The Measure of Life : Virginia Woolf's Last Years

Marder (English, emeritus, U. of Illinois) looks at the last 10 years of Virginia Woolf's life, from her creation of The Waves to her suicide in 1941, tracing her evolving social consciousness in the 1930s and connecting her growing concern with politics and social history with the facts of her everyday life. He stresses her endurance as a working writer yet finds that Woolf anticipated her suicide, enacting it symbolically many times before the fact. Marder notes that in his own writing he tried to follow Woolf's lead in combining an unobtrusive style with an attempt to convey the emotional as well as historical truth about people and events. In the process, he adds, I have had to examine my assumptions about the nature of biography and the role of biographer. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)