This prize-winning biography, newly revised, sees Virginia Woolf as she saw herself. The first to set out the private life behind the wellknown facts of her public career, A Writer's Life moves back and forth between memories and art to reveal an explorer of the 'infinite oddity of the human position'. Instead of the doom-and-death often imposed on women of genius, here is the robust walker and seeker for what was fertile in her intimacies, in women's nature, and in resistance to power. This edition brings out her ideas for biography itself: to fall on a life 'like a roll of heavy waters.., laying bare thepebbles on the shore of the soul'.

This story of a writer's triumph over family tragedies and illness was written as a counter to the plot of doom and death often imposed on the lives of women- as though genius in a woman were unnatural. The leg ends persist to this day, if we think of the doomed image of Virginia Woolf in The Hours (offset by the supposed normality of a sister who shops - not the artist Vanessa Bell was in actual life, but an obedient consumer loaded with parcels). Doris Lessing stood almost alone in the sureness of her protest: the writer, she says, is played by a star 'whose permanent frown shows how many deep and difficult thoughts she is having. Good God! the woman enjoyed life when she wasn't ill; liked parties, her friends, picnics, excursions, jaunts. How we do love female victims; oh, how we do love them.'

 List of Illustrations

 Foreword

           VICTORIAN MODELS

1  Life Has a Base

2 TheMost Lovable of Men

3 A Family Portrait

             APPRENTICESHIP

4 Twenty Dark Years

5 The Question of Madness

6 A Woman's Education

7 Setting Out

           THE LIFE COMPOSED

8 Freedom and Friendship

9 The Trial of Love

10 Counter-history

11  Inventing the Artist

12 Specimen Lives

13 The Lifespan

14 A Public Voice

List of Abbreviations

 Notes

 Acknowledgements

 Bibliography

 Index