BIOGR.




Virginia Woolf once observed, "to have so many selves." In her novels and essays, not to mention nearly 4,000 letters and a 30-volume diary, Woolf left behind her a voluminous anatomy of self, and in the years since her 1941 suicide, biographers and critics have created a succession of further portraits.
Biographies are fictions we contrive about lives we find meaningful. Facts are interpretable, and become available to the biographer with a certain randomness: the significance of unknown ''facts'' can scarcely be determined.
To literary formalists, she was a groundbreaking stylist, a courageous experimenter who, along with James Joyce, fractured and remade the novel. To feminists, she was an early advocate of women's rights, a writer concerned with both the social and emotional consequences of patriarchal politics. Quentin Bell's 1972 biography of his aunt focused on her life rather than her art, leaving us with a picture of a high-strung, unstable woman, irreparably damaged by her childhood and dependent in later life on the ministrations of her devoted husband, Leonard. Phyllis Rose's "Woman of Letters" (1978) provided a feminist reading of the transactions between her fiction and her life, while Lyndall Gordon's "Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life" (1984) attempted to use Woolf's own narrative techniques by focusing on a series of epiphanic moments that supposedly shaped Woolf's sensibility and art. James King's biography, which draws heavily on Woolf's diaries and letters, takes an altogether more comprehensive approach, providing the reader with more than anyone could want to know about the writer's daily ups and downs, travels and flirtations.
Virginia Woolf had very mixed feelings about biography, or ''life-writing,'' as she called it. On the one hand she was an enthusiast: ''As everybody knows,'' she wrote in her essay on Christina Rossetti, ''the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible.'' But, she also declared biography to be ''a ba