Adeline

Description

On 18 April 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent's ADELINE reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist. With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia's greatest consolation, and her greatest torment. Intellectually and emotionally disarming, ADELINE - a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury Group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all - is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.

Norah Vincent's first book, Self-made Man (2006) was an international media sensation and a New York Times bestseller. Previously, Vincent wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, New Republic, Village Voice and the Washington Post. She lives in New York.

The Bloomsbury Group is richly rendered . . . Vincent's use of a prose style verging on stream of consciousness is particularly effective and affecting - Independent Electrifyingly good - New Statesman