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Published Apr 2015
288 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
From a New York Times best-selling author, a boldly imagined portrait of Virginia Woolf that sheds new light on the events that preceded her fatal immersion in the River Ouse in 1941
On April 18, 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent's Adeline reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist.
With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia's greatest consolation, and her greatest torment.
Intellectually and emotionally disarming, Adeline—a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury Group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all—is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.
"Skillfully rendered and emotionally insightful."
- Publisher's Weekly
"Readers in search of a crash course on the Bloomsbury circle and the machinations of Woolf's fevered mind will appreciate Vincent's attempts to illuminate both, but her dark portrait of Woolf's agonizing journey through a life marked by psychic pain will hold the most appeal for those already familiar with this sad story of genius and madness."
- Kirkus
"Adeline is an intimate portrait of a sister, a wife, a woman, and most importantly, an artist. In this vivid, deeply moving novel, Vincent brings us beyond the world of legend directly into the passions, the struggles, the ambitions and finally the genius that is Virginia Woolf."
- Alison Smith, author of Name all the Animals
"Adeline deftly walks the fine line between story and scholarship---an entirely fresh reading of Woolf's work, brought alive by a writer of considerable imagination, insight, and skill."
- Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted and Madness
"Spare, exacting, deeply imagined, Adeline brings us as close as we are likely to get to the secret negotiations that fed Woolf's art." - Kathleen Hill, author of Who Occupies This House
"Adeline is a singular feat of the creative imagination in which the reader is taken inside the consciousness of a major artist in a way that is both completely believable and commandingly compelling. It is wholly worthy of its great subject."
- Terry Teachout, author of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington
This information about Adeline was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michele Asselin
Norah Vincent is the New York Times bestselling author of Self-Made Man, as well as three other books, including Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf . Formerly an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she also contributed regularly to Salon, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. She died in July 2022.
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