Virginia Woolf (Critical Lives)

This book draws on Woolf's letters, journals, diaries, autobiographical essays, and fiction, and paints a portrait of the writer in situ, whether in the enclosed surroundings of Hyde Park Gate or the open and free-spirited environs of Gordon Square's Bloomsbury. It shows how Woolf's experimental style was informed by her own reading life and how her deeply sensitive understanding of history, narrative, art, and friendship were rendered in her prose. It explores the famous Bloomsbury group of intellectuals in which she was immersed as well as her relationships with fascinating figures such as Vita Sackville-West and Lady Ottoline Morrel. It looks at Woolf's attitudes toward sex and marriage, analyzes her uncertain social and political views, and, finally, offers a sensitive examination of her mental instabilities and the nervous breakdowns that would plague her for most of her life, up until her suicide in 1941.… (more)