Virginia Woolf
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- €3.99
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
'You cannot find peace by avoiding life' Virginia Woolf
An intimate portrait of Virginia, the best-known and most influential Bloomsbury author of them all - 'All you need to know about the modernist, feminist icon' TIME OUT
'A gem' SUNDAY TIMES
'As a short introduction to Virginia Woolf this deceptively brief book could hardly be bettered and achieves high status instantly as a significant work of reference in its own right' THE TIMES
Virginia Woolf was undoubtedly one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. She was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, and her writings were works of astonishing originality.
Nigel Nicolson is the son of Vita Sackville-West, who was Virginia Woolf's most intimate friend, and for a short time her lover. He spent many days in her company and he has threaded his recollections of her throughout this unique narrative of her life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
