The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf's Last Years

Having previously written about feminism in Virginia Woolf's work, Herbert Marder turns his analytic abilities to her biography in The Measure of Life. Chronicling the turbulent decade preceding her suicide, during which Woolf expanded and politicized her modernist technique, Marder limns an artist who "drove herself toward her limits." During these years, Woolf actively courted the creative agitation that enabled her to write but that also invited a return of the mental illness she feared. Eighteen months into World War II, as civilization and her mental health both seemed to be crumbling, she consummated a lifelong fascination with drowning by walking into a river, her pockets weighted with stones. Marder notes images of water and submersion throughout her writings, and as he astutely assesses Woolf's late novels, The Years and Three Guineas, he reminds us that her ability to capture subjective perceptions in lyrical prose was matched by her drive to convey "anthropological truth" about human beings and their society. He is equally nuanced in his depiction of Woolf's daily existence, capturing her zest for life as well as the crippling headaches and hallucinations that finally drove her to suicide. Marder's sensitive, discerning consideration of Woolf's final years is a helpful complement to full-scale works like Hermione Lee's magisterial 1997 biography. --Wendy Smith