Synopses & Reviews
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 had 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. Drawing on a wealth of original documents, many unfamiliar and heretofore unpublished, including the surviving letters of Woolf's parents and grandmother, the vast collections of letters written among Bloomsbury friends and acquaintances, the manuscripts of Woolf's writing, her suicide notes, and other sources, Reid allows Woolf and her intimates to speak for themselves.
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 Woolf's 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 (often depicted as the very model of Victorian maternal devotion) and by her love for and rivalry with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Reid describes the competition between the sisters that became for Virginia a contest between their arts, the pen versus the brush. The effects of this rivalry were not uniformly negative--Reid shows that Virginia's jealous preoccupation with modern painting sparked her own aesthetic vision and experimentation with written forms--but the end results were tragic. Virginia's flirtation with Vanessa's husband, carefully documented here, so alienated her sister that after 1910 Virginia never again felt secure of Vanessa's affection. Reid presents powerful evidence that fear of losing both Vanessa's love and her own writing gift ultimately triggered Woolf's final suicidal depression. She also reevaluates Virginia's marriage to the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf. Reid also finds that Leonard was surprisingly supportive of Virginia's erotic relationship with Vita Sackville-West and that his constant devotion provided Virginia with the secure emotional soil in which art and affection could flourish and she could keep at bay, until her fifty-ninth year, the demons of manic-depression. Reid shows how, until the end, Virginia Woolf's own "insatiable desire to write something before I die" most sustained her.
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.
Review
andquot;Attempting to solve 'the riddle' of Tillie Lerner Olsen, literary scholar Reid paints a warts-and-all portrait of the woman who became an iconic feminist and admired writer. Reid paints a deftly engrossing, nuanced, and meticulously researched portrait of a perplexing, larger-than-life woman.andquot;
Review
andquot;Reid sets out to interrogate the heroic feminist image that adorned Olsen in her last decades, to fill in the neglected, blurred, or falsified facts of her long life, and to answer riddlesandmdash;most notably, 'why didn't Tillie write?'. An ambitious and obsessively well-researched biography.andquot;
Review
andquot;Reid brings her extraordinarily complex and endlessly perplexing subject to vitally disarming life and her book provides substantively more for Olsenites than any previous attempt. Tillie Olsen is richandmdash;and riddled with answers.andquot;
Review
andquot;A biographical bombshell. Reid's meticulous research undoes the feminist legend of Saint Tillie and replaces it with a complex, even-handed account of a passionate, often devious, and always ideological woman writer.andquot;
Review
"Panthea Reid tells an enthralling, complicated story of a maddening, charismatic writer; her self-creation, self-destruction, and self-promotion; and her profound social commitments."
Review
andquot;Panthea Reid's quest for the truth about the courageous, egotistical, generous, maddening, and difficult Tillie Olsen is downright heroic. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles is biography at its fascinating best.andquot;
Review
andquot;Reid concludes her book with a sense of conflicted loss. While she wept at Olsen's death, 'I have never adored Tillie,' she admits. Reverence hampers facts, she says, then adds, 'My biographer's obligation . . .is to tell the truth as artfully as possible and not to let love hamper honesty.' No wise reader could ask for anything more.andquot;
Review
andquot;Brilliant. Professor Reid sympathetically and critically describers the strengths and foibles of the iconic Olsen. Her intimate revelations are pertinent to Tillie's complex character.andquot;
Review
andquot;Biographer Panthea Reid's extensive research reveals that some accounts of Olsen's life are more fable than fact. While Reid solves some riddles, she creates additional ones for admirers and scholars to ponder in the years ahead.andquot;
Review
andquot;Panthea Reid chronicles a journey for knowledge and social justice that spans the entire 20th century and follows the events that made the times momentous. Olsen is a biography of rare humanity. It is profoundly real. Reid has written a marvelously evocative book.andquot;
Review
