The eminent Post-Victorian

...By the time Amis wrote those words, Bloomsbury and its circle had been at the center of things for two generations...

...All of this is presented with the sort of alert sensitivity Woolf brought to her own essays, fiction, and literary portraiture...

...Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey took on the great anti-biographer and made his life in two volumes so personable he became the real subject of the film entitled Carrington...

...A latter-day woman of letters herself, Lee presents her own character anxiously, tentatively coming face to face (biographer, tourist, intruder) with a great, troubled woman of letters, hoping to sense what she sensed, to see something of what she saw...

...Lee reminds us of the ambiguities that Woolf, the daughter of Mr...

...There have, of course, been many, many accounts of Virginia Woolf as well, notably by Quentin Bell and Lyndall Gordon...

...By the end, Virginia Woolf was conscious of a great disintegration...

...One of her most vivid and interesting books—though finally she didn't greatly like it her-self—is Flush, which examines the most romantic literary tale of the early Victorian period, the elopement of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning from Wimpole Street to Italy, through the eyes of a striking and in fact well-recorded participant: Flush, Elizabeth Barrett's cocker spaniel...

...Instead, Lee has found a highly readable form of open narrative meditation...

...It might thus seem there's little case for yet another attempt at a life of Virginia Woolf...

...They follow the whole run of Woolf's life, taking us into her writing, her language, her sensitivity, her creativity, her breakdowns, and her distinctive self-consciousness, as well as into her family life as daughter and sister, her marriage, her friendships and enmities, and her role in the greater Bloomsbury...

...She felt madness returning, and in March 1941 she walked into the River Ouse near Rodmell and "allowed herself to be drowned...

...But the "woman of letters" was not a 20th-century creation...

...Yet it was highly class-conscious, and its inclinations toward socialism never kept it from admiring aristocracy— in society, arts, intellect...

...Bloomsbury was cosmopolitan to a degree, and rule-breaking, modern, but it was a kind of Victorian family itself...

...It was never commonplace or ordinary...

...Bloomsbury dispensed taste—new taste (of course), but it could frown as imperiously as Queen Victoria herself when its taste was offended...

...Lee carries Woolf's story through, stage by stage: from early uncertainties to fame, from sexual abuse and anxiety to a strong marriage to Leonard, from gender uncertainty to a greater commitment to female equality, from solitude to society and back again, from Bloomsbury as new guard to Bloomsbury as old guard, host to the "Auden generation" of the Thirties...

...She shows too how much more writing there is still to be mined...

...Lee doesn't write the life as fiction (as Woolf did in Orlando and Flush), but as an elegant meditation, composed with both massive intelligence and an engaging humility...

...if anything, it shares a great deal with the creative tone of the Romantics, most of whom were male...

...She shows how the major novels—Mrs...

...Woolf emerges not only as a sensitive, delicate artist, but as a humorless, spiky, malicious, even malign figure...

...Virginia Woolf learned much from Joyce's Ulysses, knew it was important, drew heavily on it for the structure of Mrs...

...One of the most recent and thorough is James King's 1994 Virginia Woolf...

...Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years—came to be written, never far from the personal events of Woolf's creatively vigorous yet personally fragile life...

...Laura Ashley textiles echo its designs...

...And there is a large autobiographical aspect to every one of her novels and essays...

...An eminent British academic, Lee knows very well that modern literary theory, with its deconstructionist notions of the Death of the Author, has made the act of writing biography itself problematic...

...Some of her observations in her diaries and notebooks on the process of writing, of imagining, conceiving, and composing, are among the most illuminating modern explorations of creativity...

...As Lee shows us, Woolf's novels, essays, and diaries all constantly hark back to childhood, its houses, and its places, to the old and familiar orders and structures of bourgeois family life...

...In September 1939, war came again: "the worst of all my life's experiences...

...gaunt-faced Virginia Woolfs appear on coffee mugs and T-shirts on several contiMalcolm Bradbury is a novelist (Rates of Exchange, Doctor Criminale), a critic (Dangerous Pilgrimages), and a screenwriter (Cold Comfort Farm), now working on a screenplay of Virginia Woolfs Flush...

...It was bohemia, but very indoor and intimate—a highly elite group of mostly upper-middle-class friends, lovers, enemies, relatives, and hangers-on, who met one another often, ran many of the most interesting presses, magazines, galleries, and bookshops, retired together to the country, colonized a significant piece of the city, seemed strange, unusual, different, and often absurd, yet deeply influenced general taste...

...surely its day was past...

...Woolf was one of the best autobi-ographers of the creative act...

...In the 1950s, as Amis's jibe indicated, it seemed as though it was time to call a moratorium on the whole Bloomsbury business...

...Stephen's daughter Virginia rejected what she called the "wax mausoleum" style of biography, but unlike Strachey, who set out to debunk, she used the form to reveal the inner kernels of a life, presented without either venerative or debunking interference...

...Lee has it just about right when she calls her subject "an autobiogra-pher who never published an autobiography, . . . an egotist who loathed egotism...

...The biographer cannot extract the atom," Woolf said...

...It was a canon of Bloomsbury that the age of venerative biography was over—a pure act of Oedipal rebellion, since the father of them all, Sir Leslie Stephen, was Mr...

...Biography, observed in the enterprise...

...By the time Woolf began composing her novels, nearly all of which came after the War, the Victorian family lay shattered...

...As Lee puts it, "While as a group it was instrumental in changing the nature of English life, it also stayed thickly knit and grown together like the family trees it had come from...

...History and war could be regarded as the things of men...

...Woolf and Strachey may have rejected traditional biography, but they have become subjects of biographical veneration nonetheless...

