Virginia Woolf

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2 OCT. 2000

While most of Virginia Woolf's biographers (with the possible exception of her nephew Quentin Bell) bond with their subject through her vivid diaries and fiction, Nicolson (Portrait of a Marriage), the son of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West, draws on family archives and first-hand experience for his brisk, dutiful biography. For the young Nicolson, Woolf first appeared as a lively and amusing visitor. Not yet famous, to Nicolson she was like "a favourite aunt who brightened our simple lives with unexpected questions." Visiting Vita's stately home, Woolf might ask the young Nigel, "What's it like to be a child?" by way of research for To the Lighthouse, or she might make up histories for unidentified ancestral portraits as background for Orlando, her love-letter fantasy to Vita. Such personal glimpses enliven Nicolson's respectful position between various, often hotly contended views of Woolf as writer, feminist and Bloomsburian. Despite his insider's knowledge, which is nonetheless welcome, Nicolson manages to offer an objective perspective on Woolf's parents and siblings and on her childhood and youth. He is, however, less sensational than was Quentin Bell on her mental illness and the notorious early episodes when one of her half brothers examined her genitalia and the other forced his affections on her. Nicolson filters Woolf's writing career through Vita--and her opinions: she delighted in Orlando and was exasperated with the hyperbolic polemics of Three Guineas, the 1938 pacificist tract that was her penultimate work before her suicide. The world is no doubt weary of Woolf biographies, but this tidy and homely little introduction will sell to readers who may have been too intimidated by Woolf's modernist reputation to broach her life and work before. 3-city author tour.