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Brenda R. Silver. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.353 pp.
There was a time, not too long ago, when any scholar working on Shakespeare had to have a ready answer to the question "Did Shakespeare really write all those plays, or was it Francis Bacon?" Like Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf has captured the imagination of academics, intellectualsat-large,and common readers. And, like those stubborn questions common readers ask about Francis Bacon, the questions that excite readers outside university walls tend to be very different from those that excite academics. So, Woolf scholars tend to stutter when asked the inevitable "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
As the source of much popular "knowledge" of Woolf, Edward Albee's 1 962 play has infuriatingly too little - and too much - to do with Woolf, as Brenda Silver demonstrates. VirginiaWoolf Icon takes the different versions of Woolf as its subject. In doing so, the book offers a comprehensive chronology of Virginia Woolf s transformation into an icon. Considering that Woolf was only firmly admitted onto elite college syllabi a decade ago, this iconicity and Silver's admirable study of its history are noteworthy in themselves.
For Silver, the process began in 1953 (a dozen years after Woolf s suicide) with Leonard...