Virginia woolf the new biography pdf
Virginia woolf the new biography pdf english...
Virginia Woolf, The Art of Biography (1939)
The Art of Biography
I
The art of biography, we say — but at once go on to ask, is biography an art?
Virginia woolf the new biography pdf
The question is foolish perhaps, and ungenerous certainly, considering the keen pleasure that biographers have given us. But the question asks itself so often that there must be something behind it. There it is, whenever a new biography is opened, casting its shadow on the page; and there would seem to be something deadly in that shadow, for after all, of the multitude of lives that are written, how few survive!
But the reason for this high death rate, the biographer might argue, is that biography, compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a young art.
Interest in our selves and in other people's selves is a late development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography fully grown an