Book review: Brenda Silver's "Virginia Woolf Icon"

Posted 12/08/00

Virginia Woolf Icon
By Brenda R. Silver, Professor of English
The University of Chicago Press

Virginia Woolf wrote novels and essays; she did not-in her lifetime-sell beer or promote a communist party or seek to plaster her face on T-shirts and best-selling postcards. But about 40 years after her death, a change took place, especially in the United States, in the way the world knew her. She was no longer primarily understood for her feminist ideology or experimental novels that introduced stream of consciousness writing. Her ideas were supplanted by images of her face and uses of her name that now symbolize anything to do with being female and smart and scary, anything that will sell. This change is meticulously recorded in part two of Brenda Silver's new book chronicling Woolf's public transformation to mere star or pop culture icon, whose face is far more familiar than even the titles of her books. Analysis of the intellectual media's critiques of Woolf's work and a discussion of stage and screen adaptations of her work make up the other parts of the book. The excerpt below, from part two, discusses the use of Woolf's face:

I want to reiterate a point made earlier: that the Time cover and the advertising blitz that accompanied it, both featuring the Man Ray photograph, were a distinctly American phenomenon, linked in part to The Years' best-seller status but also endemic to American book advertising in general. American publishers, that is, spent more money for more elaborate ads, including those bearing the author's picture, than was the norm in Britain. This practice ensured that Virginia Woolf's star image in the United States was shaped from the beginning by her visual image. In contrast, Hogarth Press, the press owned and run by Woolf and her husband, Leonard, which published her writings in Britain, did not use authors' pictures in advertisements for its books; in fact, it hardly ever veered from the most understated announcements.

See Brenda Silver's essay, "World Wide Woolf"