Virginia Woolf

(Paperback)

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Description

Featuring new details about Virginia Woolf's homes and personal life, this engaging biography offers a fresh insight into her work, focusing on how place as much as imagination fashioned her writing. Drawing on her letters, journals, diaries, autobiographical essays and fiction, it reveals Woolf's response to her surroundings, from the enclosed space of Hyde Park Gate to the open and free-spirited Bloomsbury. Throughout, Ira Nadel gives consideration to her technique as a novelist, the skills she learned from reading others' work and her concern with history, narrative, art and friendship. Virginia Woolf shows how the context of her life shaped her imaginative goals.

Reviews

Ira Nadel's Virginia Woolf is a wide-ranging yet succinct treatment of Woolfs life and career, as she experienced and remembered them, and as they appear in diaries, letters, essays, and fictional writings. It comprehensively explores her upbringing and family life, her marriage, friendships, and affairs, her difficult medical history, as well as her relationship to historical events. * Alan Friedman, Thaman Professor of English & Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin *
The integration of place and space into the discussion of Woolfs writings and biography make for an interesting and informative read, providing avid Woolf readers with a new lens through which to view her works and those less familiar with her work with enough background to get started . . . As a Critical Lives biography. its aim is to provide readers with a broad understanding of her life and work, which this volume admirably docs, and it even manages to dig up some shards for future explorations of her writings * Gay and Lesbian Review *
Nadels relatively brief biography of Woolf, then, provides an excellent introduction to this writers life * Modern Language Review *

Author Bio

Ira Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, is the author of biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet, as well as studies of Joyce, Ezra Pound and Modernism.