(Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel "Night and Day", her second n...)
Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel "Night and Day", her second novel, is an examination of the relationships of its four main characters: Katharine Hilbery, Mary Datchet, Ralph Denham, and William Rodney.
(Through the perspectives and voices of various people clo...)
Through the perspectives and voices of various people close to him, Jacob’s Room follows the life of Jacob Flanders from his childhood through to his young adulthood at the cusp of the First World War.
(From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a n...)
From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.
(Virginia Woolf’s most unusual creation, Orlando is a fant...)
Virginia Woolf’s most unusual creation, Orlando is a fantastical biography as well as a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.
(In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, ...)
In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.
(Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded...)
Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It begins with six children - three boys and three girls - playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.
(The Years is the last novel by Virginia Woolf published i...)
The Years is the last novel by Virginia Woolf published in her lifetime. It traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s.
(From 1918 to 1941, even as she penned masterpiece upon ma...)
From 1918 to 1941, even as she penned masterpiece upon masterpiece, Virginia Woolf kept a diary. She poured into it her thoughts, feelings, concerns, objections, interests, and disappointments - resulting in twenty-six volumes that give unprecedented insight into the mind of a genius.
(Published years after her death, Moments of Being is "the...)
Published years after her death, Moments of Being is "the single most moving and beautiful thing that Virginia Woolf ever wrote about her own life" (The New York Times) and her only autobiographical writing. This collection of five pieces written for different audiences spanning almost four decades reveals the remarkable unity of Virginia Woolf’s art, thought, and sensibility.
(Virginia Woolf’s intention to publish her best short stor...)
Virginia Woolf’s intention to publish her best short stories was posthumously carried out in this volume shortly after her death, this collection making available Virginia Woolf’s most representative short works of fiction.
(Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one mom...)
Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy, and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a "substitute for living" because she was "forbidden to scamper on the grass". Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English a novelist and essayist, and one of the greatest modernists of the twentieth century. She was a significant figure in London literary society, as well as a member of the Bloomsbury Group. She is renowned for her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and her essay A Room of One's Own.
Background
Adeline Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on the 25th of January 1882 in London to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson). Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian, critic, and mountaineer. Julia Stephen was born in India. She moved to England with her mother, and worked as a model. Both parents had children from their previous marriages. Her mother had three children by her first husband. Her father also had one child from his previous marriage.
Education
Virginia Woolf was educated by her parents in the literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. All the children were under the influence of Victorian literary society, which came from both her parents.
In spite of her several nervous breakdowns connected to the deaths of her mother and half-sister, she managed to take courses of study in Greek, Latin, German and History, some of them at degree level. Studying at King's College, she happened to meet some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull.
In 1917, for amusement, Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf originated the Hogarth Press by setting and handprinting on an old press Two Stories by "L. and V. Woolf". The volume was a success, and over the years they published many important books, including Prelude by Katherine Mansfield. The policy of the Hogarth Press was to publish the best and most original work that came to its attention, and the Woolfs as publishers favored young and obscure writers. Virginia's older sister Vanessa, who married the critic Clive Bell, participated in this venture by designing dust jackets for the books issued by the Hogarth Press.
Quite early in her career Virginia Woolf's home in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, became a literary and art center, attracting such diverse intellectuals as E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Arthur Waley, Victoria Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. These artists, critics, and writers became known as the Bloomsbury group. Roger Fry's theory of art may have influenced Virginia's technique as a novelist. Broadly speaking, the Bloomsbury group drew from the philosophic interests of its members the values of love and beauty as preeminent in life.
Virginia Woolf began writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement when she was young, and over the years these and other essays were collected in a two-volume series called The Common Reader (1925, 1933). These studies range with affection and understanding through all of English literature.
Another essay frequently studied is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," written in 1924, in which Virginia Woolf describes the manner in which the older-generation novelist Arnold Bennett would have portrayed Mrs. Brown, a lady casually met in a railway carriage, by giving her a house and furniture and a position in the world. She then contrasts this method with another: one that exhibits a new interest in the subjective Mrs. Brown, the mysteries of her person, her consciousness, and the consciousness of the observer responding to her.
Two of Virginia Woolf's novels, in particular, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), follow successfully the latter approach. The first novels covers a day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway in postwar London. To the Lighthouse is, in a sense, a family portrait and history rendered in subjective depth through selected points in time. The novel is impressionistic, subjectively perceptive, and poignant.
