Freedom in Publishing: DIY vs. Assisted Publishing— Avoiding the traps of assisted publishing, including all the many bottom-feeders who charge way too much for 'helping' you (NOT). We speak of becoming an independent business person, in addition to being an author…

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Author & Self-Publisher. If there was ever an exemplar of the author and publishing entrepreneur, Virginia Woolf may well be it. Most of the authors cited here began by self-publishing, and ended up 'getting published' by the same establishment that lacked the vision to see their promise in the first place. There is nothing wrong with that. Virginia Woolf, and her husband Leonard Woolf, took a different path. Virginia Woolf's most famous novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925, age 43), To The Lighthouse (1928, age 44), and Orlando (1929, age 45). Her prime writing years came during and after World War I, the boom years in the U.S. remembered as the Roaring '20s and the Jazz Age (F. Scott Fitzgerald). These are the years when the empires of antiquity had been swept away in the epochal bloodbath of World War I, leaving a Lost Generation (Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, et al) to grouse in the smoky, cobblestoned heights of Montmartre in Paris. These were the years when the disillusioned intelligentsia of the British Empire's ruling class continued the Byronian and Wildean traditions of horrifying a staid establishment through their unorthodox arts, thoughts, and writings. Virginia Woolf was well-connected as a founding member of the Bloomsbury Circle, and arguably the most influential and successful publishers (self and other) of her age.

Hogarth Press. Through most of her life, Virginia continued publishing her work through their personal Hogarth Press. The two founded their press in 1917, and named it for the house in which they lived in the southwest London Borough of Richmond-on-Thames. They started out during and immediately after World War I, hand-printing their titles. Eventually, they started using commercial printers (pay attention, self-publishers, in reference to this week's article on 'Assisted Publishing' (new term I just coined to describe the pitfalls of self-publishing before an author does the necessary homework). The Woolfs did it right. {I can empathize, because I (in obscurity) hand-stitched and bound a volume of my own poetry (Pauses), while stationed with the U.S. Army in West Germany (1975-1980). From that start, brought about by an early yearning for independence, I was ready when I joined the digital era in 1996. I was ready for the technical side, but have spent the last fifteen years learning the publishing business the hard way, making every mistake in the 'book' (no pun intended); so I can empathize with their progression, and see how they did it all right.} Virginia Woolf's first modest success (To The Lighthouse, 1928, age 44) enabled the two to buy a car—not exactly millionairedom. Leonard Woolf was 'a penniless Jew' on whom her family frowned. She, on the other hand, came from an old, wealthy family in Britannia's upper crust. She had grown up in a very literary household, frequented by the most famous artists of the Victorian age, including the American Henry James. Exhilarated by immersion in the Bloomsbury Circle, she did not publish to survive (as did, for example, Daniel Defoe, subject of a feature soon to come, who wrote immortal early 18th Century classics commonly remembered as Robinson Crusoe and Fanny Hill. Hogarth Press published the first U.K. book edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1924. Hogarth Press also promoted the new science of psychoanalysis, eventually publishing the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, in collaboration with Anna Freud (posthumously, 1956-1974). Hogarth Press illustrates the development of a complete, independent publishing house through a typical and necessary evolution from hand-crafted books to the hiring of professionals. The Woolfs did not enter publishing blindly, full of starry-eyed hopes, dreams instead of hard business realities, and a lack of homework, as is the downfall of 99% of all self-publishers today.

Controversial, Edgy, Original: Bloomsbury Circle. Hogarth Press, which was eventually subsumed into Chatto & Windus in 1946, during its nearly thirty years of independence, published not only Virginia Woolf's work. They began publishing for the Bloomsbury Group, an influential modernist and edgy circle of intellectuals. The Bloomsbury Circle, as it was also known, was named for Bloomsbury Square, in fashionable Bloomsbury section of Camden Borough, central London. Leading members of the Bloomsbury Circle included Virginia Stephen Woolf and her political theorist-author husband Leonard Woolf; economist John Maynard Keynes; author E. M. Forster; the psychological biographer Giles Lytton Strachey and his wife ; Formalist art critic Arthur Clive Heward Bell, husband of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Stephen Bell. Sexual ambages seem to have been the norm. Virginia Woolf openly flirted with Clive Bell who, though he remained married to Vanessa, had a homosexual relationship with John Maynard Keynes. Virginia carried on affairs with a number of women, some well known, like the author Vita Sackville-West. Both Woolf and Sackville-West had strong, lasting marriages while they pursued affairs with women.

