Virginia Woolf: Bloomsbury & Beyond

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the few writers who is equally renowned as a character herself as any of her fictional creations. Her diaries and fiction are populated with the forboding of mortality and the urge to define herself as a woman and a writer. Having inpired two generations of readers, writers and scholars, Anthony Curtis muses, 'Virginia Woolf was clearly one of the greate writers of the past century, but in what does her greatness consist?' This book is an attempt to answer that question through an analysis of her work and personal and professional lives.Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group. This new biography approaches her from a very personal angle: 'I first came across Virginia Woolf's novels as a schoolboy aged 16 in 1942, the year after her self-inflicted death by drowning', writes Author Anthony Curtis. 'I read "Jacob's Room", "To the Lighthouse", "Mrs. Dalloway", "The Waves", all in our school library put there by a woman teacher who was a great admirer. I discussed them with her and arrived at a conception of The Modern Novel in which narrative is filtered through inner consciousness of characters. Then I read the novelists Virginia Woolf was reacting against: Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, and pondered the limitations of Woolf's techniques against their linear approach to narrative and accumulation of externally observed detail. The critical debate between the 'traditional' and "modern" approach to writing fiction has exercised me ever since. Which is more "real"?'