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Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf! You turn 133 on January 25 (which is funny, because you don’t look a day over 125).

How can you celebrate the timeless author’s big day? You can read some of her great works, of course. Or, for something a bit different, you can treat yourself to some novels that feature Woolf as a character. Here are some of our favorites:

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

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Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Parmar’s second novel brings the Bloomsbury group to vibrant life. Vanessa and Her Sister is Vanessa Bell’s imagined diary, incorporating letters and telegrams. In 1905, the four Stephen children have recently been orphaned. Vanessa, the eldest, strives to keep the family together in their London home while focusing on her painting. Mercurial Virginia, periodically affected by mental illness, struggles with her writing.

Parmar does a wonderful job of portraying the claustrophobic, almost incestuous, sibling rivalry between Vanessa and Virginia. However, due to Vanessa’s first-person narration, readers might not get a clear sense of Virginia herself; she’s a childish, impudent background figure, and her career is sidelined. Still, occasional glimpses of this tortured writer are priceless: “Virginia has been veering towards a breakdown…I watch her, vigilant, waiting for the moment when the boat capsizes in the dark.”

Vanessa and Her Sister

Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee

Gee’s latest novel is not historical fiction, but whimsical magic realism. Angela Lamb, a middle-aged English novelist, is flying to New York City to view Woolf’s manuscripts. She hopes to finish preparing for an upcoming Woolf conference in Istanbul—and to take her mind off her shaky marriage to a documentary filmmaker on location in the Arctic. The first line presages the magic to come: “There is thunder as Angela flies to New York with Virginia Woolf in her handbag, lightning crackling off the wings of the plane.” Virginia Woolf in Manhattan alternates between Virginia’s and Angela’s perspectives, set out almost like a play.

This academic comedy, reminiscent of David Lodge’s Small World, toys with history, globalization, and literary theories about “The Death of the Author.” A subplot about Angela’s daughter, Gerda, who flees boarding school bullies by getting on a plane to New York, is a distraction that makes the book overlong. However, it is a delight to see Virginia as a comic figure rather than an emblem of suicide and madness.

Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

Adeline by Norah Vincent

Norah Vincent’s second novel is closely based on Hermione Lee’s biography. Set in the years between 1925 and 1941, it focuses on Woolf’s marriage and later career. “Adeline,” Woolf’s actual first name (abandoned for her middle name), represents Woolf’s stunted, adolescent self—“The seed of me that was then and grew no further.”

Structured as a five-act play, the novel revolves around conversations with Leonard, Strachey, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats. Vincent has produced a remarkable picture of mental illness from the inside: “slowly comes the blackness with its burning edge-glow eating inward to the center until all the parchment of her right mind is consumed.”

Adeline

 

 

 

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Genre: Fiction, Historical
Rebecca Foster

An American transplant to England, Rebecca Foster is a former library assistant and full-time freelance writer, focusing on book reviewing. After a first degree in English and Religion, she earned an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Leeds. She reviews books for a number of print and online publications in the US and UK.

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