Though she remained a committed modernist, he notes, her aesthetic took a radical turn. Drawing heavily on Woolf's private writings, Marder (professor emeritus at the University of Illinois) draws a competent portrait from the writing of The Waves to Woolf's suicide during WWII-a phase that was marked by changes in her aesthetic and by tremendous fear: ""Oh yes,"" the 49-year-old Woolf wrote in her diary on completing The Waves, ""between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live."" Marder emphasizes the competing forces of her political engagement-evident in her novel-essay The Years and in her feminist/antifascist tract Three Guineas-and her artistic sensibility. Woolf remains the Bloomsbury Revival's most popular biographic draw, but in his latest account of her life, Marder (Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf) completely bypasses the more familiar and exhaustively studied first portion of the writer's life-her Victorian childhood, her Edwardian rebellion, and her early, more popular books-to concentrate on her last decade.
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