Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English novelist and essay writer who is regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

Biography

Early life

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson) (1846–1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Virginia's parents had married each other after being widowed and the household contained the children of three marriages: Julia's children with her first husband Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth (1868–1934); Stella Duckworth (1869–1897); and Gerald Duckworth (1870–1937). Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945), Leslie's daughter with Minny Thackeray, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's children: Vanessa Stephen (1879–1961); Thoby Stephen (1880–1906); Virginia; and Adrian Stephen (1883–1948).

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter) meant that Woolf was raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society.

Henry James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at 22 Hyde Park Gate, from which Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the classics and English literature.

According to her memoirs her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of London, but of St Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The family stayed in their home called the Talland House, which looked out over the Porthminster Bay. Memories of the family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction she wrote in later years, notably To the Lighthouse. She also based the summer home in Scotland after the Talland House and the Ramsay family after her own family.

The sudden death of her mother from influenza in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.

Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed, were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her work, relationships, and life, and eventually led to her suicide. Following the death of her father in 1904 and her second serious nervous breakdown, Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate, and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. There they came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group which came to notorious fame in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax Virginia Woolf participated in, dressed as a male Abyssinian royalty.

Personal life

Woolf married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew." Many biographers have concluded that the marriage was never fully consummated, and that Woolf's sexuality was primarily directed toward women. However, the couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in her diary "Love-making — after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." They also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's work.^[1] The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began an affair that lasted through most of the 1920s.^[2] In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."^[3] Although their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death.

Other intimate friendships included Madge Vaughn (the daughter of J. A. Symonds, and inspiration for the character of Mrs. Dalloway), and Violet Dickinson, composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth, and Woolf's beloved sister Vanessa Bell.

Death

After completion of the first manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel Between the Acts Virginia Woolf fell victim to depression similar to previous illness that she had experienced earlier in life. The ongoing war and the destruction of her homes in London during the air raids of the German Airforce, as well as the cool reception of her biography on her late friend Roger Fry worsened her condition, until she was convinced to be totally unable to work. ^[4]

On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until the 18 April. Her husband buried her remains under a tree in their garden.

In her last note to her husband she wrote:

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.

This novel was originally entitled 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 has been 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.

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.

Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.

Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it 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. She is also criticized as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jew. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leanord's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality." ^[5]

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' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings of most of her novels, even as they are often set in an environment of war. For example, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind.

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through 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.

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.^{[citation needed]}

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise A. DeSalvo offers treatment of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf experienced as a young woman in her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.

Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class, and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and intellectuals faced in an era when men held disproportionate legal and economic power, and the future of women in education and society.

Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf takes the position that Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. The position, which is not accepted by Leonard's family, is extensively researched and fills in some of the gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life. In contrast, Victoria Glendinning's book Leonard Woolf: A Biography, argues that Leonard Woolf was very supportive of his wife, remarkably so in view of her "corrosive contempt" for his Jewish origins.^[6]

The first biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her favorite nephew, Quentin Bell.

In 1989 Louise Desalvo published the book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.

Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf ISBN 0-7658-0321-6 was published in 2006.

Cultural references

• Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours uses some of Woolf's characteristic stylistic tools to intertwine a story of the Virginia who is writing Mrs. Dalloway with stories of two other women decades apart, each of whom is planning a party. The book was adapted into a 2002 film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie.
• Playwright Edward Albee asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use his wife's name in the title of his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which concerns a clash between a university professor and his wife as they host a younger faculty couple for evening cocktails.
• Indiana band Murder by Death have a song entitled "I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" on their first album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing.
• American folk rock duo Indigo Girls wrote and recorded a song called "Virginia Woolf" for their 1992 album Rites of Passage, and also included it on their live recording 1200 Curfews in 1995.
• British indie rock band Assembly Now reference Woolf by name in their song "It's Magnetic".
• British singer Steve Harley wrote and recorded a song "Riding the Waves (for Virginia Woolf)" for his album Hobo with a grin.
• Indie rock band Modest Mouse got their name from a passage from her story "The Mark on the Wall".
• Laura Veirs references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture".
• In The Reptile Room, the second novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, there is mention of a snake called the Virginian Wolfsnake. The only thing said about it is that it should never, ever be allowed near a typewriter.
• Folk group Two Nice Girls named their album Chloe Liked Olivia after a key phrase in Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
• Patrick Wolf's song "To the Lighthouse" was inspired by Woolf's novel.
• The character Virginia Wolfe in Rocko's Modern Life is named after Woolf.
• in Scrubs, Elliot cites Virginia Woolf as one of her favorite authors.
• Javier Krahe, spanish songwriter, references Virginia Woolf in the song Nembutal from his album Corral de Cuernos

