Virginia Woolf

Yes, another Woolf biography, but a unique one given that Briggs concentrates on Woolf's paradigm-altering work, and on Woolf's fascination with the workings of the mind. Briggs tracks the creation of each book, beginning with Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915 when she was 33, and concluding with Between the Acts (1941). By lacing her supple, revelatory readings of each book with relevant, judiciously analyzed biographical information, Briggs creates a vital portrait of a perfectionist who endured "rewriting madness," a questing woman who relished life when she was free of the depression that stalked her, and a visionary determined to combat misogyny and invent a new type of novel that would "give the feeling of the vast tumult of life." Happily, the vastly gifted writer who takes shape on these pages is the very genius readers intuit when reading Woolf's work. Woolf believed that women writers could "make the connection between literature and life," and Briggs has done just that in her sterling interpretation. Donna Seaman