Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is considered by some to be one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. She was the author of nine novels, numerous short stories, a semi-biography (of art critic Robert Fry), and numerous essays, including the famous A Room of One's Own.. She also has been the subject of numerous biographies (including at least two psycho-sexual analyses).

The British writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004) was uniquely positioned to write a biography of Woolf for the Penguin Lives series. He knew Virgina from boyhood on, and his mother Vita Sackville-West (who enjoyed an open marriage) had an intimate affair with her throughout the 1920s. (In fact, this relationship was the basis for Woolf's Orlando, described by Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.") Further, Nicolson edited a 6 volume collection of Woolf's letters (1975)-1980).

In this concise biography (186 pages), Nicolson gives a broad overview of Woolf's life and career. He traces her childhood and adolescence (when she bore the surname Stephen), her participation in the famous "Bloomsbury group" of intellectuals, her (largely chaste) marriage to Leonard Woolf (whom she described to friends as "a pennniless Jew"), her career as an author and publisher, her growing fame, and her personal relationships; he also touches on her episodes of mental illness, depression, and her suicide.

Nicolson's portrayal is informative and affectionate, but by no means uncritical. He recounts a lecture that he gave in the US in 1982 in which he warned his audience that England's Virginia and their Woolf were not the same person (meaning that academics in the US had molded her and her milieu into their preconceived notions). Thus, to Nicholson, the "Bloomsbury group" (which included Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey) were not the brave forerunners of modern progressive views; their socialism was "tepid" and even Virginia's championship of women's rights was restricted to those of her own social class.

Indeed, the feminist views Woolf published in her later works are deemed by Nicolson as "vastly overstated". In A Room of One's Own "she was speaking only of women of her own class and cultural background, a tiny minority who had little cause for complaint." Her political views were simplistic and out of step with the times; she blamed the existence of war entirely on men, and by the Second World War, her pacificist inclinations had become irrelevant. Germany's bombardment of England destroyed the Woolf's own home, and they fled the coast, knowing that upon invasion, they would be in grave danger given Leonard's Jewish ancestory. Nicolson also casts a skeptical eye on another author's claims about rampant sexual abuse in Virginia's early life.

Nigel Nicolson's book is a biography, not a hagiography, and he seeks neither to construct nor destroy a literary icon. Those who want to view Ms Woolf as an unblemished heroine will not find this book easy to dismiss, unless on the entirely unfair grounds of the author's own gender. However, those interested in seeing Virginia Woolf as a full-scale human being, and a product of her times and social class, will gain a deeper understanding from this sympathetic but honest appraisal of her life and career. ( )