Bibliography

Novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob's Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando: A Biography (1928)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• The Waves (1931)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Short fiction

• Monday or Tuesday (1921 edition)
  • 'A Haunted House'
  • 'A Society'
  • 'Monday or Tuesday'
  • 'An Unwritten Novel'
  • 'The String Quartet'
  • 'Blue & Green'
  • 'Kew Gardens'
  • 'The Mark on the Wall'

• A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944 edition)
  • 'A Haunted House'
  • 'Monday or Tuesday'
  • 'An Unwritten Novel'
  • 'The String Quartet'
  • 'Kew Gardens'
  • 'The Mark on the Wall'
  • 'The New Dress'
  • 'The Shooting Party'
  • 'Lappin and Lappinova'
  • 'Solid Objects'
  • 'The Lady in the Looking-Glass'
  • 'The Duchess and the Jeweller'
  • 'Moments of Being: Slater's Pins have no Points'
  • 'The Man who Loved his Kind'
  • 'The Searchlight'
  • 'The Legacy'
  • 'Together and Apart'
  • 'A Summing Up'

• The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985 edition)
  • 'Phyllis and Rosamond'
  • 'The Mysterious Case of Miss V.'
  • 'The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn'
  • 'A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus'
  • 'Memoirs of a Novelist'
  • 'The Mark on the Wall'
  • 'Kew Gardens'
  • 'The Evening Party'
  • 'Solid Objects'
  • 'Sympathy'
  • 'An Unwritten Novel'
  • 'A Haunted House'
  • 'A Society'
  • 'Monday or Tuesday'
  • 'The String Quartet'
  • 'Blue & Green'
  • 'A Woman's College from Outside'
  • 'In the Orchard'
  • 'Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street'
  • 'Nurse Lugton's Curtain'
  • 'The Widow and the Parrot: A True Story'
  • 'The New Dress'
  • 'Happiness'
  • 'Ancestors'
  • 'The Introduction'
  • 'Together and Apart'
  • 'The Man who Loved his Kind'
  • 'A Simple Melody'
  • 'A Summing Up'
  • 'Moments of Being: Slater's Pins have no Points'
  • 'The Lady in the Looking-Glass'
  • 'The Fascination of the Pool'
  • 'Three Pictures'
  • 'Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer'
  • 'Miss Pryme'
  • 'Ode Written Partly in Prose'
  • 'Portraits'
  • 'Uncle Vanya'
  • 'The Duchess and the Jeweller'
  • 'The Shooting Party'
  • 'Lappin and Lappinova'
  • 'The Searchlight'
  • 'Gypsy, the Mongrel'
  • 'The Legacy'
  • 'The Symbol'
  • 'The Watering Place'

Books sub-titled as "A Biography"

Apart from several essays containing biographical descriptions, Virginia Woolf published three books which she gave the subtitle "A Biography":

• Orlando: A Biography (1928, usually characterised Novel, inspired by the life of Vita Sackville-West)
• Flush: A Biography (1933, more explicitly cross-genre: fiction as "stream of consciousness" tale by Flush, a dog; non-fiction in the sense of telling the story of the owner of the dog, Elizabeth Barret Browning)
• Roger Fry: A Biography (1940, usually characterised non-fiction, however: "[Woolf's] novelistic skills worked against her talent as a biographer, for her impressionistic observations jostled uncomfortably with the simultaneous need to marshall a multitude of facts."^[7])

