NONFICTION BIOGRAPHY
Virginia Woolf by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)
In this era of fractured attention spans, the trend in biographies has been away from doorstoppers in favor of brief lives — less of a time commitment for both reader and writer. As Alexandra Harris aptly notes in her appealing, smartly written overview of the life, work and legacy of Virginia Woolf, “The telescope as well as the microscope has its role.”
Harris, a young, Oxford-educated cultural historian who made a name for herself with “Romantic Moderns,” a study of the modern renaissance in 20th-century English art and literature, assures readers that “Virginia Woolf” is intended not to supplant Hermione Lee’s seminal 1996 biography, but “as a first port of call for those new to Woolf and as an enticement to read more.” Handsomely illustrated and beribboned, Harris’ little volume is a miracle of clarity and concision, and an example of the brief life at its best.
She is aided in the cause of brevity, of course, by the fact that her subject drowned herself at the relatively young age of 59, in 1941, after a lifelong struggle with “profound despair.” This new minibiography covers ground that will be familiar to Woolf devotees, including her Victorian childhood in a London household dominated by her difficult, scholarly father, Leslie Stephen. It was a household in which sons were sent away to school while daughters received no formal education. Harris maintains that the outsider vantage point provided by never having been to school or university shaped Woolf as a writer.
Her girlhood was marked by voracious reading and by loss — including her mother Julia’s death in 1895, when Virginia was 13, followed soon after by that of her older half sister, Stella, and, about a decade later, the deaths of her father and her beloved brother, Thoby. Beginning with her mother’s death, Woolf’s adolescence was also marked by periodic breakdowns, probably bipolar, which were to plague her throughout her life.
Without overemphasizing it, Harris addresses the “physical intrusion” Virginia suffered between 1897 and 1904 at the hands of her half brother George Duckworth — who, interestingly, was the publisher of her first novel, “The Voyage Out,” in 1915. She states firmly, “We do not know what form it took or how often it happened. Least of all do we know how far these violations shaped Virginia’s life and work, though a great deal has been written on the subject.” But she seems to agree with Nigel Nicolson, the son of Woolf’s sometime lover Vita Sackville-West, who maintained in his short biography of Woolf for the Penguin Lives series in 2000 that she wasn’t actually raped and the trauma was less warping than some biographers have claimed.
Harris indicates that Virginia was still a virgin when, in 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a Jewish intellectual in her brother Thoby’s circle at Cambridge University. Leonard was part of the unconventional household that Virginia set up with her brother, Adrian, after their sister, Vanessa, married Clive Bell and took over the family’s Gordon Square home. The other boarders included economist John Maynard Keynes — living with Adrian’s former lover, artist Duncan Grant. In a twist typical of the Bloomsbury circle’s entangled relationships, Grant later became Vanessa’s lover and fathered her youngest child, Angelica Bell.
What Harris’ book has all over Nicolson’s is a combination of scholarly objectivity and literary sensitivity. She astutely discusses the genesis and import of each of Woolf’s novels, highlighting Woolf’s ongoing “conversation with the past” and noting that “she never did the same thing twice.” All her novels except her first were published by the Hogarth Press, which Virginia and Leonard established in 1917, giving her the “practical therapy” of typesetting and editing as well as the “freedom to publish” whatever she wrote — and making her, in effect, a poster child for self-published authors.
Harris cuts through thickets of Woolf scholarship with straightforward opinions. In discussing “Night and Day” and “Mrs. Dalloway,” for example, and particularly Septimus, the shell-shocked World War I veteran in the latter, she writes, “Woolf has sometimes been criticized for not facing directly enough the great conflicts of her time, but all her postwar novels are concerned with the indirections by which we come to understand our losses. Woolf’s Great War was inseparable from her personal war against illness.”
Harris buttresses her case for Woolf’s abiding merit by sprinkling her text with wonderful quotes from the writer’s letters and diaries, which show off her “addictive and formidable” wit and pleasure in “gossip and the web of human relations.” Discussing her sister’s increasingly unconventional, “raucous” family life, Woolf wrote to a friend, “Nessa seems to have slipped civilisation off her back, and splashes about entirely nude.” Harris highlights another vivid image in the following observation: “The thought of days slipping by unrecorded filled her with a sense of loss. She hated to think of ‘life allowed to waste like a tap left running.'”
Remarkably, Harris manages to include in her short book an overview of the ever-evolving “posthumous story of Virginia Woolf,” which was “shaped by the fact that Leonard Woolf did not destroy her papers” as she requested. Despite Woolf’s dark demise, Harris finds in her work “an extraordinary celebration of life” that “makes one want to live more consciously and fully.” One could hardly ask for a better inducement to read (or reread) more.
