Am I afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Hermione Lee

pp. 224-238

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

I was once doing a crossword puzzle with some friends and read out the clue: "——is the spur". One of us said, immediately, "Fear". This slip makes a good joke for the biographer. Fame may be the spur, for biographers and their subjects. But fame and fear connect. Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame (1989), came out of — and caused — as much fear as fame, the biographer's as well as her subject's. Fear, just as much as fame, could indeed be thought of as "the spur" for any biographer. It certainly plays its part in a biographer's motives and emotions.

Cited authors

Woolf Virginia