The Life of Violet catches a side of Virginia Woolf that has been obscured
She was Adeline Virginia Stephen, then. Signing her letter “AVS”, in August 1907 the 25-year-old who became Virginia Woolf complained to her friend Lady Robert Cecil: “The effort it is to write… I feel like one rolled at the bottom of a green flood, smoothed, obliterated, how should my pockets still be full of words?” Long before the masterpieces that would make her name, she was working on a series of literary exercises. These attempted to remold the biographical form into one that could encompass and celebrate the lives, not of famous men, but of unfamous women and combine what she called the granite and rainbow of “life-writing”: stony fact and iridescent fantasy. Her letter continues: If you keep The Life, or Myth, don’t quote it – see my vanity!
