10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
application/pdf
1974-4382
15462
en
Annalisa Federici
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
mediAzioni
celebrity culture
The Ethics of Writing at High Rates for Fashion Papers: Virginia Woolf's Short Stories for Harper's Bazaar
Text.Serial.Journal
https://mediazioni.unibo.it/
33
Articles
2022-12-06
2022-09-03
2022-07-25
2022-12-06
A80-A97
M
Annalisa Federici
2022/12/06
10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A80
Università Roma Tre
1974-4382
celebrity culture
en
A97
The Ethics of Writing at High Rates for Fashion Papers: Virginia Woolf's Short Stories for Harper's Bazaar
https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/download/15462/14995
33
                                                                        mediAzioni 33 (2022)
                                                                              ISSN   1974-4382


  THE ETHICS OF WRITING AT HIGH RATES FOR FASHION
    PAPERS: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR
                 HARPER’S BAZAAR
                                        ANNALISA FEDERICI
                                       UNIVERSITÀ ROMA TRE

annalisa.federici@uniroma3.it



Citation: Federici, Annalisa (2022) “The Ethics of Writing at High Rates for Fashion
Papers: Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories for Harper’s Bazaar”, MediAzioni 33: A80-A97,
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462, ISSN 1974-4382.



Abstract: In the mid-1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American
critic Logan Pearsall Smith on “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion
papers”. Harper’s Bazaar, a commercial magazine to which Woolf contributed four short
stories between 1930 and 1939, was a feminine periodical that exploited modernism’s
distinction and high cultural capital to captivate a sophisticated, but essentially middle-
class, readership by selling the illusion of upward cultural mobility. Although Woolf
referred to her high-quality contributions to Harper’s Bazaar as “pot boiling stories for
America” written “to make money”, it seems clear that her own engagement with a
middlebrow publishing venue did not in the least affect her reputation as a highbrow
intellectual and was indeed typical of the multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between
the magazine and high modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing
the boundaries between intellectual and popular culture. The publication of modernist
content within the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar was advantageous to both modernists
seeking to maintain their celebrity status and the periodical itself, which attempted to
cultivate and sustain a refined audience. Much in line with her work of the 1930s, Woolf’s
short stories engaged with social and ethical issues such as the righteousness of
penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”), violence
and decay (“The Shooting Party”), capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the
Jeweler”), human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”). Though often
considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as well as
characterisation, and the commercial venue in which they appeared, the stories Woolf
wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the preoccupations of the last decade of her career and
are indicative of the tensions between high and low in modernist culture.

Keywords: Virginia Woolf; ethics; short stories; Harper’s Bazaar; high modernism;
middlebrow culture; intellectualism; commercialism; women’s magazines; celebrity
culture.




Copyright © 2022
The text in this work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.                                        A80
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                                    A81


1. Modernism, Woolf and the Literary Marketplace

In the mid-1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American
critic Logan Pearsall Smith on the moral code of accepting lucrative
commissions to write for popular journals or, as she put it, “the ethics of
writing articles at high rates for fashion papers” (Nicolson and Trautmann
1977: 154). Although the argument mainly concerned the choice of a high-
circulation, middlebrow periodical like British Vogue as publishing venue for
five of her essays1, Woolf’s position in the contradictory, often vexed, but
eventually productive relationship between highbrow modernism and the
literary marketplace may be considered as particularly illuminating to explain
her active and fruitful engagement with popular magazines also including Eve:
The Lady’s Pictorial (where her short piece “The Waxworks at the Abbey”
appeared in May 1928)2, Good Housekeeping (which published her “Six Essays
on London Life” between December 1931 and December 1932)3, or Harper’s
Bazaar, to which Woolf contributed four short stories between January 1930
and April 1939. Although her attitude toward these commercial publications,
as well as the works she specially crafted for them, could range from mere
detachment to downright disdain4, Woolf nonetheless tied herself to

1
  The full passage, from a letter to Jacques Raverat dated 24 January 1925, reads: “I’ve been
engaged in a great wrangle with an old American called Pearsall Smith on the ethics of writing
articles at high rates for fashion papers like Vogue. He says it demeans one. He says one must
write only for the Lit. Supplement and the Nation and Robert Bridges and prestige and
posterity and to set a high example. I say Bunkum. Ladies’ clothes and aristocrats playing golf
don’t affect my style; and they would do his a world of good. Oh these Americans! How they
always muddle everything up! What he wants is prestige: what I want, money” (Nicolson and
Trautmann 1977: 154, emphasis added). Woolf’s lifetime contribution to the British edition of
Vogue amounts to five articles: “Indiscretions” (November 1924), “George Moore” (June 1925),
“The Tale of Genji” (July 1925), “The Life of John Mytton” (March 1926), “A Professor of Life”
(May 1926), while “Flying Over London” appeared posthumously in Vogue in March 1950.
These essays and, more generally, Woolf’s relationship with middlebrow print culture have
recently attracted conspicuous critical attention. See, for instance, Garrity 1999, Garrity 2000,
Luckhurst 1998 and Dubino 2010.
2
  In spite of its vitality and versatility, Eve has been largely neglected by scholars and so has
Woolf’s commitment to it. Rare and notable exceptions are represented by Plock 2018, Sheehan
2018 and Wood 2020.
3
  Apparently commissioned by Good Housekeeping as a series, these essays include “The Docks
of London” (December 1931), “Oxford Street Tide” (January 1932), “Great Men’s Houses”
(March 1932), “Abbeys and Cathedrals” (May 1932), “This Is the House of Commons” (October
1932) and “Portrait of a Londoner” (December 1932). For an attentive analysis of such
contributions, which aided the popular magazine’s marketing of Woolf’s high-quality work as a
cultural commodity, see for example Reynier 2019 and Wood 2010.
4
  It is now widely acknowledged that “Woolf never participated in a full-scale repudiation of
mass culture – even though she was consistently contemptuous of ʻpopularityʼ” (Garrity 2000:
195). In her correspondence, for instance, she recorded in neutral terms the emergence of her
plan to contribute “The Waxworks at the Abbey” to Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial: “I think I shall
write a little article on Queen Elizabeth’s nose for Eve” (Nicolson and Trautmann 1977: 468-
469). However, she was apparently much more critical of the stories she sold to Harper’s
Bazaar, as will be shown afterwards, or of the essays she was commissioned to write for Good
Housekeeping: “I’m being bored to death by my London articles – pure brilliant description – six
of them – and not a thought for fear of clouding the brilliancy” (Nicolson and Trautmann 1978:
301). In the same vein, her relationship with Vogue was indeed quite contradictory, as shown
by the caustic remarks, disseminated in her letters, concerning both the journal – whose
commercialism she dismissed as “vulgar” and “shameless” (Nicolson and Trautmann 1977:
158) – and its editor Dorothy Todd, as well as the commercial terms she used to describe her
commitment to popular print culture: “I shall sell my soul to Todd; but this is the first step to
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A82                                                                               FEDERICI


middlebrow culture for such practical reasons as visibility and financial
reward, which allowed her to achieve the intellectual and economic liberty
necessary to receive acclaim as a professional, serious writer while also
retaining her distinctive highbrow style. Moreover, she decided to do so by
renouncing the stereotypes and ethical restrictions of highbrow modernist
aestheticism, and choosing publishing venues which represent compelling
examples of how high culture often employed mass cultural forms like fashion
papers to publicise its values.
     In line with Aaron Jaffe’s – and of other scholars of modernism and
celebrity5 – view that outstanding modernists, far from being opposed to the
economy of production and consumption, “were more canny about fashioning
their careers [...] than is often appreciated” (2005: 3), it seems interesting to
consider interwar feminine periodicals as platforms that provided
contemporary writers and artists with a means to acquire prominence and
promote themselves to a wider readership. These magazines’ portrayal of Woolf
as a signifier for high modernism was ultimately dependent upon a discourse
illustrating that popular markers of femininity like fashionable clothes and
accessories might coalesce with the middlebrow commodification of the female
modernist icon. The way Woolf was showcased in commercial publications as a
renowned, out-of-reach celebrity writer is ultimately in line with recent
scholarly investigations of the presence of both “high” and “low” content in
interwar women’s magazines and their active engagement with modernist
culture. In her illuminating Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s
Magazines, Alice Wood has demonstrated that “commercial women’s
periodicals debated, disrupted, and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high
and low culture” by tracing their “participation in the construction of
modernism’s public profile” (2020: 2). Her informed analysis of interwar
women’s magazines in Britain highlights how publications such as Vogue, Eve,
Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar “disrupt the very notion of a struggle
between intellectually demanding and easily consumable pleasures by
encouraging their readers’ enjoyment of both difficult and easy pleasures and
presenting cultural activities perceived as highbrow and lowbrow side by side”
(ibid.: 8). Other studies have equally emphasised that, in the interwar years, “a
variety of women’s periodicals – from upmarket fashion magazines to lowbrow
pulps – promoted highbrow, middlebrow, and popular literary and cultural
materials, often side by side”, thus demonstrating that “periodicals produced
for women readers were not unaware of the rise of modernism in the cultural
landscape, and in various ways actively participated in its key discourses” (Clay
2018: 11). This wave of revisionist scholarship has also shown how earlier
views of Woolf as an elitist author detached from the workings of the literary


being free” (ibid.: 250). Even so, Woolf’s lifelong engagement with middlebrow periodicals
demonstrates that the highly remunerative activity of writing short pieces for commercial
magazines granted her the opportunity to achieve the intellectual and economic independence
she always aspired to as a woman writer.
5
  In recent years, the materialist turn of the “new modernist studies” (Mao and Walkowitz
2009) has thrown light on the often neglected interactions between modernism and celebrity
culture. See, among other compelling publications, Goldman 2011, Jaffe 2005, Jaffe and
Goldman 2010, Hammill 2007, Rosenquist 2013.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                       A83


marketplace can be easily challenged and complicated by a critical focus on her
active engagement with the commercial world represented, for instance, by
women’s magazines.


2. Commercialism, Intellectualism and Celebrity Culture in Harper’s Bazaar

Harper’s Bazaar, in particular, was an upmarket feminine periodical that
exploited modernism’s distinction and high cultural capital to captivate and
flatteringly cultivate an affluent, leisured, sophisticated, but essentially middle-
class, readership. Launched in October 1929, the British edition of the
magazine printed lavishly illustrated features on the latest Paris and London
fashions, etiquette and interior design; society and celebrity news accompanied
by alluring photographic reports, as well as more culturally sophisticated
contents such as fiction and articles by leading authors of the time, or essays
and reviews of recent books, art exhibitions and theatre shows. In particular, in
an effort to rival Vogue, which would not routinely print fiction, Harper’s
Bazaar assumed and at the same time expanded its audience’s cultural
awareness by welcoming contributions from both popular and highbrow
writers including E.M. Delafield, W. Somerset Maugham, Harold Nicolson,
Dorothy Parker, Vita Sackville-West, Evelyn Waugh and Gertrude Stein. It
seems evident, therefore, that Harper’s Bazaar’s interest in cultivating good
taste and refinement equally applied to fashion and lifestyle, as well as
literature and the arts, which accounts for the choice to publish four short
stories by a renowned and highbrow author like Virginia Woolf. During the
1930s, Harper’s Bazaar “offered readers an education in sophistication, within
which modernism remained an important marker of advanced cultural
knowledge” (Wood 2016: 372).
     The showcasing of modernist artists and writers among the magazine's
glossy pages, and the way it moulded literary celebrities for an audience who
would not necessarily have been exposed to them, can be considered as
strategies through which Harper's Bazaar tried to extend cultural elitism to its
middle-class readership. On a par with other women’s magazines of the
interwar period, Harper’s Bazaar commodified aesthetic value through the mass
popularisation of elite art and ultimately helped to construct and circulate an
image of Woolf as a literary icon and a marker of high culture, while at the
same time using this strategy to sell its aspirational readers the illusion of
upward cultural mobility. Scholars have variously highlighted how fashion
periodicals upholding modernity and exclusivity in relation to cultural matters
as well as style often cultivated the public personae of contemporary writers
and artists as highbrow celebrities. The profiling of modernist authors in
interwar women’s magazines frequently encouraged their reception as difficult,
elite, avant-garde intellectuals and insisted on the high cultural cachet
associated with their writing, while simultaneously making them more
accessible to the magazine’s non-specialist audience. As Wood contends,
although “upmarket British fashion magazines facilitated the spread of
modernism to new readers and equipped them with strategies to negotiate its
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A84                                                                                     FEDERICI


complexities, [...] they did not always present modernism as easy to access and
understand”; quite the contrary, “it was in the editorial interests of these
magazines to position modernism as difficult and the preserve of a minority
audience even as they extended this audience to include their readers” (2020:
99-100). Harper’s Bazaar, in particular, emphasised the perceived exclusivity of
modernist literature and art while contributing to its mainstreaming. On the
whole, the periodical “helped to assure the status of prominent modernists as
highbrow celebrities by encouraging their reception as established rather than
counter-cultural figures” (Wood 2016: 371). It is particularly instructive that
the visibility granted to notable artists and authors in sophisticated, medium-
circulation publications was part of a mutual exchange: as these periodicals
moulded and marketed modernist personalities for their readers’ consumption,
they also provided literary celebrities with a means to boost their reputations
and reach a wider audience.
    In spite of the fact that Woolf described her commitment to Harper’s Bazaar
in chiefly financial terms and referred to her high-quality contributions to the
magazine as “pot boiling stories for America” (Nicolson and Trautmann 1980:
252) written “to make money” (Olivier Bell and McNeillie 1984: 189), it seems
clear that her own engagement with middlebrow culture did not in the least
affect her style as a highbrow intellectual6, and was indeed typical of the
multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between the periodical and high
modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing the boundaries
between intellectual and popular culture. Moreover, Woolf’s short stories –
whose ethics Christine Reynier (2009) finds in their openness to, and
welcoming of, the other – were part of a project (then never completed) of
writing a series of “caricatures”7 and, much in line with her work of the 1930s,
engaged with social, moral and ethical issues such as the righteousness of
penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”,
January 1930), violence and decay (“The Shooting Party”, March 1938),
capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the Jeweler”, April 1938),
human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”, April 1939). Though
often considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as
well as characterisation, and the commercial publishing venue in which they
appeared, the stories Woolf wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the
preoccupations of the last decade of her career and are indicative of the
tensions between high and low in modernist culture. As evidence of the fact that

6
  Although, in a diary entry dated 22 November 1938, Woolf recorded the bore of “rehashing
Lappin & Lapinova, a story written I think at Asheham 20 years ago or more” (Olivier Bell and
McNeillie 1984: 188), Susan Dick posits that she took the endeavour of contributing to Harper’s
Bazaar much more seriously than she would ever admit: “the multiple typescripts of these
stories, and of others left unpublished, indicate that she put them through the rigorous process
of revision she applied to all her work” (2004: xix). Unfortunately, however, Woolf’s
relationship with the magazine has not received adequate critical attention.
7
  On 29 December 1931, Woolf wrote in her diary: “I could write a book of caricatures.
Christabel’s story of the Hall Caines suggested a caricature of Country house life, with the
redbrown pheasants” (Olivier Bell and McNeillie 1982: 57), clearly referring to her conception
of “The Shooting Party”. Dick also attests that “in January 1932, she drew up a list of titles
under the heading ʻCaricaturesʼ: ʻThe Shooting Party./ 2.Scenes from English life/The
pheasants/Scenes: Life on a Battleshipʼ [...]. She added ʻThe Great Jewellerʼ to a similar list of
ʻCaricaturesʼ made in February” (2004: xix).
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                                A85


Harper’s Bazaar did not merely publish modernist content, but actively shaped its
reception by assuming and enhancing its readers’ intellectual refinement and
familiarity with high modernist aesthetics, it seems particularly interesting to
analyse the editorial apparatus – both verbal and visual – which accompanied
Woolf’s stories and favoured her appraisal as a glamorous and sophisticated
celebrity writer. This essay, therefore, scrutinises the way in which the magazine
mediated Woolf and her short fiction to its readers, thus shedding further light
on the hitherto overlooked role of Harper’s Bazaar in publicising and marketing
modernist literature, and creating Woolf’s reputation as as a highbrow
intellectual who made frequent incursions into middlebrow territory.


3. Woolf’s Short Stories for Harper’s Bazaar

3.1. “In the Looking Glass” (January 1930)

When the magazine’s editor Phyllis Joyce Reynolds printed Woolf’s story “In
the Looking Glass” in January 1930, she made sure not only to advertise her
name on the issue cover, where it was placed at the top of a list of featured
contributors, but also to employ a captivating subtitle – “A Phantasy of Fugitive
Dreams” – on the contents page and to accompany the text with an elegant
illustration by Cecil Beaton, as well as with the editorial header “Am I
dreaming thoughts or thinking dreams?”, altogether suggesting an idea of
sophistication and intellectual refinement apt to boost Woolf’s reputation as an
aloof, upper-class author. By means of such editorial apparatus, modernist
aesthetics obeys the capitalist ethics of the marketplace, according to which
“the story is packaged and sold to readers as a high-cultural commodity that
delivers a taste of modernist experimentalism” (Wood 2016: 379). These
allusive paratextual elements employ the language of narrative psychologism
and seem to be particularly appropriate, on the one hand, to the public profile
of an experimental writer already known at that time for her brilliant attempts
to penetrate her characters’ innermost selves in Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs
Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and on the other to the content
of the story, which clearly privileges interiority over plot.
     As is well known, among Woolf’s short fiction, “In the Looking Glass” is
particularly interesting, in terms of her visual aesthetics and experimental
narrative technique, also for its suggestive title (and chiefly the subtitle, “A
Reflection”, subsequently added)8, which may refer, at the same time, to the
mental processes (thought and imagination) activated in both the narrator and
the reader by the enigmatic figure of the wealthy, middle-aged Isabella Tyson,
or to the metafictional device according to which, as the mirror arranges the
various scenes by determining what to include in its own frame, it also


8
  “In the Looking Glass” originally appeared in the American monthly Harper’s Magazine in
December 1929 and was then reprinted, together with four other items of fiction, in the
January 1930 issue of British Harper’s Bazaar. It was posthumously included as “The Lady in
the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1943), where the
other Harper’s Bazaar stories were also collected.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A86                                                                              FEDERICI


parallels the delimiting frame of the short story itself, since what the mirror
does not display the narrative excludes. Moreover, it definitely alludes to the
fact that the setting – captured by a sort of invisible camera whose eye
coincides with the fixed point of view or the observing eye of the unnamed
narrator – is reflected in the looking glass hanging in the hallway of Isabella’s
luxurious country house. With this brief modernist sketch in which she employs
photographic narrative techniques, Woolf is presented to the readers of
Harper’s Bazaar as a sophisticated writer who engages with narrative
experimentalism, allusiveness, introspection and verbal imitations of snapshots,
as the editorial choice to accompany the text with the visual medium of
Beaton’s illustration also demonstrates. As Wood aptly suggests, this large line-
drawn sketch represents Isabella standing in front of the mirror precisely as she
does in the fiction, elegantly dressed and carrying a basket of flowers.
However, it curiously includes elements not mentioned in the text – a stack of
books, a pair of reading glasses and a small figurine of a female nude on the
hall table – perhaps added to “suggest the literary and artistic milieu of Woolf
and Bloomsbury” as well as the author's “contemporary reputation in Britain as
a glamorous but elusive upper-class aesthete, crowned ʻQueen of the High-
browsʼ by Arnold Bennett in the Evening Standard on 28 November 1929”
(Wood 2020: 158).
     From the opening of “In the Looking Glass”, the reader’s view is
circumscribed by the solidly constructed view of the mirror. However, not only
does the picture provide a partial perspective; it also immobilises reality in an
unnatural way, granting “stillness and immortality” (Woolf 1930: 98). The
mirror sharply divides the setting of the story into two markedly differentiated
spaces: the static, restricted space within its frame (the apparently fixed facts
concerning Isabella’s life) on the one hand, and the animated, open space of
the hall and the garden beyond (the realm of the imagination) on the other.
While everything outside the disciplined confinement of the frame is swarming
with movement, light and colour like an Impressionist canvas, the mirror traps
reality and deprives it of life. The ability of photography to cut out a segment
of time and space, freezing them both intensely and unnaturally, is constantly
suggested. Despite its fixity, however, the photographic image eventually
allows readers to grasp an undisclosed truth, “invested with a new reality and
significance” (ibid.). Since, in this short story, epistemological questions are
closely related to the act of perception, the enigmatic figure of the protagonist
remains largely unknown until the photographic/mirror image includes and
captures her. After a long speculation about Isabella’s presumably fascinating
life, her authentic nature is disclosed in a final epiphanic moment when,
coming back from the garden, her image is reflected in the mirror and the
invisible camera placed on the sofa freezes her:

      One must imagine – suddenly here was she in the looking glass. It made
      one start. She was so far off at first that one could not see her clearly. […]
      all the time she became larger and larger in the looking glass, more and
      more completely the person into whose mind one had been trying to
      penetrate. (ibid.)

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                             A87


The inward movement of the protagonist – from the garden into the drawing
room, then inside the mirror’s frame – parallels the narrator’s and the reader’s
act of penetrating her innermost being; it corresponds to an epistemological act
of apprehension of reality leading to the sudden disclosure of a hidden
meaning. In the end, one final snapshot arrests Isabella’s figure in a mortal
trance, erodes her deceiving appearance and reveals the inner void of her true
self:

      At last there she was, in the hall. She stopped dead. She stood by the table.
      She stood perfectly still. At once the looking glass began to pour over her a
      light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the
      unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. […] Here was the
      hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in the
      pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had
      no thoughts. She had no friends. (ibid.)

At the close of the story, Virginia Woolf lets readers understand that the
picture, with its greater heaviness and solidity, has more authenticity and
significance than the world outside its frame. Thus she reverses the initial
opposition between the stiff artificiality of the photographic/mirror image and
the sheer vitality of the external world by attributing incontrovertible reality
and momentousness to the reflection itself.
    Nevertheless, this act of psychological penetration, or unveiling of the truth
behind “the mask-like indifference” (ibid.) of Isabella's face, is not devoid of
ethical concerns. Although “it was her profounder state of being that one
wanted to catch and turn to words” (ibid.), the unnamed narrator subtly casts
doubt on the righteousness of such a forceful, outrageous attempt to disclose
one’s authentic personality:

      Isabella did not wish to be known – but she should no longer escape. It was
      absurd, it was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much one
      must prise her open with the first tool that came to hand – the
      imagination. [...] To talk of “prising her open” as if she were an oyster, to
      use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was
      impious and absurd. (ibid.)

Moreover, if, on the one hand, Woolf alludes to the easy, apparently
unproblematic attractiveness of appearances – Isabella’s comfortable life,
expensive possessions, “exquisite” (ibid.) clothes and “fashionable” (ibid.) shoes
– over blunt reality, on the other hand she seems to level her criticism at
Harper's Bazaar's outlook and cultivation of superficial cultural sophistication.
As Wood persuasively remarks, “when read within Harper’s Bazaar, ‘In the
Looking Glass’ also delivers an oblique critique of the leisured, fashionable
lifestyle idealized by this magazine and epitomized by Isabella, who is ‘rich’,
‘distinguished’, well-travelled, a collector of distinctive and costly furnishings”
(2020: 131), an alluring picture which ultimately proves to be a fake.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A88                                                                       FEDERICI


3.2. “The Shooting Party” (March 1938)

No less complex or ambivalent is Woolf’s portrayal of aggressive male
aristocracy in “The Shooting Party”, printed in the March 1938 issue of British
Harper’s Bazaar. The sinister atmosphere of this story of violence and decay
with its brutal finale is also suggested by the Gothic font chosen for the title,
while the author’s name is in elegant italics, in line with the advertisement for
“Rosebank Fabrics” promoting “artistry in weave, form and colour ... to those
who appreciate fine furnishings” (Harper’s Bazaar, March 1938: 100),
appearing on the second page. Julia Briggs interprets “The Shooting Party” in
the context of the short fiction Woolf wrote after The Waves, which mainly
focused – as if to compensate for the almost exclusive attention she had
previously paid to her characters' interiority – on “the fabric of the material
and social world” as well as on her caricature vein “satirizing aspects of the
British establishment – in particular, its militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and
decaying aristocracy” (2004: 179), which she would criticise even more
harshly in Three Guineas (1938). In this story, based on gender and class
oppositions, Woolf subtly ridicules the lifestyle of Edwardian nobility, with its
declining extravagance represented by lavish shooting parties. Her attitude,
therefore, seems to be in contrast, once again, with Harper’s Bazaar’s outlook,
its appetite for gossip and high society news at glamorous sporting events, to
which she obliquely alludes when describing the enigmatic “M. M.” in the
railway carriage as dressed in the way “women dressed years ago in pictures in
fashion plates of sporting newspapers” (Woolf 1938b: 72). In particular, the
author connects the moral decay of the British upper classes, whose ardour for
imperial conquest mirrors the eagerness for blood sports, with what she
perceived as the vile and essentially masculine practice of hunting. “The
Shooting Party”, therefore, clearly engages with social, moral and ethical
issues, and represents the massive shooting of pheasants, with their “soft warm
bodies, [...] limp claws and still lustrous eyes” (ibid.: 100), as “an example of
wanton brutality, an indulgence in mass destruction that ultimately recoils
upon those who practice it” (Briggs 2004: 185), namely the last members – a
squire and his two elderly sisters – of the ancient Rashleigh family, portrayed
in their decaying stately home.
     The Rashleigh women are confined to the house and represented as victims
of their brother’s viciousness, especially in the final climatic moment when the
squire accidentally knocks old Miss Rashleigh into the fireplace, causing her
death: “she fell against the mantelpiece. Her stick, striking wildly, struck the
shield above the fireplace. She fell with a thud upon the ashes. The shield of
the Rashleighs crashed from the wall. Under the mermaid, under the spears,
she lay buried” (Woolf 1938b: 102). On the one hand, as helpless victims, the
two sisters are metaphorically described as clawed and feathered, and thus
likened to the doomed pheasants: “their bodies were warm and languid
underneath their feathers as they drank” (ibid.); “their hands gripped their
hands like the claws of dead birds gripping nothing” (ibid.). On the other hand,
the old women participate in their brother’s perpetration of violence when they
cruelly feed on the game, untroubled by the hunt raging outside and chuckling
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                    A89


at the tragic events that befell their family: “Miss Antonia drew the carving
knife across the pheasant’s breast firmly. […] She took a mouthful of pheasant.
[…] She drew her knife down the other side of the breast” (ibid.: 100). Briggs
aptly remarks that the Rashleighs’ luxurious lifestyle “dramatizes the danger of
separate spheres that Woolf would expose in Three Guineas: the men are
preoccupied with war, womanizing, or hunting and shooting, while their
womenfolk sit by the fire and sew, complacently, even complicitly, gloating
over their brother’s sexual exploits” (2004: 185). In particular, their
degeneracy is symbolised by “the emblems on the shield – grapes, mermaids,
spears”, which “indicate the family weaknesses for drinking, womanizing, and
war making” (ibid.).
     Though “The Shooting Party” relies much more on facts and a subtle
orchestration of plot than on interior monologue, the narrative technique
employed in this tripartite story, with the first and third sections providing a
frame to the central one, is by no means conventional or linear. Woolf’s short
fiction, therefore, is sold to readers of Harper’s Bazaar as a high-quality,
sophisticated piece of modernist writing which deviates from mainstream
examples of the genre commonly published in commercial women’s magazines.
It is particularly interesting that the story both begins and concludes with the
typical Woolfian figure of an unnamed woman sitting in a railway carriage,
“telling over the story now, lying back in her corner” (Woolf 1938b: 72), which
is obviously the story of the Rashleigh family occupying the central part. This
enigmatic female figure provides a link throughout the three sections: the clues
introduced at first – the initials on her suitcase, the long scar on her jaw and
her brace of pheasants – subsequently allow readers to identify the woman as
Milly Masters, the Rashleighs’ housekeeper and squire’s mistress. Moreover, the
definitive fall of the house of Rashleigh is subtly foretold by both Miss
Rashleigh’s words also prefiguring her own tragic death – “ʻFalling,ʼ old Miss
Rashleigh chuckled. ʻFalling.ʼ” (ibid.: 102) – and the final sentence of the
central section: “the wind lashed the panes of the glass; shots volleyed in the
Park and a tree fell. And then King Edward in the silver frame slid, toppled and
fell too” (ibid.). Just as “In the Looking Glass” foregrounds a series of
dichotomies – imagination and reality, inner and outer, truth and appearance –
central to both the story itself and Woolf’s aesthetic vision, “The Shooting
Party” calls attention to gender and class oppositions which represented a
matter of growing concern to her during the 1930s.

3.3. “The Duchess and the Jeweler” (April 1938)

The idea of a pervasive moral decay hidden behind the glamorous lifestyle of
the affluent and leisured upper classes connects “The Shooting Party” to “The
Duchess and the Jeweler”, which appeared in Harper’s Bazaar just one month
later (April 1938). In the former, Miss Antonia’s exclamation “ʻRotten at the
heart!ʼ” (ibid.), referred to her family and its many losses on the battle or the
hunting field, resonates in the latter with the fakeness of the pearls as symbols
of moral corruption, “rotten at the centre – rotten at the core!” (Woolf 1938a:
118), sold to Oliver Bacon by the Duchess of Lambourne. Both these characters
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A90                                                                                        FEDERICI


represent caricatures of the type Woolf had planned to compose since the early
1930s. Moreover, her impulse to social satire is even more disturbing in “The
Duchess and the Jeweler”, considering its underlying racism and explicit
antisemitism, which were controversial from the beginning9. As is well known,
this story is told from the perspective of a repulsive social climber, a Jewish
jeweller ironically named Oliver Bacon, who is duped by an unscrupulous
noblewoman into purchasing fake pearls owing to illusions of social ascension
achieved through consumption. While Dean Baldwin somehow dismisses “The
Duchess and the Jeweler”, maintaining that Woolf conformed to the
conventions and appeals of “slick magazine fiction” by using “flat characters”
aimed at mockery, and employing only “occasional stylistic flashes that raise
the story above the merely commercial level” (1989: 62), more recent and
perceptive readings have highlighted instead that “Woolf’s depiction of a
transgressive cross-class and ethnic encounter in ʻThe Duchess and the Jewellerʼ
acknowledges the commercial context of Harper’s Bazaar and, simultaneously,
indicts readers’ practices of consumption” (Henderson 2008: 1).
     The title page of this story is adorned with an illustration of a loupe and
pearls scattered across the text, which seems particularly apt to introduce
readers to its content, and to recall the numerous advertisements for “Ciro
pearls” or other fine jewellery often scattered across the pages of a magazine
encouraging fashionable behaviour in all domains. This is also demonstrated by
the ads for “Bird Iles furnishing decoration”, “Hennessy brandy”, Herbert
Johnson’s “supremely smart and distinctive hats for ladies of discriminating
tastes” (Harper’s Bazaar, April 1938: 116) and “first class cruises by the Viceroy
of India” (ibid.: 118) appearing on the following pages beside Woolf’s text,
which is clearly “embedded within a larger framework of consumption”
(Henderson 2008: 4). More generally, the illustration is also instrumental in
conveying an ideal of elegance and sophistication coveted by Harper’s Bazaar’s
aspirational readers, who desired to achieve refinement in fashion as well as
literature and the arts. However, while, on the one hand, the positioning of
“The Duchess and the Jeweler” within this magazine context seems to imply
that its audience can (at least aspire to) imitate Bacon’s social and material
ascension by means of that “education in sophistication” offered by the
magazine itself, on the other hand, by addressing an implicit criticism to the

