Adeline - Hardcover

Vincent, Norah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0349005648 ISBN 13: 9780349005645

Publisher: Virago, 2015

Synopsis

On 18 April 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent's Adeline reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist.

With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia's greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.

Intellectually and emotionally disarming, Adeline - a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury Group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all - is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.

About this title

Review

The Bloomsbury Group is richly rendered . . . Vincent's use of a prose style verging on stream of consciousness is particularly effective and affecting (Independent)

Electrifyingly good (New Statesman)

'Adeline pays tribute to Woolf in its writing style, echoing her signature prose and nodding to the stream of consciousness that became Woolf's contribution to modernist literature' (Sam Baker Harpers Bazaar)

'will give Bloomsbury addicts an enjoyable fix' (Jan Dalley Financial Times)

'This is a book for both fans of Woolf and those of us who feel guilty about not knowing the writer's work... You'll be inspired' (Viv Groskop Red)

Written elegantly in rather Woolfian free indirect style, and with spiky, erudite dialogue, Vincent's portraits are grounded in thick historical research. . . Vincent is assured enough to do a rare thing: to really ventriloquise Woolf on the topic of her work and creative imagination. . . As the Bloomsburys were such a troubled lot, Vincent is also able to sink her teeth into juicy encounters, and suck out their dramatic potential . . .[W]hat's really striking is the way that Vincent tunnels behind her characters, mining their psychological depths. She writes with astonishingly fluid conviction and insight . . . Vincent often seems to get to the heart of things - insisting, rightly I think, that Woolf's mysticism, her "overwhelming revelation" of universal inter-connectedness, is key to understanding the work and the woman. This tunnelling beyond the surface was Woolf's skill too, of course - and she often did use her circle as starting points for her writing. (Holly Williams Independent on Sunday)

'a thoughtful portrait of mental illness from the inside... the book is rich with detail... a perfectly good, densely woven yarn' (Nancy Durrant The Times)

Book Description

A captivating novel of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0349005648
• ISBN 13: 9780349005645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272