Gillian Gill's newest book is Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Virginia Woolf?--Marshal Zeringue
A: Reading Virginia Woolf was a huge influence on me as I moved from being an academic specializing in 20th-century French fiction into women studies and then into a new life as a writer.
Woolf spoke to the dilemmas in my personal life. With clarity and elegance, she argued that women had been and still were in the late 1920s systemically kept on the fringes of professional life and creative achievement. She showed her “chops” as a social and literary critic but was never pedantic or stuffy. Thus, she gave me a model for writing and the encouragement to try and be a writer myself.
I had the canonic “room of my own.” The money my dead husband left me meant I did not have to scrounge for a living. She showed me that I too was free to try and write—if I could find the energy and motivation.
And then, as my books began to get written and published and I changed from a literary critic of women’s texts, to a student of achieving women’s lives, to a teller of family stories, Virginia Woolf was kind of...[read on]