Angels and ministers of grace

Despite its provocative title, this is not a salacious book. Any reader hoping for disclosures about Woolf’s lesbian love affairs will be disappointed. But do we really need another book on Virginia Woolf when there are already two excellent biographies, by Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee, and numerous essays – such as Helen Dunmore’s perceptive Virginia Woolf and her Relationships with Women in Issue 23 of the Charleston Magazine? Wouldn’t we do better to reread Woolf’s own extraordinary prose in, say, The Waves, which I am now doing, encouraged, I admit, by reviewing the above?

Vanessa Curtis is co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. She explains that

my intention is to reveal, through these unique and remarkable women, a side of Virginia Woolf that is perhaps not so widely seen. For this purpose also I have intentionally researched the lives of some women who are not usually considered to have been even cursory members of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.