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The result is a “hidden” life in quite a different sense to the one intended.Ray Monk is the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand RussellGranite and Rainbow: the life of Virginia Woolfby Mitchell LeaskaPicador, pounds 20, 513pp. So much of her life was spent thinking and imagining that, unless one has a very rare insight into her mind, all the time spent in ascertaining the facts of her family, loves and so on will not prevent her from eluding one’s grasp. With his eye fixed on the granite, Leaska has missed the rainbow and, therefore, most of what is really interesting about Woolf. “What is more irritating than to see one’s subject, on whom one has lavished so much time and trouble, slipping out of one’s grasp altogether and indulging [in thought]. If the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her”. This is precisely the problem a biographer of Woolf has to face. It is also, crucially, about the limits of biography.”If only subjects had more consideration for their biographers!” Woolf wrote in Orlando.

Moreover, when he is not discussing metaphysics, Leaska writes extremely well, and the book is, for all its limitations, an absorbing page-turner – particularly in its treatment of Woolf’s final breakdown and suicide, which is heartbreakingly moving.He is also very good on her parents, who are portrayed more vividly than in any other book I know. Equally vivid is his account of Woolf’s romantic relationship with Vita Sackville-West; though, characteristically, Leaska misses the fact that Orlando is not just about Vita. To that extent, his book suffers by comparison with the biographies of Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee, both of whom showed a far subtler grasp of Virginia Woolf’s intricate and fascinating personality. However, this is not to say that Leaska’s book is entirely without merit.It is the product of immense scholarship, which Leaska builds into his narrative with an impressively light touch, frequently drawing the reader’s attention not only to the finished texts of Woolf’s novels, but also to early drafts and alterations. When a biographer makes the same mistake, he is in trouble.Leaska’s misunderstandings of Virginia Woolf’s thinking and his reductionist view of biography impose severe limitations on his ability to understand Woolf herself. When people insist that the facts of a writer’s life cannot explain the work, they are right.

Where they are wrong is in thinking that the task of the literary biographer is to explain a writer’s work It is not; it is, rather, to understand the writer. The rainbow is not the appearance of the granite; it is made of different stuff.Leaska’s crude confusions make his book easy prey to the fashionable, facile dismissal of biography. The biographer’s obligation is to the facts; the novelist’s to the integrity of creation These two are not related as appearance to reality. If it expresses important truths, this cannot be because it includes facts about Julia Stephen.

Leaska’s confusion on this point is not a minor flaw, but runs like a fault-line throughout his book, threatening to reduce it to incoherence. It undermines, for instance, his many, otherwise enlightening parallels between the events in Woolf’s life and the incidents described in her novels.To describe the ways in which Woolf drew on her memories of her mother, Julia, in creating Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse is to perform a useful service to scholarship; but to claim, as Leaska does, that in doing so he is revealing the granite behind the rainbow, the “real thing behind appearances”, is to miss the point.To the Lighthouse is a novel, an artistic creation. For, on his account, there would be no room for the notion of getting it wrong; thoughts and beliefs about reality would be indistinguishable from the facts and therefore not amenable to verification or falsification.The purpose of Woolf’s metaphor of granite and rainbow was to highlight, not obliterate, the difference between the truth of fact and the truth of fiction. However, Leaska does not appear to notice that, if Woolf believed what he claims she believed, she could not have written this story. When the train reaches its destination, the woman alights to join her waiting son and the narrator’s guesswork is revealed to be wrong. He summarises the plot of Woolf’s short story, “The Unwritten Novel”, in which the unnamed narrator, sitting opposite a woman on a train, begins to fantasise the life story of this woman.