Biogr.




virginia woolf once observed, to have so many selves. in her novels and essays, not to mention nearly 4,000 letters and a 30-volume diary, woolf left behind her a voluminous anatomy of self, and in the years since her 1941 suicide, biographers and critics have created a succession of further portraits.
biographies are fictions we contrive about lives we find meaningful. facts are interpretable, and become available to the biographer with a certain randomness the significance of unknown facts can scarcely be determined.
to literary formalists, she was a groundbreaking stylist, a courageous experimenter who, along with james joyce, fractured and remade the novel. to feminists, she was an early advocate of womens rights, a writer concerned with both the social and emotional consequences of patriarchal politics. quentin bells 1972 biography of his aunt focused on her life rather than her art, leaving us with a picture of a high-strung,...