Book Review: "Virginia Woolf" by Hermione Lee

I have always been a great fan of biographies about authors. I have read many biographies on my favourite authors such as: James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Boris Pasternak, Leo Tolstoy, Dante Alighieri, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley and many, many more. One thing I like about author biographies as opposed to autobiographies is that the biography is normally done by someone who is absolutely in love with the author's works and so, you get these impassioned almost love-letter like passages to some of the author's seminal prose and poetry. Their lives may not be romanticised, but the very words used to describe the works they wrote make you want to read them all over again. That is especially true for Hermione Lee's book on Virginia Woolf.

One thing that I loved about Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf is that it does not try to gloss over things that may be in the way of us really understanding who this author was. For example: yes, she was a staunch feminist, but sometimes there was racism and even classism in the family she came from. There are other examples littered throughout the book that seek not to romanticise Virginia Woolf but to humanise her as both a product of her time and a woman who wanted to be slightly ahead of it. I think that this blend between what we know of the myth of Virginia Woolf as this lonely-depressed romantic realist and feminist and the reality of her which was a modernist woman born into a Victorian society which said that it probably true that she was simply some hopeless romantic of the depressed people shows us that Virginia Woolf is far more complex than you'd initially think before reading the book.

I loved learning about Virginia Woolf's family life as well - the life she had before she became a writer was fascinating and a little sad. I learnt that Virginia Woolf was raised in a family who believed that formal education was only appropriate for boys and that girls should do the 'feminine jobs' of the household. Her mother would have nothing of the suffragette movement in the house and Virginia Woolf was resigned to teach herself various topics she wanted to know of. I can imagine that this inspired many of her characters and their ways of life - especially the headstrong but suffering Clarissa Dalloway.

The fact that Hermione Lee still acknowledges that there are many publications to this day being released about Virginia Woolf and by Virginia Woolf herself shows that Lee is absolutely aware of the time that she is writing. Correspondences are still being gathered, letters and journals are being mended and reviews, biographies and biopics (to some degree) being released, made and curated all over the world. I think though that Hermione Lee's book is possibly the most important piece of evidence we have for the life and times of Virginia Woolf apart from the writings of the woman herself. There is something really amazing about this book that draws you into Woolf's London and lets you explore her life from the inside. An immense amount of research has gone into this book, the likes of which I have only seen a few times.

All in all, this is an excellent book which stretches across time periods, coming from before Virginia Woolf was even born to after her tragic death, her cultural impact and her reigning reputation as the mother of 20th century realism. This has taught me so much about Virginia Woolf and I now wish to read what Hermione Lee has to say about other legendary authors she has written on.