Virginia Woolf greets you at the door. Sepia-tinted, larger than life, wrapped luxuriously in fur. Like a good hostess, she seems indiscriminately pleased to see everyone. Her face, delicate, emotive, carries a small, ceaseless smile. In the image, taken by an unknown photographer in 1937, she is 55. This summer, London’s National Portrait Gallery has been ambitious, not in terms of size — for the exhibition unfolds only in three rooms — but subject. ‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ hangs on an archway above her head. It promises much, and I try to push away my ambivalence — the kind I always feel before an encounter with a visual project attempting to portray a writer’s life. Under her gaze, I slip inside, and wonder what this might add to my understanding of her and her work.

As it so happened, not much.

Which is not to say the exhibition was incompetently orchestrated. Much care had been taken to source documentation — photographs of people closest to the author, family, servants, and friends (among them TS Eliot and Henry James), the famed Bloomsbury circle (also known as posh, neurotic, ‘intellectual aristocrats’), her various town and country homes, rare glimpses of her childhood (mostly, it seemed, spent playing cricket). Parts of the show even read like a racy Harlequin novel — Woolf’s secret, if short-lived, day-long engagement to writer Lytton Strachey, her brief flirtation with her brother-in-law Clive Bell, her doting adoration of the aristocrat Vita Sackville-West. Disproportionately, much had been made of her experience of war-torn London (unsurprising, given it’s the World War I centenary), while very little is explored of Woolf’s anti-war pacifism, anti-imperialism, or her experience of mental illness that eventually led to her taking her own life in 1951.

Within the National Portrait Gallery’s pristine walls, something was amiss. Her voice. Literally, because there’s scarcely an audio recording of her in existence (she loathed to give press interviews). And also the voice of an author as written text. Of the intimacy forged when we open a book, flip its pages, mark its words. Despite the proliferation of biopics — Sylvia, Iris, Capote (what’s with this penchant for one-name titles?) — exhibitions are rarer. Writers’ lives don’t always make for great cinema, less so for gallery displays. Few, as far as I can recall, have been attempted. I left wondering whether visual treatments of a writer’s life are inevitably bound to fail. Or leave an attendee vaguely dissatisfied. Perhaps. If the template, like this one, remains unchanged. Row upon row of dry evidence of the ‘Literary Life’ — letters, diary pages, endless first editions. It needn’t be so. In 2012, the British Library organised the ambitious and excellent ‘Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands’, exploring literature inspired by landscape around the British Isles. Brought alive by sound recordings, videos, letters, photographs, maps, song lyrics and drawings, as well as manuscripts and printed editions. Which persuades me to think that while people may mourn the passing of the age of letters, future visual portrayals of a contemporary writer’s life might be enlivened by the abundance of digital material. ‘The Collected Emails?’

Well, why not?

At Emory University’s Shatten Gallery, in Georgia, US, for instance, you may snoop through Salman Rushdie’s computer. For all the physical memorabilia — hand-drawn covers for Midnight’s Children , Bono’s lyrics for The Ground Beneath Her Feet — the focus of the exhibit is something intangible: 18 gigabytes of retrieved digital data. Read first drafts and correspondence about his work, check his ‘stickies’. You’re privy to the author’s creative process in context, right down to the games he played during breaks from writing. (Perhaps, in time, his Facebook posts and Twitter timeline will be archived.) At the University of Texas, Austin, the ‘born digital’ literary remains of Norman Mailer include, among others, three laptops documenting correspondence and literary drafts. The Susan Sontag Papers, at the University of California Los Angeles, contain 17,198 emails. Add to this a wealth of visual and audio recordings and an exhibition might be curated that’s less tomb-like.

Yet, beyond innovative and interactive shows, the question remains: does it bring us any closer to the author? Is that even achieved by excavating their lives and uncovering experiences that may have shaped their stories? Perhaps this mad drive to reveal — creative writing courses, literary festivals — springs from the fact that writing, at its most powerful and vibrant, is inherently an act of mystery. And that there persists what Joshua Rothman, archives editor for The New Yorker , calls ‘the artist’s sense of privacy’. If life, as Woolf imagined, was best and most intensely experienced when touched by inexplicability, so it is with writing. Or any art form that moves us. This core of secrecy, she believed, was preserved by shielding it from prying eyes — others’ and our own. Because when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, from where art is born, looking too closely changes what we feel, robs it of radiance. There is reward in leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown. ‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ was curiously devoid of Virginia Woolf. She, I have a feeling, would be immensely pleased.

( Janice Pariat’s novel 'Seahorse' will be published in November; Follow Janice on Twitter >@janicepariat )

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