the novels of virginia woolf hermione lee

Lee, professor of English literature at the University of York, who wrote an earlier study of Woolf’s novels and a biography of Willa Cather, does not begin her new biography in the usual way. Reid’s biography demonstrated what she characterized as the “peculiar intertwining of art, and affection” - to write and to be loved - in Woolf’s life, or as Woolf put it, the “desire of the pen in the blood.”

Last year, James King of McMaster University did a fine literary biography for Norton, “Virginia Woolf,” that analyzed the author’s work and life, her fascination with death and as King said, her “greatest creation, herself.” Just a few months ago, Panthea Reid published another biography, “Art And Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf” with Oxford University Press. Her biography of Woolf is scholarly, familiar and capacious. Lee gives a thumping affirmation to Woolf’s statement about “life-writing” - that is, relating life to biography. In the last twelve months, three fine biographies of Virginia Woolf have appeared and this latest, Hermione Lee’s, is best.

– Biographer Hermione Lee augmenting Virginia Woolf’s view. “ … in biography and autobiography there must be a relation between the obscure areas of personality - the “soul” - and forces like class and social pressures otherwise “how futile life-writing becomes.”

The novels of virginia woolf hermione lee