Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf

By Panthea Reid

Book Overview

More than fifty-five years after her death, Virginia Woolf remains a haunting figure, a woman whose life was both brilliantly successful and profoundly tragic. As the author of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, and Between the Acts, she helped reinvent the novel for the modernist era. And through A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and other writings, she continues to inform feminist thought. Yet this supremely gifted woman of letters endured crippling bouts of depression--the incandescent artist who captivated some of the most noted men and women of her time died alone, wading out into the depths of the river Ouse to drown, hoping to find "rest on the floor of the sea." Until now, we have had no adequate explanation of why she did so.
In this bold and compassionate new biography, Panthea Reid at last weaves together the diverse strands of Virginia Woolf's life and career. In lucid and often poetic prose, she offers a dazzlingly complete portrait that is essential to our reading of Woolf. Rich in detail and imaginative insight, Art and Affection meticulously documents how the twin desires to write and to be loved drove Woolf all her life. Drawing on a wealth of original documents, many unfamiliar and heretofore unpublished, including the surviving letters of Woolf's parents and grandmother, the vast collections of letters written among Bloomsbury friends and acquaintances, the manuscripts of Woolf's writing, her suicide notes, and other sources, Reid allows Woolf and her intimates to speak for themselves.
Her findings correct many misconceptions about Woolf's upbringing and her most significant relationships. She reveals, for instance, that recent reports of sexual abuse in Woolf's childhood have been exaggerated--that while the writer was sexually traumatized by her half-brothers and emotionally scarred by her father, she was most deeply wounded by the neglect of her mother (often depicted as the very model of Victorian maternal devotion) and by her love for and rivalry with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Reid describes the competition between the sisters that became for Virginia a contest between their arts, the pen versus the brush. The effects of this rivalry were not uniformly negative--Reid shows that Virginia's jealous preoccupation with modern painting sparked her own aesthetic vision and experimentation with written forms--but the end results were tragic. Virginia's flirtation with Vanessa's husband, carefully documented here, so alienated her sister that after 1910 Virginia never again felt secure of Vanessa's affection. Reid presents powerful evidence that fear of losing both Vanessa's love and her own writing gift ultimately triggered Woolf's final suicidal depression. She also reevaluates Virginia's marriage to the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf. Reid also finds that Leonard was surprisingly supportive of Virginia's erotic relationship with Vita Sackville-West and that his constant devotion provided Virginia with the secure emotional soil in which art and affection could flourish and she could keep at bay, until her fifty-ninth year, the demons of manic-depression. Reid shows how, until the end, Virginia Woolf's own "insatiable desire to write something before I die" most sustained her.
Brimming with new revelations and graced with sixty-six rare photographs and illustrations, Art and Affection is the definitive new account of the triumphs and tragedies that molded Virginia Woolf into one of the most original voices in modern literature.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195101952
• ISBN13: 9780195101959
• Release Date: December 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A "must" for all Virginia Woolf fans!

Panthea Reid, author of Virginia Woolf: Art And Affection, is a professor of English at Louisiana State University. She has authored a book on William Faulkner and edited one on Walker Percy, both gifted, but very eccentric Southern writers. Reid must have a predilection toward gifted artists who produce astounding work, but who never find a way to fit in with society in general. In this book Reid contends that Woolf was what we in the south call a high maintenance female. Aside from her manic/depressive disorder, Reid asserts the many psychological blows, real and imagined, Woolf suffered during her childhood left her with wounds that never healed, no matter the outside success and acclaim she enjoyed in her later life. Marriage, travel, literary fame and fortune were not enough to keep Woolf from "...put(ting) stones in her pocket...walk(ing) into the water, and sink(ing) into a tidal current, hoping to fine 'rest of the floor of the sea'" on the morning of March 28, 1941. As a child, Woolf desperately longed for the attention and affection of her beautiful but emotionally detached mother; suffered emotional scars at the hands of her stern father; endured sexual abuse from one of her half-brothers; and was pathologically attached to her sister, Vanessa, herself a free spirit whom no one could restrain. Because her many childhood needs were not sated, and because her bi-polar disorder hadn't been given a name, diagnosis or treatment, Woolf spent the rest of her life enduring lingering bouts of depression, fragile health and periods of self-doubt, despite a tremendous gift for putting words on paper. By their very nature, the book's reliance on copious correspondence between Virginia and her intimates gives the reader an excellent glimpse into the day-to-day life of an upper middle class family living in Victorian England. Some of the details are tedious, while others explain the confinement Woolf felt at being a female in a very controlling, male-dominated society. Although she was obviously gifted, she was devalued by Victorian mores. This book is meticulously researched and annotated. It appears Reid had almost unlimited access to family correspondence, records and photographs. While the book might be overwhelming at times in by the sheer weight of the research, it is a scholarly work that deserves place on a library shelf and should be included in any serious study of Woolf and the life that produced her enormous, if fragile, talent. Recommended for Woolf fans and those curious about Victorian life. Enjoy!Terry H. Mathews Reviewer

A first rate research job....

For a person who doesn't read much non-fiction, this book is a bit overwhelming. With that said, it should be said that this book is also one of the most thoroughly researched books I've read on Virginia Woolf.Woolf is one of my favorite authors. I hadn't been too interested in her life until I read Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours'. Since that time, I've read what I could find about her life, but nothing compares to this volume, for sheer quantity of research, notes and professional opinions. I found this book in a Bargain Rack. I'm sorry it's out of print. It would make a fabulous research tool for any student of Woolf, or of the Victorian Age.