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Title: Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson ISBN: 0-670-89443-5 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.09 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Outstanding Life of Virginia Woolf
Comment: I would call this a portrait and not a biography. This is not meant to denigrate a wonderful book but differentiate it from full-blown biographies that extend to volumes. Rather, this is an intimate portrait by someone who knew Virginia Wolf, has read her books and edited her letters for publication.
Nigel Nicolson gives us an intimate portrait of Virginia Woolf in a highly readable book of 191 pages. Because of his mother Vita Sackville-West's close relationship with Virginia we gain a perspective that a biographer who takes his subject as an assignment cannot always supply. However, Mr. Nicolson maintains his objectivity giving us a Virginia Woolf with all her complexity and contradictions. We are treated to frequent quotes from her diaries and letters that bring her all the closer. I enjoyed the personal touch offered by Mr. Nicolson; he is not intrusive and when he speaks from his personal knowledge of his subjects he adds a dimension of intimacy. You come away with a feeling that you know something of Virginia Woolf rather than facts about her.
There are several photographs illustrating the book. If you want to know about Virginia Woolf, or want to become reacquainted with her life and books, this is a book to read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Portrait of a troubled woman!
Comment: While most of Virginia Woolf's biographers (with the possible exception of her nephew Quentin Bell) bond with their subject through her vivid diaries and fiction, Nicolson (Portrait of a Marriage), the son of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West, draws on family archives and first-hand experience for his brisk, dutiful biography. For the young Nicolson, Woolf first appeared as a lively and amusing visitor. Not yet famous, to Nicolson she was like "a favourite aunt who brightened our simple lives with unexpected questions." Visiting Vita's stately home, Woolf might ask the young Nigel, "What's it like to be a child?" by way of research for To the Lighthouse, or she might make up histories for unidentified ancestral portraits as background for Orlando, her love-letter fantasy to Vita. Such personal glimpses enliven Nicolson's respectful position between various, often hotly contended views of Woolf as writer, feminist and Bloomsburian. Despite his insider's knowledge, which is nonetheless welcome, Nicolson manages to offer an objective perspective on Woolf's parents and siblings and on her childhood and youth. He is, however, less sensational than was Quentin Bell on her mental illness and the notorious early episodes when one of her half brothers examined her genitalia and the other forced his affections on her. Nicolson filters Woolf's writing career through VitaÄand her opinions: she delighted in Orlando and was exasperated with the hyperbolic polemics of Three Guineas, the 1938 pacificist tract that was her penultimate work before her suicide. The world is no doubt weary of Woolf biographies, but this tidy and homely little introduction will sell to readers who may have been too intimidated by Woolf's modernist reputation to broach her life and work before.
Rating: 3
Summary: Flawed
Comment: One thing to know before buying or reading this book is that it is written by a man who was born in the early 1900's and still holds many of the old-fashioned beliefs of that time. It is irritating to listen to Nicolson berate Virginia's feminist beliefs, argue that her statements about women's disadvantages were not true and basically undermine what many readers admire her for - her progressive and liberal point of view. It is not what I bought this biography for. I wanted to know more about Virginia, not Nicolson's macho attitude. For the most part the biography is very good, it would just be a lot better if he kept his opinions to himself.
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Title: James Joyce: A Penguin Life by Edna O'Brien ISBN: 0670882305 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Marcel Proust by Edmund White ISBN: 0670880574 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Jane Austen by Carol Shields ISBN: 0670894885 Publisher: Viking Penguin Inc Pub. Date: 15 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Herman Melville by Elizabeth Hardwick ISBN: 0670891584 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray, Francis Du Plessix Gray ISBN: 0670899984 Publisher: Lipper Pub. Date: 25 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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