BOOKS: Virginia Woolf

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack" So said Virginia Woolf just one of her innumerable quotes. They can fill a book. She was that intriguing. If you want to know about her, what book should you read? Her own writings are the best, they bare her inner soul, but what about a good biography? Woolf’s life has been looked at reexamined again and rewritten. Which biography should one read? I have looked at several. Hermione Lee, in her 1997 biography, “Virginia Woolf,” seems best at making sense of Woolf’s, “drifting material of life.” Lee goes somewhat beyond chronicling the unusual, the details of life, the alleged madness, the suicide. These aspects are there, but Lee gives back Virginia Woolf some of her human dimension, gone is the deified personification, the iconic myth. We see how the circumstances of Woolf’s life shaped her genius and her writing. This is a biography about Woolf as she really was, snobbish, envious, critical yet generous. This is biography that is worthy of Woolf herself, it is well written, well researched and an accurate portrait of her sharp mind. Lee makes extensive use of Woolf’s correspondence and diaries to render an accurate picture. Woolf comes off not as a fragile eccentric, suffering from madness, but as a complex, troubled, yet brilliant artist. This is a biography that will bring you closer to knowing who Woolf really was as a person as well as an artist, an artist that has been often distorted and mythologized. Still there remains something intriguing about Woolf, a women who lived passionately and dangerously and died by her on hand. Remarkably Lee has left that intrigue intact and we get a look at a very human “extraordinary person.”