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undermeyou's review against another edition
4.0
This book was difficult for me. I wanted to love it because I relate so heavily to Virginia Woolf. This did a great job of dissecting the shadowy place that many creatives tend to live. There were many stand out lines. I enjoyed the joyed of other writers that were casually slipped in. But something just was not right for me. I had the most difficult time finishing this. I think there was too often no story propulsion, resulting in large gaps of scene and unnecessary dialogue to cover it. The best thing that came from this was that it made me want to read Woolf again, since it had been over a decade.
awelsh's review
3.0
3.5. I liked this book much more in the first two thirds, the last bit dragged for me - which was surprising, given that it was her final descent into her illness. I also wondered how much of Adeline she saw as she got older - she was absent throughout a lot of the book, which was odd given the title of the book. I thought the prose was beautiful and the book kept me engaged through a three hour flight. I love Virginia Woolf and I did enjoy this version of her life, but I was ready to put it down at the end. I enjoyed Vanessa and Her Sister more than this one, but would recommend this to any fan of Woolf.
johannalm's review
3.0
Adeline, A Novel of Virginia Woolf, Norah Vincent
Ugh. Not much luck with book selections lately.
This is a very cerebral look at Virginia Woolf over the years of her marriage along with her ties to the Bloomsbury group.
It's boring and long winded and she is made out to be quite the bitch, though very brilliant. Probably gay but since that was unacceptable, she was married to a probably gay man, as were many of the others in their group.
I'll read a better biography to really get to know her but this bits and pieces was not enjoyable.
Ugh. Not much luck with book selections lately.
This is a very cerebral look at Virginia Woolf over the years of her marriage along with her ties to the Bloomsbury group.
It's boring and long winded and she is made out to be quite the bitch, though very brilliant. Probably gay but since that was unacceptable, she was married to a probably gay man, as were many of the others in their group.
I'll read a better biography to really get to know her but this bits and pieces was not enjoyable.
boredacademic's review against another edition
1.0
I wanted to love Adeline as I do any novel about Virginia Woolf. From a first glance, Norah Vincent had her act together, and I had hope. She prefaced the novel with an excerpt from Hermione Lee's biography detailing the history of the name Adeline. Vincent herself is a freelance journalist with a New York Times bestselling book (Self Made Man), so I trusted her to work well with the factual aspects of the novel.
She began the novel with a Woolfian style description of Virginia bathing, which made me yearn for a long bubble bath. I soon recognized that Vincent was trying to do two things--pull in as much historical detail as possible while using Woolf's writing style, and she pulled this off in the first few pages. But then, she turned a corner or stepped over a line or faded the line. I'm still not certain how to categorize what happened. She developed an entire scene of Virginia Woolf lying on a bed having a conversation with her imaginary self as a child, a child that Vincent would consistently refer to as Adeline. This, for me, was when things began to fall apart. As a Woolf scholar with a focus on the fact and fictions of Woolf's mental health, this portrayal betrayed my trust in Vincent, especially as Adeline is portrayed as the alter-ego of Virginia with fascinations toward death. Yes, Virginia Woolf heard voices, but at no time did she mention hallucinating her younger self. So Vincent takes the idea of hallucinations and turns these into an apparently lifelong hallucination of her younger self, which blurs the line of writing Virginia Woolf's life as a fictional tale. I was able to tolerate this blurring at this point, but later it becomes infuriating (and I'll get to that in a few more words).
Vincent's attempt to blend fiction and history comes off well in some places, but there are several places where she clearly wants to get information across but isn't certain how to work that information into her Woolfian style. Her solution is to place large blocks of historical fact as dialogue in the mouths of her characters in a most awkward fashion and in such a way that it's clear her purpose was not to further the dialogue but to get across the factual information.
There are also points where Vincent seems to lose sight of what she's doing. After spending an extensive amount of time detailing Virginia's loathing of Freud and psychoanalysis at the end of a chapter, she promptly begins the next chapter by psychoanalyzing Virginia's relationship with Vita Sackville-West. What's worse is the fact that she boils the relationship down to Virginia's desire to be intimate with her mother and sister, portraying Vita as a woman dumb as a post and only part of Virginia's life to (unknowingly) fulfill this sexual need. So, Vincent does not understand the relationship between Virginia and Vita well enough to portray this factually; she did not do the research to see the relationship (or did not care enough to portray it factually because it did not fit her idea for the book).
