Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf once observed, "to have so many selves." In her novels and essays, not to mention nearly 4,000 letters and a 30-volume diary, Woolf left behind her a voluminous anatomy of self, and in the years since her 1941 suicide, biographers and critics have created a succession of further portraits.

Biographies are fictions we contrive about lives we find meaningful. Facts are interpretable, and become available to the biographer with a certain randomness: the significance of unknown ''facts'' can scarcely be determined.

To literary formalists, she was a groundbreaking stylist, a courageous experimenter who, along with James Joyce, fractured and remade the novel. To feminists, she was an early advocate of women's rights, a writer concerned with both the social and emotional consequences of patriarchal politics. Quentin Bell's 1972 biography of his aunt focused on her life rather than her art, leaving us with a picture of a high-strung, unstable woman, irreparably damaged by her childhood and dependent in later life on the ministrations of her devoted husband, Leonard.

Phyllis Rose's "Woman of Letters" (1978) provided a feminist reading of the transactions between her fiction and her life, while Lyndall Gordon's "Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life" (1984) attempted to use Woolf's own narrative techniques by focusing on a series of epiphanic moments that supposedly shaped Woolf's sensibility and art. James King's biography, which draws heavily on Woolf's diaries and letters, takes an altogether more comprehensive approach, providing the reader with more than anyone could want to know about the writer's daily ups and downs, travels and flirtations.

Virginia Woolf had very mixed feelings about biography, or ''life-writing,'' as she called it. On the one hand she was an enthusiast: ''As everybody knows,'' she wrote in her essay on Christina Rossetti, ''the fascination of reading biographies is irresistible.'' But, she also declared biography to be ''a bastard, an impure art'' and claimed that the very idea was ''poppycock.''

Mr. King -- a professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of earlier biographies of William Cowper, Paul Nash and William Blake -- tells us about Woolf's menstrual problems, her attacks of diarrhea, her difficulties in buying clothes. He tells us about her sexual frigidity and her fears about being thought cold and detached. He dwells at considerable length on Woolf's lengthy flirtation with Clive Bell, her sister Vanessa's husband, and also speculates that Woolf might have had an incestuous relationship with Vanessa.

That suggestion, at least based on the evidence presented in these pages, seems highly suspect. As Mr. King himself points out, Woolf always shied away from the sexual side of relationships. And while Vanessa notes in a letter that Virginia was "pining for a real petting" and refers to her as an "ape" who might make "a pleasant enough bed fellow," similar animal imagery and language often recur in the sisters' and their friends' correspondence without a specifically sexual context.

For that matter, a schematic Freudianism informs this entire biography. As Mr. King sees it, the young Woolf longed for more attention from her beloved mother, who died when Virginia was 13, and as a result, experienced attraction to other women, like Vita Sackville-West, whom she regarded as a kind of substitute mother. Her feelings toward her father, Mr. King argues, were more ambivalent: on one hand, she wanted to emulate his literary career; on the other, she was determined to rebel against both his old-fashioned esthetics and his patriarchal view of the world. The sexual molestation Woolf suffered as a young girl at the hands of her half-brother, George Duckworth, says Mr. King, left her with a lasting mistrust of men, while the early deaths of her half-sister, Stella, and her older brother, Thoby, left her obsessed with death.

On the matter of Woolf's own suicide, which occurred against the threatening backdrop of World War II, Mr. King offers a few theories, some more convincing than others. He suggests that she was depressed by the ascent of Hitler, which meant, in his words, "that phallic man had triumphed." He suggests she was convinced that her last book, "Between the Acts," was a failure. And he suggests she felt "deeply alienated" from Leonard, Vanessa and Vita (even though the last decade with Leonard had been happier, on the whole, than ever; even though her relationship with Vanessa routinely fluctuated; even though the affair with Vita had long since wound down).

In Mr. King's view: "She carefully chose the time and circumstances of her death, very much in the manner of an artist imposing her will upon life. Her decision was deeply courageous: although she would not be able to write about death, she would actually face the experience itself.