"Virginia Woolf's Nose : Essays on Biography" [.]

[fiefoe]

The second essay is a rather austere look at what the book and the consequent movie "The Hours" did to the public image of "Mrs Dalloway"'s author. Hermione Lee archly pointed out 'the androgyneity of authorship (here is a homosexual male writer impersonating a bisexual woman writer and writing about the lives of lesbians and homosexuals)'.

Unsurprisingly, the rumors and the anecdotes are what the reader takes away:

• Rumour has it that Hardy's housekeeper, after the death and the extraction of the heart, placed it in a biscuit tin on the kitchen table, and that when the undertaker came the next day he found an empty biscuit tin and Hardy's cat, Cobby, looking fat and pleased.
• He cut (Einstein's) brain into 240 pieces, and, at various times, doled out bits to scientific researchers.
  
• the Parmesan cheese (Pepys) made sure to bury in his garden during the Great Fire of London.
• We keep catching sight of a real body, a physical life: the young Dickens coming quickly into a room, sprightly, long-haired, bright-eyed, dandyish, in a crimson velvet waistcoat or tartan trousers;

'(Austen makes) us understand how difficult it is to know other people right through. As Fanny Price exclaims to Mary Crawford in the shrubbery in Mansfield Park, how incomprehensible the human mind is, and how "peculiarly past finding out"!'  {And yet we don't give up.}

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