Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life – A Fresh Biography Exploring Her Creative Work Through Essays and Letters

by Julia Briggs

Virginia Woolf is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature. She was original, passionate, vivid, dedicated to her art. Yet most writing about her still revolves around her social life and the Bloomsbury set. 
 
In this fresh, absorbing book, Julia Briggs puts the writing back at the center of Woolf’s life, reads that life through her work, and mines the novels themselves to create a compelling new form of biography. Analyzing Woolf’s own commen­tary on the creative process through her letters, diaries, and essays, Julia Briggs has produced a book that is a convincing, moving portrait of an artist, as well as a profound meditation on the nature of creativity.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Feminism, Writing, Literature, Biography Memoir, History

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Julia Briggs was a writer and critic of great talents, a gifted scholar and a profoundly generous teacher who pioneered the study of children's literature and of women's writing in universities. Deeply humanist in outlook, she had an abiding belief in the value of literary study and in the power of education to transform lives.

Julia Ballam grew up in London. Her father, Harry, worked in advertising, but also tried his hand at writing. Her mother, Trudi, had been a commercial artist. Julia attended South Hampstead high school and in 1963 won a scholarship to study English at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

Beautiful and brilliant, she also became pregnant at the end of her first year and was, she believed, the first female undergraduate not to be instantly expelled. She married the father, Peter Gold, and stayed on to give birth to her son and take a first-class degree. The marriage was short-lived, and in 1969 she married Robin Briggs, historian and fellow of All Souls College, with whom she had two more sons. They were divorced in 1989.

Julia always followed her literary instincts. At Oxford, while bringing up her family, she wrote a BLitt thesis on the English ghost story - not considered a proper subject for a doctorate - which became Night Visitors (1977), her first book. From 1978 she took up a permanent post as fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. In 1983 she published This Stage Play World: Texts and Contexts 1580-1625, revised in 1997 and still in use by students. She then devoted herself to finishing Donald Crompton's book on William Golding, A View from the Spire (1985), after he died. In 1987 she published a life of the children's writer and Fabian socialist, E Nesbit, A Woman of Passion, which contributed to the emerging study of children's literature, as did Children and Their Books: a Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie (1989), co-edited with Gillian Avery.

Very active in the Oxford English faculty, which she also chaired, Julia canvassed successfully for courses on women's writing. As general editor of the Penguin paperback re-issue of Virginia Woolf's work, when it came out of copyright in 1991, she oversaw the reprinting of 13 volumes, with introductions by renowned women scholars from Britain and the US, some of whom required delicate handling. She died aged 63 of a brain tumour.

Reviews

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

What could be more fascinating than [the thing itself] how a work of art came to be? These “type” of bio’s (recently read a same of Joyce & Nietzsche) are elucidating in this regard and a pleasure to behold! I know and have noted many the author who wishes the reader to engage a book on its own without ties to its progenitor – but really, how can you/me when it’s the mind’s eye we seek? V/goat you continue to blow my mind(s) eye. I will never tire of your dulcet phrase and cantor, your penetrating look upon a day-in-the-life mystery. You move me who moves haltingly. You a regnant quill and I a willing squire to shine your books repeatingly with the sheen of another reread. Bloomsbury lives on!

‘Somehow the connection between life & literature must be made by women’
‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’
‘how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind & so making a perpetual pageant, which is to me my happiness’
‘six or seven’ (sometime, I will explain the metaphysics of this to you, Fio)
“Style, she told Vita, was simply a matter of rhythm, and should flow like a wave, ‘as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it’
‘woolgathering away …. The mind is the most capricious of insects--’
‘these premonitions of a book – states of soul creating’
‘when a subject is highly controversial … Fiction … is likely to contain more truth than fact’
“...men depend on women, and their ‘delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’
“A Room of One’s Own” published on 24 Oct -- a certain gr’s bloke’s B-D (mwah)
“Aurora Leigh”
‘Thinking is my fighting’


["In 1967, Roland Barthes announced the death of the author. Criticizing the impulse to root the meaning of a text in its writer, he complained: “the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author”. Before Barthes, the New Critics insisted that writing was “detached from the author at birth” – losing its connection to its creator at the very moment of creation. And though Barthes may well contend that even an autofictional book can be interpreted in the total absence of its creator and their intentions, the booming popularity of autofiction perhaps attests to an eclipsing of the Barthesian critical viewpoint."]

