Volume 44, Number 9 · May 29, 1997
The Whirr of Wings
By Rosemary Dinnage
Virginia Woolf
by Hermione Lee
Knopf, 893 pp., $39.95
What would Virginia Woolf have made of the immense biographical fuss that has been made, from the time of Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey onward, over the Bloomsbury group and herself in particular? Of the sexual speculations and revelations, the doctoral dissertations, the pro- and anti-Bloomsbury arguments, the iconization of herself as feminist queen, the tourists at Charleston farmhouse, the T-shirts, the innumerable student bedrooms with that wistful early photograph tacked to the wall? As exponent of the evanescence of personality, the elusiveness of a narrative line in any life, she herself has of course said the best things about biography. 'Do you think it is possible to write a life of anyone?' she wrote to her young niece when she was contemplating her life of Roger Fry. 'I doubt it; because people are all over the place.' So Roger Fry was not a great success, though in the semi-biography Orlando she did allow herself to go all over the place—mixing up centuries, sexes, and magical transformations. In her fiction, the difficulty of pinning down a life keeps on recurring: the pursuit of a vanishing Jacob in Jacob's Room, for instance, the splitting of herself into six autobiographical voices in The Waves—a book that mocks the 'biographic style' which just 'tacks together bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges.'
Review, 4186 words
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