Jottings - Slice of life- 116 ( Virginia Woolf - a biography by Quentin bell)
Jottings - Slice of life- 116 ( Virginia Woolf - a biography by Quentin bell) I just finished reading Quentin bell’s beautiful and intimate portrait of his Aunt Virginia Woolf. Its a two volume work. Each covers a specific period of Virginia’s growth into intelligent, good looking girl with increasing signs of spasmodic madness - which was to haunt and consume Virginia throughout her life - and concomitantly her emerging genius as a novelist, thinker and writer of sublime prose with keen eye for human frailty, vulnerability and inner strength. These two irreconcilable conditions - difficult childhood and overflowing genius - often find their intersection in few chosen artists in all ages, and the task of any committed biographer is to capture these shifting landscapes of hell and heaven and present to their readers the intense personal agony, pulsating creativity, demonic energy which possesses such lives. A biography is not a matter of simply documenting facts. It is something w