From ideals to reality: The women's smallholding colony at Lingfield, 1920-39

The immediate impetus for the colony at Lingfield in Surrey was the desire by the Women's Farm and Garden Association to enable women who had worked on the land during the First World War to be able to farm on their own account. However the motivation for the colony can also be traced back to late nineteenth-century ideals. The colony soon ran into problems which were exacerbated by the adverse agricultural conditions of the early 1920s. The association responded constructively but the colony was wound down from 1929. At one level the colony could be seen as a failure, yet this article argues that the 19 colony provided a rural community where single women lived in a mutually supportive environment.

Life before ‘The New Biography’: Modernist biographical methods in the Hogarth Press ‘Books on Tolstoi’ 1920-24

In the early 1920s, before Virginia Woolf wrote her now well-known essays “The New Biography” and “The Art of Biography,” the Hogarth Press published four biographies of Tolstoy. Each of these English translations of Russian works takes a different approach to biographical composition, and as a group they offer multiple and contradictory perspectives on Tolstoy’s character and on the genre of biography in the early twentieth century. These works show that Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press took a multi-perspectival, modernist approach to publishing literary lives.