andquot;This book is well-researched and provides an in-depth look at Olsen's life.Ried definitely knocks Olsen off any saintly pedestalandagrave;but she does this without lessening the impact of Olsen's work.andquot;
Review
andquot;A remarkable amount of material on the life of Olsen. Students of Olsen's work will find this a valuable guide to the autobiographical roots of Olsen's fiction.andquot;
Review
andquot;Reid has succeeded in giving us a well-rounded and well-grounded picture of Tillie Olsen. This book is a major achievement in offering a balanced appraisal of Tillie Olsen, who was revered by some and reviled by others.andquot;
Review
andquot;Superb and painstaking biography. Reid artfully depicts a tortured writer whose concern for oppressed masses often eclipsed her duty to intimates.andquot;
Review
andquot;Get ready for the unflinching, warts-and-all story of Tillie Lerner Olsen. Reid unwraps the riddle of Olsen's complex personality in this fascinating biography.andquot;
Review
andquot;Great lives challenge and empower an intelligent, determined biographer. Tillie Olsen lived a great life to which Panthea Reid does full justice.andquot;
Review
andquot;A feminist icon, beloved of the left and also a superb delineator of what blocks writers from writing, Tillie Olsen is deserving of this penetrating biography, the first book to unravel the riddle of a life devoted to and tormented by writing.andquot;
Review
andquot;Panthea Reid's ten-year odyssey in writing a definitive biography of this enigmatic woman has been long awaited by western literature and history scholars alike.
Tillie Olsen will delight readers.andquot;
Synopsis
In Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles, Panthea Reid examines the complex life of this iconic feminist hero and twentieth-century literary giant, hailed by many as the mother of modern feminism. Based on diaries, letters, manuscripts, private documents, resurrected public records, and ountless interviews, Reidandrsquo;s artfully crafted biography untangles some of the puzzling knots of the last centuryandrsquo;s triumphs and failures and speaks truth to legend, correcting fabrications and myths about and also by Tillie Olsen.
Synopsis
In
Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles, Panthea Reid examines the complex life of this iconic feminist hero and twentieth-century literary giant.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Tillie Olsen spent her young adulthood there, in Kansas City, and in Faribault, Minnesota. She relocated to California in 1933 and lived most of her life in San Francisco. From 1962 on, she sojourned frequently in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Santa Cruz, and Soquel, California. She was a 1920s andquot;hell-catandquot;; a 1930s revolutionary; an early 1940s crusader for equal pay for equal work and a war-relief patriot; an ex-GI's ideal wife in the later 1940s; a victim of FBI surveillance in the 1950s;a civil rights and antiwar advocate during the 1960s and 1970s; and a life-long orator for universal human rights.
The enigma of Tillie Olsen is intertwined with that of the twentieth century. From the rebellions in Czarist Russia, through the terrors of the Depression and the hopes of the New Deal, to World War II, the Nuremberg Trials, and the United Nations' founding, to the cold war and House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, to later progressive and repressive movements, the story of Olsen's life brings remote events into focus.
In her classic short story andquot;I Stand Here Ironingandquot; and her groundbreaking Tell Me a Riddle, Yonnondido, and Silences, Olsen scripted powerful, moving prose about ordinary people's lives, exposing the pervasive effects of sexism, racism, and classism and elevating motherhood and women's creativity into topics of study. Popularly referred to as andquot;Saint Tillie,andquot; Olsen was hailed by many as the mother of modern feminism.
Based on diaries, letters, manuscripts, private documents, resurrected public records, and countless interviews, Reid's artfully crafted biography untangles some of the puzzling knots of the last century's triumphs and failures and speaks truth to legend, correcting fabrications and myths about and also by Tillie Olsen.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [532]-543) and index.
About the Author
Panthea Reid, a professor emerita of English from Louisiana State University, is the author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. 1880s-1916
2. 1917-1925
3. 1925-1929
4. 1930-1933
5. 1934
6. 1935-1936
7. 1937-1939
8. 1940-1945
9. 1946-1950
10. 1951-1955
11. 1956-1961
12. 1962-1969
13. 1970-1974
14. 1975-1980
15. 1981-1996
16. 1997-2007
Epilogue
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C