A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: British novelist who helped create the modern novel - also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Her writing often explores the concepts of time, memory, and people’s inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception. Before the early 1900s, fiction emphasized plot as well as detailed descriptions of characters and setitbusngs. Events in the external world, such as a marriage, murder, or deception, were the most important aspects of a story. Characters' interior, or mental, lives served mainly to prepare for or motivate such meaningful external occurrences. Woolf's novels, however, emphasized patterns of consciousness rather than sequences of events in the external world. Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. In Woolf’s best fiction, plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters. Psychological effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Character unfolds by means of the ebb and flow of personal impressions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus, the inner lives of human beings and the ordinary events in their lives are made to seem extraordinary. Woolf's fiction was drawn largely from her own experience, and her characters are almost all members of her own affluent, intellectual, upper-middle class. Woolf had several major concerns other than her expressed desire to represent consciousness. She was, for example, fascinated with time—both as a sequence of moments and in terms of years and centuries—and with the differences between external and internal time. This preoccupation is often evident in the structure of her novels; Mrs. Dalloway (1925) occurs within the consciousness of several people during the course of one day, whereas Orlando (1928) traces the history of a single character who reappears over several centuries. Woolf was also interested in defining qualities specific to the female mind. She saw female sensibility as intuitive, close to the core of things, and thus able to liberate the masculine intellect from what she viewed as its enslavement to abstract concepts. Adeline Virginia Woolf was born into the late Victorian intellectual aristocracy in Hyde Park Gate, London, 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephens, was the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Duckworth (née Jackson), was a widow with three children when she married Leslie Stephens in 1887. Virginia was the third of the four children of the marriage. She was a nervous and delicate child, and, with her sister, was educated at home, mainly by her parents. Woolf's youth was shadowed by series of emotional shocks - her half-brother Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her and her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took her mother's place, but died a scant two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. After her father's death, in 1904, she, her sister Vanessa, and her brothers Adrian and Thoby moved to Bloomsbury, then a bohemian section of London. From 1905 she wrote for the Times Literary Supplement and autorbusght at Morley College, Waterloo Road, London from 1907. This was the first time she had ever held intellectual discussions with her social inferiors. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard Woolf (1880-1969). Virginia Woolf, her husband, her siblings, and their friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Meeting frequently until about 1930, the group included novelist E. M. Forster, biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, painter Duncan Grant, art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell (Vanessa's husband), economist John Maynard Keynes, and editor Desmond McCarthy. Although Virginia was not sexually interested in men, she hoped to have children. Leonard consulted doctors and was told it was inadvisable because of her health. Leonard Woolf cared for her during her bouts of mental illness and gave her the stability that enabled her to write. In 1914, she was depressed, had delusions, developed a resistance to food and attempted suicide. In 1915 she published her first book, The voyage out. In 1919 appeared Night and day, a realistic novel set in London, contrasting the lives of two friends, Katherine and Mary. In 1917, the Woolfs founded the Hogarth Press, working on a hand-press in their home at Hogarth House, Richmond, Surrey. In 1919, they printed TS Eliot's Poems. Jacob's room (1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother Toby. With To the lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. In these works Woolf developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women's experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) formed a giant web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. The central figure in the novel, Mrs. Ramsay, was based on Woolf's mother. Also other characters in the book were drawn from Woolf's family memories. Orlando (1928), a fantasy novel, traced the career of the androgynous protagonist from a masculine identity within the Elisabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928. It was dedicated to her lover Vita Sackville-West and is in effect an extended love letter. The story covers four centuries and starts with the beautiful 16-year-old aristocratic poet, Orlando, who, in 1600, becomes the favourite of Elizabeth I. During the reign of Charles II Orlando changes sex and Lady Orlando continues down the centuries, arriving at her Kent home, which is recognisably Knole, the ancestral home of the Sackvilles. The story is reproduced in the film Orlando. Virginia Woolf is regarded as a major figure in the Modernist movement, making significant contibutions to the development of the novel. She is known as an experimenter and innovator in novel writing, particularly in her use of the techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Her novels are noted for their poetic and symbolic quality, where the emphasis is not on plot or action but rather the psychological life of the characters. Her novels are also known for their delicacy and sensitivity of style, their evocation of place and mood, and their background of historical and literary reference. Many are concerned with time, its passage and the difference between external and inner time. Besides novels, Woolf also published many works of nonfiction, including two extended essays exploring the roles of women in history and society: A room of one's own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), where she examined the necessity for women to make a claim for their own history and literature. Her works of literary criticism include The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932). After her death, Woolf’s diaries were edited and published in five volumes between 1977 and 1984 as The Diary of Virginia Woolf. The Letters of Virginia Woolf appeared in six volumes from 1975 to 1980. As an essayist Woolf was prolific, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905. Characteristic for Woolf's essays are dialogic nature of style and continual questioning of opinion - her reader is often directly addressed, in a conversational tone, and her rejection of an authoritative voice links her essays to the tradition of Montaigne. From July 1940, the Woolfs became afraid of Nazi invasion (Leonard was Jewish), and they decided to gas themselves with car fumes if the invasion came. They kept enough petrol for this purpose. By 1941, Leonard became increasingly concerned by the deterioration in Virginia's health. Her depression grew as the fear of madness enveloped her. On 28 March 1941, she loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse at Rodmell, Sussex and was drowned. |
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