Virginia Woolf composes biographies by providing portrait-style snapshots of the subject's life. In order to accomplish this synthesis, Woolf attempts to present personality-revealing facts. She does not avoid the facts which Victorian scholars considered unimportant in order to provide a biography that showed the subject as the epitome of that society. Instead of composing full length biographies covering the whole of a person's life, she synthesizes the letters and memoirs of the subject into the form of an essay.