Biography Essay

The writings of Virginia Woolf have always been admired by discriminating readers, but her work has suffered, as has that of many other major authors, periods of neglect by the literary establishment. She was, as she herself put it, always a hare a long way ahead of "those hounds my critics." It was difficult to find copies of her books during the 1950s and 1960s, and they were rarely included on syllabi for literature classes. However, even before 1972, when her nephew Quentin Bell's best-selling biography introduced her to a larger public, there were signs of quickening of scholarly interest. The extensive and serious treatment given Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse (1927) in Erich Auerbach's much-esteemed book Mimesis (translated into English in 1953), was a presage and perhaps one of the causes of the turnaround. Oddly enough, her very name has become a household word because of the...