Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf - Hardcover

Vincent, Norah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544470206 ISBN 13: 9780544470200

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015

Synopsis

From a New York Times best-selling author, a boldly imagined portrait of Virginia Woolf that sheds new light on the events that preceded her fatal immersion in the River Ouse in 1941

On April 18, 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent’s Adeline reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist.

With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia’s greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.

Intellectually and emotionally disarming, Adeline—a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury Group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all—is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.
 

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for Adeline 
“Adeline deftly walks the fine line between story and scholarship, and succeeds where many books would fail. Rejecting the sentimental image of Woolf as the epitome of tortured artistry, Norah Vincent gives us Woolf as the incomparable scholar and novelist she was. This is an entirely fresh reading of Woolf’s work, brought alive by a writer of considerable imagination, insight, and skill.” — Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted and Madness  

“Spare, exacting, lyrical and deeply imagined, Adeline is an unforgettable novel that will gather an audience not only of those fascinated by Woolf and the luminaries of Bloomsbury, but of anyone interested in the creative process itself that transforms and threatens the living moment.” — Kathleen Hill, author of Who Occupies This House

“Biographical novels too often run to the obvious, but Adeline is something altogether different, a singular feat of the creative imagination in which the reader is taken inside the consciousness of a major artist in a way that is both completely believable and commandingly compelling. It is wholly worthy of its great subject.” — Terry Teachout, author of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington

From the Inside Flap

On April 18, 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse.
 
With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Norah Vincent’s Adeline reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist. Channeling Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivien Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, Vincent lays bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia’s greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.

Intellectually and emotionally disarming, Adeline—a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all—is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0544470206
• ISBN 13: 9780544470200
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288