Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography
Paperback
ebook (PDF via app)
- Sale Price:
- $16.77
- Price:
-
$23.95 - ISBN:
- Published:
- Jun 5, 2018
- Copyright:
- 2005
30% off with code PUP30
- Not for sale in the Commonwealth (except Canada)
-
Audio and ebooks (EPUB and PDF) purchased from this site must be accessed on the 91桃色 app. After purchasing, you will an receive email with instructions to access your purchase.
About audio and ebooks - Request Exam Copy
What choices must a biographer make when stitching the pieces of a life into one coherent whole? How do we best create an accurate likeness of a private life from the few articles that linger after death? How do we choose what gets left out? This intriguing and witty collection of essays by an internationally acclaimed biographer looks at how biography deals with myths and legends, what goes missing and what can’t be proved in the story of a life. Virginia Woolf’s Nose presents a variety of case-studies, in which literary biographers are faced with gaps and absences, unprovable stories and ambiguities surrounding their subjects. By looking at stories about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s shriveled, burnt heart found pressed between the pages of a book, Jane Austen’s fainting spell, Samuel Pepys’s lobsters, and the varied versions of Virginia Woolf’s life and death, preeminent biographer Hermione Lee considers how biographers deal with and often utilize these missing body parts, myths, and contested data to 鈥渇ill in the gaps鈥� of a life story.
In 鈥淪helley’s Heart and Pepys’s Lobsters,鈥� an essay dealing with missing parts and biographical legends, Hermione Lee discusses one of the most complicated and emotionally charged examples of the contested use of biographical sources. 鈥淛ane Austen Faints鈥� takes five competing versions of the same dramatic moment in the writer’s life to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women. 鈥淰irginia Woolf’s Nose鈥� looks at the way this legendary author’s life has been translated through successive transformations, from biography to fiction to film, and suggests there can be no such thing as a definitive version of a life. Finally, 鈥淗ow to End It All鈥� analyzes the changing treatment of deathbed scenes in biography to show how biographical conventions have shifted, and asks why the narrators and readers of life-stories feel the need to give special meaning and emphasis to endings.
Virginia Woolf’s Nose sheds new light on the way biographers bring their subjects to life as physical beings, and offers captivating new insights into the drama of 鈥渓ife-writing鈥�.
Virginia Woolf’s Nose is a witty, eloquent, and funny text by a renowned biographer whose sensitivity to the art of telling a story about a human life is unparalleled—and in creating it, Lee articulates and redefines the parameters of her craft.