A Woolf biography with teeth

ON Friday, March 28th 1941 Virginia Woolf, having written another detailed farewell letter to her husband walked out of her garden and down towards the River Ouse. It was still cold but there were signs of spring. The river was running very fast and high. As was later confirmed, Woolf picked up a large stone from the river bank and placing it in her pocket, discarded her walking stick and either walked or jumped into the Ouse. She could swim but she intended to drown. It was the last in a series of suicide attempts. She was 59.

The facts of Woolf's life, particularly her place within the Bloomsbury circle and her death, motivated by a fear of further mental illness - and not by despair at the continuing war - are well known. Her literary legacy, however, continues to be debated, albeit, curiously half heartedly.

Despite an impressive, if mixed, body of often experimental work, critics and readers remain undecided about her. An Edwardian who was also a Victorian, she is a pioneering writer who is also frequently qualified as a neurotic highbrow aesthete, a snob, a lesbian heroine and an abused child.

Yet Woolf's elegiac masterpiece To The Lighthouse (1927) is a 20th century classic, deservedly recognised as among the finest novels written in English. A powerful ghost story, it chronicles the death throes of a way of life ended by war, as much as it examines, through the experiences of the Ramsay family, the history of the complex Stephen clan.

All in all, however, the prospect of a biography approaching 800 pages on the life and work of Virginia Woolf might leave many wondering how much more could we possibly need or want to know about her - never mind the almost reflex reaction "not yet another book about Bloomsbury." Academic and critic Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf has been critically acclaimed and reprinted within two months of publication but was omitted from the Whitbread biography short list - no doubt because of the anti Woolf bias which certainly resulted in muted pre publication publicity. Even while working on it, Lee was conscious of the attitudes suggesting quite enough was known about Woolf. But the position of marginalised outsiders tends to appeal to her.

"There are always so many versions of the same life; Woolf herself knew this and was intensely aware of how lives are changed in retrospect. This is my version of that life," says Lee who sees the role of biographer as that of a detective assessing information ranging from hard fact to gossip. "You are interpreting but you are also trying to get as close as possible to the truth." She admits: "I love the impurity of it."

Woolf read biographies yet writing her study of Roger Fry became an ordeal. She envied painters their ability to penetrate the complexities and intrigue of a personality without having to resort to "the three or four hundred pages of compromise, evasion, understatement, overstatement, irrelevance and downright falsehood which we call biography". Lee enjoyed her five year task confronting Woolf's virtues and vices with commendable balance. "I didn't write the book as a defence; it certainly isn't defensive. She was a terrible snob, she was self obsessed, she could be very cruel, she could also be kind. But I felt she had not been recognised as the hard working professional writer she was. We think of the novels but we tend to forget the amount of essays she wrote and the vast numbers of reviews. Most people seem far more interested in whether she was mad or how many affairs she had and with whom than in her work." According to Lee, "Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness and faced it with courage".

HERMIONE Lee, the daughter of a GP, was born in 1948, seven years after Woolf's suicide.

She can't recall a time when she wasn't aware of Woolf: "I grew up in the London she knew" (South Kensington and Westminister); "We had all her books at home." As she writes near the end of her massive study, "When I was eight or nine I went away on a visit and stayed the night with friends. There was one book on the table by my bed. It was the 1951 orange Penguin edition of The Waves."

An emphatic, precise speaker, Lee clearly enjoys discussing literature and possesses a girlish enthusiasm, accompanied by large expansive gestures which temper the exactness of her opinions. Professor of Literature at York University, she is an experienced, lively broadcaster and is as tough as she is charming - tough enough to write a biography of Philip Roth, which was published in 1982. Even when at her most engaging, she never quite conceals her steely professionalism. "I would have liked to have been an actress; I like performing." Although the book avoids sentimentality it does have an emotional, living quality, despite the fact that it is also textually based and takes To The Lighthouse for its ruling motif. "It was five years' work on a troubled life. I was very drawn in. For about three months after I'd finished I was very down. I felt I'd given her back."

As a professional academic, Lee was conscious of not wanting her book to full somewhere between biography and criticism. "I always hate when biographers seem to put the life on hold and then spend pages wading through the books offering potted criticism and then abruptly pick up the life again."

Having previously written a biography about the American writer Witla Cather (1876-1947), A Life Saved Up (1989), did she feel she had an advantage writing about an English novelist? "Well obviously my Cather was more geared towards English readers. I don't know America and I'm sure American readers were asking themselves `what does this English woman think she can tell us about Cather?' But with Woolf, although I'm also English, there is a very strong difference of class between us. I had a middle class, London childhood. Woolf was born into the upper middle class. She was part of that Victorian world who travelled with their servants when they went on their annual three or four month holiday to the country. All of that is so different, almost foreign."

This of course makes the book an important social history of a lost world as well as a portrait of a life and an exploration of an original artistic sensibility. Central to Lee's study is Woolf's difficult relationship with her father, Leslie Stephen, who was 50 when she was born, and died when she was 22. Woolf's father personified everything she hated about "the terrible threat to one's liberty" implicit in family relations. Had he lived on into his nineties, she believed, "his life would have entirely ended mine."

Yet from her father, whose life project was The Dictionary of National Biography, she inherited the idea of a literary existence. Through him she also experienced helplessness in the face of an egotistical exploitation of power however. As Lee argues, It (this helplessness) informed her political ideas and her management of relationships. She wrote against it in all her books.

Woolf bitterly resented her father's meanness which tyrannised the household and excluded her from a university education. She never really came to terms with the death of her adored mother, Julia Duckworth, mother of seven, bullied wife and the model for Mrs Ramsay, although she reached some acceptance with To The Lighthouse. "But what have I done with my life?" ponders Mrs Ramsay and one knows the daughter is asking that question on her behalf.

Woolf's world as evoked by Lee is a dense one of books and furnishings of clutter, letters, conversations, tensions, voices. "I love all that feeling of dark rooms, of books. This sense of making little worlds around them with their books and their things, more so then I think we do now." Edith Wharton, contemporary of Henry James and a fascinating literary hybrid is her next project; "she's an American who is actually very English."

While at Oxford, Lee remembers being assured that Woolf, who she had not studied on her degree course, was merely a minor modernist. "Then it became fashionable to pit Woolf against Joyce, as if only one of them could be the winner and of course that had to be Joyce." Critical opinion has always varied widely on Woolf's work. The essays may eventually overshadow much of her fiction. Lee's magnificent and definitive biography brings us very close to the enigma which is Virginia Woolf.