Co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of GB, Stuart N. Clarke, has been made an Honorary Fellow by the Centre for Modernist Cultures ‘in recognition of his exceptional contribution to the study of Virginia Woolf’.
And his work on Woolf has been considerable. Before the VWSGB was a twinkle in its founders’ eyes, Stuart self-published Orlando: The Holograph Draft (1993). He assisted B. J. Kirkpatrick to compile the fourth edition of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (1997), an arduous and multifaceted task.
In 1999, he started the Virginia Woolf Bulletin for the VWSGB, and was its chief editor for the first 70 issues, supplying much of the content, including full-length papers featuring original research and many of the fascinating ‘Notes and Queries’ articles. Also for the VWSGB, Stuart produced an edition of Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky’s Translations from the Russian, which had not been reprinted since the Hogarth Press originals of 1922 and 1923.
Apart from his work for the Society, Stuart has edited and annotated volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 2009 and 2011), A Room of One’s Own with David Bradshaw (Shakespeare Head Press, 2015), and Jacob’s Room for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Alexandra Harris of the University of Birmingham has written an insightful tribute to Stuart on behalf of the Centre for Modernist Cultures:
‘Clarke himself has remained determinedly an independent scholar, sharing Woolf’s confidence in the vitality of serious reading outside the particular frameworks of university English studies, and reminding us all that professional academia is only one of the many contexts in which ground-breaking literary scholarship is pursued. [ . . . ] Clarke’s ample and scrupulous annotations have helped to set the standard for contemporary editions of Modernist texts. His method has long been to set out information that might be significant and let readers make up their own minds. Students, scholars, and common readers will indeed be making up their own minds for decades to come. The Modernist Studies community is much in Clarke’s debt.’
