Art and affection : a life of Virginia Woolf /
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 emot...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Oxford University Press,
1996.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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, and 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. |
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| Item Description: | The Cushing Library Lit/Mitchell copy is a donation from J. Lawrence Mitchell. |
| Physical Description: | xxii, 570 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [532]-543) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0195101952 (acid-free paper) |