Holtby gives us Woolf the critic, the essayist, the experimenter and the unfinished woman; in a critical memoir which is of particular interest, because it is the work of one intelligent novelist commenting upon another.
Holtby relates her own careful reading and imaginative insights to the living context of English letter's in the 1930's. She is not dazzled by exotic Bloomsbury and its scandals, though she has something to say about 'the advantages of being Virginia Stephen'; refreshingly, it is the writer's intentions and effects that concern Holtby, the inner lives of the characters, not the private life of Virginia Woolf. With lively candour and unslavish respect she talks about what really matters to her; the complex, groundbreaking work of a contemporary writer at the height of her career.
