Perhaps her most famous metaphors taken from the natural world, Virginia Woolf's figuration of “granite and rainbow” (“The New Biography” 100) appears to capture both halves of a “neatly split up” question concerning the aims of biography (“The New Biography” 95). Her 1927 essay “The New Biography” assimilates granite with the “hard facts” of reality: it is “truth in its hardest, most obdurate form; it is truth as truThis to be found in the British Museum” (95). In contrast, the rainbow is assimilated with the “artful or highly coloured” (95) and “consists in personality” (96). Granite and rainbow are, as Kathryn Miles summarizes in an earlier edition of conference proceedings, the constituent elements of “a theory of biography that seeks to reconcile the binaries of truth and fiction” (212). Miles argues that we find potential for this reconciliation in viewing Orlando (1928) as the “fictional praxis to underscore [Woolf's] theory” (213), and posits that it is through Orlando's unnamed narrator that we potentially find a biographer capable of bringing these binaries together (217). Where Miles uses “The New Biography” to illustrate the success of Orlando, however, Mitchell Leaska has used Woolf 's essay to explain the “failure” of The Pargiters (xviii). In his 1978 introduction to Woolf 's abandoned project, Leaska maps the theory of granite and rainbow onto Woolf 's initial intention to have essay segments interspersed with fiction and argues that she “gradually realised that all the factual matter which would constitute the essay portions was weighty substance that somehow collided with the artistic design she originally planned,” therefore meaning that “the truth of fact and the truth of fiction could not meet in felicitous alliance” (xiv). Confining Woolf 's term to an oppositional framework, Leaska uses it to argue that The Pargiters failed because Woolf felt “the pressure of granite against rainbow” (vii).

Specific readings of Orlando and The Pargiters are not my primary concern here, but as examples of the ways in which “The New Biography” has been utilized by some of Woolf's critics, they are important for two main reasons.