9
  Both “The Shooting Party” and “The Duchess and the Jeweler”, for which Woolf received a
total of $960, appeared simultaneously in the American and British editions of Harper’s Bazaar.
Although she recorded with great enthusiasm “a moment of the old rapture [...] over copying
The Duchess & the Jeweller for Chambrun, NY. [...] there was the old excitement, even in that
little extravagant flash” (Olivier Bell and McNeillie 1984: 107), her New York literary agent
Jacques Chambrun initially approved the synopsis of “The Duchess and the Jeweler” he
received in 1937, but later rejected it “on grounds that it was ‘a psychological study of a Jew’
and thus, because of widespread racial prejudice in America, unacceptable to his (unnamed)
client” (ibid., n. 6). Several critics have focused on the troubled publication history of this short
fiction and on the extensive revisions Woolf had to make, removing all explicit references to
Jewishness, in order to comply with the publishing market. On this point, see Briggs 2004, Lojo
Rodríguez 2001-2, Trubowitz 2008 and Schröder 2003, who nonetheless remarks that “much
as the narrative tries to write out the Jew, it can’t avoid foregrounding the terms of
Jewishness” (ibid.: 306). When quoting Woolf’s story throughout this essay, I retain the spelling
“Jeweler” of the original Harper’s Bazaar publication, which was changed into “Jeweller” when
the text was subsequently reprinted in A Haunted House.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                     A91


fashionale materialism modeled in Harper’s Bazaar through her story’s plot,
Woolf also leads readers to acknowledge that “commodities do not represent
character or morality, and that consumers are ultimately corrupted by their
misplaced belief in surface value” (ibid.: 1). In doing so, the author “encourages
the consumers of Harper’s Bazaar to question their own practices of self-
fashioning and consumption mirrored in a detested figure, and, implicitly, the
impulse to rely on caricatures that falsely praise the aristocracy and vilify the
Jewish ʻotherʼ” (ibid.: 3).
     The opening of the story describes in quite conventional terms the
protagonist’s social (from street urchin to successful merchant) and
geographical (from the Jewish ghetto in the East End to a shop in Bond Street)
climbing. All the main markers of Oliver Bacon’s acquired wealth, ease and
social distinction are displayed: his exquisitely furnished flat “overlooking the
Green Park” (Woolf 1938a: 40) and expensive possessions, his leisured morning
routine and glamorous lifestyle, but most of all his jewels, “all safe, shining,
cool, yet burning, eternally, with their own compressed light” (ibid.: 116).
Moreover, his “perfect trousers”, “boots” and “spats”, “all shapely, shining; cut
from the best cloth by the best scissors in Savile Row” (ibid.: 40), signal his
affluence as a consumer who can afford to buy the highest quality clothing
from the most exclusive tailoring district in London, which fashion-conscious
readers of Harper’s Bazaar would most probably recognise. As with Isabella
Tyson, however, appearances soon turn out to be deceptive, and the
atmosphere of spectacle of Bacon’s life is revealed to be just a pretension
adopted to mask his repressed Jewish identity: “but he dismantled himself
often and became again a little boy in a dark alley” (ibid.), recalling his
childhood spent in a lower-class Jewish neighbourhood “selling stolen dogs to
fashionable women in Whitechapel” (ibid.). Such reminiscences align Bacon
with the world of capitalism and consumption, and alter readers’ perception of
the character. In this story, not only does Woolf engage with ethical and moral
issues, but she also ultimately compels her audience to identify with the
socially-oppressed Jew, while, as critics have variously suggested, “the Duchess
is the story’s real criminal” (Schröder 2003: 310). The Jew’s stereotypically
repelling body is described in animal terms somehow anticipating the animal
world of “Lappin and Lapinova”, which appeared in Harper’s Bazaar the
following year (though drafted much earlier). Despite having succeeded in
fashioning himself into “the richest jeweler in England” (Woolf 1938a: 41) and
continuing his attempts to ascend into the upper classes, Bacon cannot use his
expensive possessions to conceal the clearly recognisable markers of Jewish
identity which represent an obstacle to his assimilation into the aristocracy. In
what Kathryn Simpson has interestingly labelled “Woolf’s anti-Semitic bestiary”
(2012: 187), the jeweller’s nose is “long and flexible, like an elephant’s trunk”
(Woolf 1938a: 41) and quivers with greed, snuffing “in the rich earth of
Mayfair” like that of “a giant hog in a pasture rich with truffles” (ibid.).
Moreover, Bacon’s chuckling is “a sound like a horse neighing” (ibid.: 116),
while his swinging down the streets of Piccadilly is compared to that of a
camel: “he swayed slightly as he walked, as the camel at the zoo sways from
side to side” (ibid.: 41).
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A92                                                                          FEDERICI


    It is equally noteworthy, however, that the overdressed, luxurious,
decadent Duchess of Lambourne, the “daughter of a hundred Earls” (ibid.: 116),
is portrayed in no less derisive terms: “she was very large, very fat, tightly girt
in pink taffeta, and past her prime” (ibid.: 118). Her magnitude as a signifier
for aristocratic lavishness amplifies Woolf’s satire of the upper classes, common
to her Harper’s Bazaar stories: “she loomed up, filling the door, filling the room
with the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp, the pride of all the
Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave” (ibid.). Furthermore, her
comparison to “a peacock with many feathers” (ibid.) extends the animal
metaphors employed in the text. At the close of the story, the plot “enacts a
miscegenation that is commercial, political, and sexual” (Schröder 2003: 308).
As soon as the duchess and the jeweller shake hands to seal their commercial
transaction, the underlying connection between them, charged with clearly
sexual overtones, is definitively established:

      And as their hands touched the link was forged between them once more.
      They were friends, yet enemies; he was master, she was mistress; each
      cheated the other, each needed the other, each feared the other; each felt
      this and knew this every time they touched hands thus in the little back
      room [...]. (Woolf 1938a: 118)

In the end, Woolf seems to implicitly refer to the fact that Harper’s Bazaar’s
strategy of selling its aspirational readers the illusion of upward intellectual
mobility by including “high” contents (such as quality fiction) alongside “low”
commodities may reveal as delusive as Bacon’s strive to climb the social ladder
and gain cultural recognition as well as monetary capital. Despite her serious
concerns regarding the commercialisation of literature, however, Woolf could
not resist the lure of remunerative publishing venues allowing her to
consolidate her reputation on the literary marketplace.

