Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema

This volume presents an original study of the visual and literary aesthetics of influential modernist women writers, in particular Virginia Woolf, HD (Hilda Doolittle), and Dorothy Richardson. Maggie Humm focuses on the neglected (often intimate) domestic photographs of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; on Woolf's essay "The Cinema" in the context of cinema journalism by other modernists; and on the influence of photography on Woolf's Three Guineas, her short visual fictions (particularly "Portraits"), and her modernist essays. Humm examines how modernist women explore a freer range of aesthetics than their male counterparts by looking at not only what has been called women's work at the margins of modernity, but also at what might be called the even more marginalized material within those boundaries-photo albums and image-texts.

More than one thousand of Virginia Woolf's uncatalogued photographs, and a similar number of Vanessa Bell's, have been sitting in archives scarcely touched until now. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures makes many of these photographs available for the first time. Both the photographs and this fresh analysis will prove fascinating to anyone interested in the many cultures of modernism.