Granite and Rainbow - The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf by Mitchell Leaska Bloomsbury 513pp £20 in UK
It would seem too soon after Hermione Lee's monumental life of Virginia Woolf for another full-length biography. What on earth can Mitchell Leaska offer that has not already been supplied by either Lee, Woolf's earlier biographer Quentin Bell, or her own letters and diaries? The answer is an extremely readable one-volume life that concentrates to admirable effect on the relation between her early years and her novels.
The image of granite and rainbow comes from Woolf's own diary, in which she considers the difficulty of biography, of conveying the reality of a life, and speculates on the possible existence of `the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow".
For Leaska, the granite and the rainbow are expressed in the dual nature of Virginia Woolf's novels. Her life and her work were inseparable, and part of that life is inscribed in every novel she wrote. As she herself said in her 1928 introduction to Mrs Dalloway, there was nothing "more fascinating than to be shown the truth which lies behind those immense facades of fiction; slowly and cautiously one would have to go to work, uncovering, laying bare, and even so when everything had been brought to the surface, it would still be for the reader to decide what was relevant and what was not". The novels of Virginia Woolf, Leaska claims, are "in essence double stories: the story told and the story deduced. The real thing behind appearances. There would always be granite behind the rainbow."
Mitchell Leaska is a New York-based academic who has published nine books on Virginia Woolf, including a critical work highly praised by Leonard Woolf. His expertise is evident in his mastery of his material, and in the way that it allows him to leave out those matters that are not relevant to the work. We are spared the interminable social round of teas with Lytton and Roger and Clive and Vanessa, and all the gossip that clutter up other biographies. Instead, the focus is kept steadily on Virginia Woolf's life as experienced by Virginia herself, and the work that she produced.
If the measure of a good literary biography is its power to send you back to the work produced by its subject, then Mitchell Leaska is highly successful. He does not go in for the conscientious, blow-by-blow analysis of every single novel and essay, as would a lesser biographer, but rather concentrates on those works - To The Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years, Between the Acts - that best illustrate his thesis.
In this, the crucial phase in the formation of Virginia's character and of Virginia the novelist is the ten years following the death of her mother Julia in 1895, an event which precipitated her first nervous breakdown. In those ten years her father died, and also her half-sister Stella Duckworth and her brother Thoby, while her sister Vanessa, who had become a kind of mother-replacement figure, "abandoned" her by getting married.
Leaska's other great strength is his illumination of Virginia Woolf's periods of madness, which other biographers have tended to gloss over. He agrees with the diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis, which, he points out, is not a neurotic process, but a genetically transmitted affective disorder, leading to psychotic episodes associated with a complicated hormonal imbalance. Leaska is aware that Woolf's illness cannot "explain" her extraordinary powers as an essayist and novelist, but a clearer picture of what she suffered during these episodes certainly helps our understanding of both the person and the work.