Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Virginia Woolf: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of British Authors)

Virginia Woolf: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of British Authors)
jjares avatar reviewed on + 3266 more book reviews


From the description of Virginia Woolf, she was an extremely sensitive person who didn't recover from change and life's difficulties very well. What she could do was help readers understand more about their lives through her introspection about her own (life). Victorian life was geared toward married women taking care of their families and doing good works outside the home. It was a restrictive environment for unmarried women, that kept them in the home, doing needlework. Politics, business, and educational interests were generally closed to women.

Obviously, the Bloomsbury Group was a group of avant-garde intellectuals, including E M Forster and Lytton Strachey. When Virginia and Leonard Woolf married, they had dogs instead of children because her physician worried about Virginia's mental instability.

Virginia specialized in the 'stream-of-consciousness' narrative voice. The author points out accurately that "Virginia was less concerned about the accuracy of reality than the impact of reality on the mind." (p. 20) I learned a great deal about Virginia, her friends, and her writings.