3.4. “Lappin and Lapinova” (April 1939)

“It is undoubtedly a great freshener to have my story taken by Harper’s”, Woolf
wrote about “Lappin and Lapinova” in a diary entry dated 18 January 1939, “I
heard this morning. A beautiful story, enchanted to have it. 600 dollars made
then. But the encouragement, I must note, [...] is a warmer, a reviver” (Olivier
Bell and McNeillie 1984: 200). Her words record both her delight at the
financial reward of this commission, published in the April 1939 issue of
British Harper’s Bazaar, and the incentive she received from its warm reception.
“Lappin and Lapinova”, not unlike “In the Looking Glass”, focuses on a sharp
contrast between facts and the imagination, or the real and a fantasy world
jointly constructed by Ernest Thorburn and his wife Rosalind (whose name
evokes the metatheatrical fiction set up by Shakespeare’s Rosalind in the forest
of Arden) during their honeymoon. This romantic illusion “made them feel,
more even than most young married couples, in league together against the
rest of the world” (Woolf 1939: 37), over which they hold control by
transforming all of its disagreeable aspects into fiction.

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                              A93


     Such a rich metaphorical scenario, where Ernest has an alternative identity
as a king rabbit named Lappin and Rosalind is a queen hare called Lapinova,
persists as a shared “private world, inhabited, save for the one white hare,
entirely by rabbits” (ibid.) for some time after their wedding, until fantasies
definitively collapse. Unlike Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s common use of
animal nicknames as terms of endearment, which lasted throughout their
marriage, in the fiction Rosalind becomes more and more emotionally
dependent on her husband’s and her own alter ego, while Ernest gradually
loses interest in sustaining the sham. After attributing to Ernest a fictional
identity and name – “ʻLappin, Lappin, King Lappin,ʼ she repeated. It seemed to
suit him exactly; he was not Ernest, he was King Lappin. Why? She did not
know” (ibid.: 36-37) – Rosalind starts to extend the fantasy and “let her fancy
play with the story of the Lappin tribe. [...] they became very real, very vivid,
very amusing” (ibid.: 37). In the meantime, Ernest’s figure acquires increasingly
threatening connotations: he is described as “above all [...] a great hunter”
(ibid.), who chases and traps a white female hare – Rosalind’s fictional identity
– in a sexually aggressive act alluding to women’s subjugation in marriage:

      “A woman hare,” he added. “A white hare!” Rosalind exclaimed, as if she
      had been expecting this. “Rather a small hare; silver grey; with big bright
      eyes?” “Yes,” said Ernest, looking at her as she had looked at him, “a
      smallish animal; with eyes popping out of her head, and two little front
      paws dangling.” [...] “Ah, Lapinova,” Rosalind murmured. “Is that what
      she’s called,” said Ernest, “the real Rosalind?” [...] “Yes; that’s what she’s
      called,” said Rosalind: “Lapinova.” (ibid.)

At the story’s climax and close, Rosalind feels her fantasy world crumble
beneath her feet and even experiences a metaphorical death at the hands of her
husband, who kills her by shattering her illusions:

      Then there was the crack of a gun ... She started as if she had been shot. It
      was only Ernest turning his key in the door. She waited, trembling. […]
      “It’s Lapinova...” she faltered, glancing wildly at him out of her great
      startled eyes. “She’s gone, Ernest. I’ve lost her!” […] “Oh, that’s what’s up,
      is it?” he said, smiling rather grimly at his wife. For ten seconds he stood
      there, silent; and she waited, feeling hands tightening at the back of her
      neck. “Yes,” he said at length. “Poor Lapinova...” He straightened his tie at
      the looking-glass. “Caught in a trap,” he said. “Killed,” and sat down and
      read the newspaper. So that was the end of that marriage. (ibid.: 98)

    In this story, therefore, Woolf interrogates the validity of fiction, and even
more subtly addresses ethical issues she also dealt with pervasively throughout
her career, such as the unequal relationship between the sexes and between the
human and the non-human world. Michelle Levy posits that “ʻLappin and
Lapinovaʼ examines the effect of marriage on women, but it does so by
condemning all forms of hunting and entrapment, whether perpetrated by men
on women or by human beings on animals” (2004: 150). In line with this view,
Simpson reminds us that “Woolf’s fictional menagerie has been variously
considered as a means of challenging social norms and as revealing repressed

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A94                                                                       FEDERICI


desires and creating a space for unruly behavior” (2011: 151). In particular,
she convincingly argues that the animal imagery employed in “Lappin and
Lapinova” “is double-edged and all references to rabbits and hares are violent
and destructive – they are animals to be shot, sold, eaten and used. Rabbits are
commodities, comestibles and in both their fantasy and real worlds Ernest is a
metaphorical hunter” (ibid.: 154). While the threat of violence and
destructiveness – represented by the frequent mentions of poaching, hunting
and shooting – exposes the disturbing undercurrent hidden beneath
romanticism and comedy, thus connecting “Lappin and Lapinova” to the other
Harper’s Bazaar stories, the commodification of the animal world is definitely
in accordance with the display of lavish gifts at the Thorburns’ golden-wedding
anniversary party – “candlesticks; cigar boxes; chains; each stamped with the
goldsmith’s proof that it was solid gold, hall-marked, authentic” (Woolf 1939:
96) – all symbolising their greed for wealth and power, as well as with the
larger framework of consumption within which the story was originally
embedded. In the commercial context of magazine publication, Woolf’s quality
fiction – embellished by a drawing of hearts and crowns on leaves encasing the
first and last capitalised letters of the title – is showcased as a commodity
among others, particularly “Peggy Sage’s new polishes” (Harper’s Bazaar, April
1939: 96) or “Barri Ltd. clothes for maternity” (ibid.: 98), advertised in two
entire columns beside the story’s text.
     Both human and non-human hierarchies and the commodification of high
art certainly represent ethical issues which were among Woolf’s most pressing
concerns throughout the 1930s, especially considering the commercial success
– received with both delight and suspicion – that she achieved also thanks to
her fictional biography Flush (1933), a canine divertissement in which she
exposed the way Western anthropocentrism underpins the phallocentrism of
the literary canon, and changed the human perspective on non-human animals
from hierarchical to relational. In “Lappin and Lapinova” – a story Woolf
revised under the threat of a new conflict approaching and in the aftermath of
the publication of Three Guineas (1938), where she had explored the close
connection between capitalism, the violence of totalitarianisms and the
patriarchal tyranny to women in the private sphere – gender and species
relations are represented in much grimmer tones. Even so, Woolf’s perceived
ability to conceal such unsettling traits beneath the appearance of a
lighthearted fantasy definitely worked to confirm her stature as a writer of
unparalleled brilliance and ascendancy.


