3 Why historicise? It has not always seemed natural or inevitable that a critic ought to. In the case of Woolf, the question of whether her works ought to be read in the context of her times has been closely linked to the argument over whether she was politically engaged with the contemporary world. In most respects, that argument appears to have been won – the ‘invalid lady of Bloomsbury’ has been rejected as an ideological myth – but the embrace of ‘historicism’ leaves unresolved several crucial methodological questions: With what materials do we historicise? What kind of agency do we grant to the author, and what are its limits? In whose name do we his- toricise? What sort of reading do we hope to produce? Historicisation marks the recognition that something has been lost, that the text needs to be returned to its context in order to become intel- ligible. Some of the irst critics of Woolf felt it necessary to establish the ‘scene’ within which she worked. To speak of a ‘scene’ is to draw, even if unconsciously, on a theatrical metaphor in which the author is an actor and the scene a backdrop. For Frank Swinnerton, writing during Woolf’s lifetime, the relevant unit of analysis was the reign of a monarch (though King George V had not yet died when he Georgian Literary Scene was published in 1935); Swinnerton characterised the Georgian scene in rela- tion to a Georgian modernity of technology, almost universal literacy, and democracy. 1 In the changed literary and political atmosphere of the mid- 1930s, the Georgian world was already in the past. For R. L. Chambers, in 1947, the decade is the more signiicant unit: in his chapter on ‘he Contemporary Scene’, Chambers emphasises the signiicance of the First World War, of the ‘lost generation’ of writers, and of a generational divide. He also summarises the 1920s as an ‘age of irresponsibility’ and the 1930s as one of ‘apprehension’. 2 Signiicantly, Chambers’s chapter on the ‘scene’ is ofered not as a preface to interpreting Woolf but as a preface to an evaluative judgement. Chambers begins with textual engagement, consid- ering in successive chapters Woolf’s purpose, style, and method; in his Chapter 1 Historicising Woolf: Context Studies Michael H. Whitworth https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511777103.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press