A lively and insightful literary life, highly acclaimed on hardback publicationVirginia Woolf once mused that no biographer had ever been 'subtle enough and bold enough to present that queer amalgam of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow' that is an artist's life.Mitchell Leaska has now answered this daunting challenge. The editor of two of her novels, a volume of letters and her early journals as well as the author of a critical work which Leonard Woolf called 'the most illuminating study of Virginia Woolf's novels that I have ever read', Leaska is uniquely placed to write the most uncompromising and deeply informed literary biography to date, one that unearths much new and disturbing material that shines light on both Woolf's life and work.'The iridescent rainbow of Woolf's own account of her life in her fiction, essays, letters and diaries flickers over Leaska's hard-hat as he drills through layers of inconsistencies into the hard rock of fact and reality. His analyses of the personal and family tensions that drove Woolf first to try to integrate them in her work and finally to suicide are very disturbing'The Times