Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Absent Presence and Digital Remediation in Woolf’s Bookselling Archive

In 1917, Virginia Woolf co-founded her own private Press, the Hogarth Press, on the dining table of her home, Hogarth House, in southwest London.  While Virginia and her husband, Leonard, initially intended to publish work anathema to commercial presses, their own Press soon outgrew their ambitions for it. They ultimately published more than 500 authors of various commercial and noncommercial stripes over twenty-five years, including all Virginia Woolf’s celebrated high modernist novels, literary essays, and feminist manifestos after 1922.  With her own Press, Woolf became one of the most famous and influential novelists and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, the Press allowing her to become, in her words, “the only woman to write what I like."  

Talk abstract: In this talk, I will detail the outcome of a large multiyear, collaborative, faculty-student digital humanities initiative to aggregate, transcribe, and data visualize Woolf’s book sales records. These records are contained in the Press’s business archive at the University of Reading and digitized as part of The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive to open up the papers of modernist publishers. These rare holographic manuscript books contain over 200,000 lines of rich quantitative and qualitative data on the entirety of the Press’s sales orders, including 25,000 lines transcribed by my collaborators, on Woolf’s sales: who bought her books, at what price, in what quantities, and over what time horizons. 

These so-called Hogarth Press “Order Books” contain a rich but unread cache of cultural historical, economic, and literary information. I will argue that taking this information seriously, both as data and biobibliography, helps to subvert received wisdom that the Press was for Woolf a mere hobby, a distraction from the more serious work of aesthetic innovation. Yet, in the process of mining them for book historical data, we must also ask bigger questions about why we have for so long alienated Woolf herself from having had any knowledge of them.  What ongoing stereotypes about women, gender, money, and the technologies of book production shape these views and how does grappling digitally with Woolf’s bookselling and publishing archive provide some remediation?  And lastly, if Woolf has been excised from crucial aspects of her own history as a publisher, where might further digital analysis of the shape and design of her novels find her critiquing the book object itself as a gendered form of knowledge acquisition?

Register to join online
 

About the Speaker

Alice Staveley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Stanford. She teaches a range of courses on British modernism, contemporary British and Canadian fiction, and Virginia Woolf. She has won the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016–2017) and directs the Honors Program in English and the Digital Humanities Minor. Staveley has taught in the Oxford tutorial system, the History and Literature concentration at Harvard University, and Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities Program (2001-2006). Research interests include: modernism; narratology; book and periodical history; women and the professions; feminist and cultural theory; and digital humanities.  Her current book project examines Virginia Woolf's life as a publisher. Select publications include: Woolf’s short fictional feminist narratology; Woolf’s European reception; photography in Three Guineas; modernist marketing; and transnational archival feminisms.  She co-founded and co-directs of The Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a critical digital archive of documents related to modernist publishing supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Roberta Bowman Denning Digital Fund for Humanities and Technologies.  http://modernistarchives.com Recent digital humanities research involves quantitative analysis of modernist book-sales records.

Lunch will begin at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees.