Virginia Woolf
A Portrait
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf's relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Virginia Woolf: A Portrait blends recently unearthed documents, key primary sources, and personal interviews with Woolf's relatives and other acquaintances to render in unmatched detail the author's complicated relationship with her husband, Leonard; her father, Leslie Stephen; and her half-sister, Vanessa Bell. Forrester connects these figures to Woolf's mental breakdown while introducing the concept of "Virginia seule," or Virginia alone: an uncommon paragon of female strength and conviction. Forrester's biography inhabits her characters and vivifies their perspective, weaving a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Meandering through this stream-of-consciousness, highly imagistic portrayal of Virginia Woolf by late French literary critic Forrester (The Economic Horror) is like wandering lost through Woolf's own labyrinthine writings. In prose by turns arresting ("and the miracle of creation often derives from its link with the general turmoil") and pedantic ("maimed children faced with the passionate instincts of a personally and physiologically frustrated man"), Forrester captures the "moments of being" that animated Woolf's life, from her childhood to her last days. Forrester ranges over Woolf's painful and tormented marriage to Leonard Woolf, her deep anguish over her mother's death, and her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, as well as how she wove the events of her life into her novels. Nimbly moving from one fragmentary impression to another, Forrester challenges the idea (proposed by Woolf's nephew, Quentin Bell, in his biography of her) that Woolf was afflicted with mental illness and suicidal impulses when she was a teenager. Instead, Forrester offers the portrait of a woman who strove to strip away any illusions and capture the rhythms of reality in her writings.
