Publisher's Synopsis
Challenging the received opinion, promulgated by Leonard Woolf in his "Autobiography" and by Quentin Bell in his influential biography that Virginia Woolf had suffered throughout her life from a periodic bouts of "insanity" and "madness". Drawing on Foucault's discourse of power and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception. "The Unknown Virginia Woolf" attempts to discover the reality behind the myth of "madness" and to offer a new reading of Virginia Woolf's life and work.;Roger Poole suggests that if one reads Virginia Woolf's novels themselves and also her letters and diaries, as well as the Bell biography and the Woolf autobiography, without the presupposition of the author's "madness", these documents present a powerful new portrait: that of a brilliant woman, abused during childhood and adolescence, caught in a marriage for which she was unprepared, treated by doctors who did not understand what they were doing, who wrote some of the greatest novels in the Modernist canon, and yet who was never fully understood.;The Unknown Virginia Woolf sheds significant new critical light on the novels, particulary the theme of engagement in The Voyage Out, the treatment of "madness" in Mrs Dalloway, and the concept of embodiment in The Waves. This revised edition contains a new introduction summarizing as far as possible what has taken place in Woolf studies since 1978, and an updated bibliography. There are also two new chapters, one on the literary debt owed by Virginia Woolf to E.M. Forster, and the other on the Diary, with a comment by Professor Quentin Bell.
