Overview

Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf's relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Virginia Woolf: A Portrait blends recently unearthed documents, key primary sources, and personal interviews with Woolf's relatives and other acquaintances to render in unmatched detail the author's complicated relationship with her husband, Leonard; her father, Leslie Stephen; and her half-sister, Vanessa Bell. Forrester connects these figures to Woolf's mental breakdown while introducing the concept of ""Virginia seule,"" or Virginia alone: an uncommon paragon of female strength and conviction. Forrester's biography inhabits her characters and vivifies their perspective, weaving a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.

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9780231153560

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Virginia Woolf was the object of considerable mystery, Viviane Forrester not only tells us about this mystery but clarifies it. At the beginning, the biographer announces that she will shatter equivocal and false portraits. She does precisely that. The result marks a decisive break in the knowledge we thought we had of this English writer. Forrester crosses the threshold of truth. Without reproving those who wrote before her, knowing what was said and how, Vivian Forrester provides a staggering analysis of the youth, marriage, work, and world of Virginia Woolf. She tracks, close up, the internal defense mechanisms and means of protection that veil the truth. In a style as poetic as the novelist/poetess deserves, Vivian Forrester throws light on the lie and the death, Virginia Woolf's two tragedies, and reveals the price of her scintillating work -- Alice Ferney Le Figaro May 14, 2009 Over the years, Forrester has read and annotated all the journals of Woolf, the five volumes of her correspondence, including, among other things, the letters from her father, Leslie Stephen, and those from her sister, Vanessa Bell, whom Virginia idolized and envied her entire life. Such a considerable quantity of fragments of a vast, complex mosaic, assembled here by the biographer, provides a new vision of Virginia Woolf. We discover her close up, fleeing, uncatchable, by turn fragile, ferocious, resplendent, or perverse. Because Forrester has refused to take into account what we thought we knew about Woolf, preferring instead to transcribe, according to her own words, multitudes of things hitherto hidden, often contradictory elements in flux but embraced nimbly in a single phrase: that which does not happen and yet truly occurs. In a lively and limpid style, Forrester attacks first the myths that have calcified around Woolf. First among them, that of her madness. Under the sharp pen of Forrester, therefore, Virginia is not mad, nor is she a martyr. -- Lila Azam Zanganeh LE MONDE April 10, 2009

Author Information

Viviane Forrester (1925-2013) was a writer, essayist, novelist, and literary critic. She worked for Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Quinzaine litteraire and was a member of the jury of the Prix Femina. She translated Virginia Woolf's essay ""Three Guineas"" and is the author of The Economic Horror, Van Gogh ou l'Enterrement dans les bles, and Une etrange dictature. Jody Gladding is a poet who has translated some thirty works from French.

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