The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years

Woolf remains the Bloomsbury Revival's most popular biographic draw, but in his latest account of her life, Marder (Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf) completely bypasses the more familiar and exhaustively studied first portion of the writer's life--her Victorian childhood, her Edwardian rebellion, and her early, more popular books--to concentrate on her last decade. Drawing heavily on Woolf's private writings, Marder (professor emeritus at the University of Illinois) draws a competent portrait from the writing of The Waves to Woolf's suicide during WWII--a phase that was marked by changes in her aesthetic and by tremendous fear: ""Oh yes,"" the 49-year-old Woolf wrote in her diary on completing The Waves, ""between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live."" Marder emphasizes the competing forces of her political engagement--evident in her novel-essay The Years and in her feminist/antifascist tract Three Guineas--and her artistic sensibility. Though she remained a committed modernist, he notes, her aesthetic took a radical turn. Indeed, her competing feelings--of being both a ""detached artist"" and an ""angry outsider""--grew more pronounced during the Depression and the rise of fascism, belying her image as ivory tower intellectual. Tracing Woolf's thoughts as gloomy current events preyed on her spirit, Marder takes readers all the way through her suicide during the worst days of the Battle of Britain. But although he strains for objectivity, his dependence on Woolf's journal entries often leads him to sacrifice biographic insight in favor of Woolf's own version of events. 24 b&w photos. (June)