Virginia Woolf Through the Women in Her Life

You would be hard pressed to find a writer from the 20th century more admiringly cited than Virginia Woolf. Her potent, evocative fiction still impresses itself on new readers; her essays give clear and vivid insight into a writer’s mind at work. There are, of course, a lot of biographies of Woolf, the most monumental perhaps being Hermione Lee’s “Virginia Woolf” (1996), and Woolf’s autobiographical writings (collected, in part, in “Moments of Being” and “A Writer’s Diary”) are also powerful resources for her readers. She is, weirdly, everywhere and nowhere. There is hardly a novelist, woman or not, more central to our understanding of modernism, women’s writing or literary fiction. Joyce is a byword for difficulty and obscurity, Lawrence for weedy crypto-fascism and misogyny, but Woolf’s work, while densely lyrical and complex, has such apparent availability that it prompts near universal adoration in critics, writers, students and book clubs.