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not Briggs, it's me, to be clear, why this gets only 3 stars.

Anyone who likes Woolf's work will surely get lots out of this 'inside biography' that focuses more on what went into the work than on the social life and gossip and pettiness of Woolf (and of her circle). (Most artists can be petty. No especial disparagement of VW meant.) When I had to read Lighthouse many years ago, in a course on british lit, I disliked it almost as much as I did Nostromo. The only highlight of that syllabus was Joyce's Portrait, though I suppose I do recall Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning well enough.

Regardless of all that chatter, this inner life gives readers a view as to what it meant for Woolf to create what she did, and also includes, at the end of each chapter about this or that novel, an "aftermath" that describes how the book was received initially and since. I can't imagine that not being of worth.

Do I recommend this book? If you like Woolf and/or her writing, then yes.

[Viv JM · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very much a writer's look at a writer's life. Rather than being a conventional biography, going from childhood to adulthood, Briggs takes each of Woolf's major works and writes about her life at the time of writing, drawing extensively on Woolf's own letters and diaries as well as others' writing about her. In this way, we don't find out much about Woolf's childhood until near the end of the book, when Woolf herself started writing her autobiographical notes.

I read this book in order from cover to cover, but I am not convinced this was the best way to approach it. I think it would make more sense to read the relevant chapter alongside reading the Woolf book the chapter is about. As I come to read more of Woolf's work, I think it will be useful to go back to this book and read about the context of the work. Each chapter ends with the "aftermath" of the relevant book with extracts from contemporaneous reviews and essays. I found these interesting.

Briggs is clearly very knowledgeable about Virginia Woolf's work and I liked the approach of getting to know a writer's life via that writer's own writings. However, at times the writing was very dry, and I did find it a little bit of a slog as a result.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, insightful read!!

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a full biography by any means, but is wonderfully, thoughtfully and carefully dedicated toward following the emotional and intellectual life of Woolf as it merged with each of her works. A dream to read. I will keep this book close. The insights into her process were exciting to read; I will be applying some to the draft of my novel I'm working on now.

[Mishqueen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the idea of a biography; to glimpse into someone's life and learn who they were and what made them tick. But that can all be ruined by a boring and unengaging biographer. There were enough fascinating things in Woolf's life that I shouldn't have been fighting sleep through the whole book. *sigh* But I was. I couldn't get past Brigg's voice in my head, endlessly discussing the most inane aspects of her subject's life. Yeah, I skipped stuff when I thought I wouldn't finish the book if I kept fighting over this awful chapter.

If I were reading Woolf's works in chronological order, I think I'd enjoy this a lot more. The author chose to explain Virginia's life in the context of which novel she was writing at the time. It's tough to understand the life context of each novel she wrote without reading them beforehand. Lesson learned--I might just read them now.

However, after all that I'm a huge sucker for tactile experiences. It may sound silly, but the book had some of the smoothest/softest paper I have handled in a long time. It was a pleasure to turn the pages without lifting my fingers off the paper--I just slid them to one side and then the other...it kept me going through some of the boring parts, and reminded me why the Kindle will never completely replace codex books.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Briggs approaches this biography of Virginia Woolfe by telling the story of the writer through the story of her writing. This isn't necessarily a novel approach, and it has been one bofore. Yet, it is uncommon enough to capture the uniqueness of the approach, befitting as it is for an author who essentially gave birth to modernism in literature, defying the conventions of the artform.

It also feels apt given the Woolf's intimate connection to the artform. She is a writer. Writing also defined her. It became an integral part of her identity, set explicity in her lived years inbetween the wars.

She begins to flesh out this identity when she publishes her first novel in 1915 at thirty three years of age. But this identity was formulated, as the story of her writing will tease out, much earlier, framed as it is by her parents interest in storytelling. Part of what occupies her journey from her first book to her last (the posthumously published Between the Acts) were three essential facets of her experiences- mental illness, feminism, and war. The first occupies space behind the scenes, the second becomes a prominant and interconnecting theme, and the latter functioning as the inspiration that desires to reconcile the first two as a cohesive narrative. As the journey unfolds, we know the least about her first book, and the most about her last book. In a poetic sense, given the way the last book ends, her life is thus marked by the absence of a beginning and the open endedness of the end.

