Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is one of the great writers of this century, yet surprisingly this biography is the first to explore fully the relationship between her troubled life and her writings - the novels, essays, book reviews, letters and diaries - that have made her so celebrated.

All her life Woolf struggled with sadnesses that threatened to overwhelm and annihilate her. In many ways her writings were attempts to run counter to these powerful feelings and to grasp the healing forces of life. This was her central reason for writing: to investigate and curb her fascination with death and, at the same time, to capture the vitality of existence. The paradox was that such affirmation inevitably brought her back to the subjects she knew best: the destructiveness of men, the burdens of the past and the fragility of life. In this absorbing biography James King examines how the raw material of Woolf's daily existence was transformed into art, and he pays close attention to her search for forms of writing which encompass a new feminist aesthetic.

Although most of Woolf's letters and diaries have been published and a great deal of information has long been available about her life, many important matters are examined from a fresh perspective, such as her gloomy childhood at Hyde Park Gate, her experience of sexual abuse, her bouts of mental illness, her flirtation with Clive Bell, her unorthodox marriage to Leonard Woolf, her strong friendships as a young woman with older women, her substantial role in the genesis of the Bloomsbury group, and her fascinating, often troubled relationships with Vanessa Bell, Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth. Above all, this book emphasizes Virginia Woolf the professional woman of letters, a shadowy figure in previous accounts.

Virginia Woolf sheds new light on this daring, impetuous, tormented person, who strove relentlessly to find the right words to capture life's insubstantiality and its vibrancy.

Brilliantly researched, it provides a fascinating revaluation of Virginia Woolf the writer and the woman.