Virginia Woolf

Trade Paperback

A Writer's Life

New revised edition of this remarkable biography from Lyndall Gordon, the highly acclaimed biographer of T.S.Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Only writing, Virginia Woolf said, could compose 'the synthesis of my being'. Lyndall Gordon reveals an explorer of 'the infinite oddity of the human position' and, specifically, the more hidden problems and possibilities of women. Integrating new material - diary, memoirs, unpublished sketches, and drafts of novels - this book brings out the experiences that shaped Virginia Woolf's work: the family deaths that shut off her youth as a well of memory, the muted suffering of a Victorian girl, and the volcanic matter of her madness. It looks at her unusual education with her eccentric father, Leslie Stephen; the formative bond with her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell; her fascinating marriage to Leonard Woolf; above all, her attachments to the dead, so as to find the sources of her creativity and uncover how Virginia Woolf transformed private memories into classic works of art.