The author of this major biography of Virginia Woolf is Professor of English at York University and a distinguished critic and broadcaster. She is also one of my best friends, so do not expect a dispassionate review, though actually I would not have written it differently even if I were unacquainted with her. 

A lot of the interest in Bloomsbury has been a para-literary gossip interest. Readers who know all about the intricate relationships between Virginia and Vanessa and Lytton and Carrington and Clive and Duncan and Maynard and Roger and so on and so on may have only a nodding acquaintance with