Periodicals Review and her review of Freya Johnston’s Jane Austen, Early and Late (2021) was published with Review 19 in 2024. She currently serves on the steering committee to host the 2025 British Women Writers Conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Introduction: Profession and Performance in Late Woolf | Benjamin D. Hagen

I Fictional Performances, Literary Professions
1. Woolf’s Early Quit Lit: Attending to the Sacred in “Solid Objects” | Amy C. Smith
2. “Dreams and Realities”: Outsiders Staging Otherwise in The Voyage Out and Between the Acts | Sarah Schwartz
3. “To indicate that the space is filled to repletion”: Omission in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography and Sally Potter’s Orlando | Pamela L. Weidman

II Alternative Texts, Connections, and Motives
4. Performing the Performer: Woolf on Rachel Félix, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry | Eleanor McNees
5. “The most brilliant novelist of the younger generation”: Appraising Virginia Woolf in Vogue | Annalisa Federici
6. Modernist Intersections of Print Culture at Shakespeare and Company and the Hogarth Press | Francesca Mancino
7. “TO VIRGINIA WOOLF”: Performing Publications and Dedications | Diane F. Gillespie

III Professions of Women
8. The Art of Drawing People Together: Relationships and Gender Roles in Virginia Woolf’s Domestic and Fictional Photographs | M. Giulia Laddago
9. Putting on a Good Face: Reflected Faces, Vulnerability, War, and Makeup in and beyond Woolf’s Between the Acts | Joyce E. Kelley
10. Remarkable Obscurity: Portraits of Professional Women | Stella Deen
11. Reflections on The Mark on the Wall (2018) | Ane Thon Knutsen