Hermione Lee has created a portrait - rich in detail, epic in scope - that lets us know Virginia Woolf as we never have before: how she looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, how she wrote. This book gives us a vivid sense of the texture of Woolf's daily life - her houses and habits, money and servants, parties and talk.

And through her own words and newly published letters between family members and friends, we gain a fresh and penetrating understanding of Woolf's formative personal relationships: with her parents and siblings; with her husband, Leonard; with writers she edgily admired, such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield; and with the women who changed her life, including Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth.

Lee casts aside the misleading received images of Woolf as an ethereal and emotionally dependent creature, and takes us deep inside her inner being. We see a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered from a terrifying chronic illness and wrestled with the contradictions of her own character. And we see a tougher Woolf than we have previously known: a woman acutely alert to the realities of her times, a committed feminist, an opponent of every sort of political and intellectual fascism.

At the same time, Lee offers an unequalled insight into the connections between Woolf's life and work.