Non-fiction

• Modern Fiction (1919)
• The Common Reader (1925)
  • 'The Common Reader'
  • 'The Pastors and Chaucer'
  • 'On not knowing Greek'
  • 'The Elizabethan Lumber Room'
  • 'Notes on an Elizabethan Play'
  • 'Montaigne'
  • 'The Duchess of Newcastle'
  • 'Rambling round Evelyn'
  • 'Defoe'
  • 'Addison'
  • 'Lives of the Obscure - Taylors and Edgeworths'
  • 'Lives of the Obscure - Laetitia Pilkington'
  • 'Jane Austen'
  • 'Modern Fiction'
  • 'Jayne Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights'
  • 'George Eliot'
  • 'The Russian Point of View'
  • 'Outlines - Miss Mitford'
  • 'Outlines - Bentley'
  • 'Outlines - Lady Dorothy Nevill'
  • 'Outlines - Archbishop Thomson'
  • 'The Patron and the Crocus'
  • 'The Modern Essay'
  • 'Joseph Conrad'
  • 'How it strikes a Contemporary'
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• On Being Ill (1930)
• The London Scene (1931)
• The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
  • 'The Strange Elizabethans'
  • 'Donne After Three Centuries'
  • '"The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia"'
  • '"Robinson Crusoe"'
  • 'Dorothy Osborne's "Letters"'
  • 'Swift's "Journal of Stella"'
  • 'The "Sentimental Journey"'
  • 'Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son'
  • 'Two Parsons: James Woodforde, John Skinner'
  • 'Dr. Burney's Evening Party'
  • 'Jack Mytton'
  • 'De Quincey's Autobiography'
  • 'Four Figures: Cowper and Lady Austen, Beau Brummell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth'
  • 'William Hazlitt'
  • 'Geraldine and Jane'
  • '"Aurora Leigh"'
  • 'The Niece of an Earl'
  • 'George Gissing'
  • 'The Novels of George Meredith'
  • '"I am Christina Rossetti"'
  • 'The Novels of Thomas Hardy'
  • 'How Should One Read a Book?'
• Three Guineas (1938)
• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
  • 'The Death Of The Moth'
  • 'Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car'
  • 'Three Pictures'
  • 'Old Mrs. Grey'
  • 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure'
  • '"Twelfth Night" at the Old Vic'
  • 'Madame de Sévigné'
  • 'The Humane Art'
  • 'Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole'
  • 'The Rev. William Cole: A Letter'
  • 'The Historian and "The Gibbon"'
  • 'Reflections at Sheffield Place'
  • 'The Man at the Gate'
  • 'Sara Coleridge'
  • '"Not One Of Us"'
  • 'Henry James'
    • '1. Within the Rim'
    • '2. The Old Order'
    • '3. The Letters of Henry James'
  • 'George Moore'
  • 'The Novels of E. M. Forster'
  • 'Middlebrow'
  • 'The Art of Biography'
  • 'Craftsmanship'
  • 'A Letter to a Young Poet'
  • 'Why?'
  • 'Professions for Women'
  • 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid'
• The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
• The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)
  • 'Oliver Goldsmith'
  • 'White's Selborne'
  • 'Life Itself'
  • 'Crabbe'
  • 'Selina Trimmer'
  • 'The Captain's Death Bed'
  • 'Ruskin'
  • 'The Novels Of Turgenev'
  • 'Half Of Thomas Hardy'
  • 'Leslie Stephen'
  • 'Mr. Conrad: A Conversation'
  • 'The Cosmos'
  • 'Walter Raleigh'
  • 'Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown' (1924)
  • 'All About Books'
  • 'Reviewing'
  • 'Modern Letters'
  • 'Reading'
  • 'The Cinema'
  • 'Walter Sickert'
  • 'Flying Over London'
  • 'The Sun And The Fish'
  • 'Gas'
  • 'Thunder At Wembley'
  • 'Memories Of A Working Women's Guild'
• Women And Writing (1979)

Play

• Freshwater: A Comedy - Play written in 1935, published in 1976 and then in 1985 (edited by Lucio P. Ruotolo, drawings by Edward Gorey)

Autobiography

• A Writer’s Diary (1953) - Extracts from the complete diary
• Moments of Being (1976)
• A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
• A Passionate Apprentice: the early journals (1990)
• Congenial Spirits: the selected letters (1993)
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) - Diary of Virginia Woolf from 1915 to 1941
• The Flight of the Mind: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 1 1888 - 1912 (1975)
• The Question of Things Happening: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 2 1913 - 1922 (1976)
• A Change of Perspective: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 3 1923 - 1928 (1977)
• A Reflection of the Other Person: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 4 1929 - 1931 (1978)
• The Sickle Side of the Moon: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 5 1932 - 1935 (1979)
• Leave the Letters Till We're Dead: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 6 1936 - 1941 (1980)
• Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (1990)
• Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)
• Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) - Greek travel diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris

Books about the life of Virginia Woolf

• Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson. New York, Penguin Group. 2000
• Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972
• The Unknown Virginia Woolf by Roger Poole. Cambridge UP, 1978.
• The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
• Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work by Louise DeSalvo. Boston: Little Brown, 1989
• A Virginia Woolf Chronology by Edward Bishop. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.
• A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf by Jane Dunn. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990
• Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life by Lyndall Gordon. New York: Norton, 1984; 1991.
• The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness by Thomas D. Caramago. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992
• Virginia Woolf by James King. NY: W.W. Norton, 1994.
• Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
• Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee. New York: Knopf, 1997.
• Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf by Mitchell Leaska. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
• Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005

Notes

Wikipedia information about Virginia Woolf This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Virginia Woolf". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.