Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English author, feminist,
essayist, publisher, and critic wrote A Room of One’s Own (1929);
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you
will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true
nature of fiction unsolved.-Ch. 1
Now regarded as a classic feminist work, Woolf
based her extended essay A Room on lectures she had given at women’s
colleges at Cambridge University. Using such female authors as Jane Austen and Emily and Charlotte Bronte, she examines women and their struggles as
artists, their position in literary history and need for independence. She also
invents a female counterpart of William Shakespeare, a sister named Judith to at times
sarcastically get her point across. Woolf proved to be an innovative and
influential 20th Century author. In some of her novels she moves away from the
use of plot and structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasise the
psychological aspects of her characters. Themes in her works include gender
relations, class hierarchy and the consequences of war. Woolf was among the
founders of the Modernist movement which also includes T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.
The effects of bi-polar disorder at times caused
Woolf protracted periods of convalescence, withdrawing from her busy social
life, distressed that she could not focus long enough to read or write. She
spent times in nursing homes for ‘rest cures’; frankly referred to herself as
‘mad’; said she heard voices and had visions. “My own brain is to me the
most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring
diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this
passion for?” (from a letter dated 28 Dec. 1932).
The subject of suicide enters her stories and essays at times and she disagreed
with the perception that it is an act of cowardice and sin. When Virginia was
not depressed she worked intensely for long hours at a time. She was vivacious,
witty and ebullient company and a member of the Bloomsbury Group or
‘Bloomsbury’ which had been started by her brother Thoby
and his friends from Cambridge. It quickly grew to encompass many of London’s
literary circle, who gathered to discuss art,
literature, and politics. During her life and since her death she has been the
subject of much debate and discussion surrounding the sexual abuse she suffered
at the hands of her half-brother, her mental health issues and sexual
orientation. Also, her pacifist political views in line with Bloomsbury caused
controversy. From Three Guineas (1931);
Therefore if
you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood,
soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex
instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and
probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either
myself or my country. “For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I
have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the
whole world.”-Ch. 3
Regardless of the polemic, or because of it,
even into the 21st Century Woolf’s prodigious output of diaries, letters,
critical reviews, essays, short stories, and novels continue to be the source
of much scholarly study. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London, England
on 25 January 1882, daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), literary critic
and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. His first
wife, daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Marion (b.1840) died
in 1875. Virginia’s mother was his second wife, Julia Prinsep
Jackson Duckworth (1846-1895) who inspired the character Mrs. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse (1927).
Virginia had two brothers, Thoby
(1880-1906) and Adrian (1883-1948) who became a psychoanalyst. She was very
close to her older sister Vanessa ‘Nessa’ (1876-1961)
who would become a painter and marry art critic Clive Bell. She also had four
half-siblings; Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870-1945), and George (1868-1934),
Gerald (1870-1937) [who would found Duckworth and Co. Publishing] and Stella
(1869-1897) Duckworth.
A number of the Stephen relatives were friends
of Scottish historian and author Thomas Carlyle. Many other successful Victorian authors of the
time were regular visitors to their bustling home in Hyde Park including Henry James and George Eliot; Virginia would write an article about her for
the Times Literary Supplement in 1919. “Middlemarch,
the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English
novels for grown-up people.” (“George Eliot”). Their works and many others’ including Charles Dickens’s and Thackeray’s were part of her home
education. Her father had a massive library so she and her sister were not
without material although Virginia would soon reject the values and morals of
their generation.
The Stephens summered at ‘Talland
House’ in St. Ives, County Cornwall in the southwest of England along the rocky
shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Virginia had vivid and fond memories of these
times which often had an influence on her writing including visits to a nearby
lighthouse. However they ended when her mother died; she was just thirteen
years old and suffered the first major breakdown of many that would plague her
off and on the rest of her life. The death of Stella, who had become like a
mother to Virginia and the death of her father caused another period of
profound depression. “The beauty of the world ... has two edges, one of
laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” (A Room of One’s
Own). Vanessa then moved her sister and brothers to another neighborhood in
London, Bloomsbury. Virginia was feeling better and by 1905 was writing in
earnest articles and essays, and became a book reviewer for the Times
Literary Supplement. She also taught teaching English and History at Morley
College in London.