4. Conclusion

As this essay has tried to show, Woolf’s Harper’s Bazaar stories deal with social,
moral and ethical issues which speak to the concerns of the last decade of her
career, and ultimately refer to the author’s ambivalent relationship with the
literary marketplace as well as her growing anxieties about the
commercialisation of high art. By publicising Woolf’s works among other
commodities with the aim of attracting and cultivating an aspirational
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                     A95


readership, Harper’s Bazaar contributed to her reputation and, in turn,
benefited from the intellectual prestige accorded to her figure. Exerting a
considerable influence over what was regarded as fashionable, Harper’s Bazaar
and other women’s periodicals of the interwar period were definitely
instrumental in moulding and marketing Woolf’s iconic status, and worked to
consolidate and disseminate her public profile as a modernist of serious
imprint. Woolf’s engagement with commercial magazines, far from being
unethical or demeaninig her stature as Logan Pearsall Smith would have it,
ultimately fashioned her into a true modernist icon.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, Dean (1989) Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, Boston:
       Twayne Publishers.
Briggs, Julia (2004) “ʻCut deep and scored thick with meaningʼ: Frame and
       Focus in Woolf’s Later Short Stories”, in Kathryn Benzel and Ruth
       Hoberman (eds.) Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction, New
       York: Palgrave Macmillan, 175-191.
Clay, Catherine (2018) “Culture and the Modern Woman: Introduction”, in
       Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (eds.)
       Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar
       Period, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 11-13.
Dick, Susan (2004) “Foreword”, in Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman (eds.)
       Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction, New York: Palgrave
       Macmillan, xv-xx.
Dubino, Jeanne (ed.) (2010) Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, New
       York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garrity, Jane (1999) “Selling Culture to the ʻCivilizedʼ: Bloomsbury, British
       Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity”, Modernism/Modernity
       6(2): 29-58.
------ (2000) “Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue”, in
       Pamela Caughie (ed.) Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
       New York: Garland, 185-218.
Goldman, Jonathan (2011) Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity, Austin:
       University of Texas Press.
Hammill, Faye (2007) Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars,
       Austin: University of Texas Press.
Henderson, Kate Krueger (2008) “Fashioning Anti-Semitism: Virginia Woolf’s
       ʻThe Duchess and the Jewellerʼ and the Readers of Harper’s Bazaar”,
       Journal of the Short Story in English 50: 1-14. Online version
       http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/697 (accessed 25/08/2022).
Jaffe, Aaron (2005) Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Cambridge:
       Cambridge University Press.
------ and Jonathan Goldman (eds.) (2010) Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity,
       Modernity, Culture, Farnham: Ashgate.


https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
A96                                                                           FEDERICI


Levy, Michelle (2004) “Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fictional Explorations of the
       External World: ʻclosely united ... immensely dividedʼ”, in Kathryn Benzel
       and Ruth Hoberman (eds.) Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short
       Fiction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 139-155.
Lojo Rodríguez, Laura María (2001-2) “Contradiction and Ambivalence:
       Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetic Experience in ʻThe Duchess and the
       Jewellerʼ”, Journal of English Studies 3: 115-129.
Luckhurst, Nicola (1998) Bloomsbury in Vogue, London: Cecil Woolf.
Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz (2009) “The New Modernist Studies”,
       PMLA 123(3): 737-748.
Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann (eds.) (1977) A Change of Perspective:
       The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, London: The Hogarth Press.
------ (1978) A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4,
       London: The Hogarth Press.
------ (1980) Leave the Letters Till We Are Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol.
       6, London: The Hogarth Press.
Olivier Bell, Anne and Andrew McNeillie (eds.) (1982) The Diary of Virginia
       Woolf, Vol. 4: 1931-1935, London: The Hogarth Press.
------ (1984) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5: 1936-1941, London: The
       Hogarth Press.
Plock, Vike Martina (2018) “ʻA Journal of the Periodʼ: Modernism and
       Conservative Modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial”, in Catherine Clay,
       Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (eds.) Women’s
       Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period,
       Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 28-41.
Reynier, Christine (2009) Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, London and
       New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
------ (2019) Virginia Woolf’s Good Housekeeping Essays, New York: Routledge.
Rosenquist, Rod (2013) “Modernism, Celebrity and the Public Personality”,
       Literature Compass 10(5): 437-448.
Schröder, Leena K. (2003) “Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia
       Woolf’s and Leonard Woolf’s ʻJewishʼ Stories”, Twentieth Century Literature
       49(3): 298-327.
Sheehan, Elizabeth (2018) “Now and Forever? Fashion Magazines and the
       Temporality of the Interwar Period”, in Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo,
       Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney (eds.) Women’s Periodicals and Print
       Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
       University Press, 124-138.
Simpson, Kathryn (2011) “ʻLappin and Lapinovaʼ: A Woolf in Hare’s Clothing?”,
       in Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman (eds.) Virginia Woolf and the
       Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International
       Conference on Virginia Woolf, Clemson: Clemson University Press, 151-156.
------ (2012) “ʻCome Buy, Come Buyʼ: Woolf’s Contradictory Relationship to the
       Marketplace”, in Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki (eds.) Contradictory Woolf:
       Selected Papers from the Twenty-First Annual International Conference on
       Virginia Woolf, Clemson: Clemson University Press, 186-193.


https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
WOOLF’S SHORT STORIES FOR HARPER’S BAZAAR                                  A97


Trubowitz, Lara (2008) “Concealing Leonard’s Nose: Virginia Woolf, Modernist
       Antisemitism, and ʻThe Duchess and the Jewellerʼ”, Twentieth Century
       Literature 54(3): 273-306.
Wood, Alice (2010) “Made to Measure: Virginia Woolf in Good Housekeeping
       Magazine”, Prose Studies 32(1): 12-24.
------ (2016) “Modernism, Exclusivity, and the Sophisticated Public of Harper’s
       Bazaar (UK)”, Modernist Cultures 11(3): 370-388.
------ (2020) Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines, New York
       and London: Routledge.
Woolf, Virginia (1930) “In the Looking Glass”, Harper’s Bazaar 1(4): 43, 98.
------ (1938a) “The Duchess and the Jeweler”, Harper’s Bazaar 18(1): 40-41,
       116, 118.
------ (1938b) “The Shooting Party”, Harper’s Bazaar 17(6): 72, 100, 102.
------ (1939) “Lappin and Lapinova”, Harper’s Bazaar 20(1): 36-37, 96, 98.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15462
