Content area
Full Text
THE MEASURE OF LIFE: VIRGINIA WOOLF'S LAST YEARS. By Herbert Marder. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp.xiii + 418; 18 illustrations. $35.
Most biographies cover their subject's entire lifetime. In the case of Virginia Woolf this has always meant focusing on the years that culminated with the publication of her best known novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (I 927). In Hermione Lee's and Quentin Bell's biographies, for example, what we tend to remember, and what has most frequently been discussed, is their treatment of Woolf's childhood in Kensington, the sexual abuse by her stepbrothers, the beginning of the Bloomsbury Group, the untimely deaths of her mother, her brother Thoby and her stepsister Stella, her breakdowns and suicide attempt, and her marriage to Leonard. In The Measure of Life, however, Herbert Marder has chosen to concentrate on the final decade of Woolf's life. Although he occasionally "digs caves" behind events to illuminate the past, the time line of his biography is from the publication of The Waves ( 93 1) to Woolf's suicide in 1941.
Marder claims that his reason for concentrating on Woolf's last years was his "fascination with the way people change under stress" (p. 9), and the thrust of the biography is indeed Woolf's increasing radicalism in the thirties as events in Europe moved towards the potential destruction of civilisation as she knew it. He sees this change in Woolf beginning with the publication of Flush (1933), her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, a parody of Strachey's iconoclastic biographies of the Victorians which she felt only served to glorify them further While he challenges Jane Marcus's presentation of Woolf as "'a guerilla...