Virginia Woolf and The Lytton Strachey Group. Lytton Strachey was bisexual, but apparently leaned more toward homosexual. He famously carried on a love affair with the androgynous and bisexual painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932), as sensitively illustrated in the 2001 film Carrington, starring Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce, and Steven Waddington. Carrington was little known as an artist in her day, though her unconventional love affair with Strachey brought her notoriety. Like Strachey and certain other Bloomsbury members, she was pulled in two directions, having affairs with both men and women. Carrington made woodcuts for Hogarth Press editions, among other art work. She lived in an unconventional three-way relationship with Lytton Strachey and his male lover Ralph Partridge. Carrington had moved in with Strachey in 1917. Soon after, Ralph Patridge joined them, by far Strachey's greater sexual interest, though he professed genuine love for Carrington as well. In 1921, Carrington married Partridge as a way of cementing the duogamous or polyandrous triangle (one woman, two men). (For a duogynous love triangle—one man with two women—in an atmospheric and adventurous World War II espionage novel, see Umnitsa). During this time, Carrington had a possibly intimate relationship as well with Partridge's best friend, the Anglo-Irish adventurer and Bloomsbury peripheral Gerald Brenan. Patridge, meanwhile, fell in love with another longstanding Bloomsbury woman, Frances Marshall. Patridge began dividing his time, spending the longer midweek in London with Marshall, and weekends at Ham Spray (country estate) with Carrington and Strachey. After Strachey died of cancer in 1932, Carrington committed suicide by shooting herself. As with Woolf nine years later under totally separate circumstances, Carrington's ashes were interred under a tree in the backyard of her married home. Partridge then married Frances Marshall (now Patridge) in 1933. The two had one son, Lytton Burgo Partridge (named for Strachey), in 1935. In 1962, Lytton Burgo Patridge married his cousin Henrietta at the start of a promising writing career. Henrietta Garnett was an illegitimate daughter of Vanessa Bell with the married Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant. Henrietta, thus a niece of Virginia Woolf, conceived with their only child, Sophie Vanessa, who was born in August 1963. Three weeks later, the promising young writer Lytton Burgo, just 28 years old, died suddenly of heart failure. Ralph Patridge (1894-1960) predeceased his son Lytton Burgo by three years. Frances sold Ham Spray, the house where Carrington's ashes were interred, and which had been the second home of Patridge, Carrington, and Strachey since 1924. Frances, born in 1900, died in 2004 at age 104. She was by far the longest-surviving member of the Bloomsbury Circle. Perhaps the final epitaph of a rebellious young circle, signifying their acceptance into the mainstream of literary, philosophical, and artistic history, was Frances' being honored, by the Queen, as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000.

Web of Rebels, Lovers, and Geniuses. The web of such relationships around the Bloomsbury is considerable, extending for generations. One cannot help but compare it with the circle surrounding Lord Byron a century earlier—rebels of the British upper crust, on leave from its black-clothed, religious-political, imperial tyrannies. For similar talents and tendencies, one also thinks of the Boston Transcendantalist movement of the 1830s, and the Algonquin Round Table of New York City in the 1920s, or for that matter the long-standing salons of Paris. On a very dark note, both Virginia and her sister Vanessa were long sexually abused by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, which goes a long way toward explaining Virginia's depressions, nervous breakdowns, and a least one institutionalization. This unconscionable abuse also sheds light on Virginia's becoming a leading proponent of feminism, and her dalliances with lesbianism though she remained married to Leonard Woolf to her end. Her sister Vanessa became a famous and influential painter in her own right. Besides being portrayed by Janet McTeer in the 2001 film Carrington, Vanessa was characterized by the late Miranda Richardson 2002's The Hours, in which Nicole Kidman starred as Virginia Woolf. The sisters have been fictionalized in novels as well. Keeping matters in focus, radical circles like Bloomsbury were a counterpoint to the same U.K. of crumbling empire and diminishing wealth, in which the brilliant mathematician and computer sciences pioneer Alan Turing was driven to suicide in 1954, at age 41. Turing had been outed as a homosexual, and after being hounded in the press and by a paranoid Cold War government. The atmosphere in Britain then is more remembered for the imaginary antics of Ian Fleming's James Bond than for the reality of its gray, bleak industrial skylines, and the repressiveness mirrored in George Orwell's 1948 novel 1984 (the digital swap in the title was purposeful).

Suicide and Coincidence. Virginia Woolf committed suicide, at age 59, in 1941. She left her beloved husband a note, saying she was hearing voices, and could not bear the pain of slipping beneath the waves of another black period of depression. She was depressed by the onset of World War II (having lived through the Great War of 1914-1918). Her house had been demolished by Nazi bombs. Critics were cool to her later work. Finally, she filled her coat pockets with stones, and walked out into the nearby River Ouse, in which she drowned. Her body was only found nearly a month later, cremated, and her ashes lovingly interred by Leonard Woolf under a tree in their back yard. The publishing ('self-') operation she and Leonard started in 1917 is defunct as of 1960, when it was submerged in Jonathan Cape publishers. Its titles today form part of the backlist of Random House. Random House was formerly a U.S. publishing conglomerate, but today is an imprint of the German macroconda Bertelsmann Verlag, Gmbh., headquartered in Gütersloh, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. By a remarkable coincidence, another great author-self-publisher, James Joyce (2 February 1882 to 13 January 1941) was born eight days after Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 to 28 March 1941) and died about 74 days before she died. Joyce died of complications from surgery for a perforated ulcer.

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