Virginia Woolf: an inner life Julia Briggs Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 528pp, £30 ISBN 0713996633

Virginia Woolf had, at best, an ambivalent attitude to biography. If it fed her interest in human nature, it was also a genre she slightly despised. Biographers, she insisted, were craftsmen, not artists. Though she herself, at the request of others, wrote a life of the critic and painter Roger Fry, she admitted in her diary that she found it a terrible grind. She was, after all, the daughter of Leslie Stephen, editor of 26 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography. His labours on that great monument had, she claimed, crushed the energy out of her brother Adrian and given herself a twist of the head: "I shouldn't have been so clever, but I should have been more stable, without that contribution to the history of England." It was partly in riposte that she wrote her spoof biography Orlando, with its teasing preface mimicking the acknowledgements made by serious practitioners of the art.

Woolf is today surrounded by biographers; it seems a new account of her life appears every year. The first authorised biography (1972), by her nephew Quentin Bell, offered enjoyably direct access to her life but ducked critical engagement with her work; feminists argued that it depoliticised her. Since then, Woolf has been turned into a lesbian heroine, a victim of child abuse and a case history for madness. Her life has become such complex territory that it is no longer possible to regard her simply as the explorer of private, interior, feminine spaces. This was especially noticeable in Hermione Lee's biography (1996), which depicted Woolf as a shrewd, strenuous, eager observer of life, a woman in many ways obsessed with injustice and therefore strongly politicised.

Julia Briggs makes an impressive entry into a crowded field by developing further this aspect of Woolf. She does so by using an unusual tactic. Abandoning the conventional from-cradle-to-grave procedure, she mentions such rites of passage as birth, education and marriage only in passing. Chronology, too, goes more or less by the board, with the result that Briggs sometimes has to bring us up to date in a rather breathless summary. The focus, as the subtitle reminds us, is on the inner life. Woolf would have approved. She once remarked on how little we know of ourselves, let alone of others: "In spite of all this, people write what they call 'lives' of other people; that is, they collect a number of events and leave the person to whom it happened unknown."

Suitably warned, Briggs proceeds by other means. Woolf, she argues, "believed that external events were insignificant in themselves: ultimately the only 'real' events were those of the mind". If this is true, then Woolf, like other members of Bloomsbury, was an inheritor of G E Moore's anti-materialist philosophy, which placed more importance on states of mind than on action. Briggs deliberately stays as close as possible to her subject's thought, structuring her biography around her writings; each chapter deals with a book, sometimes two, and related articles. The more material aspects of biography enter only when they have some connection with the work.

The results justify the method, although there are weaknesses, such as the (perhaps necessary) rehashing of familiar material, and some rather laboured summaries of Woolf's texts. But our scepticism as to the viability of yet another biography soon gives way to admiration. Briggs makes us freshly aware of Woolf's radicalism on matters such as the link between medicine and power. Much has been written about Woolf and her doctors, but no previous writer has made it so evident that Woolf's experience of mental illness, combined with her privileged position within the establishment, left her uniquely placed to describe the nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway. Bradshaw exercises a repressive authority in the name of the god "proportion"; he "made England prosper", Woolf wrote, "secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion".

Equally provocative is the contribution this book makes to our understanding of Bloomsbury's involvement with pacifism. It is not widely known that, in 1917, two of Leonard Woolf's brothers were hit by the same shell at Cambrai. It killed one and woun- ded the other. Virginia Woolf visited the surviving brother in hospital with her husband. First-hand contact with the effects of war on young men confirmed her detestation of it. She worked out her response in the only way available to her: by focusing, in Jacob's Room, on the fate of an individual and the impact of his loss on those who loved him. But later, in the 1930s, while her husband urged the Labour Party to promote the need for re-armament, she began to inquire more deeply into the links between militarism, male rivalry and ceremonial display. The result, Three Guineas, was, as Briggs notes, one of the founding documents in the history of gender studies. "Thinking is my fighting," Woolf observed.

Concentration on the inner life also brings out the unremitting persistence with which Woolf pushed at ideas. She recognised a need to drop down into her mind to uncover new thoughts, to enrich her imagination. This biography comes as close as any to her astonishingly fertile creativity. "I think what I'm at," Woolf told Katherine Mansfield while writing Jacob's Room, "is to change consciousness, and so to break up the stodge." She rightly saw that this flight from the clutter of factual description had the paradoxical effect of enabling her "to come closer to life". The unfolding of this idea, as it develops from one book to the next, is here made freshly exhilarating.

Briggs ends each chapter with an "aftermath", in which her aim is to provide a history of each book's production and reception. Though not uninteresting, these sections seem cobbled together, mingling scraps of biographical information with bib-liographic history, period literary criticism and personal comment. No such lack of focus mars the rest of this book, which gains in resonance as it proceeds.

It is either boldly ambitious or wildly misguided to enter the field of Virginia Woolf studies at this late stage. Yet Briggs pulls it off, in part because she makes good use of the research that has recently been done on the various drafts of Woolf's novels. There have been fresh insights into Woolf's creative thinking, and Briggs uses these to enrich our understanding of her subject's inner life, as well as her relevance to the period in which she lived.

At one point, while considering Woolf's response to the rise of fascism, Briggs astutely remarks: "The moral convictions of her generation, the sense that war was the ultimate evil, had not only sharpened her views; they had been a key factor in the British government's confused and incoherent policy on Europe and rearmament during the 1930s." Reading Briggs's book reminds us that Woolf's work brings us closer not only to the flight of the mind, but to a particular moment of history in which she intervened, forcibly and with astonishingly far-reaching results.

Frances Spalding's most recent book is Gwen Raverat: friends, family and affections (Pimlico)

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