ABSTRACT
The themes of duality and mirroring selves are prevalent in the novels studied in Chapter 5, ‘Polarity, Pairs, Peers and Parallelisms’: Norah Vincent’s Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (2015), Alienora Taylor’s Riding at the Gates of Sixty: A Fictional Account of Virginia Woolf’s Death and Life (2015) and Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998). This chapter illustrates the way other characters act as catalysts in their interactions with Virginia and reveal her hidden facets, secret motivations and intuitive creative process. These biographical novels have an episodic structure and a teleological, dramatic arc, which explains and leads to Virginia’s expected death. While Virginia is limned as a tragic figure in Vincent’s and Taylor’s novels, Nunez’s Virginia is depicted in comic situations as the unusual rival of Mitz, the marmoset, and as the author of Flush in a novel that imitates Woolf’s 1933 original mock biography. In this chapter, discussions about stylistic pastiche lead to broader considerations about the potentialities of biofiction, which can function as a matrix for digested, popularised literary criticism with a pedagogical aim for the mainstream reader.
