Imprint
- Virago
- Virago
Biography: general, Prose: non-fiction
New revised edition of this remarkable biography from Lyndall Gordon, the highly acclaimed biographer of T.S.Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Only writing, Virginia Woolf said, could compose 'the synthesis of my being'. Lyndall Gordon reveals an explorer of 'the infinite oddity of the human position' and, specifically, the more hidden problems and possibilities of women. Integrating new material - diary, memoirs, unpublished sketches, and drafts of novels - this book brings out the experiences that shaped Virginia Woolf's work: the family deaths that shut off her youth as a well of memory, the muted suffering of a Victorian girl, and the volcanic matter of her madness. It looks at her unusual education with her eccentric father, Leslie Stephen; the formative bond with her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell; her fascinating marriage to Leonard Woolf; above all, her attachments to the dead, so as to find the sources of her creativity and uncover how Virginia Woolf transformed private memories into classic works of art.
Praise for Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life
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a most perceptive book which greatly adds to our knowledge and understanding - London Magazine
Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon was born in Cape Town and studied American Literature at Columbia University in New York. She came to England through the Rhodes Trust in 1973.
She is the prize-winning author of biographies including The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot; Henry James: His Women and his Art; Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds and Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World. There are also two memoirs, Shared Lives, A Story of Women's Friendship, and Divided Lives, about her mother, whose spiritual journey opened up Eliot's poetry for her. She has written the 'Life' for the Eliot website: tseliot.com.
Lyndall Gordon is a fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford.
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