1According to Gene Bell-Villada, this general definition of ‘aesthetic separatis’, a phrase he coined to refer to ‘aestheticism’, ‘pure poetry’, ‘pure art’, ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ or ‘formalism’ (when discussing critics), gives us the essential core of a doctrine that considers artistic autonomy as a form of immunity from social praxis, but lacks a sense of time and place. The title of Bell-Villada’s book speaks for itself—Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790-1990—and his analysis of the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ and its various guises in Great Britain, France and the USA could have provided an entry in Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, complementing the already existing one on formalism. Bell-Villada’s study follows the developments of the notion across Enlightenment and Bourgeois Europe, through its diffusion to 19^th century aestheticism and New Criticism in Britain and the North American Campus while focusing on the ‘concrete social, economic, political and cultural reasons’ for its emergence and entangled growth (Bell-Villada 11).

2In chapters 6 and 7, Bell-Villada wonders to what extent literary modernism is a chapter in the history of aesthetic autonomy: ‘On one level, Modernism is indeed the expansion of aestheticist doctrine from lyric poetry to almost all artistic media. On the other hand, an honest answer to the question must be a cautious “Yes, but [...]”. Both the affirmative and the reservation require extensive comment, for the intellectual relationship between the literary vanguard and the aestheticist ethos is unstable and complex’ (161). As we know, there are indeed numerous metanarratives on the general ethos of modernism contrasting apolitical ‘pre-avant-garde aestheticism’ (or ‘high modernism’) with committed literary ‘avant-garde’; high-brow culture with counter-culture; the institutionalization of grand theory with critical revolts and manifestoes; the immunity to newly urban commercial and market interests with art’s hostile commitment to those interests; the foregrounding of form and style with the representation of life in its diversity. Obviously, the dichotomy construed here is itself an ideological discourse depending on a cultural context and a critical standpoint: whether we consider Georg Lukács’s Marxist critique of modernism’s static aesthetic rejection of historical process, Peter Bürger’s vision of the social inconsequentiality of a pre-avant-garde ‘aestheticist modernism’ grounded in its ‘apartness from the praxis of life’,2 or Andreas Huyssens’s similar thesis in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, the views that many modernist writers detached themselves from the public sphere and from life usually refer us to the situatedness of the proponents of this ideology, proponents who supposedly assume their implication in social and historical systems of cultural production on Marxist or postmodernist grounds.

3More recently, those views have been challenged from a variety of angles, not only in feminist and gender studies but in studies of imperialism and colonialism, nation and race, popular culture, and the publishing industry. The ethos of modernism is being re-thought as a discursive and historical field implying the study of its formations of reception and of production together with its contradictions. In Modernism: A Cultural History, Tim Armstrong suggests that modernism should be mapped according to its different phases (early, high and late) and trends (futurism, imagism, vorticism, classicism, surrealism), but also according to its dialectical oppositions embodied by artists as different as Lewis, Marinetti, Eliot, Pound or Joyce. Among other things, Armstrong shows how ‘the demands “to make it new” placed modernism and modernity in proximity’, but could either involve ‘a violent rejection of the petrified values of “art” in favour of “life” or reform’, or lead to the expression of an anti-modernity rooted in ‘the preservation of an aristocratic high culture’.3

4In this current re-mapping of modernism, Virginia Woolf appears less frequently than her male contemporaries. Maybe because her fragmented body of criticism prevents her from being clearly situated, contrary to Eliot, for example, whose famous critical essays progressively, but also problematically, turned into the conventional figure of the assimilation of modernism, formalism and New Criticism. And yet, just as there is a cultural history of the notions of ‘autonomy’ and ‘commitment’ in their modernist version, there is a revealing history of the apprehension of Woolf’s ‘aesthetic separatism’ which provides a complex picture of her commitment with art and life, as artist and critic.

