This biography of Virginia Woolf is unusual in two respects. It is written by someone who knew her well when he was a child; and it closely investigates her attitudes to feminism and war. Nigel Nicolson was the son of Vita Sackville-West, who was Virginia Woolf's most intimate friend, and for a short time her lover. He spent many days in her company, particularly at the period when she was writing Orlando, her spoof biography of his mother, and he has threaded his recollections of her through his narrative of her life. Virginia Woolf was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, and her writings, specially her novels Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, were works of astonishing originality. She is equally well-known for her two polemical books, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, which have become classics of the feminist movement., although in Nicolson's view they are 'wildly overstated'. On matters political, on the first world war, he also thinks 'she got it wrong'. Nigel Nicolson's life of Virginia Woolf is an affectionate, but not uncritical biography of one of the most remarkable women of her age.

Nigel Nicolson is the son of the politician, diarist and biographer Harold Nicolson, and the writer Vita Sackville-West who restored Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, now a property of the National Trust. The family were close friends with Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Nicolson was the co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, was a Conservative MP in the 1950s and is the author of fifteen previous books.