Adeline
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
On 18 April 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent's ADELINE reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist.
With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia's greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.
Intellectually and emotionally disarming, ADELINE - a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury Group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all - is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It is perhaps not surprising that Vincent (Self-Made Man), whose nonfiction has dealt with issues of gender and mental illness, should choose as the topic of this novel the life and death of Virginia Woolf. Specifically, the novel focuses on a handful of scenes from the last 15 years of Woolf's life, exploring not only Woolf's complicated relationship with her own creative process but also the intricate and fraught entanglements of the Bloomsbury Group. Central to Vincent's imagined version of Woolf's later years are the consequences of the author's troubled childhood and its implications for her close relationships, including her sister, Vanessa. Here, much of Woolf's depression and anxiety is linked to her childhood self and her given name, Adeline with whom Woolf has a pivotal imaginary conversation that haunts her to the end. This exchange is skillfully rendered and emotionally insightful, leading Vincent's novel to its somber conclusion.
