Virginia Woolf: A Portrait

Meandering through this stream-of-consciousness, highly imagistic portrayal of Virginia Woolf by late French literary critic Forrester (The Economic Horror) is like wandering lost through Woolf’s own labyrinthine writings. In prose by turns arresting (”and the miracle of [a writer’s work’s] creation often derives from its link with the general turmoil”) and pedantic (”maimed children faced with the passionate instincts of a personally and physiologically frustrated man”), Forrester captures the “moments of being” that animated Woolf’s life, from her childhood to her last days. Forrester ranges over Woolf’s painful and tormented marriage to Leonard Woolf, her deep anguish over her mother’s death, and her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, as well as how she wove the events of her life into her novels. Nimbly moving from one fragmentary impression to another, Forrester challenges the idea (proposed by Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, in his biography of her) that Woolf was afflicted with mental illness and suicidal impulses when she was a teenager. Instead, Forrester offers the portrait of a woman who strove to strip away any illusions and capture the rhythms of reality in her writings. (May)