"Woolf's story is reformulated by each generation," writes Hermione Lee, a professor of English literature. But her richly human portrait, so respectful of the complexities of her subject's life, seems unlikely to be surpassed. Lee extricates Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) from clichés about madness and modernism to reveal a vigorous artist whose work is politically probing as well as psychologically delicate. She makes brilliant use of the formidable Woolf archives to let the writer speak directly to us, then comments shrewdly on her words' hidden significances. Biographies don't get much better than this.


From Library Journal
Before dismissing this new biography as just another in a long line of familar material, one would do well to stop and take in it. Lee (English, Univ. of York, England) has succeeded in presenting a different side of Woolf somewhat overlooked in previous studies. Aspects of Woolf's personal life like her childhood abuse by her stepbrother and her stormy family life are already well documented (see Louise DeSalvo's Virginia Woolf, Ballantine, 1990, and Panthea Reid's Art and Affection, LJ 9/15/96, respectively); and literary studies abound (see James King's Virginia Woolf, LJ 4/1/95, and Lyndall Gordon's Virginia Woolf, Norton, 1993). By making use of Woolf's extensive correspondence, diaries, and works, Lee strives to present her not as a fragile, eccentric victim, as has been done often, but as a complex, sometimes troubled, yet brilliant artist who overcame much to accomplish what she did. What results is a biography that is part social history, part literary analysis, and overall a fuller picture of Woolf. Lee's eye for detail allows us to get closer than ever to knowing who she was. While the subject may not be new, this biography is well worth a close reading.-?Ronald Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., KansasCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New Yorker
... [a] superb book ... worthy of its subject.... She organizes Woolf's life into essaylike chapters ... thereby juxtaposing sophisticated speculation with meticulous research.


Los Angeles Times, Regina Marler
It is Hermione Lee's breadth of awareness, her willingness to expand the conventional boundaries of life in the search for a richer and more faceted Virginia Woolf, that distinguishes her biography from its predecessors and contemporaries.


From Booklist
This pleasantly readable, comprehensive study of Woolf's life offers, among other things, a particularly contemporary perspective by thematizing genres--specifically, that of biography. Lee sees Woolf's writing life as substantially concerned with the question of biography and "life-writing," as she attempted to grasp aspects of life, primarily regarding women, that have not been fully or truthfully represented. This revisionary response to life-writing reverberated through a number of key questions in Woolf's fiction and nonfiction, such as censorship (especially self-censorship), the relation of biography to fiction, and the relation of private "moments of great intensity" to the publicly observed self. Woolf's questioning of the inherited framings of the self in biography was most fully explored in Orlando, a fictional work that called itself a biography, whose main character changes sexes over a period of several hundred years. Through her analysis of the context and evolution of this and other works, Lee reveals to us a more energetic, probing, and (as in Woolf's responses to Vita Sackville-West's sexual "challenges") resiliently witty writing life than had yet been written about. Jim O'Laughlin


From Kirkus Reviews
Following Woolf's own experience of her life rather than later interpretations of it, Lee (English/Univ. of York, England; Willa Cather: Double Lives, not reviewed) delivers a comprehensive, elegantly structured work on the High Victorian modernist. At almost 900 pages, Lee's life seems to be in competition not with the many previous Bloomsbury books, but with Woolf's multivolume diaries, the ``great mass for my memoirs,'' as she called them. Woolf never actually got around to producing a finished autobiography. Yet she once wrote that ``only autobiography is literature,'' and Lee takes this as her cue for Woolf's life story and creative development, from her first anonymous review in 1904 to the militantly feminist essay Three Guineas in 1938. Lee goes back to primary sources (e.g., Woolf's diaries, her incomplete Moments of Being, and her sketches for Bloomsbury's ``Memoir Club'') to resurrect a fully human personality. Intelligently incorporating into every page letters, diary entries, and other writings, she smartly bypasses previous reductionist versions of Virginia the victim, the snob, the suicide, or the madwoman. Maintaining a degree of objective skepticism, Lee views Woolf foremost as a creative force and a fascinating personality, ``a sane woman who had an illness'' (although manic-depression, often identified as her malady, is still difficult to diagnose posthumously). Lee also gives balanced due to those in Woolf's life who have been neglected in previous biographies, such as her eminent father, Leslie Stephen, her sister, Vanessa, and the septuagenarian suffragette Ethel Smyth. Leonard Woolf, in Lee's view, was more of a guardian than a husband and helpmeet. Out of the Bloomsbury biography glut, Lee's admirably sympathetic portrait is as close to the Boswellian ideal as one could hope for. (24 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Midwest Book Review
This new biography of writer Woolf is recommended as essential reading for any college-level scholar of Woolf, or for adults with a special passion for and familiarity with her works. Lee paints a portrait of Woolf as a powerful woman who struggled with chronic illness as she created. Enjoy a fine portrait of her family and self which includes strong assessment of character and support systems.


