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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. Forrester's biography draws on revelations about the author that often remain buried and carefully applies them to a narrative of her development and influence. 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, her father, and her half-sister, . Forrester connects these figures to Woolf's mental breakdown while introducing the concept of "Virginia seule," : 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 and her world.
Riassunto
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. Forrester weaves a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.
Relazione
"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
