The Ethics of Writing at High Rates for Fashion Papers: Virginia Woolf's Short Stories for Harper's Bazaar

Abstract

In the mid 1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American critic Logan Pearsall Smith on “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers”. Harper’s Bazaar, a commercial magazine to which Woolf contributed four short stories between 1930 and 1939, was a feminine periodical that exploited modernism’s distinction and high cultural capital to captivate a sophisticated, but essentially middle-class, readership by selling the illusion of upward cultural mobility. Although Woolf referred to her high-quality contributions to Harper’s Bazaar as “pot boiling stories for America” written “to make money”, it seems clear that her own engagement with a middlebrow publishing venue did not in the least affect her reputation as a highbrow intellectual and was indeed typical of the multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between the magazine and high modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing the boundaries between intellectual and popular culture. The publication of modernist content within the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar was advantageous to both modernists seeking to maintain their celebrity status and the periodical itself, which attempted to cultivate and sustain a refined audience. Much in line with her work of the 1930s, Woolf’s short stories engaged with social and ethical issues such as the righteousness of penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”), violence and decay (“The Shooting Party”), capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the Jeweler”), human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”). Though often considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as well as characterisation, and the commercial venue in which they appeared, the stories Woolf wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the preoccupations of the last decade of her career and are indicative of the tensions between high and low in modernist culture.