Book Description
"A majestic literary biography, a truly new, surprisingly fresh portrait. --
Newsday

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

"A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit, and her sanity and strength.

It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come.

"One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history."
--Financial Times

"The most distinguished study of Woolf yet." --The New Republic


From the Inside Flap
"A majestic literary biography, a truly new, surprisingly fresh portrait. --
Newsday

A New York Times Book Review  Editors' Choice
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

"A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh."  
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
            
While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact.  Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit,  and her sanity and strength.

It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come.

"One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history."  
--Financial Times

"The most distinguished study of Woolf yet."  --The New Republic


About the Author
Hermione Lee holds the Goldsmiths'Chair in English Literature at New College, Oxford. She loves in England.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"A majestic literary biography, a truly new, surprisingly fresh portrait. —
Newsday

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

"A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

While Virginia Woolf—one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers—has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit, and her sanity and strength.

It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction—but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come.

"One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history."
—Financial Times

"The most distinguished study of Woolf yet." —The New Republic

FROM THE CRITICS

Elizabeth Judd

My college roommates and I sometimes argued about which of us looked or acted most like Virginia Woolf. We rarely discussed her novels. Hermione Lee has written the latest Woolf biography for people like me -- fans of the Virginia Woolf legend who are less intrigued by her prose. Nothing short of a biographer's dream, Woolf is famous for her feminism, friendships with Bloomsbury artists, romantic relationships with women, recurring bouts of madness, childhood sexual abuse and suicide, and Lee delivers the goods in this absorbing and well-researched book.

If you're not well acquainted with Woolf's history, however, this biography is not for you. Lee -- annoyingly -- assumes familiarity with Woolf's life, casually dropping names and mentioning family incidents without explanation. (For example, she refers to the Dreadnought Hoax several times but waits until page 278 to relate the incident in which Woolf and friends dressed up as Abyssinians, tricking the British Navy into taking them aboard a warship.) The book's structure will be another obstacle for newcomers; Lee organizes chapters around themes like "Abuses" or "Party-Going," rather than telling Woolf's story chronologically. Adding to the confusion, Lee writes as if Woolf's novels are common knowledge, and neither summarizes the plots nor explains the novelist's contribution to modernism.

On the other hand, Lee adopts the perfect tone for Woolf aficionados: bracing, forthright, even confiding. Having sifted through volumes of correspondence, reminiscences and sometimes conflicting information, Lee debunks the wilder speculations about Woolf and draws reasonable conclusions about long-standing controversies. For instance, she re-examines the myth that Woolf's marriage was loveless by citing diary passages of true affection; after 25 years of marriage, Woolf wrote, "You see, it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." Similarly, Lee tempers Woolf's reputation for mean-spirited gossip by citing examples of her extraordinary kindness. And she balances Virginia's reputation as a depressive with anecdotes about her mischievousness and light-hearted friendships.

By calling into question the prevailing images of Woolf as madwoman, daffy genius or elitist snob, Lee paints the writer as far more nuanced than such distorted myths suggest. Even Lee's explanation of Woolf's enduring appeal is characteristically complex. She quotes Woolf on Shelley: "There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation, not that we have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them which makes them not only Shelley's story but our own." I'd simply add that Woolf's story is delicious enough to deserve one more retelling. -- Salon

Newsday