Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf

In this bold and compassionate new biography, Panthea Reid at last weaves together the diverse strands of Virginia Woolf's life and career. In lucid and often poetic prose, she offers a dazzlingly complete portrait that is essential to our reading of Woolf. Rich in detail and imaginative insight, Art and Affection meticulously documents how the twin desires to write and to be loved drove Woolf all her life. Drawing on a wealth of original documents, many unfamiliar and heretofore unpublished, including the surviving letters of Woolf's parents and grandmother, the vast collection of letters written among Bloomsbury friends and acquaintances, the manuscripts of Woolf's writing, her suicide notes, and other sources, Reid allows Woolf and her intimates to speak for themselves. 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.