Hermione Lee - Virginia Woolf

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781407066240

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Published by Vintage 1997

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Copyright Hermione Lee 1996

The right of Hermione Lee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1996

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ISBN 9780099732518

Hermione Lee grew up in London, and spent her childhood close to the streets, parks and buildings of Virginia Woolfs life and novels. After leaving Oxford, and lecturing for a year in America, she taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York, where she is now Professor of English Literature. She is also well known as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster. From 1982 to 1986 she presented Channel Fours first books programme, Book Four. Her previous publications include a critical study of the novels of Virginia Woolf, a book on the writing of Elizabeth Bowen and a collection of Bowens non-fiction, editions of Stevie Smith, Willa Cather and Woolf, and a popular anthology of short stories by women writers, The Secret Self, reissued and enlarged in 1995. Her 1989 critical biography, Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up, was enthusiastically received. Virginia Woolf won the 1997 British Academy Rose Mary Crawshaw Award. She is married, and lives in Yorkshire.

Also by Hermione Lee

The Novels of Virginia Woolf

Elizabeth Bowen

Philip Roth

Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up

Virginia Woolf

Editor

Stevie Smith: A Selection

The Hogarth Letters

The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen

The Secret Self: Short Stories by Women

The Short Stories of Willa Cather

Virginia Woolf: A Room of Ones Own and
Three Guineas, To the Lighthouse, The Years

Woolf has found her ideal biographer in Hermione Lee Lee has replaced the vaporous, irritatingly feeble image of Woolf with one that stresses her wild sense of humour, her magnetic beauty and social charm, her steely loyalty to her clan, her elusiveness, even her polymorphous sexuality. Such a shaded, subtle portrait can only send readers back to the novels with renewed curiosity and admiration

Edmund White, Sunday Times

A superlative critical achievement Hermione Lee is a most honourable, perceptive and intelligent biographer of a writer we all thought we knew quite enough about

Eileen Battersby, Image Magazine

Hermione Lees beautifully written biography has redrawn the character of Virginia Woolf, scrupulously argued the problems (madness, snobbery, cliqueyness) and given us back a woman of tremendous spirit and energies as well as the great writer capable of emotional warmth and much light-footed wit besides

Marina Warner, Books of the Year,

Times Literary Supplement

A richly readable account of an extraordinary life

Helen Dunmore,

Books of the Year, The Times

A meticulous, clever book that still bursts with colour and pleasure; the definitive Virginia Woolf biography

Natasha Walter,

Books of the Year, Guardian

A multi-layered study, sympathetic, scholarly and gripping

Melvyn Bragg,

Books of the Year, Sunday Times

Lee has emerged triumphant. This is a marvellous new biography of Woolf

Helen Simpson, Times Literary Supplement

Lees biography of Virginia Woolf is the first for over 20 years and, given the subject matter, the easiness of the writing, and the painstaking nature of the research which draws on the wealth of new documentary material, it is certain to be the most noteworthy of the decade A definitive work

Steve Grant, Time Out

Hermione Lees remarkable triumph is to produce a biography that does for the genre what Woolfs fiction did for the novel A monumental achievement. It manages to question and transform the limits of life-writing without simply becoming involved in a conversation with itself. The most satisfyingly complete account of Woolfs life and work to date

Kathryn Hughes, New Statesman

It is one of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history Lee has got as close to the core as one can imagine, in a book which makes us think anew about how womens experiences are distilled on to the page

Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

There is scarcely a page in this new biography where the reader is not surprised by new information, a fresh slant or an unexpected connection With this vivid, rich and compelling biography at hand we can marvel afresh at the transformation of Virginia Woolfs life into art

Frances Spalding,

Times Educational Supplement

Each generation brings a new perspective, a new order of priorities, a new understanding even, and Virginia Woolf is lucky to have so perceptive and acute a writer as Hermione Lee to sift again through her facts. Entirely fresh breathtakingly clever

Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday

Lees book is bigger, more ambitious and with a broader sweep of knowledge than anything we have seen on Woolf before. The best thing is that she is flexible, not ruled by an agenda, receptive to the flow of period and feeling, to the flights of Woolfs own imagination Professor Lees book crackles with intelligence [A] marvellous portrait

Fiona McCarthy, Observer

An immense book, a sprawling English landscape mountainous in detail Virginia Woolf is various, lively, unsensational and calm, consolidating her position at the end of her century as one of our most important writers

Ali Smith, Scotsman

Virginia Woolfs posthumous life is assured. If that life continues to change in response to the perceptions of future generations, this book will be pivotal in the process. For the foreseeable future, it will be the book to read about Virginia Woolf

Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review

This is the best life of Virginia Woolf that we have yet had a high achievement The result is one of the best biographies of this decade from either side of the Atlantic [An] invaluable book