A Portrait of the Artist and Everyone Around Her

First published in France 2009, Viviane Forrester's newly translated book presents a brief look at the life of Virginia Woolf, one of the most influential writers of the modernist movement. According to Forrester, Woolf was interested in life and yearned "to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding." The book, which is replete with quotations from both Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf's personal diaries, intrigues and entices readers. Forrester uses a quote from Woolf's personal diary as evidence of the author's difficulty in pinpointing this thing we call 'life': '"Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say, 'This is it?'" Indeed, although life was the strange, inexplicable subject for Woolf, she had an artistic knack to depict life in her works. In addition, Woolf's novels, as Forrester indicates, introduce readers to the most unforgettable characters. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for example, we meet Septimus Warren Smith, who can't feel sympathy with the world after the intense experience of war. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf presents readers with the stoic Mrs. Ramsay, a symbol of strength holding everyone together. While Forrester speaks of Woolf's unforgettable novels, she asks, "But can we say of her novels, which are so many live beings . . . . That's her?" Forrester's book, in an attempt to pinpoint Woolf, is marred by her endless opinions (which appear often as editorial notes) about those closest to the author and how they have an impact in her life.

Forrester's book is divided into five parts. The first begins with an overview of Woolf's beautiful writing style and her ability to bring "the pages . . . to life." This section not only presents information about Woolf, it also examines how the author's life mirrored the lives of those closest to her, especially Leonard. According to Forrester, "[Woolf's life was] lived among other lives, silhouetted against them." This is a terrific start, which entices the curious reader to discover links between Woolf's life and her fiction. Leonard become the focus of the section as Forrester's assumptions and doubts about the validity of Woolf's first biography "practically dictated by [Leonard] to Quentin Bell," Woolf's nephew pervade the pages. The first part spends much time discussing Leonard's life before, during, and after Woolf. Additionally, the section portrays Leonard as a weak, shy, and depressed individual who finds in the young, talented, unmarried Virginia Stephen, a way back to London's respectable society. Forrester's personal commentary about Leonard, and the tone she uses when speaking about him, highlights the negative influence he had upon Woolf's life. She says, "Leonard who uses Virginia to better hide himself and who officially attributes to her his own troubles, his own vertigo in facing the risk of his own alienation." Forrester's editorial commentary is relentless in this section, as she attacks Leonard and illustrates the emotional distance between the couple. Forrester's commentary on Leonard seem to distract her from the main task of examining Woolf's work in the first section. She, rather, spends much time insisting on the emotional distance between Leonard and Woolf. Leonard, in addition, is portrayed as a "discouraged, ruined man" by Forrester. As one reaches the end of the first part, one becomes confused and frustrated, as one can foresee that the author's many assumptions about Woolf's life will prevent and derail her from the main argument of the book—to find Woolf within her works.

The second part focuses on Woolf's adolescent years and the deaths of Julia Stephen, Woolf's mother; Stella, a step-sister; and Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father. Woolf was thirteen years old when her mother died, and she described her mother's death as '"the greatest disaster that could happen.'" Forrester adds another quote from Woolf's diary in order to illuminate...