Virginia Woolf’s life, and her writing,
were deeply, indelibly marked by World War I. Her postwar fiction
returned again and again to the challenge of memorializing both personal
and collective loss. But before Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse,
before the war was even over, she and her husband Leonard worked side
by side to produce a physical memorial to Leonard’s youngest brother
Cecil, killed in 1917 at the battle of Cambrai just after he turned 30.
It was a tiny collection of Cecil’s poetry, printed and bound by the
Woolfs on the printing press they had purchased that year and set up in
the dining room of their home in Richmond, Hogarth House, which lent its
name for their publishing company, the Hogarth Press. Only a handful
of copies of the book exist in print and it is rarely remembered among
the output of Virginia Woolf or the Hogarth Press, but its creation,
laborious and physical, was a powerful act of commemoration.
Working the press, as Hermione Lee writes in her 1996 biography of
Virginia, required “manual dexterity, patience, vigilance, and
concentration.” It was an activity Leonard had encouraged his wife to
take up as a form of therapy. The setting and printing of Cecil’s poetry
was an absorbing and extended physical act of remembrance occupying
both the Woolfs for several weeks in the final year of the war.
The Woolfs were still new at printing. In a letter to T.S. Eliot
written around this time, 19 October 1918, Leonard referred to their
plans to print Eliot’s Poems with a cautious caveat: ‘‘I should
add that we are amateurs at printing but we could, if you liked, let
you see our last production.” Leonard’s phrasing—“our last
production”—shows that he saw publication as a joint effort, and the
result of intensive labor. He was most likely referring to Katherine
Mansfield’s Prelude, which the Hogarth Press put out in May 1918, before Eliot’s Poems
a year later. But between these modernist literary landmarks the Woolfs
had put together a memorial volume that belonged to a much older
tradition that became popular during the Victorian era. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/virginia-and-leonard-woolf-remember-their-war-dead/
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