the novels of virginia woolf hermione lee

The story about Jane Austen concerns uncertainty about whether she fainted when learned she would have to leave her beloved home and move to Bath. The stories are fascinating, including various versions of what happened to Shelley’s corpse as it was burned on a beach in Italy (his heart supposedly did not burn Edward Trelawny plucked it from the flames and it ended up with Mary Shelley who kept it in a glass jar). Lee’s essays describe controversies that have sprung up about Percy Shelley (with a brief anecdote about Samuel Pepys), Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf, and she closes the book with a chapter on the ways biographers narrate the story of their subjects’ death. Really, accurately telling the story of someone’s life is impossible - accurately telling your own life story is impossible too, I suppose. The more I read about biography, the more I realize just how hard it is to write one - not just because of all the painstaking research involved, but because of the many, many decisions a biographer must make about what to emphasize, what to put in and leave out, how to interpret facts that can have multiple meanings, what to do with the legends that crop up about famous people that might have little to do with reality.

Hermione Lee’s collection of essays on biography, Virginia Woolf’s Nose, has a number of good stories to tell about the disagreements and controversies that crop up when biographers try to piece together people’s lives.

The novels of virginia woolf hermione lee