Art and Affection:  A Life of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid is a 570-page hardcover published in 1996. The dust jacket has minor shelf wear.  Inside, the half-cloth book is in nearly new condition, with clean unmarked pages and tight, straight binding.  The condition is very good.  

Book Summary

More than fifty-five years after her death, Virginia Woolf remains a haunting figure, a woman whose life was both brilliantly successful and profoundly tragic.  As the author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, and Between the Acts, she helped reinvent the novel for the modernist era.  And through A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and other writings, she continues to inform feminist thought.  Yet this supremely gifted woman of letters endured crippling bouts of depression--the incandescent artist who captivated some of the most noted men and women of her time died alone, wading out into the depths of the river Ouse to drown, hoping to find "rest on the floor of the sea."  Until now, we have no adequate explanation of why she did so.

In this bold and compassionate new biography, Panthea Reid at last weaves together the diverse strands of Virginia Woolf's life and career.  In lucid and often poetic prose, she offers a dazzlingly complete portrait that is essential to our reading of Woolf.  Rich in detail and imaginative insight, Art and Affection meticulously documents how the twin desires to write and to be loved drove Woolf all her life.  Her findings correct many misconceptions about Woolf's upbringing and her most significant relationships.  She reveals, for instance, that recent reports of sexual abuse in her childhood have been exaggerated--that while the writer was sexually traumatized by her half-brothers and emotionally scarred by her father, she was most deeply wounded by the neglect of her mother and by her love for and rivalry with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. 

Brimming with new revelations and graced with sixty-six rare photographs and illustrations, Art and Affection is the definitive new account of the triumphs and tragedies that molded Virginia Woolf into one of the most original voices in modern literature.

ISBN:  0-19-510195-2