In 1906 Virginia, Vanessa and their brothers
traveled to Europe, where Thoby contracted typhoid
fever and died from in 1906. Back in England the Bloomsbury Group was
flourishing, their home a meeting place for writers, scholars and artists
including Clive Bell, artist and art critic, who Vanessa married 1907. They
would not stay together for long. After his third proposal, Virginia finally
married left-wing political journalist, author and editor
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) on 10 August 1912. They would have no children. In
1914 when World War I broke out they were living in Richmond and Woolf was
working on her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) a satirical
coming-of-age story;
As the
streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is
better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will
have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget
behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded,
eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to
wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.-Ch. 1
Leonard and Virginia would themselves get into
the publishing business, together founding the Hogarth Press in 1917. Works by T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield would be among their
many publications including Virginia’s. Night and Day (1919) was
followed by her short story collection Monday or Tuesday (1921) and
essays in The Common Reader (1925). Jacob’s Room (1922) was
followed by Mrs. Dalloway (1925) which inspired a film “The Hours” in
2002. To The Lighthouse (1927) was followed by Orlando: A Biography (1928);
Different
though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from
one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep
the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what
it is above…..Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life,
every quality of his mind is written large in his works.-Ch.
4
One of her more popular novels, it was adapted
to the screen in 1993. A roman à clef, Orlando’s character is modeled
after Vita Sackville West (1892-1962), friend and possible lover of Woolf;
Princess Sasha based on her friend Violet Trefusis.
Vita’s husband Harold Nicolson also plays a part as Marmaduke.
Their son Nigel referred to it as “the longest and most charming love letter in
literature.” “I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am
a woman again—as I always am when I write.” (The Diary
of Virginia Woolf, 31 May 1929.) The Waves (1931) is said to
be Woolf’s most experimental work. Flush: A Biography (1933) is told
through the eyes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. The Second Common
Reader (1933) her next collection of critical essays, was followed by The
Years (1937) and Roger Fry: A Biography
(1940).
With the outbreak of WWII the Woolfs were living at their country retreat, ‘Monk’s House’
near the village of Rodmell in Lewes, Sussex, which
is now preserved by the National Trust. In 1940 they received word that their
London home had been destroyed. Fear of a German invasion loomed and Leonard’s
Jewish heritage provoked the couple to make a suicide pact if the possibility
of falling into German hands arose. Leonard as usual was ever vigilant to the
onset of the next major depressive episode in his wife; she would get migraine
headaches and lay sleepless at night. However, he and her doctor, who had seen
her the day before, would never intuit that her next one was to be her last.
Her letters to friends had been written in shaky handwriting and though she was
actively working on her manuscript for what was to be the last publication
before her death, Between the Acts (1941) she did express much disdain
for its worth and wanted to ‘scrap’ it.
The scullery
maid....was cooling her cheeks by the lily pond. There had always been lilies
there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green
plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the
hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of
mud....fish swam—gold, splashed with white....poised in the blue patch made by
the sky....It was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had
drowned herself.
Virginia Woolf died on 28 March 1941 when she
drowned herself in the River Ouse near their home in
Sussex, by putting rocks in her coat pockets. Her body was found later in April
and she was then cremated, her ashes spread under two elms at Monks’ House. She
had left two similar suicide notes, one possibly written a few days earlier
before an unsuccessful attempt. The one addressed to Leonard read in part;
Dearest, I
feel certain I am going mad again....And I shan’t recover this time.....I am
doing what seems the best thing to do....I can’t fight any longer....Everything
has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling
your life any longer....I don’t think two people could have been happier than
we have been. V.
After her death, Leonard set to the task of
editing her vast collection of correspondence, journals, and unpublished works
and also wrote an autobiography. He died in 1960. Posthumous publications
include; The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), A Haunted
House and Other Short Stories (1944), and The Moment and Other Essays
(1948). Virginia’s nephew, the late Professor Quentin Bell (1910-1996) wrote
the award winning Virginia Woolf: A biography (2 vols,
London: Hogarth Press, 1972).
Every season
is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude.
Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of
dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own
orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is
everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness. So, in the
name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the end of the journey. The
Common Reader “Montaigne”-Ch. 6
Biography written by C. D.
Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic
Inc. 2007. All Rights Reserved.