ADELINE

A Novel of Virginia Woolf

By Norah Vincent

280 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23.

Sometimes we write novels about authors to see if we might get closer to these figures, or coax what remains unsaid out of them. But if an author leaves behind a mountain of diaries and letters, there may be nothing left to imagine but a glorified series of stage directions. And if a biographer of an author is something of an artist in her own right, the resulting life history can be as richly textured and psychologically acute as fiction; it, too, can render make-believe beside the point.

None of this seems to have bothered Vincent, whose “Adeline” imagines several episodes in the life of Virginia Woolf, taking us from the morning in 1925 when she conceived “To the Lighthouse” to the morning in 1941 when she ended her life by walking into the River Ouse. There is no real plot to the book; we eavesdrop on interior monologues and dialogues with those in her circle. She and her husband, Leonard, bristle at and bend to each other; she navigates with awe and amusement some meetings with Yeats; she spars with Lytton Strachey; she submits to a visit to the doctor Leonard arranged for her to see before she died.

Woolf in this novel does not sound like Woolf. “God, but he is astounding,” she thinks while watching Yeats, whom she calls a “wild-eyed Fenian shaman,” at a gathering. That fangirl breathlessness isn’t Woolf talking as much as it is Vincent, whose acerbic voice seems to inflect this portrait. Woolf might be amused to find herself being garlanded with overwrought prose, as in this reckoning with a breakfast tray: “Standing over it, she stiffens, eyeing the delinquent bun as if it were a calling card left by one of those unctuous second-tier society women whom she somehow both needs and loathes.” In and around this dissonance, however, Vincent is a sensitive recorder of a mind’s movements as it shifts in and out of inspiration, and as it fights before submitting to despair. It’s an impressive change in Vincent’s own register, considering that in her book “Voluntary Madness,” she offered the depressed, among whom she herself has been numbered, this advice: “You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.” In the end, she is sympathetic without being overly sycophantic.