Editorial Content for Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
Virginia Woolf went for a walk one day and never returned. Her body was found a few days later in the River Ouse, and her death was ruled a suicide, as she had filled her pockets with stones in order to keep herself under the water. She had spent a lifetime battling through and recovering from nervous breakdowns but left an astounding contribution to Belle Lettre.
ADELINE is a stunning interpretation of her life. Written in the third person, the book reads as if it were Virginia's sister, Vanessa, writing a diary. In real life she did not keep one, thus author Norah Vincent had a large landscape upon which to paint the story. No need to think up characters, the Stephen sisters had enough people in their lives to allow dozens of books to be written about them and their friends. When Virginia and Vanessa moved out of their family home, they settled in Bloomsbury, a neighborhood not considered anything but Bohemian, which is exactly what they had in mind. They opened their door to the writers, artists, poets and other like-minded persons of the day.
"ADELINE is a stunning interpretation of [Virginia Woolf's] life. Written in the third person, the book reads as if it were Virginia's sister, Vanessa, writing a diary."
Every night the friends gathered to talk, argue, support, undercut and make sure they left the house in one piece. Some of the people who could be depended upon to show up were T. S. Eliot and his crazy wife, Vivienne, W. B. Yeats, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and E M Forster. They were accustomed to having arguments at Cambridge as undergraduates, and their adult verbal trysts were an extension of those.
The novel takes place between 1921 and 1942, the year Virginia died. In her life she had visions; one that repeated itself became her alter ego, Adeline. This figment haunted and supported Virginia when she chose to appear or when the writer "called her up." According to Vincent: "[she] recalls what Virginia cannot bear to: her mother’s deathbed, the incestuous fumblings of her stepbrother --- and the figure who held her hand on the riverbank as she went to her suicide. It is all a bit lurid.”
The architecture of ADELINE is set in a series of "Acts," each representing the time when the author published a new book. While Vincent doesn't go into any critical analysis of the novels, she doesn't really have to. Those familiar with Virginia Woolf and her work will know those books and a myriad of literary criticism, biographies and fiction that already exists.
Teaser
On April 18, 1941, 22 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. She 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.
Promo
On April 18, 1941, 22 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. She 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.
About the Book
From a New York Times bestselling author, a boldly imagined portrait of Virginia Woolf that sheds new light on the events that preceded her fatal immersion in the River Ouse in 1941
On April 18, 1941, 22 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.
