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Book Picks: Portraits of the Artist
Book Picks: Portraits of the Artist
You don’t need to know everything about a writer’s life to enjoy her work. But in the cases of Colette and Virginia Woolf, beautifully written biographies draw a link between art and life in two of their greatest novels.
The Vagabond—Colette (Wings Press) Renee Nere is a newly divorced woman in her thirties, supporting herself (just barely) as a music hall entertainer while trying to decide whether or not to let love back into her life. Written soon after Colette left her philandering first husband, the novel explores the tension between the pleasures of independence and seductions of romance.
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (Knopf) reveals how that same conflict played out in the life of the author through three marriages and a notorious liaison with the transgendered Marquise de Belboeuf.
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (Harcourt) Clarissa Dalloway, hostess extraordinaire, throws a party as the man she nearly married unexpectedly arrives in London. Memories of the past infuse the present as Woolf gently slips in and out of the minds of the men and women Mrs. Dalloway encounters throughout the day—including a World War I veteran spiraling into suicidal madness and the wife aching to save him.
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (Knopf) charts Woolf’s own struggle with depression and her husband Leonard’s devoted care and companionship throughout their long marriage.
And one more great novel gift idea:
Kindred – Octavia E. Butler (Beacon) Dana, a contemporary African-American woman, is inexplicably pulled back in time where she meets the child (later the man) who will rape and impregnate her black female ancestor, giving birth to her line. Called back again and again to save him, she becomes complicit in the crime in order to ensure her own eventual birth. Harrowing and heart-breaking…
Deborah Rudacille is working on a book about Baltimore steelworkers and their families called Roots of Steel. Her last book, The Riddle of Gender, was published by Pantheon in 2004.