...This is quite the best and most interesting book I know on the writerly and much-written-about subject of Virginia Woolf...

...All possessed a high, confident sense of cultural and political authority, and much of their best writing was on the subject of their Victorian forebears, those "Eminent Victorians" Lytton Strachey mocked with such decisive results in his 1918 book of that title...

...Even as Woolf and Bloomsbury broke away (how they broke away) from the Victorian ethos, they also sustained a curiously deep and intimate relationship with the intellectual and artistic energies of Victorian Britain...

...Bloomsbury was and is the postal district around the British Museum and the University of London that specialized in education, publishing, medicine, science, specialist bookstores, student hostels, bohemian pubs, art, and ideas...

...then let him write the life as fiction...

...Studies of its texts and art-objects, biographies and bio-pics of its heroes and heroines, pastiches of its style, imitations of its chic are everywhere...

...She was writing mostly about death—so many deaths now surrounded her—and the past...

...The Eminent Post-Victorian A New Life of Virginia Woolf By Malcolm Bradbury T°> not Bloomsbury," I I thinks Jim Dixon when -L ^1 he wonders where in London to settle, as he escapes from his academic prison in the provinces near the end of Kingsley Amis's 1954 novel Lucky Jim...

...Dalloway...

...It looked down on literature, however avant-garde, that was touched with the vulgar taint...

...For at its center, it was a dynastic elite, born from and extending the task of the Victorian reforming intelligentsia, out of which a good many of its most active participants (Stephenses, Woolfs, Stracheys, Russells) were descended...

...The bombs fell on Blooms-bury, destroying two of the circle's houses, erasing much of the London that had made her...

...women's writing needed a different history...

...In Eminent Victorians, the world was introduced to the subversive modern art of defacing the statue, deconstructing the monument, upturning the solemn public identity...

...It was the name and address of the most powerful, coherent, long-lived artistic intelligentsia Britain has produced during the 20th century...

...So it had better be said at once that Hermione Lee's new life is brilliant, and justifies itself from the very start...

...but still she pronounced it "underbred...

...What her book reveals most of all is that Woolf, the great enemy of Vic-torianism, might actually be accounted the last of the Victorians...

...These continuities, Lee stresses, now seem very power-ful—and perhaps lead us where Bloomsbury would never have suspected they would lead, to a greater appreciation of the richness of Victorian literature and sensibility...

...King's book gives a vivid portrait of a clever, fragile, self-destructive, often sexually provocative woman, much preoccupied with identity and death...

...There was a plentiful quota of female scribblers working in proximity to scribbling men—sometimes they hid behind male names, and sometimes their education was spotty, but they were there, and they were formidable...

...It wasn't, not in 1954, and not today...

...Stephen set its goal in 1882: "A biography written with a single eye giving all the information presumably desirable by an intelligent reader may be not only useful, but intensely interesting, and even a model of literary art...

...The chapters have headings like "Biography," "Houses," "Party-Going," "Madness," "Fascism," "War...

...Let the biographer print fully, completely, accurately, the known facts without comment...

...It unfolds as a continuous series of essays, portrait speculations, based on voluminous research...

...She wrote furiously, felt she had "lost all power over words," and so produced largely fragments...

...her strong preoccupation with self is one of the qualities modern critics like to label "feminist," but it isn't...

...The heyday of Bloomsbury ran from about 1904, when the children of the just-dead Sir Leslie Stephen departed Kensington to settle in its Georgian squares, to about 1941, the year in which the most influential of those children, Virginia Woolf, killed herself...

...There were the sudden shocks of modernization brought about by the social and technological transformations of the turn into the 20th century, then the terrible European crisis of the Great War, which destroyed the Victorian universe forever...

...the women were mostly determined, demanding, sexually active bluestockings...

...nents...

...Over that period it shifted from a kind of bitter Oedipal revolt against the remnants of late Victorian culture, against power, pomposity, piety, and patriarchy, into the chief expostulator of the spirit of the new, whatever the "new" was...

...He gives us the husk...

...History and politics were transforming the bourgeois world from the outside just as modern consciousness (like Woolf's) was challenging it from the inside...

...In exploring her own relationship to these changes, Woolf inclined more and more to see herself, by virtue of being female, as the essential outsider...

...Bloomsbury somehow found a face to meet the face of every postmodern decade, with its aestheticism, its feminism, its tribalism, its political liberalism, its economic radicalism, its liberationist ethics, its psychological consciousness, its Post-Impressionist exhibitions, its complex artistic and sexual networking, its self-confessed concourse of sodomites and sapphists, its alert response to fresh politics and new avant-garde adventures...

...Woolf, the daughter of a man of letters, was a woman of letters...

...It was generally left-leaning and radical, the source of Keynesianism, Anglo-liberalism, sexual and political revolution...

...Woolf sought to create a distinctively female literary identity that could rival or outshine her father's...

...Now as the century ends, Blooms-bury is coming to resemble the Victorian intelligentsia—those "moral authorities"—against which it was so passionately and formidably in revolt...

...Biography himself, the mastermind behind the biggest biographical project of his age, the Dictionary of National Biography...

...Bloomsbury still fascinates, still seems to command...

...I believe she has...

...But it was more than that...

...In Woolf's writing, the supposedly comfortable precincts of high bourgeois domesticity are always under threat from within by the tensions between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, men and women...

...as a profession, the "woman of letters" first made her presence known in the Victorian intelligentsia...

...Like the great Victorians, the men were mostly donnishly inclined, and very concerned with the aesthetic state of their souls...

...Bloomsbury was advanced, enlightened, open...

...Yet one of the most gratifying aspects of her Virginia Woolf is that it is not overtly theoretical...