Woolf story with plenty of bite

WHO's still afraid of Virginia? Hermione Lee, a professor of English Literature and more widely known as the presenter of Channel Four's first and very successful book programme, was born seven years after Virginia Woolf waded to her death in a river in 1941. When she spent her first night away from home at the age of nine, there was a book beside her bed; an orange Penguin, The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

She began to read it - and though, as a child, she wasn't really sure what it was about, she felt she had happened on a secret language that belonged to her. This is when her near-obsessional interest in Virginia Woolf began. She read everything she could lay her hands on about the woman and talked exhaustively to those who knew her. This biography comes after some shorter critical essays and analyses of Woolf's life and writings, and she says she is nervous of her subject - that she would have been frightened to meet her - and that the more she read and learned about Virginia the more she became afraid or apprehensive for her.

In a way this is the key to the book, which is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, detailed and scholarly work on one of the most compelling and complicated women of this century. It is respectful - possibly too respectful not defensive and certainly not afraid to face the more unlikable side of Virginia Woolf.

Plenty has been written about the woman already; her nephew Quentin Bell wrote a two-volume biography, there have been others by Lyndall Gordon and Phyllis Rose, and all her letters and diaries have been published. Why do we need to know more? Hermione Lee thought that we should try to look at her from a contemporary perspective time and examine her place in a time long gone. Ms Lee puts a heavy emphasis on setting her subject in her proper context, explaining what a Victorian upbringing could do to a person - especially the burden of childhood sexual abuse - and there is a sympathetic, concerned examination of her various bouts of mental instability and the inadequate ways of coping with them in those days.

All the account books are examined so we learn what money was spent and what was saved. The friendships come under a microscope; there can have been no letter, no cross-reference, that Hermione Lee has not checked. But the hundred or so pages of footnotes are tucked away neatly at the back, and the book itself reads fluently from start to finish - the reader never becomes annoyed with the biographer for having over-researched.

What sets this aside from most ordinary biographies is that the story is not told chronologically. Ms Lee doesn't begin with the birth of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson's baby Adeline Virginia on January 25th 1882 and then go on to tell her life story. Instead she takes the story in topics, with chapter headings like "Siblings", "Marriage", "Loss

"Experiments". In ways it's a very satisfactory approach, since it gives the author freedom to go into great detail about aspects which might otherwise have to be skated over.

The story about Virginia's friendship with Katherine Mansfield is fascinating; the jealousy and rivalry and admiration and fellow-feeling and petty resentments and then, after Mansfield's suicide, the huge remorse that she had not been more open-hearted and less chippy about it all. There is a good deal of speculation about posterity and which of them would be more highly regarded. It is like opening a window into the soul of a very private Virginia.

Her horrible, restrictive childhood, particularly the behaviour of her domineering father, is explained away by historical reference and the assurance that for those days this was fairly normal behaviour. There is a lot, too, about Virginia's sad comment of relief on her father's death. Had he lived on, she felt, he would surely have ruined her life - she would have written nothing, been nobody. Her gentle husband Leonard Woolf, whom she married when she was 30, gets sensitive and sympathetic treatment. I always thought he deserved many medals and felt that his generosity in giving his disturbed wife the Hogarth Press to occupy her was something that she was far better equipped to handle than children.

It was felt in the past that Virginia's sensitivities were not beyond criticism; there was a notorious picture of her waving to Nazi crowds in Germany and she was patronising to her husband's family, seeming to mock their Jewishness. Yet Hermione Lee - who is, after all, writing a story for our times, and presenting a Virginia Woolf comprehensible to the 1990s is curiously uncritical of the anti-semitism and "neopaganism" of the Bloomsbury Set, who would refer to Leonard and Virginia, as Rupert Brooke did, as "the Jew and his wife". This was just what people like that said at that time.

Although I had enjoyed The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, I never warmed to Virginia Woolf before I read this book; I thought she was distant, complicated and self-regarding. I thought the Bloombury Set, with their posturings, would be people from hell. But now I like her much more; I even think I know what was going on in her mind when she wrote those letters of farewell and went to her death, and I will read her other books for more hints about her complicated personality.

Hermione Lee expects her readers to know the whole story, to be familiar with the cast and to have read all the books so for new readers it would be very sensible to know an outline of Virginia's life story, and to have read at least her major works before beginning this very compelling and satisfying account of a troubled life, written by a woman who thinks of Virginia Woolf not only as a literary historical figure, but also as a friend.