5It would require more than a paragraph to retrace this history in detail, yet the few well-known facts listed below suffice to show how fluctuating, if not contradictory, the responses to Woolf’s art have always been. Woolf’s relationships with the Scrutiny critics in the late 1930s is one of those facts: they mainly saw her work as belletrist, amateur and insulated by class. When F. R. Leavis contrasted Woolf with Conrad in one of the essays that were to be included in The Great Tradition, he clearly reduced her to a cultural and gendered stereotype that refers us to his virulent opposition to Bloomsbury and what it stood for:

The contrast brings out how little of human experience—how little of life—comes within Mrs Woolf’s scope. The envelope enclosing her dramatized sensibilities may be ‘semi-transparent’; but it seems to shut out all the ranges of the experience accompanying those kinds of preoccupation, volitional and moral, with an external world which are not felt primarily as preoccupation with one’s consciousness of it. The preoccupation with intimating ‘significance’ in fine shades of consciousness, together with the unremitting play of visual imagery, the ‘beautiful writing’, and the lack of moral interest in action, gives the effect of something clearly akin to a sophisticated aestheticism.4

6In 1940, the publication of Woolf’s controversial essay ‘The Leaning Tower’ in Folios of New Writing was followed by responses in the next Spring issue that Woolf was never to read. Among those responses was Louis MacNeice’s analytical yet aggressive answer to what he considered over-simplifications and errors on Woolf’s part.5 In MacNeice’s view, Woolf was wrong about social upheaval being antithetical to the production of good literature, wrong about good writing not being didactic and wrong about the writing of the 1930s being solely didactic. In an article published the same year and to which she alludes in her diary, David Cecil categorized Woolf and Lytton Strachey as ‘withdrawing from life to cultivate their art in quiet’.6 In his 1941 Rede lecture dedicated to Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster delivered an ambiguous eulogy of Virginia stating that she was ‘an aesthete [with] no great cause at heart’. In the same lecture, though, he also paradoxically mentioned the outmoded extreme feminism which marred her art in Three Guineas.7 A few decades later, Elaine Showalter wrote her discomfort about Woolf’s ‘flight into androgyny’,8 triggering off responses from other feminists like Jane Marcus who argued in the 1980s that Woolf was a tough and committed writer who had devised the feminine sentence and the appropriate female form9. In the following years, to oppose Woolf’s committed politics to Woolf’s high modernist aesthetic formalism became so frequent as to treat her feminist essays separately from the novels, as if there were a division, assumed by Woolf herself, between polemical ‘nonfiction’ and creative writing as separate from social concerns.

7It thus appears that what we talk about when we talk about Woolf’s autonomy and/or commitment not only depends on the critical and cultural context, but also on a debatable antithesis. According to the chosen perspective and the corpus emphasized, ‘autonomy’ might either refer to the author’s personal and artistic apolitical posture and is then blamed as such, or it might be prized as the proof of Woolf’s resistance to the dangers of ideology through an exclusive commitment to literature. In both cases, I would argue that Woolf’s awareness, as artist and critic, of the entangled realities involved here have often been underestimated. Inspired by the work of Melba Cuddy-Keane in Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere, published in 2003, I have chosen to concentrate on the corpus of Woolf’s essays, trying to find out how Woolf’s obvious involvement in the intellectual and political debates of her time affected her vision of her art, looking for her own dialectical terms when she discusses the value of literature, criticism and their relation to ‘life itself’, trying to understand those words in the context shaped by the intense debates of the 1920s and 1930s around the issues of general literacy and reading, of the embattled position of English studies during this time and of the growing pressures of the newly industrialized market on the writers and of the growing professionalism of criticism.

8Thanks to the recent research on the subject10 we now have a clearer view of those debates which led to the emergence of New Criticism from a field of literary theory dominated by ‘impressionist criticism’11 and Marxism. The reactions against belletrism and amateurism, the will to elevate criticism to a position of social and cultural authority in the academy, the emphasis laid on the need for literary theory to return to the text in itself rather than bring in outside, non-literary interests shaped the particular context in which we read modernism along lines that seem to be converging towards a similar version of ‘aesthetic separatism’. However, just as the contributions of T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards or J.E. Spingarn12 have to be reassessed in their diversity, Woolf’s positions in those debates has to be examined closely if we want to come to terms with their apparent ambivalence.

