MODERNIST LIVES: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF'S HOGARTH PRESS

[...]Modernist Lives reflects its author's deep mining of Hogarth Press and Woolf archives from the E. J. Pratt Woolf Collection at Victoria College, University of Toronto, to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, to the Hogarth Press Archive at the University of Reading. Noting both the Woolfs' personal preference for biographies and the public's general desire for more publications in this genre, the introduction poses the book's central question: "If life writing was so important to Virginia Woolf, and Virginia Woolf is so important to our critical understandings of life writing, what can the biographical and autobiographical works published at the Hogarth Press tell us about those genres and their relation to literary modernism?" (8). The book oscillates between Virginia Woolf's opposed biographical counters "granite" and "rainbow" in its endeavor to balance factual details of the Hogarth Press publishing practices-solicitation of titles, marketing, sales figures-with qualitative analysis of a handful of biographies and autobiographies the Press published. [...]an experimental biographer in essays distinct from the DNB entries and arguably a proto-modernist himself, Stephen's voice would have enhanced the discussion of biographical theory in Chapter 3.