Reviews

• A Tour De Force of An Extraordinary Woman and Writer: Her Life, Times, Struggles and Enduring Legacy...

  This is at first heft a tome, very weighty physically, but even meatier in the depth and breadth of knowledge and historical data of the life and times of Virginia Woolf. I must say that I have heard her name mentioned so often and in so many tantalizingly vague, but scandalous and semi-scandalous contexts, that I thought I knew more than I really did, which was just a lot of superficial cultural mumbo-jumbo, but in reading this book and a couple others beforehand, have opened my eyes to so much more...that Virginia Woolf was not only a writer of great talent and discernment, and not only intermittently unbalanced emotionally and mentally, and ultimately fatally, but that she was far ahead of her time, not only as an independent woman thinker and reluctant feminist, but as an experimental writer of literary forms, a liberal and freethinker socially, culturally, politically, sexually, economically, and religiously. She was a 'common reader' as she named some of her published works, but only because she considered herself incompletely and home/self educated, since she never received a formal college or university education. This was a bone of contention from which she never fully recovered or would ever be able to fully forgive either her father or the patronizing and limiting patriarchal society into which she was born and reared, and which she resented her entire life, spilling over into resentment for those male members of her social class who she felt were favored with special and exclusive membership into the upper echelon of 'Oxbridge' intellectual life. She managed to excel through sheer strength of mind as well as of her will, and to flourish professionally, as well as become one of the most productive and respected writers of her time, in some instances far exceeding the initial promise and ultimate output of more promising literary luminaries and purported talents. A tour de force of an extraordinary woman's personal journey to 'becoming and being', with a well-deserved place in twentieth century literature and an enduring legacy.

• Excellent

  Great biography. Excellently researched, very well written, very thorough. The best so far about VW. It makes an excellent read

• Virginia Woolf (English edition)

  Estupenda antología, de Leonard Woolf, de los múltiples volúmenes de su Diario personal.

• Who is Afraid of VW?

  Read this twenty years or so ago. This is a re-read. a challenge, very detailed, and I would only recommend it for the intermediate VW fan: not too academic( Hermoine Lee is great). Came from an Irish bookseller thru Amazon and was very happy with Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway.

• Reality Merchant

  This is a long biography – of nearly 800 pages plus notes etc, and the overwhelming impression it leaves me with is that Virginia Woolf had a very strong connection to an inner world which to her was at least as real as Oxford St, or the village shop in Rodmell where she lived or anything in the outer world. This accounts for the staccato like brilliance of my favourite of the four novels by her I have read, namely “Jacob’s Room” and “Mrs Dalloway”, in which certain scenes and even sentences, or groups of sentences stand out. In “Mrs Dalloway” for example I find all the material about Septimus Smith brilliant with life whereas most of the rest functions for me as a backdrop to the drama of his life. In “Jacob’s Room” I felt I was honing in on every sentence about Jacob to try and grasp his character through a long sequence of scenes in which he played bit parts as he was not a conventional hero, or even anti-hero. Lee details at great length VG’s struggle with reality, depicts her as constantly on edge, being entertaining and even bitchy at times, deeply compassionate in her political views but the next minute snobbish, perhaps trapped by her class and gender. Despite her obvious intelligence she was not educated by her father who gave preference to her brothers. She was also it seems sexually abused by at least one stepbrother and her sexual life was virtually non-existent although she certainly had a happy marriage. Her relationships with Leonard, her husband and Vanessa, her sister sustained her throughout her life. Much is made in this book of all the people she knew. I found of particular interest her encounters with TS Eliot and WB Yeats. Eliot apparently did not make a close study of her work but valued her very much as a friend even if they were not very close. He clearly responded shall we say to her grasp of the essential. On a number of occasions he took the trouble to write to her in verse: “Possum now wishes to explain his silence And to apologise (as only right is); He had an attack of poisoning of some violence; Followed presently by some days in bed with laryngitis. Yesterday he had to get up and dress – His voice very thick and his head feeling tetrahedral, To go and meet the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress At a meeting which had something to do with repairs to Southwark Cathedral.” Lee writes: “He identified her death, in wartime, as the end of ‘a whole pattern of culture’ of which she was both the symbol and the mainstay.’ According to Ottoline Morrell, when VG met Yeats, she “wanted to widen her knowledge of people by mixing with the people of the streets,” and thought that “we hide in little sets.” Morrell went on, “Yeats said if you came to Ireland you wouldn’t get that. There is equality here. If you visit in the cottages you would be free but have your dignity. But this cottage woman would also have her dignity. So you would meet equals – there is no striving to ‘better’ position as there is in America.” The other thing I would say about this book is that by trawling through VG’s letters, diaries and other writings, Lee has managed to give me the most vivid cinema verite impression of life during the General Strike, and also of life during the first year or two of the Second World War. This cold hard look perhaps where inner and outer realities combine is also expressed by a paragraph from VG’s “A Room of One’s Own”, quoted by Lee, where VG is talking about the First World War: “Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rules in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked – German, English, French – so stupid.” Lee adds: “The narrator is divided between regret and relief that ‘the catastrophe….destroyed illusion and put truth in its place.” Lee has taken immense pains and her book is worthy as a biography of its author. However, if you are going to buy a copy please buy a hardback because the photographs in my Vintage paperback, printed on cheap paper are simply awful and very frustrating especially given that aesthetics played such an important part in the lives of the Bloomsbury group.

Purchase links