Virginia Woolf's Nose

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters 5 Chapter 2: Virginia Woolf's Nose37 Chapter 3: Jane Austen Faints 63 Chapter 4: How to End It All 95 Notes 123 Index 135

Hermione Lee is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and the first woman Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She is a critic and biographer who has published books on "Elizabeth Bowen", "Philip Roth", "Willa Cather", and "Virginia Woolf". She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy, and, from 2004 to 2005, a Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2003 she was awarded the CBE for services to literature.

"Lee's immensely enjoyable study will energize debate among thoughtful readers and should become essential reading for aficionados of literary biography."--Publishers Weekly "Lee's tales of the battles of the biographers are gripping and vivid. There is a lightness of touch for stories of story-making that are often funny... The nose is a funny thing anyway; stick it on to 'Virginia Woolf' or any other of the illustrious names Lee discusses, and you are bound to bring them down a peg. All part of the biographer's power to make or unmake, sniff out or sniff at, which Lee so engagingly shows us."--Rachel Bowlby, Financial Times "Hermione Lee, biographer of Woolf and Willa Cather, acknowledges the 'messy, often contradictory' nature of the craft of biography... Lee concedes [that] Woolf--as any subject--will continue to be reinvented; any life, protean and elusive, refuses to be owned."--Linda Simon, Biography "Lee is able to give the reader an authoritative glimpse of the difficulties that must be overcome when tackling a literary biography... Well written, insightful, and enjoyable."--Library Journal "So many fine literary biographers are practicing that the genre itself is the subject of books with surprising frequency. The most alluring, eccentric and thoughtful example I?ve come across recently is Virginia Woolf?s Nose: Essays on Biography by Dame Hermione Lee."--George Fatherling, Books in Canada "Monumental and long-needed... So much is here for future scholars to use and appreciate from this tremendous and substantive quarry of Stracheyan biographical material."--Jay Dickson, Woolf Studies Annual "The four essays are the equivalent of listening to a smart, kind and personable professor holding forth on her favorite subject... These essays are everywhere informed by the fact that Lee is such an accomplished biographer, a writer who knows the ropes."--Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune "For proof of Hermione Lee?s expertise in biography (or, to use the technical term,