If her first book was any indication, she couldn't have been anything other and couldn't have written about anything other, jumping into the deep waters of the world's uncertainties without reservation. As she says about her approach to the form, "What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderdly as possible... the whole was to have a sort of pattern and be somehow controlled." The difficulty? "Keeping any sort of coherence". This was a vision for her writing life. This became her life, pushing and pulling her between the fiction/fantasy and the reality.

What she encounters, and thus confronts as a woman who is also a writer, is the world of the patriarchy that surrounded her. As Briggs suggests, Woolf first set out to change the literary field by being a woman writer in a field dominated by men. But then she also wanted her writing to change the many parts of the world that were governed by the same reality. Thus her stories begin to take on a life of their own.

"Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction." These words were uttered by Aunt Eleanor in Night and Day become near prophetic given Woolf's eventual fascination with the idea of suicide. Perhaps a result of sinking herself into the darkness with such feverish intensity. This seems most evident in The Waves, where she confesses that "the life of the mind was the only real life". So much so that her books begin to be the thing that gives life to her subsequent writings, with characters from one story making their own way into the next, and worlds colliding through their interweaving presence. The Waves, for example, becomes a novel about silence that emerges from the desires of Terence in The Yoyage Out. A novel that takes the external processes of the latter and "reorders" these details into an exmination of the inner processes. Most poignant is the fact that these experiences that bind the journey of these stories and characters come from the story of her own life.

At one point Woolf suggests that "she wants to keep the individual and the sense of things coming over an over again and yet changing." A portrait of the cycles giving way to new perspective, a key characteristic of eastern philosophy. Which of course becomes an odd mix with her appeal to modernity. A way, perhaps, of not losing herself amidst the inevitable demands of her feminist concerns, her focus on matters of identity and sexuality, and her desire to bring about a new world, one where she could equally, perhaps, find herself outside of the pages. A similar tension exists in a book such as The Years, where she wrestles with individuality in the face of community. Certainly this is where the realities of the war loom large, balancing this notion that the world was changing for the better, and yet "everywhere she looked there was death." Looking back at her need for order and disorder, she wonders at one point, "if there were a pattern... what woul it be... how would it be...?

Briggs suggests that one of the demons Woolf carried was her need to see herself, and thus find herself in the stories she wrote, as an outsider, something that sat in tension with her privileged life and certain inconsistencies when it came to her own behavior of turning others into outsiders. This was perhaps the same tensions that found her caught between imagining a past and future self that look different, of a married woman and a rejection of marriage as a cultural construct. "Love and hate- how they tore her assunder." Or, as Briggs notes, "She had an almost painful sense of the poignancy of things when they are emptied of us." These inconsistencies, these tensions, they become the thing that write her story as a disordered and often incoherent mess being made, reluctanctly, into some kind of order. An order that sometimes directs her back towards the conventions as harboring some measure of truth in a senseless world, but always with a firm handed grip on her revolutionary interests. She never seemed to be able to escape, even when writing suicide notes, the idea that this story, this life, needs her to live it.

One last comment on the structure and nature of this book- I think this book would work best accompanying reads through her individual writings. Its not necessary to do it in chronological order, but certainly, even if you read through this first as I did, it feels like it would gain its full worth accompanying the actual words it is talking about. Briggs does a really good job at putting you inside the text and outlining each story with a fair amount of detail, but for someone like me it did feel like it missing that first hand experience.

[Kris Underwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woolf has survived into the 21st century as a literary great, holding her place among the men of her time and still, among the writers of today.

Briggs focuses more on the writing itself: the process of it, the woman who wrote it, etc., a biography of her words, if you will, rather than churning out well-known biographical content and the social aspect of her life, familiar to Woolf readers.

What’s interesting about this book is how the individual chapters chronologically correlate with each book published by Woolf, following events and ‘inner thoughts’ concerning the book of that particular time. Throughout the book, copies of drafts, letters and dist jackets are dispersed, offering revealing glimpses into Woolf’s writing processes.

