Tasty Woolf rissoles

When I was a child, an aunt gave my mother a cookery book called 100 Ways with Mince. This made a huge impression on me, because of my mother’s irritation — it was not her idea of a present — but even more so because of the enormity of the title. It sprang into my mind for the first time for ages as I embarked upon Virginia Woolf: The Platform of Time.

In the larders of literature, as well as the left-overs of major works, there are generally minor meaty morsels lurking in saucers at the back of the shelf. Ever since Virginia Woolf died in 1941 her literary remains, large and small, have been continuously collected and published, whether in book form or in specialist journals. They have been arranged and re-arranged, edited and re-edited, and every now and then the scrapers and scourers through her papers come up with something as yet unconsidered.

S. P. Rosenbaum, a Canadian academic, now Professor Emeritus at Toronto, has over the years made excellent use of the pick of the pickings. The doyen of Bloomsbury scholars in North America, he is old enough to have met and corresponded not only with the group’s junior offshoots and satellites, but with some of the original members. He has edited a useful and frequently updated clutch of anthologies, much appreciated as source-books by biographers as well as by aficionados of Bloomsbury, and composed of first-hand Bloomsbury material — mostly biographical, from letters about themselves and each other, and extracts from their memoirs — framed by his own knowledgeable commentaries.

In The Platform of Time he follows the same format. The title of this collection of Virginia Woolf’s accounts of her own family and friends refers to a phrase she herself used in connection with the changing perspective of memory.