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1The outcome of the 2019 conference of the same name, organised by the French Woolf Society (Société d’Études Woolfiennes) at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Virginia Woolf and the Age of Listening / Virginia Woolf à l’ère de l’écoute, is a bilingual collection of essays by Woolf scholars comprising three contributions in French and seven in English. The focus adopted by the editors of the volume, Adèle Cassigneul and Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, is both well anchored in modernist studies and original in its formulation. Tackling the question of listening in Woolf, Cassigneul and Smith-Di Biasio shift the attention away from the much discussed issues relating to vision and seeing in that author’s oeuvre—one thinks in particular of Woolf’s interest in the dual possibilities of the ‘sister arts’ of painting and writing, but also of the role of cinema, photography, and more generally of images in her work—while simultaneously building on such approaches as Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower’s Vibratory Modernism (2013) or Catriona Livingstone’s Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity (2022). Unlike previous studies however, the present volume is concerned not so much with the physics of sound and vibration as with the position the ‘acoustic quality’ (8) present in Woolf’s texts naturally elicits—that of the listener. Woolf ‘listens to texts and writes acoustically’ (7), Cassigneul and Smith-Di Biasio argue, and by favouring this paradigm they are able to draw connections between two usually independent domains in Woolf studies: psychoanalysis and audiovisual media, with a particular insistence on the radio. As the editors remind us, ‘the active passivity of the analysist’s listening is construed as a sound wave receptor’ (8) by Freud, suggesting parallels with the realm of broadcasting, itself keenly embraced by Bloomsbury in the 1920s. The theoretical frame outlined by Cassigneul and Smith-Di Biasio thus opens a multiplicity of perspectives which the ten chapters of Virginia Woolf and the Age of Listening set out to explore.

2While the volume evidences no sections or internal divisions—therefore showcasing the specificity of each contribution rather than common themes—different groups of chapters emerge, based on correspondences and echoes which become manifest as one navigates the theses and readings put forth by contributors. To start with, four chapters rely, at least partially, on the twofold paradigm of the listener delineated in the introduction of the volume, with its pairing of psychoanalysis and the sound technologies of the early twentieth century. Claire Davison, in ‘Broadcasting Becomes Orlando: Sound Waves in and around 1928’ thus reads the ‘sonic modernity’ (15) of Orlando—a novel she perceives as “[r]adiophonic in terms of conception, composition and reception” (20)—through the prism of Woolf’s and Vita Sackville-West’s involvement with the BBC at the time the work was conceived and in the aftermath of its publication. Sound and radio waves are further explored in Olivier Hercend’s and Marie Allègre’s respective chapters. In a very fine analysis of the agency of listening and listeners in Woolf, Hercend indeed contends that ‘the reproduction of sounds, the telephone and the radio, shed light on the inherent complexity of the listener’s position’ (244). This allows him to show that listeners—whether it is Sara in The Years, Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, or the reader figure Woolf advocates in her essays—‘are often more powerful than their silence suggests’ (246). While Allègre also pays close attention to audio media, and in particular to the gramophone of Between the Acts, her essay (‘The Primeval Voice Sounding Loud in the Ear of the Present Moment: Oedipal Psychoanalytic Frameworks & Virginia Woolf’s Transferential Voices’) is the one in the volume that engages the most fully with psychoanalytic theory. Allègre’s project, however, defies traditional psychoanalytic constructs as she relies on the ‘dislocated voices’ in Woolf’s texts (the aforementioned gramophone, or the beggar woman’s onomatopoeic singing in Mrs Dalloway) to question the notion of the pre-oedipal. Such voices indeed bear witness to a ‘primordial realm’ (209) which ‘exceeds the individual, ontogenetic, level’ (210). Finally, psychoanalysis is also harnessed in Anne-Laure Rigeade’s article, ‘Écoutes françaises de The Waves: Non-écoute, écoute totale, écoute transformative’, in which she contends that translators, listening to texts by Woolf or other authors, are placed in a position that is akin to that of the analyst. Their listening—if sufficiently attuned to the author’s voice—may therefore be described as transferential.

