ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the archive of Virginia Woolf’s principal writing of the 1930s, all of which is related to the novel The Years. It discusses that the political and diplomatic work of Woolf’s husband Leonard and friend John Maynard Keynes may properly be understood in relation to the concept of “the event,” i.e., to moments in which interventions become possible that resist being understood in terms of historical contextualization. The modernist movement provides the focal point of Woolf’s biography of Fry, who curated the First and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions and in 1913 founded the Omega workshops, an experiment in modern commercial and residential design that drew on the efforts of highly talented young artists. “The End of General Gordon” is revealing in its analysis of epistemological fault lines within the psyches of both colonizers and colonized. The chapter focuses on General Gordon’s death at the siege of Khartoum in 1885.
