The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years. - book review

Criticism, Spring, 2001 by Lisa Low

I think Woolf would have appreciated Marder's version of her life. She was critical of the ways conventional biographies were written, of their assumption that outward facts were more important than feelings and intuitions. She was interested in the many selves that made up a life and defiant against the standard biographer's egotism. She herself always respected the otherness of her subject, even as she tried, as a biographer, to reconstruct the person's inner life. Marder is, in this sense, a Woolf-friendly biographer. His "I" doesn't dominate; instead he is a silent medium, a sympathetic presence through whom Woolf herself can be dimly seen, as if he had willed his soul to join with hers. Indeed, there is a sense throughout that his own personality is almost completely submerged in hers.

A few years ago, Jane Marcus wrote that what one needs is an artful biography of Woolf. Though Marcus qualified that a woman should write it, this book is certainly artful and empathetic. Each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger (but in truth cliff-hangers make for good writing, and Woolf experienced her share of them). Whether by the force of Marder's personality or Woolf's, one feels also in this biography, increasingly, the great weight and shattering sadness of Woolf's last years. Where Bell gives the idea of a romp, and Lee is astringent, oddly distant from her well-covered subject, Marder seems emotionally attached. A whiff of loneliness drifts through the prose. Woolf remarked that she had had more happiness in one day than most people had in a lifetime, but this biography gives us the sense that Woolf never experienced happiness without an accompanying cry or twang of pain. Woolf was acutely sensitive, sensitive to a fault. We are not surprised, at this narrative's end, by her suicide.

Woolf wanted to be taken seriously as a political thinker. At key moments in her writing, it is clear that she recognized herself as a visionary and a prophet of the first order. While she rejected medals, lectureships, the institutionalization of herself that would have required a compromise of her ideas, she wanted to be blazingly famous. When Wyndham Lewis wrote in a cutting review that nobody reads Woolf much anymore; and when Prince Mirsky called her a bourgeois tippler, a panderer to the middle class, she was devastated. Every publication of every one of her books was an agony to her. She was delighted to be called the most "brilliant pamphleteer in England" by the Times after Three Guineas was published. For this very reason, and especially because in the days before her death she believed that she had "lost the art," she would have appreciated Marder's project. Now, see, here, one might overhear her say, he has seen what I was up to. He has shown a different light upon my work. He has allowed them to see what matters.

What killed her in the end? Was it the Duckworth brothers' sexual invasions? Her sense that the apocalypse was at hand? Or her feeling, as Marder emphasizes, that she had "lost the art" and felt useless? Woolf died early, at 59, killing herself by stuffing her pockets with stones, and going to her death by water with the assuredness of an officer performing a duty. She went down to the Ouse before noon, leaving her walking stick behind, and without saying goodbye to Leonard or telling Louie, their maid. She was fervently committed to dying and unsentimental about it. It must have seemed to her, under the circumstances, the only way.