3Yet, as Virginie Podvin and Michel-Guy Gouverneur remind us, listening in Woolf is often also a matter of music. In ‘Donner à entendre la parole folle: La musique et Mrs Dalloway’, Podvin claims that madness, whose voice cannot be articulated through the logic of words, is instead expressed musically in Mrs Dalloway. She sees the novel’s structure, juxtaposing Clarissa’s and Septimus’s perspectives, as reminiscent of a musical form, the gymel, in which two voices sing the same melody in different ranges before combining in unison (146). As for Gouverneur’s contribution, it focuses on Woolf’s short story entitled ‘The String Quartet’ to analyse its representation of a thwarted desire for music, and Woolf’s debunking of an ‘ideal model of listening’ (158; my translation).

4It may well be that one of the most suggestive avenues opened by Virginia Woolf and the Age of Listening undergirds the volume in an implicit way, and therefore resembles those connecting caves Woolf meant to dig out behind the characters of Mrs Dalloway. For a number of chapters coalesce around the idea that, beyond immediate auditory perception, listening is intimately connected to memory. What Woolf’s texts listen to, these essays seem to tell us, always places them—and the listening subjects they represent—in relation to the past. In ‘Echoes of the Unrecalled: Listening to the Past in To the Lighthouse’, Marie Laniel first voices that consideration by turning to ‘acoustic reminiscence’ (42) in To the Lighthouse. After a very convincing reading of Mrs Ramsay’s role in shaping ‘the acoustic fabric’ (51) of the dinner scene in the novel, thereby anticipating Hercend’s remarks on the agency of the listener in the last chapter, Laniel gives full consideration to Woolf’s ‘Utopian desire to directly connect past and present impressions’ (41) through a form of ‘listening “en abyme”’ (55) which sees Lily Briscoe imaginatively recreating Mrs Ramsay’s past auditory perception. In ‘Lyrical Anteriority or Woolf’s Listening through Disembodied Voices: A Prosopopoeia for Modernity’, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio takes her cue from Walter Benjamin and his ‘dialectic constellation’ of past and present within the same experience to suggest that ‘anteriority is inscribed in the present of writing as palimpsestic sound layering’ (87), such as when Mr Ramsay’s recitation of Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ allows echoes of the Victorian past to reverberate in the present of the text in a complex ‘sound/image palimpsest’ (87) that also foreshadows the war and destruction to come. Thus, ‘reading we are awakened in the present to the anachronistic haunting of a future-past’ (93). Adèle Cassigneul’s contribution, ‘Listening, on the Edges of Seeing’, similarly foregrounds Woolf’s sound-image complexes, seen this time not as palimpsestic but as an ‘eye-ear continuum’ (62). ‘Recording voices and images’, Cassigneul demonstrates, ‘Woolf creates texts that are intended for polysensory reception’ (71). Her chapter also consolidates the association of listening and memory as she dwells on texts—‘A Sketch of the Past’, ‘The Fascination of the Pool’, ‘A Haunted House’—in which sound-images are retrieved from the past and even from beyond the grave. Finally, the past we listen to is also one of the main subjects of Nell Wasserstrom’s ‘A Novel of Voices: Metalepsis in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’. In this dense and remarkably crafted contribution, Wasserstrom reads Woolf’s last novel as registering an ‘anxiety over living a life beating to the rhythm of the future anterior—he what will have been—in which one’s plot has been written in advance’ (184). The chapter identifies metalepsis as the source of this claustrophobic space-time: ‘transgression[s] between “voices” and across narrative levels’ (187) collapse the distinction between inside (the diegetic content) and outside (the act of narrating). As a result, characters and readers alike feel trapped in a fictional space that they fear might well extend to include their own lives.

5The heuristic of listening opened up by Virginia Woolf and the Age of Listening / Virginia Woolf à l’ère de l’écoute strikes its readers as both original in its configuration and teeming with possibilities, some of which were left out of the present review for sheer lack of space (the implications of the figure of the listener for reader response theory is one of those prospects, touched upon in the volume by Hercend, Rigeade, Wasserstrom or Allègre, notably through the notion of transference). The absence of sections in the volume and a relatively short introduction may nevertheless be felt as hinderances in the unfolding of the paradigm of listening, as these factors do not favour the emergence of focal points for the reflection. The wide thematic range embraced by the contributions may account for this difficulty, which never prevents readers from relishing the wealth of suggestions and insights contained in the volume. Virginia Woolf and the Age of Listening stands out as an essential reading for anyone interested in one or several of the various threads it skillfully weaves, from Woolf studies to psychoanalytic criticism, cultural studies, or reader response theory.