In 1928 Woolf wrote her experimental novel Orlando. The main character Orlando is both a boy in Elizabethan times and a woman of thirty-eight some four centuries later. The Waves (1931) is Virginia Woolf's most experimental and difficult work. It is a series of monologues "spoken" entirely in the present tense by one after another of six characters. These sections in turn are divided into nine larger units, each introduced by an italicized passage describing the sea, the sky, a garden, hills, and a house during some imaginary day. But here inner life is presented in a highly stylized, unrealistic way. What is presented seems more like different aspects of the same consciousness than six separate consciousnesses.
In the early years of World War II, Woolf wrote her last novel, Between the Acts, in a cottage in Rodmell, Sussex, where she and her husband lived after their London home was bombed by the Germans. Depressed about the war and fatigued by the tremendous effort exerted on the novel, she drowned herself on March 28, 1941 in the nearby River Ouse, leaving her husband a farewell note explaining that she feared she was going mad and this time would not recover. Her A Writer's Diary was posthumously published in 1953.
Virginia Woolf was born into an agnostic family, and in a letter to Ethel Smyth, Woolf gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, seeing it as self-righteous "egotism" and stating "my Jew has more religion in one toenail - more human love, in one hair." Woolf stated in her private letters that she thought of herself as an atheist.
Views
In her lifetime Woolf was outspoken on many topics that were considered controversial, some of which are now considered progressive, others regressive. She was an ardent feminist at a time when women's rights were barely recognised, and anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and a pacifist when chauvinism was popular. On the other hand, she has been criticised for views on class and race in her private writings and published works. Like many of her contemporaries, some of her writing is now considered offensive. As a result, she is considered polarising, a revolutionary feminist and socialist hero or a purveyor of hate speech.
Virginia Woolf wrote far more fiction than Joyce and far more nonfiction than either Joyce or Faulkner. Six volumes of diaries (including her early journals), six volumes of letters, and numerous volumes of collected essays show her deep engagement with major 20th-century issues. Though many of her essays began as reviews, written anonymously to deadlines for money, and many include imaginative settings and whimsical speculations, they are serious inquiries into reading and writing, the novel and the arts, perception and essence, war and peace, class and politics, privilege and discrimination, and the need to reform society.
Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political, feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with novelistic form during a remarkably productive career altered the course of Modernist and postmodernist letters.
Quotations:
"Nothing has really happened until it has been described."
"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."
"Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."
"Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."
"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."
"Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
"Let us never cease from thinking—what is this 'civilisation' in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them?"
"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
"I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun."
"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?"
"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."
"At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever."
"Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title."
Membership
Virginia Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Personality
As a young girl, Virginia was curious, light-hearted and playful. Later in life, always extraordinarily sensitive and emotional, Virginia Woolf suffered two severe mental breakdowns: the first, when she was 13 years old, following the death of her mother; the second in 1915, during which she unsuccessfully attempted suicide.
Between the age of six and her early adulthood, Woolf was sexually abused by her two older half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, who are also believed to have abused a number of other girls in the family. It has been suggested that this abuse led to a lifetime of sexual fear and mistrust of male authority.
Quotes from others about the person
Christopher Isherwood: "Her genius was intensely feminine and personal - private almost. To read one of her books was (if you liked it) to receive a letter from her, addressed specially to you."
Camille Paglia: "In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance."
Edith Sitwell: "I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter'."
Connections
In 1912, eight years after her father's death, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a brilliant young writer and critic from Cambridge, whose interests in literature as well as in economics and the labor movement were well suited to hers.
Virginia Woolf
A book by Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact.
1996
Virginia Woolf
In this illuminating account, Alexandra Harris uses vivid flashes of detail to evoke Woolf’s changing backgrounds and preoccupations.
2011
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
The first full-scale biography of the eminent British writer, written by her nephew, Quentin Bell.
1972
Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life
In this book, Julia Briggs puts the writing back at the center of Woolf's life, reads that life through her work, and mines the novels themselves to create a compelling new form of biography. Analyzing Woolf's own commentary on the creative process through her letters, diaries, and essays, Julia Briggs has produced a book that is a convincing, moving portrait of an artist, as well as a profound meditation on the nature of creativity.