In and Out of Bloomsbury

In and Out of Bloomsbury by Martin Ferguson Smith (Manchester University Press, 2021)

Review by Mitchell Alcrim, Cambridge, Mass.

In a series of essays all written in his seventies, classical scholar Martin Ferguson Smith turns his attention to some notable twentieth-century authors and artists. The first six pieces in In and Out of Bloomsbury deal primarily with key members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry, while the remaining chapters focus on such figures as Rose Macaulay and Dorothy L. Sayers. Smith’s mission, as in his work on classical topics, is to ‘make known new material rather than recycle old.’ (ix)

Over the course of these essays, Smith addresses inaccuracies which have appeared in published works; as he tells us in his introduction, ‘the task of any biographer … is challenging enough without ignoring or distorting sure facts.’ Smith informs us from the outset that he will be dealing in hard facts rather than speculation. (3) Of course, it is difficult to be certain of some ‘hard facts’ in human lives. Smith usefully corrects some facts about places, dates and transcriptions, but he also offers detailed discussions on matters of mental health, which cannot be purely factual, but involve considerable interpretation (even speculation).

That said, Smith provides us with valuable new information about the spring 1932 trip to Greece undertaken by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, accompanied by Roger Fry and his sister, Marjorie. Smith limits the scope of the piece; for a more complete account, he urges us to consult Woolf’s diary and letters. (95) Research for this essay was sparked by an incorrect caption to a photograph of the group in front of a Greek temple which appeared in Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography of Virginia Woolf. (109) In her book, Lee (like several other scholars) identifies the location of the photograph as the Acropolis, but Smith notes that it is, in fact, the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. He explains: ‘the clearly visible Corinthian capitals rule out the Acropolis straight away.’ (109-110) While conceding that Lee’s book has ‘many merits,’ (109n65) Smith argues, somewhat brutally, that this misidentification ‘betrays a breath-taking ignorance of the architecture of one of the most celebrated groups of ancient monuments in the world.’ (109)

Biographers cannot be experts on every topic, and even the best biographies contain material that might require modification or correction over time. Smith’s approach can be rather combative and sometimes nit-picking in his criticisms of other scholars, especially on Woolf; some readers might find this weakens an otherwise very interesting set of arguments.

In his detailed reconstruction of the travellers’ itinerary and timetable, supported by his examination of manuscripts and other archival materials, Smith shows that the group visited the Acropolis on at least three occasions, and Woolf makes frequent mention of it in her diary and letters, yet no photograph of it exists in the album in which all but one of the ‘Greek’ photographs are displayed (known as VW’s Monk’s House Photograph Album no. 3, now housed in the Houghton Library, Harvard University). In fact, only one photograph taken in Athens actually exists, and that is the one misidentified by several leading Bloomsbury scholars. Smith posits that perhaps the Woolfs did not bother to photograph locations for which picture postcards were commercially available, but he does not claim to provide a definitive answer. (100-111)

In comparing the 28-page manuscript account of the Greek holiday (inserted in Woolf’s 1932 diary) to the edited, published text, Smith unearthed a number of errors. The most significant of these, according to Smith, is found in Woolf’s description of Fry. In the published version, the editors have Woolf describing Fry as ‘sweet, rich, accommodating, infinitely serious’ while a careful reading of the manuscript revealed that she had in fact used the word ‘porous.’  

This unfortunate misreading ‘attributes to Roger, the subject of Virginia’s only biography, a characteristic he did not possess and she would not have admired, and deprives him of a characteristic he did possess and she did admire.’ Smith connects this adjective to Woolf’s landmark work of 1929, A Room of One’s Own, in which she refers to Coleridge’s notion of the androgynous mind. Porousness is associated with the ability to both give and receive emotion and is crucial to creativity. Fry’s connection to the art world (his Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 rocked the British art scene) as well as Woolf’s description of him as someone who ‘detested fixed attitudes’ make Smith’s correction credible. (114-115)

The sixth essay in the collection presents the corrected text of a letter written to Virginia Woolf by Mary Louisa Gordon following the publication of Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry in July 1940. In the letter, dated 4 November 1940, Gordon focuses her attention on Woolf’s portrayal of Roger’s wife, Helen Fry née Coombe and on Roger’s character. (145) Here Smith builds upon and amends the pioneering work of Beth Rigel Daugherty who first published the letter in 2006 in Woolf Studies Annual 11. (146)

Gordon was well known to Woolf. In 1936, the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press had published her historical novel about the Ladies of Llangollen, Chase of the Wild Goose. (146) As Smith tells us, Woolf mentions Gordon six times, once in her diary of September 1935 and five times in letters to her friend, the composer, Ethel Smyth, but never with affection. (147) Twice she refers to her as the ‘hermaphrodite’; initially, Smith thought this was a reference to her somewhat androgynous appearance or to her interest in the Ladies of Llangollen, who had the reputation for dressing in a masculine fashion. Woolf also tells Smyth that Gordon was in the midst of ‘writing a sequel to Orlando’, Woolf’s novel of 1928. (148)

