Despite its modest origin, during its first twenty years the Hogarth Press published books by several of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. Many of these were notables from the Bloomsbury group, to which both Leonard and Virginia belonged. From its inception Hogarth’s catalog was diverse, with stories by Katherine Mansfield and E. M. Forster; the multi-volume series The International Psycho-Analytical Library, which included English translations of Sigmund Freud’s writings; “Stavrogin’s Confession” (1922), an English translation of the lost chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed; Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, 1931), by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke; Benito Mussolini’s The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1933); H. G. Wells’s The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia (1936); and critical works by Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and John Maynard Keynes.
Leonard and Virginia published according to their tastes rather than releasing safe profit-makers, and they produced many of their favorite titles by hand. One of these was T. S. Eliot’s volume of poetry The Waste Land (1922), which, along with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s own Jacob’s Room (both published the same year), is considered to have officially heralded the modernist movement in literature. In 1923 Hogarth reissued The Waste Land in a handsome hand-printed volume—an edition, like many in Hogarth’s catalog, that is now a highly coveted collector’s item. Virginia wrote to Barbara Bagenal on July 8, 1923: “I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliot’s poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles.”
The Hogarth Press published most of Virginia Woolf’s own writings as well. The 1919 publication of her short story “Kew Gardens,” which included woodcuts by her sister Vanessa Bell, was Hogarth’s first highly successful book. Woolf wrote in a June 10, 1919, diary entry: “We came back from Asheham to find the table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa and we opened them intermittently through dinner.... The pleasure of success was considerably damaged . . . by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing labels, glueing backs, and finally despatching, which used up all spare time and some not spare till this moment.” This small volume transformed the Woolfs’ publishing venture into a serious enterprise.
The Woolfs’ independent ownership of the Hogarth Press allowed Virginia to experiment freely with her writing style; the first notable example of this is her novel Jacob’s Room, published by Hogarth in 1922. Without the interference of editors and strict commercial standards, Woolf toyed as she pleased with the ground-breaking techniques in plot, form, characterization, and treatment of time that established her literary reputation. Other works by Woolf published by the Hogarth Press include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), and Three Guineas (1938). Some of these volumes featured cover designs and woodcuts by Vanessa Bell.
In 1938 Virginia Woolf relinquished her interest as a partner in the press, and an apprentice at Hogarth, John Lehmann, filled her position. Lehmann and Leonard Woolf, however, disagreed on various business issues, and in 1946 Woolf bought Lehmann’s share of the company and sold it to the publisher Chatto and Windus. Hogarth Press became a limited company within this larger house, with Woolf serving as a director on the Hogarth board until his death in 1969. Chatto and Windus was acquired by Random House UK in 1987.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
The reader of Night and Day will find that, while each scene is complete, full of life, present significance, suggestive allusion, the progression of scenes is so arranged as to draw him on to a point in the story which—‘only a love-story’ though this be—is so exciting that to read it is to pass through a keen emotional experience. And thence comes the gradual descent, not into a house with shut doors and windows, but to a point whence the future prospect can be seen stretching away into the blue distance.
—October 30, 1919
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
To those of us who love to linger down at the harbour, as it were, watching the new ships being builded, the old ones returning, and the many putting out to sea, comes the strange sight of Night and Day sailing into port serene and resolute on a deliberate wind. The strangeness lies in her aloofness, her air of quiet perfection, her lack of any sign that she has made a perilous voyage—the absence of any scars. There she lies among the strange shipping—a tribute to civilization for our admiration and wonder....
We had thought that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what has been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chilclass="underline" we had never thought to look upon its like again!
—from Athenaeum (November 21, 1919)
W. L. GEORGE
Here is perfect aloofness, entire distinction; Mrs. Virginia Woolf outstrips all novelists of her period, for she possesses two qualifications for high literature: pity, and fine disdain.
—from English Review (March 1920)
RUTH MURRAY UNDERHILL
The half expressed thought, the interrupted sentences by which the action of Night and Day proceeds, are baffling. Carry this sort of thing a few steps further and you have [Maurice] Maeterlinck. Yet even this intent study of a fragmentary and delicate thing strikes one as in the spirit of Tennyson’s ‘flower in the crannied wall’ whose complete comprehension means comprehension of what God and man is.
—from Bookman (August 1920)
CLIVE BELL
Night and Day is, I think, [Virginia Woolf’s] most definite failure. She chose a perfectly conventional, a Victorian, theme, the premiers amours of five young people.... She should have written about the quatre-vingt-dixième to make her work strong and passionate and real (the grand desideratum); she should have written about Life.
—from The Dial (December 1924)