The proper writing of lives : biography and the art of Virginia Woolf

The proper writing of lives. Biography and the Art of Virginia Woolf analyses Virginia Woolf’s lifelong interest in the genre of biography and life-writing. Being the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Woolf was personally connected to the genre of literary life. She made biography the substance of her experimental fiction. In addition to this, biography was the topic of several of her critical writings: Woolf reviewed biographies by contemporary and non-contemporary authors and questioned the literary function and significance of the genre in the context of the modern art of writing. In the wake of these considerations, and by taking into account Woolf’s life and her literary achievement, Claudia Cremonesi’s work traces a different portrait of the modernist writer, less encumbered by the orthodoxy of her age and deeply involved in a constant and fruitful dialogue with the voices of the past. Woolf’s capability to stride over different epochs and to profit from the classical models in the genre biography frames and sustains the present work.