Virginia Woolf should live on, but not because of her death

Her genius continues to inspire all manner of new artistic work, but far too much of it fixates on her suicide over the vivid life of her fiction

Virginia Woolf may be famous for her death – she drowned herself in 1941 – but she is enjoying an uncommonly busy afterlife. A seemingly unending stream of novels, plays and films seek to re-animate her, fictionalising Woolf’s life - and death. And it ripples out: her wider circle, the Bloomsbury group, are also regularly brought back to life for our entertainment.

Three novels in the past year have channelled Woolf. Norah Vincent’s Adeline floats between the inner lives of Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister ventriloquises Vanessa Bell, letting us see Woolf through her long-suffering sister’s eyes (the perspective, too, of Susan Sellers’ 2008 novel Vanessa and Virginia). Maggie Gee more literally resurrected her in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, imagining the author suddenly appearing in a New York library in the present day.

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