This is a study of Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with silence and the barrier between the sayable and the unsayable. It draws upon a wide range of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Kristeva and Derrida, demonstrating that Woolf was the first modern writer to practice silence in her writing.

Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's...