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| The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf''s Last Years
ISBN: 9781501728464
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Cornell University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Woolf Virginia 1882-1941 -- Last years; Novelists English -- 20th century -- Biography;
Woolf remains the Bloomsbury Revival's most popular biographic draw, but in his latest account of her life, Marder (Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf) completely bypasses the more familiar and exhaustively studied first portion of the writer's lifeÄher Victorian childhood, her Edwardian rebellion, and her early, more popular booksÄto concentrate on her last decade. Drawing heavily on Woolf's private writings, Marder (professor emeritus at the University of Illinois) draws a competent portrait from the writing of The Waves to Woolf's suicide during WWIIÄa phase that was marked by changes in her aesthetic and by tremendous fear: "Oh yes," the 49-year-old Woolf wrote in her diary on completing The Waves, "between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live." Marder emphasizes the competing forces of her political engagementÄevident in her novel-essay The Years and in her feminist/antifascist tract Three GuineasÄand her artistic sensibility. Though she remained a committed modernist, he notes, her aesthetic took a radical turn. Indeed, her competing feelingsÄof being both a "detached artist" and an "angry outsider"Ägrew more pronounced during the Depression and the rise of fascism, belying her image as ivory tower intellectual. Tracing Woolf's thoughts as gloomy current events preyed on her spirit, Marder takes readers all the way through her suicide during the worst days of the Battle of Britain. But although he strains for objectivity, his dependence on Woolf's journal entries often leads him to sacrifice biographic insight in favor of Woolf's own version of events. 24 b&w photos. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Herbert Marder was born in Vienna and came to the U.S. as a child, fleeing the Holocaust. He has had a long and sustained interest in Virginia Woolf and published a pioneering work, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf , at the beginning of the current Bloomsbury revival. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Illinois, Marder lives in Champaign, Illinois, and on Monhegan Island, Maine. |
