Cold, nervy, brittle egoist

Even the mildest of individuals could be permitted a mannerly groan on hearing of yet another life of Virginia Woolf. Not because we are weary of Woolf the writer but her cloistered life, limited by her frail mental health is not particularly interesting. It could also be argued that if "definitive" is possible in terms of biography, it surely has been achieved by Hermione Lee in her superlative study on the writer's life and work which was published in 1996. In that book, Lee not only assessed the work, she examined it in the context of the life, because Woolf's life was so much a part of it, and it of her.

It is to Lee's credit that she neither deifies nor demonises her subject. Excellent though it is, it does suggest that Woolf's life, dominated as it was by her ongoing depression, does not make compelling reading. No, the problem with Woolf is that of the society she inhabited, the lively group known as the Bloomsbury set. It has spawned a publishing industry; many of the books are repetitive, some poor, others redundant.

All of which brings us to the latest book about Woolf. Nigel Nicolson is a publisher and a biographer as well as a former MP. He is not a scholar, nor is he claiming to be definitive, but he does have a more than novel angle on Woolf. Not only did he know her when he was a child, he is the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. His parents knew Woolf; his mother had an affair with her. Well that certainly makes it the stuff of Bloomsbury: they were all friends and some were lovers. It was liberal and easy. No one would seriously expect to come to such a personal study expecting new insights into Woolf's work, but there is the expectation of acquiring a greater sense of the shadowy Woolf.

She is interesting as an Edwardian who was really a Victorian. Such is Woolf's status as a 20th-century writer it is easy to forget that she was born in 1892 into a late-19th century world.

Nicolson presents the usual facts. It is not his fault that anyone with an interest in Woolf knows her story so very well. There is nothing exciting about his approach. He is, on this performance, a dutiful, even dull writer with a vaguely defensive streak. What he does make clear, however, is his belief in the enduring value of the Bloomsbury set as individuals. "Most positively it should be emphasised that this small group of men and women exerted in several directions a beneficent influence of which we are the inheritors. Each in his or her own way was attempting the most difficult feat that a man or woman can undertake - to give an art or a doctrine a new shape which survives challenge and ridicule to be accepted as non-controversial decades later."

He goes on to name Woolf, E.M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes. Admittedly T.S. Eliot, whose masterpiece The Waste Land was first published by the Woolfs' pioneering Hogarth Press might not spring to mind as a core member of the Bloomsbury set, nor indeed does Forster. Nicolson continues rather righteously: "All of them by their conduct can teach us how to live, how to allocate our time, how to be happy, how to live." In what way? How he comes to this conclusion must be answered by him, as on the evidence of this book his remark makes no sense.

It is good to see the achievement of the Hogarth Press well noted here. Nicolson appears more at ease when writing about Leonard Woolf, the wonderful Ethel Smyth and his mother than about Woolf whom he refers to as "Virginia". As ever, she emerges as a cold, nervy, brittle, egoist, possessing more opinions than instinct. Her political arguments about war and her feminism were at best chaotic. She is, however, a fine writer. To The Lighthouse (1927) remains one of the great novels of the 20th century, although a stronger case is made in this book for The Waves (1931). Nicolson also acknowledges her tireless journalism and diary writing.

It is a little book in every way. But then the "Lives " series is intended as no more than a series of extended essays. To date they have been mixed bags, more of a case of matching writers with writers or personal icons or both: Edna O'Brien on James Joyce; Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse, or Mary Gordon on Joan of Arc. Edmund White, a gifted writer with a flair for biography, proved superb on Proust. Peter Gay's volume on Mozart is also a vivid, exciting book. True, Woolf is no Mozart. Nicolson by his very closeness to her world seems all the more ill at ease with the fragile, haunted Woolf, who yet again fails to win our sympathy, and this time, disappointingly, even our interest.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times