Even if you can’t stand her writing, I would still recommend reading Bell’s
biography of Virginia Woolf. She’s such an eccentric, such an interesting
character that her story is fascinating.

First, there’s the whole madness issue. She committed suicide in 1941 after
years of periodic psychotic episodes. And the treatment then was so
primitive, almost nonexistent, that it almost seemed to make her problems
worse. She probably had some form of bipolar disorder and Bell gives some
time to tracing the mental health issues of her forbear back a few
generations. I’ve often wondered if she were alive now, with all the
therapeutic drugs available, would she have been able to write as
imaginatively as she did?. Or would the drugs have stabilized her mind and
destroyed her creative spark?.

Then, there is the whole Bohemian, Bloomsbury, lesbian thing.
After reading the book, I can’t think of anyone I know who led a more staid,
happily married lifestyle than she did. She was married for years to Leonard
Woolf and, yes, had passionate friendships with lesbians but Bell, who
happens to be her nephew and actually knew her, is highly skeptical that any
physical reaction was reciprocated by Virginia. She did have flamboyant,
creative friends. Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy and Roger Fry were just
a small part of the circle she was involved in. She knew Henry James and
H.G. Wells. And later in life, she befriended Katherine Mansfield and
Elizabeth Bowen. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, was a leader in Post Modernist
painting in Britain and famous in her own right. But Virginia’s major wild
fling seems to be that she shared a house as a cooperative with unmarried
men prior to marriage.

What mostly comes thru is a highly gifted woman plagued with shyness and
insecurity and threatened by permanent madness who writes because she’s
passionate about language and words and thoughts. She isn’t highly educated;
in fact, Bell points out that neither she nor her sister were allowed to
attend school and were educated, badly, at home by their impatient and
overbearing father. She loved London and England. The war with its bombings
and threats of invasion lead indirectly to her final slow slide into another
episode of madness which she forestalls by putting rocks into her pocket and
walking into the river Ouse.