A Life of Virginia Woolf

...Pippett) after her father's death had released her, after she had managed to recover from the untimely snuffing-out of her gifted brother's promise, after she had, at 30, married the great companion of her life--Leonard Woolf--that she felt free to embark on those flights, those poetic, mysterious literary explorations--The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, The Years--by which she is now judged...

...But perhaps the most moving and convincing evidence on Virginia Woolf lies in the many quotations from letters, happily made available to the author, written to V. Sackville-West, Mrs...

...now you have caught what you feel must be her essence, now she again eludes you...

...It was only (according to Mrs...

...At the age of 59 and in the midst of the agony of World War If, she embarked, by her own will, on the flight from which there is no return...

...She had more knowledge of man's mind by the time she reached maturity than most people ever die with...

...Each took off on its own flight, its course uncharted till her subconscious had gained control...

...In the factual sense, as her biographer never ceases to point out, Virginia Woolf's world was limited...

...Woolf's closest friend...

...Not all the facts in the book are emotional...

...But in each, the goal was the same: the underlying truth, hidden and tantalizing, forever envisioned, yet forever beyond reach...

...Born at the end of the nineteenth century in England of a brilliant, eccentric father, Leslie Stephen, and a mother, a renowned beauty, who died when Virginia was 13, she had been from the start so delicately strung, so tensely wrought that even to go to school like other children was for her out of the question...

...Aileen Pippett, Virginia Woolf's biographer, has of course decided...

...Her name," writes Aileen Pippett in this attempt to pin down the elusive moth and fix the bright star of Virginia Woolf's personality, "crops up in all sorts of memoirs and autobiographies and critical studies by men distinguished in various fields...

...Since the moment it came out...

...After what was obviously an extraordinary effort to penetrate the heart of Virginia Woolf through the internal evidence of her writings and to evaluate the impressions and anecdotes and intimate glimpses revealed by Mrs...

...now she vanishes...

...Now you see her...

...And yet the woman these different people speak or write about had a difficult life made more difficult by attacks because she lived in Blooms-bury, worked in an ivory tower, was aloof and snobbish and perversely unintelligible and, having a private income, could know or care nothing about the lives of ordinary men and women...

...In her own books, there is fixed immutably that part of her which was like a star: but here in these pages there flitters only the ephemeral moth...

...Like every born writer, Virginia Woolf, though she studied literature and the life around her for material, drew for sustenance upon herself...

...Each reader, each generation must decide...

...Since all the necessary ingredients for a biography can be found in The Moth and the Star, why is it that, somehow, Virginia Woolf is not here in the round...

...this book has been, for countless women everywhere, both a balm to their wounds and a summons to self-liberation...

...Thrown back upon herself long before she had collected the treasury of resources with which she later furnished her solitude, as a child she devoured books with all the avidity that other children pour into games and the discovery of one another...

...A highbrow," wrote Virginia Woolf herself, is "a man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea...

...Despite the private glimpses, the quotations from her own words, the description of her houses, clothes, treasures, relationships and relations, she escapes from your grasp, an insubstantial shadow, an incommunicable ghost...

...The building-up of the Hogarth Press, which the Woolfs started in their own house, is described...

...Woolf's many distinguished friends, the author of this book concludes that she was one of the illuminators of literature, for us and for all time...

...Shy, hypersensitive, enslaved by the stormy magnetism of her father and by her own continually exacerbated nerves, she had far more doubts, fears and griefs than seem justified by the outward security and lofty tenor of her surroundings...

...If, as her friends and her works testify, she was primarily a mystic, A Room of One's Own reveals her also as a realist...

...Nor is the setting neglected...

...Here in these letters the warmth, the courage, the hopes and fears, intuitions and absurdities, small pleasures and great anguish that made up her private life can at least be surmised, if never measured...

...so, too, are the eminent folk, their names aglow with achievement--Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, Harold Nicolson--who peopled Virginia Woolf's world...

...Reviewed by Virgilia Peterson Frequent contributor, "Saturday Review," N. Y. "Herald Tribune Books" Who was Virginia Woolf, and what was she--that not only the keen, sensitive, knowledgeable minds of her time but also thousands of ordinary book-readers so commend her...

...Only from her own truth could she surmise that of others...

...Pippett shows in a careful analysis of each of them, were the same...

...But what of her emotional development...

...On the contrary, the author undertakes an almost impassioned apologia for "Bloomsbury" itself--that old-fashioned London Square which stands to some for irresponsible intellectualism, to others, including the author of this book, for a true elite...

...She leans, too, upon that coolly ironic dissertation called A Room of One's Own, from which emerges, beneath the perfect phrases and the happy images, her special vulnerability to being born a woman and as such still, in her country and her time, underprivileged, subject, prevented by custom, and in her early years even by law, from due share in the shaping of the world she lived in...

...Mrs...

...Although Aileen Pippett's book shows devoted care, a near-worship at Virginia Woolf's shrine, it must unfortunately be said that to see her whole in this biography is impossible...

...Who is right...

...No two of her books, as Mrs...

...Pippett leans heavily for source material on Virginia Woolf's own diary, posthumously published three years ago...

...By her own definition, then, she was a highbrow...

...only from the precise knowledge in her own heart could she generalize about the heart of life itself...