Now is the perfect time to become acquainted with Virginia Woolf. Last Oscar night, Nicole Kidman won a best actress statuette for her portrayal of Woolf in "The Hours," an homage to Woolf’s novel "Mrs. Dalloway," which perched on the bestseller lists for months – a feat the author hadn’t achieved for sixty years.

Kidman was sickly and crazy, snobbish, suicidal – everything you’d want in a mad literary genius. Her portrayal, however, had strict limits. It

character: the prankster, the clown, the woman who could captivate a room with her brilliant voice and wit or make you fall in love with her in the course of an intimate, gossipy letter.

manuscripts, diaries – to let her subject speak, as much as possible, in her own words. What emerges is Woolf’s probing curiosity about the swift changes of the early twentieth century and her tenacious desire to capture the elusive, quicksilver impression of the modern world through the power of her pen.

"life-writing," and she was particularly concerned with the often unheralded lives of women of intellect and achievement. In her journals, she frequently anticipates the day she would sit down as an old woman to write her memoirs. Robbed of that unwritten book by her early death, we may content ourselves with Lee’s masterly effort: a biography that allows Woolf to retain her victories and her vices. She inhabits its pages as neither failure nor saint; rather, she is revealed as a challengingly contradictory person with days both bad and good, an author whose work still clamors to be read, an individual one wishes to know. It’s a tribute to both biographer and subject that the book simply serves to whet the appetite.