Virginia Woolf and the Art of Cooking

In "Virginia Woolf and the Art of Cooking", we are introduced to the private realm of the writer's domestic life. In line with the recent critical focus on Bloomsbury's material culture, and drawing on the results of this research, Orestano sets out to analyse the many ways in which the art of writing and the art of cooking mingled in the course of Virginia Woolf's life and work. A meaningful token of cultural identity, food is the key to understanding the complex network of lowbrow-highbrow relationships that existed within her household and, in particular, within the space of her kitchen. Generally precluded to the Victorian mistress, the kitchen acquires a new and different connotation when Virginia no longer limits herself to presiding over it, as her mother had done, but actively participates in the preparation of food, for example by teaching her cook, Louie Mayer/Louisa Annie Everest, how to bake cottage loaf. The proximity of mistress and cook, and their shared intimacy, "no longer channeled in the conventional master/servant, order/obedience pattern," as Orestano observes, acts as an implicit questioning of consolidated social hierarchies and habits, and reflects that change in "human character" that Woolf celebrated in her "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" (1924). A change that Bloomsbury helped to enact, and that certainly represents an essential part of its invaluable legacy.