We know more about Virginia Woolf than any other 20th-century writer, and still the mine of her life isn't played out. She was the experimental novelist of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse," a sort-of post-impressionist word painter of modern consciousness; a center of the Bloomsbury salon, an unstable genius who drowned herself at 59 in 1941. Almost religiously she kept a diary her whole life chronicling her bouts of madness and love affairs with women.
Her letters, too, fill out the many identities of a Marxist feminist, highbrow snob, trailblazing lesbian, deranged artist: no wonder she seems to be everywhere and sells more postcards than any other subject in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her new biographer Nigel Nicolson was the son of her lover; he himself was a subject Virginia Woolf studied once as a model of boyhood. The immortal modern, Virginia Woolf, is this hour on The Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
