Virginia Woolf and the Theater

Putzel (English, Penn State) has written a meticulously researched and necessary study of Woolf's relationship to theater. Woolf attended pantomimes as an audience member early on, and she remained an active theatergoer through adulthood, attending a variety of plays (noted in her calendar and listed here in an invaluable appendix). As a reviewer, Woolf wrote extensively on theater, particularly the tension between the reader's imagined text and the performed text. As a writer, she experimented with performativity, theatricality, and narrative, and she wrote a play (Freshwater, first performed in 1923, based on her great-aunt Julia Cameron). Putzel toggles between biography, theater history, and analysis, offering chapters on Woolf's passion for opera, Bloomsbury theatricals (including the 1907-09 Play Reading Society), women playwrights and actors and Woolf's ambivalence toward their work, and adaptations of Woolf's work for the stage. All of this insightful scholarship is founded on research into unpublished archival material and situated in a useful history of Victorian and Edwardian theater. Putzel contributed "Virginia Woolf and Theatre" to The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. by Maggie Humm (CH, May'11, 48-4938), and the present book provides a delightful expansion of that earlier essay. Summing Up: Highly recommended. CHOICE