Virginia Woolf S Nose

What choices must a biographer make when stitching the pieces of a life into one coherent whole? How do we best create an accurate likeness of a private life from the few articles that linger after death? How do we choose what gets left out? This intriguing and witty collection of essays by an internationally acclaimed biographer looks at how biography deals with myths and legends, what goes missing and what can't be proved in the story of a life. Virginia Woolf's Nose presents a variety of case-studies, in which literary biographers are faced with gaps and absences, unprovable stories and ambiguities surrounding their subjects. By looking at stories about Percy Bysshe Shelley's shriveled, burnt heart found pressed between the pages of a book, Jane Austen's fainting spell, Samuel Pepys's lobsters, and the varied versions of Virginia Woolf's life and death, preeminent biographer Hermione Lee considers how biographers deal with and often utilize these missing body parts, myths, and contested data to "fill in the gaps" of a life story. In "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters," an essay dealing with missing parts and biographical legends, Hermione Lee discusses one of the most complicated and emotionally charged examples of the contested use of biographical sources. "Jane Austen Faints" takes five competing versions of the same dramatic moment in the writer's life to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women. "Virginia Woolf's Nose" looks at the way this legendary author's life has been translated through successive transformations, from biography to fiction to film, and suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life. Finally, "How to End It All" analyzes the changing treatment of deathbed scenes in biography to show how biographical conventions have shifted, and asks why the narrators and readers of life-stories feel the need to give special meaning and emphasis to endings. Virginia Woolf's Nose sheds new light on the way biographers bring their subjects to life as physical beings, and offers captivating new insights into the drama of "life-writing". Virginia Woolf's Nose is a witty, eloquent, and funny text by a renowned biographer whose sensitivity to the art of telling a story about a human life is unparalleled--and in creating it, Lee articulates and redefines the parameters of her craft.

Julia Briggs has written a chronological exploration of Woolf's life that reads her life through her books, using the novels to create a new form of biography. Each chapter is illustrated with a sample of Woolf's original manuscript.

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, "A Writer's Diary" was drawn by her husband from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing and those that are clearly writing exercises, accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw material of her work, and finally, comments on books she was reading. Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

The pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book by a highly respected Woolf critic and biographer. Julia Briggs reconsiders Woolf's work--from some of her earliest fictional experiments to her late short story, 'The Symbol', and from the most to the least familiar of her novels--from a series of highly imaginative and unexpected angles. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, Night and Day and investigate her links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, her fascination with transitional places and moments, with the flow of time (and its relative nature), her concern with visions and revision and with printing and the writing process as a whole. We watch Woolf as she typesets an extraordinarily complex high modernist poem (Hope Mirrlees's 'Paris'), and as she revises her novels so that their structures become formally - and even numerologically - significant. A final essay examines the differences between Woolf's texts as they were first published in England and America, and the further changes she occasionally made after publication, changes that her editors have been slow to acknowledge. Julia Briggs brings to these discussions an extensive knowledge of Woolf both as a scholar and as an editor. She records her findings and observations in a lively, graceful and approachable style that will entice readers to delve further and more meaningfully into Woolf's work

The proliferation of Virginia Woolfs in both high and popular culture, she argues, has transformed the writer into a "star" whose image and authority are persistently claimed or challenged in debates about art, politics, gender, the canon, class, feminism, and fashion."--BOOK JACKET.

Flush: a biography / Virginia Woolf.

A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.

An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sistersStella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.