Meet the writers: Virginia Woolf
“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel - also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf’s books were published by Hogart Press, which she founded with her husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf. Originally their printing machine was small enough to fit on a kitchen table, but their publications later included T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922), fiction by Maxim Gorky, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, and the complete twenty-four-volume translation of the works of Sigmund Freud.
She was born in London, the daughter of a member of the Duckworth publishing family and a famous literary critic. In her home, she kept in contact with her father’s friends - a group of famous writers that included Henry James, Alfred Tennyson and George Eliot.
Woolf, who was educated at home by her father, had a youth shadowed by a series of emotional shocks: Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, sexually abused her; her father suffered a slow death from cancer; when her beloved brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown.
Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter, agreed to marry the critic of art and literature Clive Bell. Their house become central to activities of the Bloomsbury group, formed by artists and writers - including E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, her brother-in-law Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, and her husband Leonard Woolf. In 1905, Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement, and in 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard (Sidney) Woolf, who had returned from serving as an administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and was also a writer himself.
With TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931), Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. On the publication of To the Lighthouse, Lytton Strachey wrote: “It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more… than an arabesque - an exquisite arabesque, of course.” The Waves is perhaps Woolf’s most difficult novel. It follows in soliloquies the lives of six persons from childhood to old age. Louis Kronenberger noted in The New York Times that Woolf was not really concerned with people, but “the poetic symbols, of life–the changing seasons, day and night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth and death and change.” To the Lighthouse had a tripartite structure: part 1 presented the Victorian family life, the second part covers a ten-year period, and the third part is a long account of a morning and reconciliation. The central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, was based on Woolf’s mother. Also other characters in the book were drawn from Woolf’s family memories.
MRS. DALLOWAY (1925) formed a web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. There is little action, but much movement in time from present to past and back again. The central figure, Clarissa Dalloway, married to Richard Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She spends her day in London preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before World War I, her friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton, and her relationship with Peter Walsh. At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war. Sally returns as Lady Rossetter, Peter Walsh is still enamored with Mrs. Dalloway, the prime minister arrives, and Smith commits suicide. Most critics consider that Woolf’s masterpiece is ORLANDO (1928), a fantasy novel, in which Woolf traced the career of the androgynous protagonist, Orlando, from a masculine identity within the Elisabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928.
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. In her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ Woolf argued that John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and other realistic English novelist dealt in surfaces but to get underneath these surfaces one must use less restricted presentation of life, and such devices as stream of consciousness and interior monologue and abandon linear narrative.
In the event of a Nazi invastion, Woolf and Leonard had made provisions to kill themselves. After the final attack of mental illness, Woolf loaded her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941. On her note to her husband she wrote: “I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.” Woolf’s suicide has much colored the interpretation of both of their work.
