Synopsis
Virginia Woolf's life as part of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group has captured the imagination of millions. Now Nigel Nicolson threads his personal reminiscences through the narrative of her life. In so doing, he paints an astonishing portrait of one of the most remarkable women in history.
Nicolson recalls childhood times with Woolf: from her walks around his ancestral home as she planned Orlando to her writing of the modern classics Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf probes keenly her stance on women's issues and the nature of war and is suffused with personal admiration and affection for this incomparable writer.
Reviews
While most of Virginia Woolf's biographers (with the possible exception of her nephew Quentin Bell) bond with their subject through her vivid diaries and fiction, Nicolson (Portrait of a Marriage), the son of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West, draws on family archives and first-hand experience for his brisk, dutiful biography. For the young Nicolson, Woolf first appeared as a lively and amusing visitor. Not yet famous, to Nicolson she was like "a favourite aunt who brightened our simple lives with unexpected questions." Visiting Vita's stately home, Woolf might ask the young Nigel, "What's it like to be a child?" by way of research for To the Lighthouse, or she might make up histories for unidentified ancestral portraits as background for Orlando, her love-letter fantasy to Vita. Such personal glimpses enliven Nicolson's respectful position between various, often hotly contended views of Woolf as writer, feminist and Bloomsburian. Despite his insider's knowledge, which is nonetheless welcome, Nicolson manages to offer an objective perspective on Woolf's parents and siblings and on her childhood and youth. He is, however, less sensational than was Quentin Bell on her mental illness and the notorious early episodes when one of her half brothers examined her genitalia and the other forced his affections on her. Nicolson filters Woolf's writing career through VitaAand her opinions: she delighted in Orlando and was exasperated with the hyperbolic polemics of Three Guineas, the 1938 pacificist tract that was her penultimate work before her suicide. The world is no doubt weary of Woolf biographies, but this tidy and homely little introduction will sell to readers who may have been too intimidated by Woolf's modernist reputation to broach her life and work before. 3-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Woolf entered Nicolson's life when she and his mother, the writer Vita Sackville-West, fell in love, precipitating Woolf's only extramarital affair and inspiring Orlando (1928), the book that made her famous. An elegant stylist in his own right and one of the editors of Woolf's letters, Nicolson, whose boyhood recollections remain startlingly vivid, presents a unique perspective on Woolf and the now legendary world of Bloomsbury, recounting highly amusing conversations with the unpredictable woman he thought of as a "favorite aunt," and sharing insider information including the fact that she baked good bread. But he has more serious missions in mind, such as dismantling the myths associated with Woolf's childhood, accurately depicting her marriage and bouts with madness, and celebrating not only her transcendent novels but her prolific output as a journalist and the impact of Hogarth Press, an endeavor to which she and her husband were extraordinarily devoted. Nicolson's superb addition to the remarkable Penguin Lives series offers a deeply personal, compelling, and indelible likeness of one of the most fascinating and influential writers of all times. Donna Seaman
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