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DALSIMER, KATHERINE. Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 206 pp. $24.95.
The title of Katherine Dalsimer's previous Yale book, Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature, suggests how, as a clinical psychologist, Dalsimer interrelates psychoanalysis and literature in therapy and in writing. That melding of disciplines can offer valuable insights into human trauma and accomplishment. Here, Virginia Stephen Woolf provides a most useful model because she surmounted early tragedies and mental instability to become a major modernist writer.
Exploring the period when Woolf was "becoming a writer, the years of her adolescence and young womanhood" (xii), Dalsimer in this second book shows how writing worked as therapy for Virginia. Despite dust-jacket claims for the book's novelty, Dalsimer is not the first writer to make this point, but her book will be useful to creative youth facing similar problems, to their therapists, and to anyone wanting an introduction to Woolf s life and work.
Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer is marred by its cavalier use of biographical sources (of which more later), but among its strengths is readability. Dalsimer writes lucid, engaging prose, unhampered by the jargons of either psychology or literary criticism. She keeps her cast of characters small and summarizes plots and relevant biographical facts efficiently. Quoting extensively from young Virginia's spirited journals, she offers insightful, humane commentary. To her credit, Dalsimer makes almost none of the faux pas authors often make writing out of their fields.1
Dalsimer offers a therapist's insight into the negative effects of what she calls "the fierce submersion of grief" (8) in the young Virginia. She notes that Woolf soon realized how idealizing creates the "advantage that the dead have over the living" (114). Dalsimer points out that Woolf realized how deleterious is either idealizing or forgetting the "infinitely obscure lives" of (usually) women (124, 126). She considers how Woolf used metaphors of submersion for death, illness, and also work. Dalsimer finally shows Woolf endorsing life. Despite her struggles with manic-depression, in Woolf s diaries and letters we find, "in addition to extremes of emotion preserved in language of astonishing freshness, a capacity to savor the ordinary pleasures of life, to relish the excitement of London and the serenity of the countryside" (194).
Dalsimer says...