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Article: Virginia Woolf.
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 7, 1996
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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VIRGINIA WOOLF. By Hermione Lee. Chatto and Windus; 892 pages; [Pounds] 20
THERE seems at the moment to be an appetite for monumental literary biographies, something that sets you wondering: do writers live their lives twice over? Is biography a necessary route to their books, especially with the great 19th- and early 20th-century figures (to speak only of them) whose work was so self-exploratory? Now at the end of the 20th century, are they fading, their worlds and ideas no longer within easy grasp? And, more simply, does biography also satisfy a desire for "character" and "life" in an old- fashioned (and unWoolfian) sense, for a good long novel with a story, ...