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

Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo  (21)  $10.88

Vertigo: A Memoir (The Cross-Cultural Memoir Series) by Louise DeSalvo  (4)  $14.36

Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell  (7)  $17.25

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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. Beginning when she was six, she was regularly abused for many years by her resentful half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth, according to her own testimony. George also turned his erotic attentions on Virginia's sister Vanessa, and, by their own admission, the two sisters were homoerotically involved with each other. After their mother's death in 1895, when Virginia was 13, their father, Leslie, apparently turned for sexual fulfillment to his passive stepdaughter Stella, whose family nickname was "the Cow." J. K. ("Jem") Stephen, Virginia's flamboyantly aggressive cousin who went mad, also seems to have had his way with one or more girls in this dysfunctional household. While these horrors have been touched on by Woolf's biographers, DeSalvo, professor of English at Hunter College in Manhattan, delves further than other scholars to dig out what probably, or definitely, happened, and how incest left the novelist feeling betrayed, helpless and tainted. Much of Woolf's writing can be read as an exploration of adolescence in which women are trained to fulfill a subservient role. DeSalvo's insightful analysis of selected works is a major step toward a reappraisal of Woolf's feminism. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover
"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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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