I Own My Soul: The Secret of Virginia Woolf

The closest thing to an autobiography of the British writer and essayist.

A few years before her suicide, Virginia Woolf tried to capture her own life in her memory instead of writing her autobiography. And she soon realized that the project was eluding her. Impressions of sounds and images, auditory and tactile sensations that dated back to her childhood, surfaced in her mind. Regarding her memories, however, she was overwhelmed by doubts, uncertainties about their true content. In any case, they were no longer hers: she had lent them to the characters in her novels. Her own life was literally poured into her work. So she stopped, gave up, convinced that what she remembered would not serve to reconstruct "Virginia."

Only Nadia Fusini, an accomplished scholar and interpreter of the English writer, could undertake the risky task of writing not a biography, but a long, erudite, and engaging live account. This, as compensation for Virginia's nonexistent autobiography, presents the highly original invention of writing life as an adventure of the soul. Making the diary, novels, letters, and fragments of memories speak, * I Am the Mistress of My Soul* recreates Virginia Woolf's entire world: from her native, Victorian, bourgeois Kensington to her new life in the bohemian neighborhood of Bloomsbury; from feminist struggle to pacifism to revolutionary positions on literature, art, and ethics. Because Bloomsbury changed not only the ways of thought, but also the modes of daily existence: the way of writing as well as the way of living and loving, which, in Virginia's case, continually refer to the fear and pain suffered at such a young age.

Around the English writer, in a moving and lively fresco, move her father Leslie and mother Julia, her sister Vanessa and her half-siblings, as well as her friends Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, her husband Leonard, and her beloved Vita Sackville-West. It is a world rich in intelligence, eccentricity, and bizarreness that knew how to face with generous aplomb the scabrous trials of modernity, including the experience of mental illness, which accompanies, obscures, and illuminates Virginia's existence and writing.

Thanks to a pressing and vivid style that imperiously summons the reader to experience the truth, in I Am the Owner of My Soul , Nadia Fusini guides us towards Virginia Woolf's secret.