“Come buy, come buy”: Woolf's Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace

Summary

Earlier views of Woolf as an elitist author detached from the workings of the literary marketplace have been challenged and complicated more recently by a critical focus on Woolf's engagement with the commercial world. Far from being wary of being “sullied” by contact with the market, Woolf is now recognised as an artist intent on marketing her wares: as a writer and publisher she is seen to manipulate, exploit and, as Jennifer Wicke argues, shape the market and our understanding of it (“Mrs Dalloway” 5). However, this active engagement with the market is in tension with, and contradicted by, the strong distaste for popularity and commercial success which remained a signifi- cant factor influencing Woolf's publishing decisions and her fictional representations of money-making success. One of Woolf's most controversial stories—“The Duchess and the Jeweller” (published in Harper's Bazaar in 1938)—proves a rich site for exploring these contradictions, especially given Woolf's position in this particular historical moment of the late 1930s as a writer at the peak of her fame but increasingly critical of the commercial world. Always ambivalent about making money from her writing, by the late 1930s Woolf's more typically critical and contradictory attitude to the literary marketplace had become more antagonistic and her hatred of what, in Three Guineas, she called “intellectual harlotry” (TG 114) had become increasingly fierce. Whist she struck out (in essays, such as “Reviewing” 1939) against the increasing commercialisation of literature and the commodification of art, however, she continued to utilise her business acumen in her negotiations over fees paid for her fiction throughout the 1930s. “The Duchess and the Jeweller” was a story for which, taking Vanessa Bell's advice, she insisted on being paid in advance (L6 157, 159, 191).

Many critics have examined Woolf's anti-Jewish prejudice in this story and elsewhere in relation to what Hermione Lee calls “the habitual, half-conscious anti-Semitism of her circle” (680).