9Virginia Woolf clearly shared with the new critics of her generation—some of which were to become part of what is now acknowledged as a critical school—the belief that things ought to change. Many of the reviews she wrote in the 1910s and 1920s on books of criticism by academics like George Saintsbury, Walter Raleigh or William Ernest Henley underline her commitment to the language of the literary text. In ‘Henleys Criticism’ she explains that ‘there are times when we would sweep aside all biography and all psychology for the sake of a single song or a single page expounded and analysed phrase by phrase’,13 and in ‘Creative Criticism’ she agrees with J.E. Spingarn that ‘the important change of course [in criticism] was the change that led critics to conceive of literature as an art of expression’ (Woolf 1987, 123)14.

10Yet Woolf did not exactly belong to the same intellectual sphere as Eliot, Leavis or Richards: she was not a scholar, she did not lecture at Cambridge, she favoured the reading of the classics but also of all the books that the new literary market had to offer, and she wanted as much to rescue literature and literary criticism from subjective, biographical and impressionist perspectives as from objective, scientific, rule-devising and judgemental readings. She was well aware of the hot debates within and outside the Academy, in Britain and in the States: she read Lubbock, E.M. Forster,15 Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), though probably not after the first chapter. However, in ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ she opposed ‘these diverse schools [who] have debated as hotly as ever’ and the men ‘who kept the main principles of literature closely in view’ and ‘controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown’ (Woolf 1988, 354). She contrasted the critical authority of Coleridge, Carlyle or Sainte Beuve with the ‘freakishness of contemporary criticism’ (Woolf 1988, 286-287), making no clear distinction between the older generation of critics and the new one. Her views on Scrutiny were unorthodox for the time—she called it ‘a prigs manual’16—and her quarrels with the Leavises were open. When she reviewed Scrutinies II in 1931 in ‘All About Books’,17 she managed to do so without mentioning the essays at all, which she found were written in a doctrinaire critical voice. Contrary to most New Critics, Woolf wanted to pursue literature, pedagogy and criticism outside academic boundaries, where readers and professional or common writers met. She was also suspicious of all categories of self-appointed experts, and of all forms of authority which she tended to associate with the risk of political dictatorship. In her review of the American critic Joel E. Spingarn’s 1910 conference on New Criticism, she both challenged the dogmatism and the anhistoric perspective that the notion of ‘work of art in itself’ implied:

Mr Spingarn makes a long and bold list of questions that have to be thrown overboard. In his phrase we have done with all the old Rules. [...] We have done with the genres; we have done with technique as separate from art; we have done with the history and criticism of poetic themes; [...] We have done with the race, the time, and the environment of the poet; we have done with all moral judgement on literature. [...] The critic then is confronted by the work of art in itself. He has to reproduce in his own mind the ‘essence of unmixed reality’, if we like to call it so, and to say how completely it has been expressed. In order to do this, says Mr Spingarn, ‘aesthetic judgment becomes nothing more or less than creative art itself’; [...] How in criticism are we to go altogether without ‘rules’? Is not the decision to do so merely another rule? Although to feel is of the first importance, to know why one feels is of great importance too. There can be no doubt however that to be free to make one’s own laws and to be alert to do it afresh for every newcomer is an essential part of criticism worth having. (Woolf 1987, 123)

11The whole quotation is indeed about Spingarn’s ‘aesthetic separatism’, his dismissal of the relevance of the historical and cultural contexts, whether they refer to genres, rhetoric, rules or literary history. But it also alludes to his unawareness of the contingency of any critical value. According to Woolf, a critic should derive his ‘laws’ and ‘principles’ from the literary text rather than impose them on the text. He should also be aware that those laws are not universal standards but the products of contingent and localized ideological systems: ‘Although to feel is of the first importance, to know why one feels is of great importance too.’