Smith first believed this to be a reference to the third portion of Gordon’s Llangollen novel, in which the Ladies are resurrected and confronted with all that has occurred in the world since their deaths. (148) However, in the course of his research in the Hogarth Press Archives, Smith was fortunate enough to unearth a letter from Gordon to Leonard Woolf, dated 18 February 1937 in which she describes her current writing projects; one, she tells him, is an appendix to her novel, the other is ‘on a very imaginative theme – the hero being a son of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and a spiritual son of Hermaphrodites.’ Smith writes:

I confess that, when I first read this, I nearly fell off my chair with surprise. But there we have the true explanation of the ‘sequel to Orlando’ and probably the main justification for ‘the Hermaphrodite.’ (149)

After reading Woolf’s brief references to Gordon, one might think she was little more than an eccentric minor novelist, but Smith restores her dignity in a wonderfully detailed account of her many accomplishments. Not only was she a qualified physician, surgeon, and general practitioner, she was also Britain’s first female Inspector of Prisons. (154) A devoted feminist, she was an ardent supporter of the Women’s Social and Political Union. (154-155) She was also a loving friend to Helen Coombe, meeting her in the years before her marriage to Roger. (158)

In her letter to Woolf, Gordon movingly recalls the Helen she once knew, ‘so eager to live and learn, so full of ideas.’ Gordon tells Woolf that she wished that her book ‘could have said something about the courageous charming Helen of those days.’ Smith admits that Gordon is perhaps a bit unfair to Woolf here; in her biography of Fry, he states, there are several rather long quotations from interviews conducted with friends of Helen in which they are able to praise her ‘charm and qualities of mind.’ Gordon clearly links Helen’s growing mental instability to her marriage, and in an earlier essay, Smith would appear to agree with her, saying that for both Woolf and Helen Fry, ‘[t]he psychological problems … experienced during the early months and years of marriage were not helped by their loss of independence, and were perhaps aggravated by it’ (129) – a valuable point made by previous Woolf scholars.

Smith remarks that, while for Virginia Woolf, marriage did eventually prove a stabilising factor, (129) sadly, for Helen, this did not prove to be the case and in 1910, she was admitted to The Retreat, a mental institution in York, where she would spend the final 27 years of her life. (167) Smith is currently writing a biography of Helen Fry (x), and he provides the reader with an enlightening summary of her life; perhaps most significantly, he highlights her early success as an artist in the years leading up to her marriage. Much admired for her work in the decorative arts, especially for her stained-glass window installed in the Church of St John the Evangelist at High Cross, Hertfordshire in 1896, and her decoration of Arnold Dolmetsch’s ‘Green Harpsichord’, Helen continued to paint pictures and received much praise for these as well. (163) In his review of Roger Fry, the art historian Tancred Borenius writes poignantly of Helen:

And as to her gifts as an artist, I find it difficult to speak of them with moderation – I remember in particular an impression by her of some chalk pits in brilliant sunlight, fixed on the canvas with a justness and certainty akin to Manet in his last phase. … It is, indeed, my full conviction, that in Helen Coombe there was lost one of the truly great ‘might-have-beens’ of English art. (165-166)

Smith’s book includes three essays in which Helen Coombe is a major focus.

Smith’s subjects are wide-ranging. He presents much new material, including two previously unpublished portraits by Roger Fry, one a drawing of his wife, Helen, which Smith argues was created on their wedding day, and the other, a pencil and gouache portrait of his lover and friend, Vanessa Bell. Also published here for the first time is Clive Bell’s account of his early relationship with Annie Raven-Hill, first presented to the Memoir Club in 1921. Remaining true to his wish to increase ‘knowledge and appreciation of some less well known’ figures, Smith includes two thoughtful pieces on Dorothy L. Sayers, plus a chapter on the letters of Rose Macaulay to the Irish novelist and poet, Katharine Tynan, and another on the artist Tristram Hillier’s first visit to Portugal.

While covering a wide array of people and topics, the essays display a remarkably organic quality, seemingly growing out of one another. Smith’s erudition and commitment to scholarly rigour are everywhere in evidence, yet he enlivens his prose with wonderful anecdotal detail, often drawing from Woolf’s diary and letters: Woolf, reading D. H. Lawrence during the Greek sojourn, muses ‘[he] writes his books as I write this diary in gulps and jerks … no welding, no shaping’ (103) or Roger, infamous for his critical ideas about classical art, remarks ‘they don’t compose. … Look at the thinness of the lines: and no background.’ (98)

In this interesting book of essays, Martin Ferguson Smith both instructs and inspires. He reminds us that there is still much to discover and learn about the brilliant Bloomsbury Group and their contemporaries. We just wish for a more generous approach to other critics’ research, which has made so much else possible.

Further reading

Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1996)

Martin Ferguson Smith, In and Out of Bloomsbury (Manchester University Press, 2021)

Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1977-1984)

Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1975-1980)

Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (Hogarth Press, 1940)

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth Press, 1929)