Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was a British author and feminist, who is considered to be one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Between the world wars, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous novels include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room.

Life and work

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, Woolf was brought up and educated in a classically Victorian household at 22 Hyde Park Gate. In 1895, following the death of her mother, she had the first of several nervous breakdowns. She later indicated in an autobiographical account, "Moments of Being," that she and her sister Vanessa Bell had been sexually abused by their half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. She is now also generally regarded as having suffered from bipolar disorder, an illness which was to colour her work and life, and eventually lead to her death.

Related Topics:
London - 1895 - Nervous breakdown - Vanessa Bell - Sexually abused - Gerald Duckworth - Bipolar disorder

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Following the death of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen, a well-known editor and literary critic) in 1904, she and her sister, Vanessa, moved to a home in Bloomsbury, forming the initial kernel for the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury group. While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.

Related Topics:
Sir Leslie Stephen - Editor - Literary critic - 1904 - Vanessa - Bloomsbury - Bloomsbury group - G.E. Moore

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

She began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a civil servant and political theorist. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. This novel was originally titled "Melymbrosia," but due to criticism Virginia Woolf received about the political nature of the book, she changed the novel and its title. This older version of The Voyage Out has been compiled and is now available to the public under the intended title. She went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She is hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category, such as James Joyce.

Related Topics:
1905 - Times Literary Supplement - 1912 - Leonard Woolf - Civil servant - Political theorist - 1915 - Hogarth Press - Modernists - James Joyce

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. In the words of E.M. Forster, she pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.

Related Topics:
Stream-of-consciousness - E.M. Forster

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War Two, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, it seems that a critical consenus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist: Virginia Woolf is among the greatest of 20th century writers. Reaction against her work has had much to do with the change of sensibility and literary modes dominant in the postwar era?Woolf's novels, in this view, epitomized the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia peopled with delicate, but ultimately trivial and self-centred, introspection-obsessed individuals. One should not overlook the conspicuous absence (or scarcity) of sexual element in representation of her female characters' soliloquizing selves. This weakness is all too visible due to the stream of consciousness technique, which is devised to disclose the workings of protagonists' inner minds. As far as the revealed psychic content was concerned, Woolf's women might have lived in a Victorian novel. Worse yet, her work was judged to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes who seemed to belong to an era definitely closed and buried. Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace is refracted?and sometimes almost dissolved?in the characters's receptive consciousnesses. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Woolf is at her best in rendering self-soliloquizing existences whose perpetual interior dialogue frequently yields Joycean epiphanies on the universals of the human condition. The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision of life elevates ordinary, sometimes banal settings of the greater part of her novels (with the exception of ' and Between the Acts). For example, Mrs. Dalloway centers around Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged society woman's efforts to organize a party; To the Lighthouse is a story on the Ramsay family holiday and the family members' interlocking tensions resolved in a visit to the lighthouse; also, one of the themes is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe; The Waves present a group of six friends whose reflections (closer to recitatives than to the interior monologues proper) create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel. Her last and most ambitious work, "Between the Acts," sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through the art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation- all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.

Related Topics:
Feminist criticism - Mrs. Dalloway - To the Lighthouse - The Waves

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her home in Rodmell. She left a suicide note for her husband: "I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness... I can't fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work" (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, p. 481).

Related Topics:
March 28 - 1941 - River Ouse - Rodmell - Suicide note

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf provides an authoritative examination of Woolf's life, updating the earlier biography by Woolf's own nephew, Quentin Bell.

Related Topics:
Hermione Lee - Quentin Bell

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~