Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Paperback)

~ Louise A. DeSalvo (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Required reading for fans of Woolf, this superlative study traces the impact of early sexual abuse on her personality and her writing," reported PW , calling the work "a major step toward a reappraisal of Woolf's feminism." Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The importance of DeSalvo's book lies in its central placement of incestuous abuse as a biographical key and as key to Woolf's many portraits of childhood and adolescence in her fiction.... DeSalvo probes the nature of Victorian patriarchal family dynamics in the stifling of female dissidence and examines the disaster for young women of Victorian family mores and attitudes toward education.... Most important, she hears and believes Virginia Woolf's testimony to her childhood abuse."

-- The Washington Post Book World

"Brave, honest, beautifully attentive, and loyal... DeSalvo knows Woolf's work, especially her early work and juvenilia, practically by heart.... She pays very close attention to the early diaries, newsletters, and sketches in which Woolf reveals the extent of her abuse the way it hurt her, and the way she decided to fight back.... Thorough and convincing."

-- The Boston Globe

"Exciting...Well-documented and revealing... DeSalvo views Woolf as an incest survivor from a classically dysfunctional family .... The Virginia Wolf who emerges from this account is an amazingly brave woman, even more subversive anti far-seeing than has been apparent, one who wrote and talked as openly as she could about her incest experience, with little support, at a time when the subject was forbidden."

-- San Francisco Chronicle

"Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo's major new revisionist study...shatters the establishment view on numerous aspects of the brilliant British writer's life -- from her 'madness' to her purportedly idyllic childhood to the reasons why she committed suicide.... Part biography, part literary criticism, [DeSalvo's book] gives fascinating examples of symptoms Woolf experienced that have been shared by contemporary incest survivors."

-- The Hartford Courant

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 17, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345366395
• ISBN-13: 978-0345366399
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #734,916 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, eye-opening analysis of Woolf, February 8, 2000

By A Customer

DeSalvo has given us something ground-breaking, heart-breaking, but above all important, in this book. This book brings so much insight into Woolf, her work, and the time in which she lived (ie V.W. as representative of the experience of other children of the time) and does it all in 305 immensely readable pages. This is that kind of fantasy bridge book that allows true readers insight into an author without first having to go and study critical theory for ten years to even get through most books about great authors! I am an avid, organic, non-academic reader and this book was excellent for me. I think it also rescues and gives Virginia Woolf to all of us, as a writer, a woman, a child, a victim of circumstance. As opposed to mad, she was one incredible artist who adapted extremely well in such an isolated and shaming time. DeSalvo you should be honored (as you were, by Kennedy Fraser's New Yorker review, which led me to you!)

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, eye-opening analysis of Woolf, February 8, 2000

By A Customer

DeSalvo has given us something ground-breaking, heart-breaking, but above all important, in this book. This book brings so much insight into Woolf, her work, and the time in which she lived (ie V.W. as representative of the experience of other children of the time) and does it all in 305 immensely readable pages. This is that kind of fantasy bridge book that allows true readers insight into an author without first having to go and study critical theory for ten years to even get through most books about great authors! I am an avid, organic, non-academic reader and this book was excellent for me. I think it also rescues and gives Virginia Woolf to all of us, as a writer, a woman, a child, a victim of circumstance. As opposed to mad, she was one incredible artist who adapted extremely well in such an isolated and shaming time. DeSalvo you should be honored (as you were, by Kennedy Fraser's New Yorker review, which led me to you!)

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Essential for understanding Woolf's life and fiction, April 21, 2006

By	D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Scholarly without suffering from an overuse of lexicon, DeSalvo's study investigates how sexual abuse affected not only the development of Virginia Woolf's life and fiction but also the lives of the other members of her family as well as their internecine tangle of relationships. DeSalvo portrays the Stephen household and reveals how its adult members and doctors treated female members who diverged from societal norms or who behaved, it was then thought, "hysterically"--often, we now know, in response to incest.

The book is an important, passionate attack on the still-prevalent notion that Woolf suffered from madness: "her biographers have continued to portray her as mad, rather than having been treated as if she were mad." Instead, Woolf was responding as any adolescent would to childhood trauma, and what should be noted (and celebrated) is her success at survival. "What seems almost a miracle," DeSalvo writes, "is watching Virginia Stephen, at fifteen, in the process of creating herself as a significant, purposeful, dignified human being."

The meat of the book is the first part and a chapter entitled, "1897: Virginia Woolf at Fifteen." The three opening chapters present biographical sketches of Laura (the "madwoman in the attic" of Woolf's household) and of Virginia's sisters Stella and Vanessa; the section on the year 1897 shows how Virginia responded to her own experiences. These portraits detail overwhelming evidence for rampant incest, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse; it also describes the treatment accorded to girls who in any way departed from the patriarchal expectations of the middle-class Victorian family household. In addition, DeSalvo discusses how these childhood experiences replicated themselves in the complex web of Woolf's adult relationships: "Virginia flirted with Clive, her sister's husband; Angelica, Vanessa and Duncan's daughter, married Bunny Garnett, Duncan's former lover; Virginia said that she would seduce Angelica...; Bunny teased that he would seduce Quentin [Vanessa's son]."

The weakest sections of the book, it must be said, are those that subject Woolf's juvenilia and diaries to speculative psychoanalysis. "I believe that we are seeing Virginia use that process which psychoanalysts refer to as "reversal of the opposite." "I believe that Virginia is communicating something of great significance here...." (DeSalvo's repetition of the phrase "I believe," while honest in alerting the reader to the speculative nature of her statements, is unnecessary and ultimately cloying.) The irony here is that Woolf's adolescent writings are both revealing and fascinating on their own, without placing them on the couch.

Fortunately, DeSalvo's interpretations of Woolf's adult writing are more grounded and informative. Examined are "The Voyage Out," "Jacob's Room," "To the Lighthouse," "The Waves," "The Years," "Between the Acts," as well as selections from her nonfiction. Not only does DeSalvo's commentary shed new light on novels I've already read, but it will also affect (for the better) the way I read Woolf's work in the future. And that's the best reason for owning this book: it doesn't simply add to our knowledge of Woolf's biography; it also enhances our understanding of her literature.