This is an impressively wide-ranging exploration of ‘the most timely meeting of writers in the history of literature’ (Ali Smith) illuminating the unhomed, dislocated ‘other rooms’ of Woolf’s and Mansfield’s six-year-long creative dialogue, encompassing obliquely angled portraiture, cities and sisterhood seen sideways, and distancing devices of distaste. ‘Other rooms’ also open onto unexpected vistas – public gardens, gardens of earthly delights, and cultivated flower beds of philosophy, thereby redimensioning intimacy, food and body politics, animality, stage-masks, and Time itself.
Claire Davison, University Sorbonne-Nouvelle - Paris III