Opening the door to Woolf

Biography: In the scant five pages of a short story entitled The Searchlight - unpublished in the author's lifetime, rarely remarked upon by critics and nowhere mentioned in Julia Briggs's detailed new biography - Virginia Woolf projected a precise image of her aesthetic.

From a balcony overlooking London in the weeks before the outbreak of the second World War, Mrs Ivimey, a society hostess, spots something briefly in the beam of a military searchlight. It sets in motion a complex machinery of shadows, telescopes and mirrors by which Mrs Ivimey imaginatively links the present moment to her own childhood and that of her great-grandfather.

But the reminiscence remains obscure: Mrs Ivimey cannot fully explain it to her guests: "the light only falls here and there". For Woolf, as Briggs ably reminds us, the "inner life" always spills over and gets dispersed confusingly among images, objects and fugitive sensations.

Briggs declares early on that the Woolf she is interested in is less the brittle, neurasthenic centre of the dizzy Bloomsbury orbit than the intrepid explorer of this disputed inner territory. Woolf herself described her working method as a descent into herself, as though she were a diver testing the lethal pressures of her own soul. As Briggs puts it: "Woolf's fiction is centrally concerned with the inner life, and finding ways of recreating that life in narrative". Maybe that sounds, nowadays, like a rather precious and hackneyed précis of the modernist enterprise in fiction, but Briggs is good at re-establishing the real labour and drama that the task entailed. She is unafraid of writing a biography in which her subject, much of the time, is doing nothing much. As Woolf put it, she wrote "as the oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself".

What that patiently deposited residue eventually hardens into is the trio of great novels: Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and The Waves. Briggs sedulously traces the several stages of the composition of each, but the real fascination of these chapters is in the way she captures the novelist's struggle to understand and record the process of writing as it occurred. A good deal of Woolf's reflection on her own techniques is in her diaries, but there is a lot of it also in the novels themselves. Briggs rightly, for example, identifies artist Lily Briscoe as the real centre of To The Lighthouse, not the somewhat vacuous and overpowering Mrs Ramsay, to whom readers often respond most readily. Lily is devoted, like Woolf, to an almost intractable formal challenge: how to link as subtly as possible the human elements of her composition without herself intruding in the manner of a Victorian novelist.

Of course, what all of this admirable attention to the detail of Woolf's working life avoids is the entire (frantic and quite tiresome) milieu that probably draws most readers to her biography in the first place. The fact that all of that has been gone into at such length elsewhere allows Briggs to treat calmly Woolf's relationship with Vita Sackville-West, her probable affair with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, and her periodic bouts of mental illness.

She is especially level-headed with regard to the latter, only ever going as far as Woolf in positing a link between writing and madness. (In her essay On Being Ill, Woolf wrote: "How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed.") Such is Briggs's brisk way with the aspects of Woolf's life that attract the most fevered speculation, she may end up disappointing even readers sympathetic to her methods. If the curious entomology of the Bloomsbury crowd is simply less startling than it once seemed, it has been supplanted by other controversies. The feminist Woolf apparently evinced culpable bad faith in her treatment of female servants. Certain anti-Semitic remarks ("I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh" - this in spite of her husband's Jewishness) may have been made in the throes of depression; others certainly were not. And her notorious diary entries on Joyce - Ulysses, she writes, "is the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are" - are abominable, even if she later had to admit her debt to him. Briggs shies away from none of this, but neither is she able to make much sense of it - to make, as Lily Briscoe puts it, "a line there, in the centre" between life and art.

The result is a biography that, in drawing back from executing that crucial brushstroke too swiftly, stays true to the essential solitude of the writer - but that, in refusing to risk it at all, often leaves her stranded outside time and history. And as Woolf knew in The Searchlight, history was always waiting in the shadows.

Brian Dillon is an editor of Cabinet, a cultural quarterly. His first book, In the Dark Room, will be published by Penguin Ireland in October

Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs Allen Lane, 528pp. £30