Recent years have seen some excellent work on Virginia Woolf's engagement with Greece and with Greek, mainly from scholars whose expertise lies more in English literature than in Classics. This short book, the first in a new series (Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writings), offers the welcome perspective of a specialist in Greek literature who is also closely familiar with Woolf's oeuvre. Seven of the nine novels receive attention, together with key essays.

W.'s approach is to focus on a single genre, and it would be hard to argue against the view that, of all ancient genres, Greek tragedy was the most important to Woolf's thought and writing. The book is not, however, intended as a general study of the topic, but has a more specific concern with ‘tragic aesthetics’, Woolf's attachment to which is held to be ‘much more pervasive and sustained … than scholars have noticed’ (p. 2). For Woolf, W. argues, Greek tragedy ‘shapes an exoticized aesthetic space … enabl[ing] critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes’, with ‘Greek tragic style emerg[ing] as a correlative to feminine (and feminist) modes’ (p. 7); there is thus (as one would expect) a keen gender as well as an aesthetic dimension to the analysis. Materiality and embodiment are seen as central aspects of the tragic aesthetics by which Woolf's writing is, in W.'s assessment, so deeply informed.

After a contextualising introduction, W. delivers three broadly chronological chapters, each centred on a different facet of Woolf's gendered encounter with tragedy. Chapter 1, ‘Gender and Primitivist “Greek” Aesthetics’, discusses Woolf's early sketch ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’, her first novel, The Voyage Out, and the essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ (ONKG), under the general rubric of ‘“Greek” adventures’ (p. 13), which W. applies particularly to male privilege and ‘adventuring’ in relation to the knowledge of Greek. Greek as an essentially male possession is evident in all these texts, but ONKG is especially relevant because of its knowing (though ambivalent) alignment with the marginalised position of women in regard to the language. Instead of following the usual critical route here, however, W. focuses closely on what Woolf has to say about tragedy, especially the figure of the Sophoclean Electra, where both embodiment and ‘the suggestive, adumbrating nature of dramatic poetry’ (p. 38) are emphasised; it is this reading of Woolf's essay that gives most impetus to the whole book. Platonic dialogue, to which Woolf turns later in the piece, also comes under W.'s scrutiny, as a (characteristically male) genre which for Woolf makes a strong contrast with tragedy while possessing common features with it; particularly acute here is W.'s linkage of tragedy to the Socrates-Silenus images of the Symposium (p. 41).

Although, like ONKG itself, W.'s discussion is sometimes elusive, it sheds valuable new light on this text. Less convincing is Chapter 2, ‘Electra and the Materialities of Tragic Language’, the focus of which is (despite assertions to the contrary) hard to pin down. There is a general concern with language and style, particularly the way in which Woolf, on W.'s account, employs ‘Greek tragic style’ in her own writing. But nowhere in the book does W. define this ‘style’ (few readers are likely to be familiar with her 2002 monograph, The Cast of Character, where she explains her understanding of the term), and the difficulty of getting a purchase is increased by the absence, in many places, of compelling evidence or strong argument in support of a particular claim. Good individual observations thus tend to be submerged in a discussion that often seems diffuse and impressionistic. The structure of the chapter adds to the problems, with an especially awkward gear-shift between the discussions of the Oresteia and Sophocles’ Electra in the first section and that of Jacob's Room in the second.

In Chapter 3, ‘Female and “Natural” Choral Voices’, W. explores, with greater success, the different kinds of ‘choral voice’ that she detects in Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway and more especially in The Waves and Between the Acts. There is much of interest here, not least the attention to birdsong (significant in three of these novels, and generally evocative of Electra's lament where she implicitly compares herself to a nightingale, cited by Woolf in ONKG); more broadly, viewing these works, especially collectively, through the lens of the tragic chorus, opens up a rich new perspective. And yet W.'s apparent reluctance to make explicit, specific connections between Woolf and Greek tragedy tends to weaken her case; (too) much is left to association. The opening scene of Between the Acts, for example, may be construed in terms of an (animal) chorus, but that this bears a meaningful relationship to a tragic chorus calls for more underpinning than is provided (pp. 94–5). The possibilities here are illustrated by the excellent link made between the villagers’ chorus in the pageant in the same novel and the chorus of tragedy, via ONKG (p. 102).

An epilogue homes in on Woolf's great essay Three Guineas, in which Antigone has a notable presence, as she does also in The Years, discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 72–7). These are strong sections, which underline that W. is at her best when making a case on the concrete ground of a text, rather than on concepts that are suggestive but frequently left unanchored.

Space permits comment on only one or two points of detail. ‘[M]odernist tastes for the “primitive” aspects of Greek tragedy’ and Harrisonian influence may very well be relevant to Woolf's apparent lack of interest in Euripides (p. 8), but the preference of E.M. Forster (not strongly influenced by the ritualists) for Sophocles and of the much more obviously modernist H.D. for Euripides are also worth recalling; the picture becomes fascinatingly complex when broadened out. In this regard, W.'s almost undisturbed focus on Woolf (contemporaries and the broader historical/cultural contexts hardly get a look-in) seems a limitation as well as a strength. In a quite different vein, on several occasions W. interestingly connects the rhythms of Woolf's prose to the metres of Greek tragedy, but without elaboration (fleetingly at p. 128 n. 54). So we are told that Woolf had a ‘penchant for cadences that echo tragic lyric metres’ (p. 61) and that ‘[t]he jarring rhythms of such moments may well echo those of tragedy itself’ (p. 85; cf. 107): but what lyric metres, what tragic rhythms, how exactly do the correspondences work?

The volume is nicely presented, with few typographical errors (though see, e.g., pp. 61, 73, 91, 94). There is a detailed index.

It will be evident that I have mixed feelings about this book. Certainly, while innovative and suggestive in approach (and thus making a significant contribution to Woolf studies), it would have benefited from a less impressionistic manner of criticism and a sharper and more consistent focus on the embodiment and materiality central to W.'s reading of ‘Woolf's tragedy’ (W. may attempt too much). I conclude, however, by drawing attention to an important aspect of W.'s methodology, namely her strongly emphasised departure from the historicising, particularly biographical, approaches to the interpretation of Woolf's fiction that are almost normative in Woolf criticism (see, e.g., pp. 3, 7, 15, 45) – and, I suggest, in English studies at large. Working in a field notable for the absence of reliable biographical data for most authors, Classicists are far less likely than their modern-language counterparts to feel the heavy pull of biographical criticism; and, as W. shows, in this, as well as in familiarity with Greek (and Latin) – even if we can never quite ‘know’ them –, classical reception studies can make a pronounced and meaningful impact on the understanding of later literatures.