12For similar reasons, Woolf sarcastically fulminates, in ‘The Anatomy of Fiction’, against Clayton Hamilton’s Materials and Methods of Fiction, an American manual for scholars and teachers published 1908 that testified to the institutionalization of New Criticism.18 Hamilton is first compared to ‘a professor on a platform exhorting the peasants’ (i.e.: ‘the young aspirant to the art of fiction’) to ‘come up and buy his wonder pills. Whatever their disease, whether of body or mind, he has a name for it and a cure;’ to solve their doubts he will use a ‘diagram’ and will quickly ‘gabble long Latin words’, will ‘vociferate from his platform’ and will generously give ‘five pills with nine suggestions for home treatment’. Woolf then gives her readers examples of some review questions listed by Hamilton— 1-Define the difference between realism and romance. 2- What are the advantages and the disadvantages of the realistic method? 3- What are the advantages and the disadvantages of the romantic method?—she compares Hamilton’s criticism with the dissection of a frog, and concludes: ‘In America, evidently, Mr Hamilton is considered a very good professor [...]. But let us consider: Mr Hamilton is not a professor; we are not credulous ploughboys; and fiction is not a disease. In England, we have been in the habit of saying that fiction is an art.’ (Woolf 1988, 43-44)

13Here again, the arrogance of the critic’s dogmatism is satirized. Woolf rejects Mr Hamilton and his industrious band’s vision of the work of art as an autonomous artefact, immune to life: ‘But it is evident that Mr Hamilton does not like life [...]. He has found life troublesome, and [...] rather unnecessary; for, after all, there are books’. She also challenges their vision of criticism as immune to ‘the problems of the present moment’: ‘any good novelist, whether he be dead or alive, has something to say about [those problems], though it is said very indirectly, differently to different people, and differently at different stages of the same person’s development’ (Woolf 1988, 44). As a matter of fact, this last sentence helps us dispel some of the apparent ambiguities of Woolf’s views on art and criticism. In deceivingly simple words, she broaches here the questions of the historicity of art, of the situatedness of criticism and of the pragmatic value of all speech acts. By doing so, she sheds light on the impossible autonomy of the artist, of his work and of the reception of his work from social praxis.

14When reading the critical essays, we should therefore be aware of the fluctuating context of their utterance and reception. Woolf spoke differently when she addressed educated readers, a corpus of critics, Cambridge students or the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association, just as she spoke differently before the war and in 1940, when ‘suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came’ (Woolf 1992, 164).19 Sometimes her critical exchanges with the authors under her scrutiny seem to foreground a negative vision of aesthetic autonomy. In ‘On Re-Reading Novels’, an 1922 essay inspired by her reading of Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, Woolf acknowledges the relevance of ‘form’ while insisting on the ‘confusing’ origin of a word that ‘comes from the visual arts’: by talking about ‘form’ as if ‘something were interposed between us and the book as we know it’, it seems to Woolf that Lubbock has somewhat dismissed the issues of emotion, literary influences and history (Woolf 1988, 338- 344). Five years later, however, in her review of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel entitled ‘The Art of Fiction’, Woolf questions Forster’s ‘informal attitude’ when analysing the novel in general and Meredith’s, Hardy’s or James’s ‘failure in relation to life’ in particular: ‘Almost nothing is said about words’, she worries (Woolf 1966b, 52). It requires an attentive reader to see that Woolf’s artistic commitment to language in this essay does coexist with her commitment to ‘life itself’ in others.

15Woolf’s own words when discussing the value of literature and criticism in their relationship to ‘life itself’ obviously have to be reconceptualized in order to become less perplexing or contradictory. Indeed, Woolf always foregrounded her own theoretical conceptions indirectly by engaging in a critical dialogue with her peers and the particular audiences she addressed. Thus, her conception of ‘form’, which often led to formalist readings of her art, was nourished by her critical readings of Coleridge’s organic metaphor, of DeQuincey’s aestheticism or of Roger Fry’s notions of ‘vision’ and ‘design’ to name but a few of her sources of inspiration.20 At any rate, the notion is never associated in her essays with the centripetal, inward-looking vocabulary of New-Criticism, the proponents of which often used phrases like ‘the poem itself’, ‘inherent in’ or ‘self-reflexive’. Woolf did not regard the text as an artifact, especially not fiction. She was suspicious of metaphorical pictorial designations and did not deepen the dichotomy of signs and objects, of poetic language and ordinary language. She did not break the representability of the sign in order to break existing political structures; she rather tried to break the growingly institutionalized monologic lecturing of criticism. And assuredly, Woolf was definitely concerned by the ‘aboutness’ of the literary text. In ‘Life and the Novelist’ she wrote:

The novelist—it is his distinction and his danger—is terribly exposed to life. Other artists, partially at least, withdraw; they shut themselves up for weeks alone with a dish of apples and a paint-box, and a roll of music paper and a piano. When they emerge it is to forget and distract themselves. But the novelist never forgets and is seldom distracted. (Woolf 1966, 131)

16Once more, Woolf’s terminology when defining the artist’s ‘exposition to life’ has to be examined in the context of her constantly shifting critical positioning. Life, in Woolf’s essays, can refer to the Edwardians’ outside contingencies of ‘the trivial and the transitory’ or to the moderns’ ‘dark places of psychology’ (Woolf 1987, 152-159); it can refer to the domestic, political social influences to which an artist cannot be immune, as Woolf shows when exploring the specificities of ‘American Fiction’ in 1926: ‘Where the land itself is so different, and the society so different, the literature must needs differ, and differ more and more widely as time goes by, from those of other countries’.21 But ‘life’ may also refer to the demands of the polemics of contemporary life, of a world at war. Those polemics, Woolf explains in ‘The Leaning Tower’, forced the poets of the 1930s to be politicians; it constructed them as self-conscious minds alone, excluded their ‘artist’s unconscious’, ‘paralyse [d] [their] inner mind’ and prompted them to ‘preach’ and ‘lecture’, to produce ‘oratory’ instead of ‘poetry’ and finally to run the risk of ‘fall [ing] into step with the dominant ideology’ (Woolf 1992, 159-178).

17Thus, far from absolving herself from political questions, Virginia Woolf critically committed to them by rethinking them in historical and historicized terms. She proceeded similarly with literary questions, engaging with texts, writers and readers in a critical dialogue which never built up to a theory but was constantly reassessed through time. To understand Woolf’s critical commitment to art and life therefore requires from us a similar engagement with the numerous essays that focus on the notions of ‘form’, ‘influence’, ‘life’, ‘politics’ or ‘aesthetic judgement’. This is the reason why any conclusion on those subjects can only be provisional. Mine offers a synthesis that obviously needs to be supplemented and debated. In the meantime, I would like to argue that according to Woolf:

• Artists cannot and should not be immune to life. What Hazzlit called ‘the Spirit of the Age’, an expression which recurs throughout Orlando, cannot but ‘affect’ them through numerous ‘influences’ (Woolf 1992, 161).

• Therefore, ‘aesthetic autonomy’ cannot define an artist’s relationship to life, nor can it describe the audience’s reception to his works. It is a reasonable maxim only when referring to his creative process.

• For Woolf, artistic creation both implies a phase of ‘unconsciousness’ which allows the artist to ‘devote himself to his art’, ‘to explore rather than to criticize’, ‘to fumble his way into something genuine, persistent, of universal significance’ (Woolf 1947, 101), and a conscious resistance to the dangers of ideology.

• The artist’s consciousness, his ‘autonomy’ or freedom of mind, should not be confused with self-consciousness: ‘consciousness of self, of race, of sex, of civilisation [...] have nothing to do with art’ (Woolf 1947, 96). Art should not be the result of a compulsion to lecture, to inscribe one’s audience as a passive, undifferentiated group.

• Woolf thus never urged aloofness from social reality. On the contrary, what she called ‘the democratic art of prose’ in ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’,22 requires a form of political and ethical commitment, which, in Woolf’s own case, can be characterized as mainly critical: ‘Let us trespass at once. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves’ (Woolf 1992, 178).