VIRGINIA MAINTAINED intense relationships with women throughout her life, none of which seemed to have menaced Leonard's emotional balance. They fulfilled certain of her needs for maternal admiration and stability of which her mother's early death deprived her. Most important of these was Virginia's affair of the heart with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicholson. Bell thankfully cannot conclude that their intimacy involved physical love, though Virginia's reputation as an "aging Sapphist' no doubt derives from her deep attachments to select females. In another relationship with a rival female author. Katharine Mansfield, however. Virginia exposed the malice and narcissism native to her character, qualities she shared with her father. Their friendship was compounded on both sides of feelings of jealousy and attraction. Woolf, with her deep sense of class, occasionally considered Mansfield, who dressed and behaved, she thought, like a tart, only worthy of her pity, though she also admired her art. Most observers, including Bell, agree that as Virginia Woolf's reputation increased, so did her malice.
As her husband records in Downhill All the Way, their middle age suffered "the erosion of life by death," as many of their demon friends died after 1932, including Roger Fry, Julian Bell and Lytton Strachey. The tempo of Virginia's life was made desperate by the threat of a second war. Perhaps the entire Bell biography can be read as the history of a woman's progression towards lunacy. She lived through the Battle of Britain, but fearing the onset of another attack of madness she was convinced would be incurable, she drowned herself in March, 1941.
As a biographer, Bell is not jealous of his own observations. As a result, while treating his subject with considerable dignity, and distant sympathy, his narration often is speculative. The majority of his conjectures are quite credible. At one point in the biography, while attempting to take stock of her character, he writes with humility:
"To know the psyche of Virginia Woolf, and this is what she is in effect asking of a biographer, one would have to be either God or Virginia, preferably God."
The book's first section, treating the period before Virginia Woolf's marriage, responds better than the second part of his method. But his approach spares the biography from being overly prescient or oppressed by unsupportable conclusions.
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S contemporary high reputation as a paradigm of feminine sensibility is often puzzling. She does not emerge from Bell's chronicle as a generous, forgiving, or warm human being, though endlessly fascinating. It is her sister Vanessa who appeals to the reader for the attractive qualities Virginia lacked. Virginia's history dramatized the miseries of a sick person, for, she was, on occasion, as mad as the March Hare. She fought a painful battle against the possibility that the next attack of insanity would paralyze her permanently. Clearly, Virginia Woolf in Bell's biography is quite often piteous.
Perhaps Virginia Woolf's current stature and importance to present-day women derives from exactly the excruciating periods in her career. Bell makes clear her courage and fortitude, as he does her expert sense of her craft. In the end, reading Bell's account shows Virginia Woolf had more emotional resiliency than she has been credited for. As a novelist she succeeded in solving the intellectual challenge writing presented by embodying her sensibility in the only shape capable of expressing it. That she was ignorant of great preserves of human experience is undeniable, but to expect more from her or her fiction than she sought to achieve is like asking Elizabeth Barret Browning to have been Shakespeare, and to have written like Shakespeare. The constant marvel of Virginia Woolf's life is that she was able to have a serene marriage, and to compose so much fiction and criticism, despite her personal frailties.