Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Summary

“Daring . . . Vincent’s psychological approach is intriguing.” — USA Today

“Vincent is a sensitive recorder of a mind’s movements as it shifts in and out of inspiration, and as it fights before submitting to despair.” — New York Times Book Review

With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Norah Vincent’s Adeline reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the banks of the River Ouse, offering us a denouement worthy of its protaganist. Channeling Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and Dora Carrington, Vincent lays bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia’s greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.

Intellectually and emotionally disarming, Adeline—a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the storied Bloomsbury group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all—is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.

“Skillfully rendered and emotionally insightful.” — Publishers Weekly

“[An] electrifyingly good novel . . . by a master of discomfort.” — New Statesman