Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. One of the most interesting aspects of Virginia Woolf is that it is a biography. Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography. Dive deep into Hermione Lees Virginia Woolf with extended analysis. Virginia Woolf's Nose is an entertaining book that should make readers very cautious. In the final essay, 'How to End It All,' Lee shows how biographers bend the truth in telling death scenes to make the final moments sum up their lives tidily. With most of the evidence of the author's life destroyed intentionally, modern biographers now speculate on her life, often unfairly. In the third essay, 'Jane Austen Faints,' the essayist tells about how the Austen family controlled the portrayal of the author successfully for a century by having relatives write biographies. Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, and teacher of literature. She also shows how biographers use a Samuel Pepys quote without ever giving it proper context. She uses many stories of what became of the poet Shelley's heart after his death and cremation to illustrate her point. In the first essay in the volume, 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters,' Lee berates biographers for omitting vital facts from their books to simplify their narratives to conform the biographers' viewpoints. She is a critic and biographer who has published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf. She rues that The Hours has now colored the author's public reputation adversely. Hermione Lee is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and the first woman Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She argues in the second of four essays in this book on literary biography that Woolf was actually a humorous, charming person, not Cunningham's drab, unappealing character. Instead, Hermione Lee chose Virginia Woolf's Nose, reflecting her complaints about how Woolf is portrayed in the book and film versions of The Hours by Michael Cunningham. 'Biographers Gone Bad' could have been the title of this book.

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