Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Norah Vincent

Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Norah Vincent
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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’sAdeline 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.

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Adeline was a book I really looked forward to reading. I read Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers a few years back and I loved that book. When it comes to Virgina Woolf I have so far only read Mrs. Dalloway, but I have plans to read more books by Mrs. Woolf.

So believe me, I was quite happy when I got a chance to read this book. But unfortunately, I just couldn't connect with it, nor the story or the characters. There were moments in the book when the text really spoke to me, but not nearly enough to make me truly enjoy this book. In the end, it just became a struggle to finish the book. Too much rambling for my taste. But as I said before, there were moments that were good, often when other characters interacted with Virgina, like Lytton or T.S Eliot or Yeats. But the moments were like gems in the sand, rare and hard to find.

In the end, I just want to say that this was a book that just didn't work for me. I hoped that I would get into the story, but it never happened.

I received this copy from the publisher in return for an honest review!