Virginia Woolf

"Hermione Lee has created a portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. This book gives us a vivid sense of the texture of Woolf's daily life - her houses and habits, money and servants, parties and talk. And through her own words and newly published letters between family members and friends, we gain a fresh and penetrating understanding of Woolf's formative personal relationships: with her parents and siblings; with her husband, Leonard; with writers she edgily admired, such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield; and with the women who changed her life, including Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth." "Lee casts aside the misleading received images of Woolf as an ethereal and emotionally dependent creature, and takes us deep inside her inner being. We see a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered from a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character. And we see a tougher Woolf than we have previously known: a woman acutely alert to the realities of her times, a committed feminist, an opponent of every sort of political and intellectual fascism. At the same time, Lee offers an unequalled insight into the connections between Woolf's life and work."--Cover

Originally published in hardback: London : Chatto & Windus, 1996; First American edition: New York : Knopf, 1997.

Part I: 1882-1904 -- Biography -- Houses -- Paternal -- Maternal -- Childhood -- Siblings -- Adolescence -- Abuses -- First loves -- "Madness" -- Part II: 1904-1919 -- Changes -- Thoby -- Experiments -- Liaisons -- "Bloomsbury" -- Subversives -- Leonard -- Marriage -- War -- The press -- Seeing life -- Katherine -- Reading -- Part III: 1919-1929 -- Monk's house -- Post-war -- Party-going -- A haunted house -- Vita -- Censors -- Selves -- Money and fame -- Part IV: 1929-1941 -- Ethel -- Young poets -- Loss -- Outsider -- Failure -- Fascism -- Waiting -- War -- Anon.