Review by Choice Review
The best biography of Virginia Woolf since Lyndall Gordan's Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (CH, May'85), Lee's volume creates an integrated portrait of a life of writing without reducing the writing to the life. The author's extensive use of Woolf's autobiographical writings, Moments of Being, ed. by J. Schulkind (CH, May'77), diaries, letters, and essays makes for an expansive view of Woolf as an experimental writer--exploring the boundaries of biography, fiction, and poetry--and an iconoclastic individual synthesizing political, social, and aesthetic thought. Lee describes Woolf as plagued by both physical and emotional trauma as she maintains a complex, interdependent web of relationships with husband and coworker Leonard, the Bloomsbury family, and the numerous women who shaped her life, beginning with her mother, Julia Stephen. Lee captures the "many selves" that Woolf claimed the biographer often missed, leaving the reader with the sense that further exploration of the fiction and other writings will result in discovering the "many thousand" selves yet unexplored. Suitable for all academic libraries, undergraduate and graduate, and general readers interested in an aesthetic, literary, political, and historical perspective on 20th-century Britain. N. Allen; Beaver College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
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 Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Balance and perspective characterize this extensive biography of one of the world's most chronicled writers. Lee (biographer of Willa Cather) is a British academic who, unlike so many writers on Woolf (1882-1941) and friends, wasn't a member of the Bloomsbury circle and, apparently, wasn't involved in any complex psychosexual ballet with the Stephens/Woolf/Bell clan. With quiet attention, she has absorbed and ordered a daunting amount of material from the letters, diaries, essays and fiction of Woolf herself, the detailed records kept by her husband, Leonard, and, not least, the outpouring of words from her family. Then there were her friends and literary contemporaries from Vita Sackville-West and T.S. Eliot to E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, all of whom had recorded their encounters with Woolf, and by so doing, immortalized her idiosyncrasies. Lee refuses to jump on any of the Woolf bandwagons that have sought to explain her writing style, fragile mental profile, subsequent breakdown and suicide. She doesn't discount early sexual abuse by Woolf's half-brother Gerald Duckworth, but she questions the intricate lengths to which chroniclers have extrapolated its effects; she agrees that Woolf's husband, writer and socialist thinker Leonard, was highly controlling of their lives together, yet she creates a touching portrait of a relationship smoothed by years of interdependence, suffering and understanding. Lee takes considerable risk in not following a chronological structure. She ferrets out themes and lines of thought and pursues them through the years, doubling back to fill in the major landmarks. Thus she demands of her readers a certain fluency in Woolf's writings and a grasp of the cast of characters (a complex family tree is included). Lee interweaves the events of her subject's life with her writing, assessing life and work as a seamless whole. Most important, she allows Woolf and her circle to speak for themselves and reveal their own inconsistencies. In so doing, Lee helps vanquish the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as a half-mad bohemian writer who destroyed herself as the bombs of WWII exploded over England. The ultimately vulnerable Woolf has found a thorough and sympathetic biographer who refuses to exploit either her literary talent or her devastating mental illness. Photos not seen by PW. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/97.]Ronald Ratliff, Chapman H.S. Lib., Kansas (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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)
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