Scrupulously researched and well laid out with a fresh perspective, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life should be on every woman’s bookshelf, in a room of her own.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Others have written excellent reviews of this book. I'll add my personal response which is 1) I liked the format of moving through Woolf's life based on the chronology of the books she was writing. 2) I have not read all of Woolf's books and this has made me want to go read more and reread others 3) Briggs' writing is, well, obscure and unnecessarily dense. For example:
"Woolf heralds Orlando's sex change with a Jonsonian masque, a form in which the antimasque of vices is dismissed and a sacred figure invoked."
huh? and I don't even want to TRY and figure this out.
Off to read hopefully better written biographies about this unique writer.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully detailed companion to Woolf's work. Briggs has a way of giving historical and personal detail with an emotional and intimate voice. I re-read her chapters each time I re-read any of Virginia's texts.

[bloosmartie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in a very short space of time as I was off work with migraines and thankfully still able to read. I previously knew almost nothing about Woolf aside from her suicide and had hoped for a biography in a truer sense than this which is more an attempt to set a 'lit crit' analysis in the context of the writer's life and times. It was nonetheless interesting and I both learnt a lot and came away with a lot of questions and other things I'd like to read, which I think is a sign of a valuable bit of reading. Some of the writing is frankly unnecessarily dense as others have said and i I found the use of the notes quite strange - many of them seem to me to convey valuable points that should have been in the main text but perhaps that is just my love of ephemera. About halfway through I looked up the writer and the style makes a lot more sense knowing that she was a literature professor (who also sounds like a very interesting person). I am glad to have read this but will probably seek out another more traditional biography in the future, but something lighter first!

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The life of Virginia Woolf, with all its lumps and imperfections, framed within the context of her writing. Each chapter represents one of her books, and talks about what she was doing at the time, and how the events of her real life inspired her work. My favourite chapters were about the works I was most familiar with, namely "Orlando" and "A Room of One's Own," as well as the chapter about "Three Guineas" that unpacks Woolf's antisemitism, which the author concludes was in line with the attitudes of the day. I'm going to look up some other takes on this now. I was also interested, as I always have been, in the parts about her and Vita Sackville-West. "You make me up and I'll make you up."

Also, this: "Shall I ever write again? And what is writing?"

[William]

Very well researched and well written biography of Virginia Woolf. Especially interesting was the manner in which the author, Julia Briggs, by weaving together Woolf's journal writings and published sources, creates an understanding for the reader of her creative process as a writer.

[Emma Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me a longgg time to get through this, I think it might be the densest thing I’ve read since uni haha. But very enjoyable & interesting nonetheless

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best choice I could've made for my first Virginia Woolf biography, but an interesting read nonetheless. The book is structured around her major works, moving through them in chronological order and exploring how each responded to its personal, political and social context. Good if you want to track the development of her style and ideas or if you're seeking insight into her creative process; not so good if you're looking for a traditional linear biography, since these back stories tend to overlap and flow into one other. Quite heavy on the literary analysis at times (the author assumes at least a familiarity with both Woolf's personal life and her oeuvre), which made for slow and demanding reading, but I imagine it would be a good field guide to reading her works in order.

While the book definitely sparked my interest in reading more of her work, the best part by far was the extensive use of Woolf's own diaries and letters. In Briggs' words, they have the capacity to both "descend to trivial annoyance and rise to pure poetry," revealing their author's wit, character and sharp intelligence more eloquently than any biographer could.

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book was interesting--I mean, I do love Virginia Woolf, and I really enjoyed learning more about her, and this book did make me want to read her journals and letters more--largely it was a disappointment. The writing was shabby and lacked variety, engaged in gratuitous, not to mention elementary, word play, and the author's pounces on easy answers to question of Virginia Woolf's work (like what the significance is to the Manx cat in A Room of One's Own--really, what could lack possibly mean in a feminist text about women being locked out of the literary world and having men write their lives for them for years and years until reaching a point where a new language for women must be created so that a feminine voice can actually exist--what could lack possibly mean here? the mind reels).

[Ci · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a valuable biography exclusively on the inner life of Woolf. In particularly, this book provided the historic and contextual information around her major works, showing how the ideas were generated, the processes -- often painful and tortured -- for writing and publishing, ending with each book's reaction post publications. I have only read a few of Woolf's books, with preferences to her essays instead of her more important genre of fictions. My own lack of understanding and appreciation of her major works such as Dalloway or Voyage Out perhaps contributed my present lack of enthusiasm for Ms Briggs biography. Yet I can sense her scholarship and meticulousness in gathering and collating a credible inner world of Woolf and her family and associates. I plan to re-read this book at some future point when my reading of Woolf is broader.