Vincent does something similar with Dora Carrington's suicide. In Vincent's retelling, Virginia (via the young Adeline) is responsible for Carrington's suicide. Vincent keeps with the factual narrative that Carrington saw no reason to live after Lytton Strachey's death; however, after this fact, she moves into a fictional account of the last encounter with Virginia that drives Carrington over the edge. According to Vincent, Carrington asked Virginia if she knew of any reason for her to carry on and Virginia (suddenly overcome by the possession of Adeline) answered no. Vincent continues with this blame by leaving a scrap of paper visible in the house when Carrington's body was found, a scrap of paper with the lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men/ “Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!" only the word Dog is replaced--and underlined--with the word wolf, clearly proving that in Vincent's fictional world, Virginia is responsible for Carrington's death.
Finally, there is Virginia's suicide. I often complain that Virginia's suicide is romanticized as are so many artists' suicides, but I cannot raise that complaint about Vincent's portrayal in that way. Vincent does romanticize her suicide to an extent (specifically in Virginia pouring a vial of milk over a rock in reference to a Yeats poem), but the suicide as a whole is a bizarre series of hallucinations which, obviously, has no foundation in the reality of Virginia's suicide. From the point that Virginia begins writing her suicide notes to the time when she wades into the Ouse, Virginia is in hallucinatory conversation with multiple people--T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Yeats all make appearances in these last minutes. More disturbing, though, is the idea that young Adeline is there gleefully waiting for the death of her older self. Of all the people Virginia hallucinates, Adeline is the one that frustrates me the most. Part of that frustration is borne from the continued idea that Virginia hallucinated her younger self for her entire life and that her suicide is, essentially, the fault of her younger self. Vincent falls prey to the idea that Virginia's suicide was the result of her madness, and she furthers this idea with the hallucinations. In fact, a reading of Virginia's suicide notes shows clarity in her words and no hint of mental illness or hallucinations, but Vincent avoids showing by having Virginia suddenly return from a hallucinatory conversation to discover she's finished a suicide note).
I do not doubt that Vincent is a good writer, but as a freelance journalist I expected her to be more faithful to the facts. There are many ways to write Virginia's life as a fiction and maintain a faithful duty to the facts, but Vincent has not done this in her novel. I could have tolerated this book a lot more had Vincent decided to write a novel about a fictional author and her fictional set of friends. In that case, all my earlier objections would be taken back; however, Vincent blends fact and fiction in such a way here (and it's obvious that some of this is fact) that an unsuspecting reader who indulges in the book will need a lot of correcting to truly understand Virginia's life.
She began the novel with a Woolfian style description of Virginia bathing, which made me yearn for a long bubble bath. I soon recognized that Vincent was trying to do two things--pull in as much historical detail as possible while using Woolf's writing style, and she pulled this off in the first few pages. But then, she turned a corner or stepped over a line or faded the line. I'm still not certain how to categorize what happened. She developed an entire scene of Virginia Woolf lying on a bed having a conversation with her imaginary self as a child, a child that Vincent would consistently refer to as Adeline. This, for me, was when things began to fall apart. As a Woolf scholar with a focus on the fact and fictions of Woolf's mental health, this portrayal betrayed my trust in Vincent, especially as Adeline is portrayed as the alter-ego of Virginia with fascinations toward death. Yes, Virginia Woolf heard voices, but at no time did she mention hallucinating her younger self. So Vincent takes the idea of hallucinations and turns these into an apparently lifelong hallucination of her younger self, which blurs the line of writing Virginia Woolf's life as a fictional tale. I was able to tolerate this blurring at this point, but later it becomes infuriating (and I'll get to that in a few more words).
Vincent's attempt to blend fiction and history comes off well in some places, but there are several places where she clearly wants to get information across but isn't certain how to work that information into her Woolfian style. Her solution is to place large blocks of historical fact as dialogue in the mouths of her characters in a most awkward fashion and in such a way that it's clear her purpose was not to further the dialogue but to get across the factual information.
There are also points where Vincent seems to lose sight of what she's doing. After spending an extensive amount of time detailing Virginia's loathing of Freud and psychoanalysis at the end of a chapter, she promptly begins the next chapter by psychoanalyzing Virginia's relationship with Vita Sackville-West. What's worse is the fact that she boils the relationship down to Virginia's desire to be intimate with her mother and sister, portraying Vita as a woman dumb as a post and only part of Virginia's life to (unknowingly) fulfill this sexual need. So, Vincent does not understand the relationship between Virginia and Vita well enough to portray this factually; she did not do the research to see the relationship (or did not care enough to portray it factually because it did not fit her idea for the book).
