Her life having been related repeatedly since her 1941 suicide, British novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf is reborn through the mind of Julia Briggs, a scholar at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, in her new biography, “Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life.”
The Woolf biography treadmill has tended to focus on her outward life because of its uncoventionality and because of the fascinating company she kept. But, after all, Woolf is worth knowing about primarily because of her books, including, but not limited to, “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Orlando” and “A Room of One’s Own.”
As Briggs comments, with perhaps a tinge of sarcasm, “My account is inspired by Woolf’s own interest in the process of writing, as well as by a corresponding unease with accounts that concentrate too narrowly on her social life, and so underestimate the centrality of her art. … Woolf was evidently a highly sociable person, with a fascinating and gifted circle of family and friends, an engaging companion and an entrancing aunt, yet it was what she did when she was alone, walking or sitting at her desk, for which we now remember her.”
Briggs understands well that a subject’s inner life cannot be captured with certainty. But, as Briggs argues convincingly, “it is possible to track down a number of the factors that brought her books into being, by following the genesis and process of their writing as reflected in the surviving drafts, and supplementing these with the accounts she gave to friends, or confided to her diary as aids to reconstruction.”
Briggs says her aim “is to lead readers back to her work with a fresh sense of what they might find there.”
In that aim, Briggs succeeds admirably. Because of her chapter-by- chapter accounts, I want to reread the Woolf digested by me at a younger age, especially – as a biographer myself – the novelas-biography “Orlando.”
In addition, because of Briggs’ literary detective work, I want to read the Woolf previously undigested by me, especially “The Waves.”
Briggs treats each of 14 Woolf volumes to its own chapter. When Briggs has finished explicating the genesis, plot development, characters and themes of each book, she ends each chapter by sharing the aftermath – information about who published the book, how well it sold, what Woolf thought of reviews, and the first step in the direction of the next book.
Of the biographies about Woolf’s outward life, my favorite remains the one by Hermione Lee, published nearly a decade ago.
But Briggs has won my mind as well as my heart for her focus on the inner life of Woolf, for her always approachable writing style, for her ambitious mission to inspire casual readers as well as confirmed Woolf fanatics.
Steve Weinberg is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.
“Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life”
By Julia Briggs
Harcourt, 544 pages, $30
