But you may say “Why Contradictory Woolf? Why Glasgow?” Why not? For one thing, Contradictory Woolf, the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (but the first ever to be held in Scotland) opened the delicious opportunity for our assembling Woolf scholars to say “But” in the Bute Hall, that magnificent Victorian chamber of intellect and scholarly debate at the heart of the neo-gothic edifice, the Gilbert Scott Building, the centrepiece of the University of Glasgow, replete with quads, lawns and gravel. But Woolf scholars take happy note: there is no law of trespass in Scotland! And how splendid to have the rising and setting sun shining through the Bute Hall's stunningly beautiful stained glass windows, in which are depicted numerous figures, figures which, as the University website has it, “represent a wide range of characters and subjects including writers, philosophers, scientists, theologians, saints, monarchs and women [sic].” (Here we may say but doesn't and sometimes mean but?) The women figures in the eastern windows are personifications of seasons and virtues and other abstractions; the men figures in the western are portraits of great men such as Plato, Chaucer, Thomas Carlyle, et al. But there is one window in the Bute Hall commemorating three women pioneers of Scottish university education, Jessie Campbell, Isabella Elder, and Janet Galloway, and it is pleasing to note that there are still blank panes awaiting stains…How gratifying to have our Principal remind us in his welcome speech that “but” in Scotland is also an affirmation, but! But how fabulous, too, to have on display, for the duration of the conference at least, Suzanne Bellamy's superb pageant painting depicting Woolf on Chaucer's horse with the sun streaming through its rich colours, its golden touches gleaming, while the voices in the Bute Hall for four days sang out their buts and many other wise and contradictory words too.

Those voices (and I have space only to mention the five keynotes and must pass over the plenary panels on bi, queer, war, and class as well as the numerous parallel panels held in the Bute) included that of Judith Allen, author of an inspirational “but” paper on Woolf, and now of the book Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language published by Edinburgh University Press (2010).