Edward's Reviews > Virginia Woolf

This massive tome reinforces why I'm generally not too enthused about reading lengthy biographies. Lee has written nearly 800 pages about the life of Woolf, one that ended in suicide at the age of 59. How much detail does a reader need to know about her life? I recently reread her TO THE LIGHTHOUSE which I think is a great novel, and as I happened to have a copy of this biography, I thought I'd read it, hoping it might fill in some obscurities of the novel. It didn't help particularly as the novel is pretty self-sufficient.

So why read, or write for that matter, all of the details of a person's life that can be dug up from primary and secondary sources and interviews with persons who knew the author? Presumably, it's to reveal how a person's life contributed to his accomplishments, especially if the accomplishments seem to come out of unlikely origins. . That's a legitimate attempt, but to me too many biographers, including Lee, are so concerned about leaving out something and being accused of neglect or insensitivity, they dredge up any details of a person's life, no matter how slight.

Woolf's life is eccentric enough to be fairly interesting, and I suppose it's helpful to know that TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, for example, draws heavily on her childhood family experiences. But the novel transcends those experiences, and in reading the novel I was mostly indifferent to what real life experiences fired Woolf's imagination. .

All this said, though, some items of interest do emerge from Lee's study of Woolf's life. It is a life that is dominated by untimely deaths beginning with her mother's sudden demise, and the abrupt cutting off of possibilities,. Death dominates all of her novels. World War I, a huge collective death, violent and shocking, overshadows everything she wrote.

Another theme that is found in her works and emerges from her life was a conflict between private and public life. Woolf was an intensely private individual, but at the same time she wanted her novels to be read. When some of her works commented on the diminished role of women in the world, she was regarded as an early feminist with all of the critical scrutiny that involved. Many of the attitudes toward women that she criticized grew out of her 19th century past, and this cleavage between the past and the present is another major topic in her books.

As for her husband, friends, critics, acquaintances, yes, they're interesting and do show up in some form or other, often disguised, in her works, but again my interest in identifying these sources of material is minimal.

As a scribbler of comments such as this one, I found Woolf's critical ideas to be of interest, She commented that good reading is challenging in its own right and should involve the effort to express what one thinks of what one has read, to make it "whole" and to put one's reading into a context of reading.

Finally, there is the question of why she waded into a river with rocks weighing down her clothing and drowned . The author feels this action was not the result of a deranged mind, but rather one of calculated rationality. To begin with, she was discouraged by what was happening in WW II . She was 59 and beginning to feel her age and that her best work was behind her. She didn't want to be a burden to her husband, Leonard Woolf, and felt that he could get on with his life better without her.

The always obscure motives of persons you know and love who kill themselves are always of concern, and if you admire Woolf as a writer, these motives always raise questions. But I'll repeat that my enjoyment of Virginia Woolf's writing accomplishments was only slightly increased by slogging through these hundreds and hundreds of pages.