Vincent does something similar with Dora Carrington's suicide. In Vincent's retelling, Virginia (via the young Adeline) is responsible for Carrington's suicide. Vincent keeps with the factual narrative that Carrington saw no reason to live after Lytton Strachey's death; however, after this fact, she moves into a fictional account of the last encounter with Virginia that drives Carrington over the edge. According to Vincent, Carrington asked Virginia if she knew of any reason for her to carry on and Virginia (suddenly overcome by the possession of Adeline) answered no. Vincent continues with this blame by leaving a scrap of paper visible in the house when Carrington's body was found, a scrap of paper with the lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men/ “Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!" only the word Dog is replaced--and underlined--with the word wolf, clearly proving that in Vincent's fictional world, Virginia is responsible for Carrington's death.
Finally, there is Virginia's suicide. I often complain that Virginia's suicide is romanticized as are so many artists' suicides, but I cannot raise that complaint about Vincent's portrayal in that way. Vincent does romanticize her suicide to an extent (specifically in Virginia pouring a vial of milk over a rock in reference to a Yeats poem), but the suicide as a whole is a bizarre series of hallucinations which, obviously, has no foundation in the reality of Virginia's suicide. From the point that Virginia begins writing her suicide notes to the time when she wades into the Ouse, Virginia is in hallucinatory conversation with multiple people--T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Yeats all make appearances in these last minutes. More disturbing, though, is the idea that young Adeline is there gleefully waiting for the death of her older self. Of all the people Virginia hallucinates, Adeline is the one that frustrates me the most. Part of that frustration is borne from the continued idea that Virginia hallucinated her younger self for her entire life and that her suicide is, essentially, the fault of her younger self. Vincent falls prey to the idea that Virginia's suicide was the result of her madness, and she furthers this idea with the hallucinations. In fact, a reading of Virginia's suicide notes shows clarity in her words and no hint of mental illness or hallucinations, but Vincent avoids showing by having Virginia suddenly return from a hallucinatory conversation to discover she's finished a suicide note).
I do not doubt that Vincent is a good writer, but as a freelance journalist I expected her to be more faithful to the facts. There are many ways to write Virginia's life as a fiction and maintain a faithful duty to the facts, but Vincent has not done this in her novel. I could have tolerated this book a lot more had Vincent decided to write a novel about a fictional author and her fictional set of friends. In that case, all my earlier objections would be taken back; however, Vincent blends fact and fiction in such a way here (and it's obvious that some of this is fact) that an unsuspecting reader who indulges in the book will need a lot of correcting to truly understand Virginia's life.
emtobiasz's review against another edition
3.0
Adeline is the fictionalized biography of Virginia Woolf, focusing on her inner life and relationship with friends and family in the period when she wrote many of her novels, 1924-1941.I really like the Woolf novels that I've read, including several the book highlights, but I have more mixed feelings about this book. Adeline reads as if it were written in Woolf's style, and Vincent obviously did her research related to Woolf's relationships and life events. This research is blended into many of the internal monologues and conversations the character of Virginia has in the book, but the information sometimes felt awkwardly inserted. Those moments when I felt like Vincent inserted some point of backstory because she needed it there and not because it fit into the conversation really threw me out of the narrative, and I had trouble finding my way back in. I liked the way the point of view did not stay with Virginia all the time, and other characters would point out her flaws and make her more human than the mad-genius narrative sometimes allows.
My interest has been piqued enough to research more about Woolf's life and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group, but I think I'll look for nonfiction titles this time. I'm not sure who I would recommend this book to-- perhaps someone who had read a novel or two by Woolf and wants to learn more about her, but isn't interested in a biography.
My interest has been piqued enough to research more about Woolf's life and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group, but I think I'll look for nonfiction titles this time. I'm not sure who I would recommend this book to-- perhaps someone who had read a novel or two by Woolf and wants to learn more about her, but isn't interested in a biography.
balancinghistorybooks's review against another edition
4.0
Norah Vincent’s Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf is, in simplified terms, a fictionalised biography of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring authors. Adeline, named as she was after her mother Julia’s deceased sister, was Woolf’s given name. It was never used within her family, ‘as Julia did not like to use the name full of painful association’.
The structure of Adeline is fitting; Vincent has chosen to split the story into separate ‘Acts’, all of which correspond to Woolf’s own publications; one is entitled ‘Night and Day’, for example, and another ‘The Voyage Out’. The novel begins on June the 13th 1925, and ends with Woolf’s suicide on the 28th of March 1941. Throughout, Woolf’s thoughts – all of which have been influenced by her diaries and letters – have been woven into various plotlines from her novels. Vincent is marvellous at demonstrating in this manner how inspiration strikes.
In Adeline, Woolf comes to life immediately, and the novel’s opening scene is particularly vivid: ‘She is lying full down in the bath, with the tepid water hooding her head and lapping just below the vaulted arches of her nostrils… She can hear her heart galloping distantly, as it so often does when she is ill, thrumming weakly but so quickly, a soft insistence sucking at the drums of her ears’. Vincent goes on to describe the way in which, ‘as if startled by the sound of her own voice, she sits upright with a great sloshing urgency, her buttocks squeaking on the porcelain, her knees bucking, legs tensing straight and splashing’.
