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A review by boredacademic
Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Norah Vincent
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.