[Serena · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book marks the reemergence of my unhealthy obsession with Virginia Woolf. I've read many Woolf bios, and so far this is the most thorough and intriguing. It organizes her life by her works---a refreshing switch from the too-common inclination to view every moment as either “lesbian," "feminist," or “crazy”---and it uses each work as a lens through which to view her social connections, her love life, the critical response to her work, her writing processes, and, yes, her mental illness. A cautionary note: this is very dense sometimes impossible material if you haven't read the books (or if you're like me and still don't "get" JACOB'S ROOM).

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Briggs isn't radically insightful, she does a beautiful job tying Woolf's biography to her work. It feels very much like a writer's biography - written about a writer, for writers - in how it illuminates her process and creative struggle.

Also, the cover is flipping gorgeous.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book hard-going & had to really push myself to keep with it. Having finished it I can't honestly say that it has added anything to my understanding/insight into VW's life and writing. Colourless & lacking something (warmth? life? a beating heart?)

[Tammy]

823.912 Bri

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poorly written and factually suspect. The author reaches for an erudite form but fails on the basics of biography. A terrible slog.

[Kim Stallwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book about my favourite writer. A mixture of biography and literary criticism. I open at any page, start reading and always enthralled.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book, made me want to read, really read, some of Woolf's books again, with maybe more understanding now than before.

[Ron Stafford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting and well written book. It is a great gift Virginia but she paid greatly for it, like most artist.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, a great biography of Woolf and a breakdown of her novels. An excellent tool for research and further study of he work.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent exploration of Woolf's work and how her life affected her work, as well as interesting look at her artistic experiments.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful background, well researched.

[Helen]

Although I wouldn't dispute that Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf [1999] is a masterly work, if you're more interested in what Woolf wrote than in what she did, Julia Briggs' book is the one to read. The trouble with biographies of writers, for me, is that I get impatient - I don't want to hear how many parties the writer attended, I just want to know how she came to write her books. In other words, I'm less interested in the degree to which Woolf used autobiographical details in her novels than in the process of writing - the gestation and creation of each book. And this is exactly Briggs' approach.

Each chapter is devoted to one of Woolf's books (in order of writing), placing Woolf's life (her 'inner life' rather than the parties she went to...) in literary context as the traces the journey from initial idea to eventual publication of each book.

Woolf's life was not, of course, irrelevant to her writing. Writers bring their life experiences to their writing, however obliquely. And Woolf's life (or what we think we know of her life) remains fascinating - her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, her depressions, her unconventional marriage to Leonard, the sexual abuse she may or may not have suffered - but as a reader and fellow writer what most interests me is where her ideas came from, and how she felt when she sat down and began to write. Because Woolf's novels are so concerned with the 'inner life' (as opposed to plot or character development) this approach makes sense. In her diary, Woolf noted 'how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind & so making a perpetual pageant, which is to me my happiness'.

'Wool gathering' was an essential part of the creative process for Woolf, but she recognised that this crucial area of her writing life would never be seen or written about by biographers: 'No biographer', Woolf wrote, 'could possibly guess', the vision of 'a fin rising on a wide blank sea' that would lead to the writing of The Waves - 'yet biographers pretend they know people'.

Briggs does not get bogged down in minutiae concerning Woolf's childhood - biographical details are given only insofar as they are key details and obviously impact upon the writing. Briggs quotes from Vanessa Bell, who found in To the Lighthouse 'a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived possible.'

Briggs also points out the fundamental dichotomy of Woolf as a person and as a writer - on the one hand, because of the new form of fiction she was inventing, she felt herself to be an outsider ('it is part of a writer's profession to be an outsider - [to] see aspects of things that are not visible from the inside'). On the other hand her background was one of privilege, and as Briggs notes, 'She could not cross the gap between working women's experiences and her own'. Woolf seems almost wilfully blind to the anti-Semitism that more than one critic has found in her work. I think this is possibly one of the reasons why I've always found it hard to identify with Woolf - I can admire her art, the innovation of her work, but on a human level I can't relate to her.

Each chapter ends with a section dealing with the publication of each book - how many copies were printed, the reception from reviewers, and Woolf's reaction to reviews. Briggs reprints the covers (only in black and white, unfortunately) of Vanessa Bell's designs for her sister's work.

As all good literary biographies should do, Briggs book sent me straight to the bookshelf to dig out the Woolf books I haven't read. [March 2007]