Dimensions
143 x 204 x 19mm
This biography of Virginia Woolf is unusual. It is written by someone who knew her well when he was a child. Although short, it gives the key moments, they key traits and the key ideas that have made her life so continuously fascinating to new generations. At the same time it provides a firm record of her literary achievement.
Nigel Nicolson is the son of Vita Sackville-West, who was Virginia Woolf's most intimate friend, and for a short time her lover. He spend many days in her company, particularly at the period when she was writing 'Orlando', her spoof biography of his mother, and he has threaded his recollections of her throughout this unique narrative of her life. Virginia Woolf was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, and her writings, especially her novels 'Mrs Dalloway' and 'The Waves', were works of astonishing originality. She is equally well known for her two polemical books, 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas', which have become classics of the feminist movement, although in Nicolson's view they were "wildly overstated".
Nigel Nicolson's life of Virginia Woolf is an affectionate, but not uncritical, portrait of one of the most remarkable women of her age.