The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years - Hardcover

Marder, Herbert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801437296 ISBN 13: 9780801437298

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2000

Synopsis

This elegantly written and richly detailed biography tells the story of Virginia Woolf's last ten years, from the creation of her great visionary novel, The Waves, to her suicide in 1941. Herbert Marder looks closely at Woolf's views on totalitarianism and her depictions of Britain under siege to create a remarkable portrait of a mature and renowned writer during a time of rising fascist violence.

An awareness of personal danger, Marder says, colored Woolf's actions and consciousness in the years leading up to World War II. She practiced her art with intense dedication and was much admired for her wit and vivacity. But she had previously tried to kill herself, and she asserted her right to die if her manic-depressive illness became intolerable. Waves and water haunted her imagination; visions of drowning recurred in her work.

The Measure of Life suggests that Woolf anticipated her suicide, and indeed enacted it symbolically many times before the event. Marder's account of her death emphasizes the importance of her relationship with her doctor and distant cousin, Octavia Wilberforce. Wilberforce's letters about Woolf's last months, including some previously unpublished passages, appear in the appendix.

Staying close to the spirit of Woolf's own writing, Marder traces her evolving social consciousness in the 1930s, connecting her growing concern with politics and social history with the facts of her daily life. He stresses her endurance as a working writer, and explores her friendships, her complex relations with servants, and her activities at the Hogarth Press. The Measure of Life illuminates the unspoken quarrels and obscure acts of courage that provide a key, as Woolf herself believed, to the hidden roots of our existence. By letting the reader see events as Virginia Woolf saw them, Marder's compelling narrative captures both her unique comic spirit and her profound seriousness.

About this title

About the Author

Herbert Marder was born in Vienna and came to the U.S. as a child, fleeing the Holocaust. He has had a long and sustained interest in Virginia Woolf and published a pioneering work, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf, at the beginning of the current Bloomsbury revival. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Illinois, Marder lives in Champaign, Illinois, and on Monhegan Island, Maine.

Reviews

Woolf remains the Bloomsbury Revival's most popular biographic draw, but in his latest account of her life, Marder (Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf) completely bypasses the more familiar and exhaustively studied first portion of the writer's lifeAher Victorian childhood, her Edwardian rebellion, and her early, more popular booksAto concentrate on her last decade. Drawing heavily on Woolf's private writings, Marder (professor emeritus at the University of Illinois) draws a competent portrait from the writing of The Waves to Woolf's suicide during WWIIAa phase that was marked by changes in her aesthetic and by tremendous fear: "Oh yes," the 49-year-old Woolf wrote in her diary on completing The Waves, "between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live." Marder emphasizes the competing forces of her political engagementAevident in her novel-essay The Years and in her feminist/antifascist tract Three GuineasAand her artistic sensibility. Though she remained a committed modernist, he notes, her aesthetic took a radical turn. Indeed, her competing feelingsAof being both a "detached artist" and an "angry outsider"Agrew more pronounced during the Depression and the rise of fascism, belying her image as ivory tower intellectual. Tracing Woolf's thoughts as gloomy current events preyed on her spirit, Marder takes readers all the way through her suicide during the worst days of the Battle of Britain. But although he strains for objectivity, his dependence on Woolf's journal entries often leads him to sacrifice biographic insight in favor of Woolf's own version of events. 24 b&w photos. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A biography of the last decade of Virginia Woolf’s life that generously grants the reader an intimate view of her extraordinary world.Marder (English/Univ. of Illinois) outlines a simple and honest theory of biography in his introduction, and it is a tribute to his skills as a writer and to Woolf’s life as an artist that his resulting work sings her praises clearly while not flinching from her failures. Through the past 30-plus years of feminist literary criticism, Woolf has rightly emerged as an icon of feminism, and icons tend to be rather flat and two-dimensional; Marder uncovers the human features beneath the symbol in all of Woolf’s dignity and in her (ultimately contradictory) detail. The beauty of this biography is found in its small moments: Woolf haggles with John Lehmann, the manager of the Hogarth Press; she bickers with servant Nelly Boxall; she takes a trip to Greece with art critic Roger Fry and his wife Margery; she worries over the economic crises of 1930s England and frets whether Maynard Keynes’s warnings will sound in time to avert disaster. The ups and downs of domestic life with husband Leonard are delineated with artistic precision, as are the moments with her stubborn mother-in-law. Through it all, of course, Woolf writes, and she does so brilliantly. With judicious excerpts from her diaries and letters, as well as the words of her friends, Marder creates a breathing and multi-layered vision of a genius at work. The story ends, as it must, with Woolf’s suicide in the river; the bleak ending feels not as harsh as it might because Marder has given the reader a real sense of the woman and the causes for her untimely death.A biography for those who love Woolf, and for those who want to love her all the more by knowing her all the better. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

For Marder (Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf), a motivation to write this book was her "fascination with the way people change under stress." Unlike other recent Woolf biographies (James King's Virginia Woolf, LJ 3/1/95; Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf: A Biography, LJ 5/1/97), Marder's work covers only Woolf's last decade to show how events in the outside world and in her own life led to her suicide in March 1911. A major factor was a dread of recurrences of her bipolar disorder, triggered in part by unresolved issues from her past as well as the war and her equation of Nazism with an "accelerated descent in barbarism." Woolf's ability to keep writing was her defense against depression, but, the author points out, a pattern of references to water and drowning in her works foreshadowed her final act. Relying heavily on Woolf's diaries and letters, Marder allows the reader to see events from her unique perspective. Recommended for academic and public libraries.DDenise J. Stankovics, Rockville P.L., Vernon, CT
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801437296
• ISBN 13: 9780801437298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432