It is quite a responsibility to relate even the bare facts of Virginia Woolf's life, given the sometimes explosively diverging accounts of it in circulation. There are numerous published biographies of Woolf, as well as various collective Bloomsbury ones, a number of which will be briefly considered in Chapter Two. And sketches and snippets concerning Woolf's life crop up in all sorts of places, from Hollywood films to fashion magazine spreads. Leaving aside for the moment such fleeting, and often wholly misleading, cultural appropriations of Woolf's life and persona, each serious biography presents Woolf in a different light, and some offer quite differing views of everything from her writing habits to her relationships, her sexuality, her illness and her suicide. The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography’ (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase ‘granite and rainbow’. ‘Truth’ she envisions ‘as something of granite-like solidity’, and ‘personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’, and ‘the aim of biography’, she proposes, ‘is to weld these two into one seamless whole’ (E4 473). The following short biographical account of Woolf will attempt to keep to the basic granite-like facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality.