Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life Book

This book is very much a writer's look at a writer's life. Rather than being a conventional biography, going from childhood to adulthood, Briggs takes each of Woolf's major works and writes about her life at the time of writing, drawing extensively on Woolf's own letters and diaries as well as others' writing about her. In this way, we don't find out much about Woolf's childhood until near the end of the book, when Woolf herself started writing her autobiographical notes.

I read this book in order from cover to cover, but I am not convinced this was the best way to approach it. I think it would make more sense to read the relevant chapter alongside reading the Woolf book the chapter is about. As I come to read more of Woolf's work, I think it will be useful to go back to this book and read about the context of the work. Each chapter ends with the "aftermath" of the relevant book with extracts from contemporaneous reviews and essays. I found these interesting.

Briggs is clearly very knowledgeable about Virginia Woolf's work and I liked the approach of getting to know a writer's life via that writer's own writings. However, at times the writing was very dry, and I did find it a little bit of a slog as a result.