Vincent is so in control of Woolf’s dual personality; one gets the impression that she comprehends it, and its implications, perfectly: ‘There is the stall of recognition. She knows this feeling, this progression of decline, she knows it very well, the consciousness curling under the despair, helpless as a page in the fire, succumbing to the grey, darkening possession’.
In Adeline, Woolf and her genius have essentially been placed upon a pedestal, from where they are examined. Vincent has included some well developed conversations, and has built the plot around Woolf’s relationships with others, from her siblings and husband Leonard, to her affair with Vita Sackville-West. Famous characters from the Bloomsbury Group have been considered too, from biographer Lytton Strachey to poet T.S. Eliot.
Adeline has been meticulously researched, and its prose is both beautiful and intelligent. The turns of phrase are deftly created: ‘The world seemed to be speeding up and slowing down, going liquid and solid at the same time, and me with it’. The literary techniques which Vincent has used – Woolf talking to her child self, for example – work so well, as does the way in which the story follows both Virginia and Leonard. The Bloomsbury Group, intrinsic as it was in the lives of the Woolfs, has been considered too: ‘Their life, their bond, their work and their circle of closely kept friends are about one thing: maintenance of the necessary illusion’. So many ideas can be found within the story, and one really gets a feel for Woolf’s world.
The only thing which let the novel down for me are the Americanisms which sometimes creep into the text. The use of the word ‘gotten’ is rather jarring, and its historical inaccuracy with relation to England during the 1920s and 1930s pulls the novel from its otherwise excellent historical grounding.
Adeline is a must-read for any fans of Woolf, or those with interest in the wider circle of the Bloomsbury Group, providing as it does a stunning and interesting portrayal of an author whose life and legacy still fascinate to this day.
The structure of Adeline is fitting; Vincent has chosen to split the story into separate ‘Acts’, all of which correspond to Woolf’s own publications; one is entitled ‘Night and Day’, for example, and another ‘The Voyage Out’. The novel begins on June the 13th 1925, and ends with Woolf’s suicide on the 28th of March 1941. Throughout, Woolf’s thoughts – all of which have been influenced by her diaries and letters – have been woven into various plotlines from her novels. Vincent is marvellous at demonstrating in this manner how inspiration strikes.
In Adeline, Woolf comes to life immediately, and the novel’s opening scene is particularly vivid: ‘She is lying full down in the bath, with the tepid water hooding her head and lapping just below the vaulted arches of her nostrils… She can hear her heart galloping distantly, as it so often does when she is ill, thrumming weakly but so quickly, a soft insistence sucking at the drums of her ears’. Vincent goes on to describe the way in which, ‘as if startled by the sound of her own voice, she sits upright with a great sloshing urgency, her buttocks squeaking on the porcelain, her knees bucking, legs tensing straight and splashing’.
Vincent is so in control of Woolf’s dual personality; one gets the impression that she comprehends it, and its implications, perfectly: ‘There is the stall of recognition. She knows this feeling, this progression of decline, she knows it very well, the consciousness curling under the despair, helpless as a page in the fire, succumbing to the grey, darkening possession’.
In Adeline, Woolf and her genius have essentially been placed upon a pedestal, from where they are examined. Vincent has included some well developed conversations, and has built the plot around Woolf’s relationships with others, from her siblings and husband Leonard, to her affair with Vita Sackville-West. Famous characters from the Bloomsbury Group have been considered too, from biographer Lytton Strachey to poet T.S. Eliot.
Adeline has been meticulously researched, and its prose is both beautiful and intelligent. The turns of phrase are deftly created: ‘The world seemed to be speeding up and slowing down, going liquid and solid at the same time, and me with it’. The literary techniques which Vincent has used – Woolf talking to her child self, for example – work so well, as does the way in which the story follows both Virginia and Leonard. The Bloomsbury Group, intrinsic as it was in the lives of the Woolfs, has been considered too: ‘Their life, their bond, their work and their circle of closely kept friends are about one thing: maintenance of the necessary illusion’. So many ideas can be found within the story, and one really gets a feel for Woolf’s world.
The only thing which let the novel down for me are the Americanisms which sometimes creep into the text. The use of the word ‘gotten’ is rather jarring, and its historical inaccuracy with relation to England during the 1920s and 1930s pulls the novel from its otherwise excellent historical grounding.
Adeline is a must-read for any fans of Woolf, or those with interest in the wider circle of the Bloomsbury Group, providing as it does a stunning and interesting portrayal of an author whose life and legacy still fascinate to this day.
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