Virginia Woolf: A Biography

One of the better, most thorough biographies I've read anywhere. The prose is easy to digest, provides detailed events that stack up well against Woolf's own journal entries and provide great insight into Bloomsbury along with many of Woolf's own characters who have their inspiration in the Stephen family. Not only captured the life of Virginia but provides insight into the upper middle class, and the intellectual and artistic circles of England over a 40 year period.

" . . . The first truly full-scale treatment of the writer's life to be published. As a nephew of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell brings to his book the authority that family intimacy affords, but he does so without bias, evasion, or sentimentality, and as an observer rather than as a participant. His intention is personal history, not literary criticism, and this he achieves impressively. By the end of this narrative Virginia Woolf has assumed reality outside the elusive world of her art." - from book jacket

A stunningly-written biography, by her nephew, of the creative genius whose Bloomsbury group, formed early in the 20th Century, affected our society for the entire century. Inspirational and true to human nature.

I don't like Ms. Woolf any better knowing her history, but maybe I will be able to better understand her writings. On the other hand, however, Leonard Woolf was a saint!

I had to DNF this book, it was very dry and boring.

more than we can expect from a nephew of the subject.

Excellent read on her life.