Granite and Rainbow: The Life of Virginia Woolf

""Oh but the divine joy of being mistress of my mind again!"" Virginia Woolf once wrote. Apparently inheriting mental instability as well as intellectual brilliance, she employed words and recycled remembrance to exorcise her family ghosts. According to Leaska, an English professor at New York University and editor of Woolf's early journals, A Passionate Apprentice, which he exploits relentlessly here, Woolf's writing ""twisted pleasure from pain"" and created defenses against her manic-depressive cycles. Through Leaska's Freudian lens, Woolf--who blamed an elder half-brother's childhood molestations for her being ""sexually cowardly""--was actually concealing oedipal fantasies about her domineering father, evoked in such novels as To the Lighthouse and The Years. Though the psychological sleuthing and the recounting of Bloomsbury homosexual and lesbian rapacity may be provocative, this work scants the actual texture of life--how people really lived--and intrusively insists on its unfortunate title (a 1958 title of a posthumous Woolf essay collection) by employing it metaphorically at least 11 times. Still, this book will stir more controversy than most of the seemingly endless run of Woolf biographies, the most recent of which was Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf (Forecasts, March 24, 1997). In its shrewd probing for the wellsprings of the writer's creativity, Leaska's life can't be ignored. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)