Virginia Woolf
Hermione Lee (Author)
"A monumental, definitive new biography - the most important since Quentin Bell's acclaimed work of twenty-five years ago - of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most fascinating writers. Hermione Lee has created a miraculously evocative portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. With novelistic precision, this book gives us an inimitably vivid sense of the texture of Woolf's daily life - her houses and habits, money and servants, parties and talk. And through her own words and newly published letters between family members and friends, we gain a fresh and penetrating understanding of Woolf's formative personal relationships: with her parents and siblings; with her husband, Leonard; with writers she edgily admired, such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield; and with the women who changed her life, including Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth. Lee casts aside the misleading received images of Woolf as an ethereal and emotionally dependent creature, and takes us deep inside her inner being. We see a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered from a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character. And we see a tougher Woolf than we have previously known: a woman acutely alert to the realities of her times, a committed feminist, an opponent of every sort of political and intellectual fascism. At the same time, Lee offers an unequaled insight into the connections between Woolf's life and work. Consistently moving and absorbing, written with matchless authority and sympathy, Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf is a biographical masterpiece sure to stand as the definitive life of its subject for many years to come. -- Dust Jacket
Print Book, English, 1997
Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York, 1997