Granite and Rainbow

Mitchell Leaska unearths much new and disturbing material that illuminates both Woolf's life and her work. He recounts the hard realities of her early life - the succession of tragic and untimely deaths, the illnesses, the stretches of madness - as they emerged, infallibly transformed by Woolf's imagination in her iridescent novels, letters, and diaries. Leaska's unprecedented reliance on the Woolf archives leads to fresh revelations about the troubled lives of Virginia's parents.

Plunging beneath the dense lyrical surface of Woolf's narratives, he uncovers the dissonances generated by her parents' relationship and the deeper story of how she sought to create harmony out of such profound divisions.