Woolf: A Critical Biography

When people ask me how to find a "good" biography, I tell them to look for a critical biography because, I say, "you can be sure it will discuss the author's work, not just his or her life." While this may be an overgeneralization, it is not out of synch with the definition put forth by Maria DiBattista in her latest book, Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography. DiBattista acknowledges the important traditional biographies about Woolf, especially Hermione Lee's 1996 Virginia Woolf, but also writes of the unique contribution her own book can make, precisely because of its critical approach. "What a critical biography offers is something at once less and more personally satisfying [than the traditional biography]—an attempt to portray the persona captured in the writing itself.… The structure of a critical biography … is nonbiological; the author's imaginative personality, not her animal life, underpins it." Given this articulation of what the critical biography can achieve, I had high expectations for DiBattista's book, and for the most part, it met my expectations, delivering a convincing study of Woolf's imaginative personality.

In presenting this imaginative personality, DiBattista argues that Woolf herself, in her essay "How Should One Read a Book?," suggests that an author's personality is only ever a "figment" of the reader's imagination, along the lines of Roland Barthes's notion of the author as someone who "leaves his text and comes into our lives," but only as "a body" not "a (civil, moral) person." While DiBattista believes the author is "more than a body, if less than a civil, moral person … a figment with distinguishing features and characteristics that produce in our mind's eye that mirage called personality," both DiBattista and Barthes share the post-structuralist assumption that the author is not a stable entity but a more fragmented and perhaps iterative one, to draw on Judith Butler's notion of how "bodies" materialize.

Out of this post-structuralist assumption, DiBattista sets out to discuss the various aspects of Woolf's imaginative personality—the sibyl of the drawing room, the author, the critic, the world writer, and the adventurer—and to show how these "multiple personalities" suggest not a "pathological condition" but the "highest achievement" an artist can reach. This approach seems particularly well suited to a study of Woolf, whose work has always raised important questions about the relationship between the text, the reader, and authorial practices, and DiBattista's discussion of Woolf's understanding of the "pull" writerly personalities have over readers, as evidenced in her essay "Personalities," grounds the argument in early-twentieth-century ideas about author, text, and reader. DiBattista also makes good use of Erich Auer-bach's analysis of authorial voice in Mimesis (1946) here and in other chapters in the book, and this adds a layer of historicity to the theoretical assumptions of the book.

DiBattista's chapter on Woolf as "sibyl of the drawing room," the first of the five personalities, is, like other chapters in the book, supported by compelling examples from Woolf's body of work, both from her well-known novels and from her lesser-known stories and essays. In this chapter, DiBattista shows how Woolf's writing reflects both her embrace of the modern life of Bloomsbury beginning in 1904 and her continued reliance on the Victorian drawing-room culture of her previous residence in Hyde Park. She argues that Woolf's 1906 story "Phyllis and Rosamund" and 1909 sketch "Memoirs of a Novelist" feature modern drawing-room sibyls, whose personalities provide the model for women (including Woolf herself) to express themselves creatively. The drawing-room sibyl reappears in Woolf's major novels, including Night and Day, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and Between the Acts, often in a comical role, so that Woolf can show the consequences of believing outdated fantasies about women.

DiBattista's chapter on Woolf-as-author, one of the two "public" personalities discussed in the book, shows how Woolf's "relatively traditional" use...