Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press: Too much room to write?

A study of Virginia Woolf and the effects of the Hogarth Press on her fiction writing. The study begins by looking at her involvement with the press as a partner in the business with her husband Leonard Woolf. It examines the degree to which she participated in press operations as a business woman, as opposed to a fiction writer or editor, and her role the modernist movement as a writer concerned with both the short-term and long-term markets for her works. After the examination of the financial and business concerns brought on by ownership of the press, the study moves on to look at the ways her own writing was affected by her work as the sole fiction reader for the press and by her work as an editor on those manuscripts accepted and published by the Hogarth Press. Very detailed comparisons of small samples of her writing reveal how Virginia, the writer, slowly alters her writing methodology in ways that reflect her work as an editor. In the end, it is apparent that the Hogarth Press, while allowing her to write and publish anything she wished, also had negative effects on her work---not the least of which is a devaluing of the work by some critics because of Virginia's self-publication and her lack of an outside editor---shifting the press's role in her life from an enjoyable hobby to an overwhelming occupation.