Virginia Woolf

I've become quite enchanted with the Overlook Illustrated Lives series. None of these books are going to go down as great classics, nor will any be regarded as among the essential biographies of their subjects. Nonetheless, every book in the series that I have read is critically solid, lavishly illustated and quite handsome, and provides a great introduction or review (depending on the use to which one is putting the volume) of the writer under consideration. Virginia Woolf is an ideal subject for an illustrated biography. The background for her writing is a rich and varied one, and her acquaintances included a host of important writers and artists and intellectuals in their own right. The fact is that this book is less a treatment of Woold considered solely in her own right, as Virginia Woolf in her overall context, especially in light of Bloomsbury. As a result the focus of the book is less on her writing, and a bit more on her friendships with Roger Fry. The book also focuses a bit more on her realtionship with her sister Vanessa (a relationship presented as more mutually fulfilling than most other biographers do). The book therefore can function as a nice introduction both to Virginia Woolf as well as to Bloomsbury as a whole. There are helpful photos of all the major and many of the minor figures attached to the group. The weakness of the book is that it really doesn't take one very deeply into Woolf's writings. One gets more of a sense of Woolf's world than of her art. This is a problem the book shares with Mary Ann Caws's book in the same series on Marcel Proust. I like the way that Caws shows Woolf's great passion for life. She also has, however, a tendency to varnish over the negatives. Woolf famously suffered from serious mental illness, and Caws's account leaves her appearing less afflicted than does other accounts. It is a question of balance, and I must admit that the problem here is solely one of emphasis. She does a good job of detailing her relation with Leonard, who seems to have been as close to a perfect husband to Virginia as anyone could have been: the fact is that it was almost impossible for anyone to be Virginia's husband, and that Leonard managed to help her so much is nothing short of a miracle. He clearly provided her with an emotional stability she might not otherwise have enjoyed. These caveats aside, I do strongly recommend this book. It is very short and heavily illustrated so that it is possible in only two or three hours to enjoy a very plesant time reading both Virginia Woolf and her world. But for those seeking a very short biography, I can even more strongly recommend the volume in the Penguin Brief Lives series by Nicol Nicolson, the son of Woolf's close friend and sometime lover (and the model for the title character in ORLANDO) Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and perhaps destined to be the last biographer of Woolf to have actually known her. Though it isn't delightfully illu