Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism Book

DiBattista's experiment is an interesting approach to answering the question of who, really, Virginia Woolf was. Exploring Woolf's novels, essays, diaries, and biographical works, DiBattista tries to imagine five facets of Virginia Woolf, author: the sybil of the drawing room, the author, the critic, the world writer, and the adventurer. She intersperses biographical and textual data with her own, clearly labeled, suppositions about what the texts tell us about Woolf. Overall, I found the work captivating, and it expanded my own views of Woolf as author; however, the book seems to rely more on faith in the latter chapters, the world writer and the adventurer.

The greater takeaway, it seems, is not as much how DiBattista reads to construct Woolf the author, but her insights into often overlooked areas of Woolf's work. DIBattista takes a common fact and turns it into a supposition or a new reading that encourages rereading the original work and looking for other connections. For example, when talking about Woolf's early approach to writing essay criticisms, DiBattista hypothesizes:
Woolf then, might be said to have pioneered reader response criticism of a very sophisticated, if unmethodocial kind (109)
The reader familiar with Woolf's critical essays must take a moment and think through this, not because the idea is radical, but rather because DiBattista is touching on an area unexplored by scholars.

Imagining Virginia Woolf is a book worth reading for anybody with an interest in either Woolf's life as seen and interpreted in her writing or new avenues of interest for returning to a previously read work. DiBattista's experiment may not be completely successful, but she does offer significant insight and fresh perspectives to reading Virginia Woolf.