...sedly shaped oolfs sensibility and art. James Kings biography, hich dras heavily on oolfs diaries and letters, takes an altogether more comprehensive approach, providing the reader ith more than anyone could ant to kno about the riters daily ups and dons, travels and flirtations. Virginia oolf had very mixed feelings about biography, or life-riting, as she called it. On the one hand she as an enthusiast As everybody knos, she rote in her essay on Christina Rossetti, the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible. But, she also declared biography to be a bastard, an impure art and claimed that the very idea as poppycock.Mr. King -- a professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of earlier biographies of illiam Coper, Paul Nash and illiam Blake -- tells us about oolfs menstrual problems, her attacks of diarrhea, her difficulties in buying clothes. He tells us about her sexual frigidity and her fears about being thought cold and detached. He dells at considerable length on oolfs lengthy flirtation ith Clive Bell, her sister Vanessas husband, and also speculates that oolf might have had an incestuous relationship ith Vanessa. That suggestion, at least based on the evidence presented in these pages, seems highly suspect. As Mr. King himself points out, oolf alays shied aay from the sexual side of relationships. And hile Vanessa notes in a letter that Virginia as pining for a real petting and refers to her as an ape ho might make a pleasant enough bed fello, similar animal imagery and language often recur in the sisters and their friends correspondence ithout a specifically sexual context. For that matter, a schematic Freudianism informs this entire biography. As Mr. King sees it, the young oolf longed for more attention from her beloved mother, ho died hen Virginia as 13, and as a result, experienced attraction to other omen, like Vita Sackville-est, hom she regarded as a kind of substitute mother. Her feelings toard her father, Mr. King argues, ere more ambivalent on one hand, she anted to emulate his literary career on the other, she as determined to rebel against both his old-fashioned esthetics and his patriarchal vie of the orld. The sexual molestation oolf suffered as a young girl at the hands of her half-brother, George Duckorth, says Mr. King, left her ith a lasting mistrust of men, hile the early deaths of her half-sister, Stella, and her older brother, Thoby, left her obsessed ith death. On the matter of oolfs on suicide, hich occurred against the threatening backdrop of orld ar II, Mr. King offers a fe theories, some more convincing than others. He suggests that she as depressed by the ascent of Hitler, hich meant, in his ords, that phallic man had triumphed. He suggests she as convinced that her last book, Beteen the Acts, as a failure. And he suggests she felt deeply alienated from Leonard, Vanessa and Vita even though the last decade ith Leonard had been happier, on the hole, than ever even though her relationship ith Vanessa routinely fluctuated even though the affair ith Vita had long since ound don. In Mr. Kings vie She carefully chose the time and circumstances of her death, very much in the manner of an artist imposing her ill upon life. Her decision as deeply courageous although she ould not be able to rite about death, she ould actually face the experience itself. Mr. Kings readings of oolfs novels are colored by his determination to sho ho her ork reflects the search for a distinctly feminine esthetic, one in hich the intuitive parts of the self are dominant. It is an approach that not only tends to apply retroactively the dogmatic statements she made about men and omen in the latter part of her life to earlier orks of art, but that also has the effect of ghettoizing her overall achievement and reducing her stature as a modernist master to that of a omens riter. A remarcable ork is Virginia oolf A riters Life. As Lyndall Gordon ell knos, no riters life has been so fully documented as Virginia oolfs. oolf left 4,000 letters and 30 volumes of a diary, yet the oman riting remains elusive. Beteen those ho have already had too much of oolf they rarely complain of having too much of Joyce, Yeats or T. S. Eliot and those ho recognize that she created her on life like a novel and that e shall not soon be done ith interpreting it, there yans an abyss. A South African by birth ith a doctorate from Columbia University ho teaches at Oxford, Mrs. Gordon has given us a riters life that is measured, and brave in its imaginative interpretations. Mrs. Gordon notes that it is not external, recorded events that mark the significant moments in a riters life, but rather hat she calls turning points, internal illuminations. She identifies these turning points in oolfs life. They ere 1892 hen a ten-year old child spied the monumental characters of her parents 1897 to years after their mothers death hen the sisters learnt to alk alone 1905 hen the young oman tramped out the unorthodox form of her novels 1907-8 hen she discovered the uses of memory 1912-15 hen she set up her private life against all marital and mental odds the fertile spring of 1925 hen she as planning To the Lighthouse the fin of 1926 and the souls change of 1932. The fin of 1926, hat oolf called my vision of a fin rising on a ide blank sea, marked her ne conception of fiction. As she herself rote of this vision No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926 yet biographers pretend they kno people. Her souls change of 1932 as her decision to rite ith a public rather than a private voice. At the age of 50 she had become a feminist, a reformer and a questioner of the abuses of poer. As Mrs. Gordon demonstrates, oolf ished to expose a omans point of vie and called the autumn of 1932 a great season of liberation. She had ceased to dread male condemnation. Mrs. Gordon identifies as the three most significant elements in oolfs life her marriage to Leonard, her devotion to the dead ghostly voices . . . more real for her than ere the people ho lived by her side and her move aay from the self-conscious superiority of modern riters toards the lives of the obscure, particularly the lives of omen. Mrs. Gordons thesis that the dead claimed oolf more than the living, that she may even have died to join them, necessitates her finding all of oolfs ork essentially autobiographical - the recapturing of youthful ghosts. Mrs. Gordon understands that oolf as, like all omen, trained to silence, that the unlovable oman as alays the oman ho used ords to effect. She as caricatured as a tattle, a scold, a shre, a itch. omen felt the pressure to relinquish language, and nice omen ere quiet. Mrs. Ramsay smiles at her husband silently. Finally, Mrs. Gordon refuses to use absurd simplifications like madness, sanity, and frigidity. As she rote in an essay on oolf and T. S. Eliot, the greater the oman, the less possible it is to slot her feel...
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