Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography (review)

A note of caution, readers—if you require a traditional biography of "Virginia Woolf, author (b. 1882-d. 1941)," then you must seek elsewhere. However, if what you require is a highly readable, original, and illuminating study whose relevance is not limited to the work of Virginia Woolf, then look no further.

In Woolf's eyes, biography as a genre cried out, as did modern fiction, for a fresh approach, or new form, one which could create a vision of "a life" appropriate for the realities of modern times. Jacob's Room (1922), in its presentation of a fictional biographic subject who is, for the most part, absent from the novel and appears primarily to the reader through the impressions of the other characters, constitutes Woolf's radical and path-breaking experiment with the complexities that circulate around our ideas of biography and what we expect from reading "The Life of . . . . . ."¹ In her essay "The Art of Biography" (1939), Woolf suggests that for a new form of biography to emerge, the writer "must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face" and that this could, perhaps, be achieved by a process of "hanging up looking-glasses at odd corners."²

In this selection of essays, DiBattista plays, as did Woolf, with conventional notions of biographic form in a number of subtle and entrancing ways. First, DiBattista claims, "the person who writes never appears to us except as a figment of our imagination" since "we can never know the person who writes directly through her writing" (p. 5). The Woolf we meet in DiBattista's pages is, therefore, not a direct representation of Virginia Woolf as a historical figure, but rather what DiBattista christens a "figment of the author"—that phantasmal entity which is conjured in readers' minds as they engage with a piece of writing (p. 6). In this way, Woolf (similar to her own fictional character, Jacob) is found to be absent from the "room" that constitutes traditional biographic territory, seeming to haunt rather than to inhabit that particular space.

Secondly, since the Woolf who forms DiBattista's biographic subject is a creature born in the imagination of the reader, the idea that a biography need offer a linear account of its subject as a single, unified being can be abandoned. The Virginia Woolf we encounter in DiBattista's essays is a shape-shifter, elusively exhibiting a multiplicity of personalities, which DiBattista encapsulates in her chapter titles and which range from "Sibyl of the Drawing Room" to "Author" and "Critic," from "World Writer," to "Adventurer." Through this means of framing her subject, DiBattista captures perfectly the sensation of which Woolf spoke in "The Art of Biography," that of living "in an age when a thousand cameras are pointed . . . at every character from every angle" (p. 149). In other words, DiBattista adroitly presents Woolf by means of the very strategy that Woolf proposed could enrich the scope of biographic writing—indirectly, as "contradictory versions of the same face" whose multiple images appear in "looking-glasses" hung at whichever "odd corners" her biographer finds most illuminating (p. 150).

However, DiBattista does not consider the figment of the author to be the only important inhabitant of the reader's imagination. As readers, we also encounter "the demon of reading" (p. 11)—referred to by Woolf as "the demon in us who whispers, 'I hate, I love,'" and who refuses to be silenced.³ Although for Woolf this demon is valuable for its independent stance against "the critics, the gowned and furred authorities" who would impose their literary judgments on the reader, she is somewhat evasive concerning the extent to which we should allow this aspect of the reading process to dominate our response to books, suggesting that we progress to "control" and "train our taste" and so bring "order to our perceptions" (pp. 67-68). DiBattista, in contrast, advocates that the demon of reading cannot, and perhaps should not, be controlled or tamed...