Virginia Woolf
(Adeline)
Virginia Woolf (Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March
1941) was an English novelist and essayist, 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."
Adeline
Virginia Stephen born in London to Sir Leslie
Stephen, considered the father of the Bloomsbury
Group, and Julia Prinsep Stephen (born 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 each been married previously, and their spouses
had died. Consequently, 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) was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she
was institutionalised in 1891. Laura remained there for the rest of her life.
Leslie and Julia's children comprised the third subset of 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, T. S.
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 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 institutionalized.
Her
breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars
(including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) 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.
Following
studies at King's College London, Woolf 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 royal.
Virginia
Stephen married writer Leonard
Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless
Jew." The couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in her diary
"Love-making — after 25 years can’t be attained by my unattractive
countenance ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted, a pleasure that I
have never felt." They also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding
the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published
most of Woolf's work. The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold
Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a relationship that lasted through
most of the 1920s. 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. After their affair ended, the two women remained friends
until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf was also very close to her family,
including her sister, Vanessa Bell and Vanessa's husband Clive Bell.
After
completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel Between
the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to
that which she had earlier experienced. The war, the Luftwaffe's destruction of her London homes, as well as the cool reception given to her biography of her late
friend Roger
Fry, worsened her condition until she was unable to work.
On March 28,
1941, after having a nervous
breakdown, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into
the River Ouse near her home and drowned
herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her
cremated remains under a tree in the garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex.
In her last
note to her husband she wrote:
|
“ |
I feel certain that I am going
mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I
shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So
I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest
possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I
don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease
came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that
without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write
this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of
my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I
want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would
have been you. 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. |
” |
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 Woolf repeatedly changed the
draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by
Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the
intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text
were in response to changes in her own life.
Woolf 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 and the underlying
psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. 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 was also criticized by some as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage
to a Jewish man. 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 Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I
hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."
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 - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. 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]
Her works
have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers of the calibre of Jorge
Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.
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,
which is even more extensively researched and supported by contemporaneous
writings, argues that Leonard Woolf was not only very supportive of his wife,
but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and
atmosphere she needed to live and write. Accounts of Virginia's supposed
anti-semitism (Leonard was a secular Jew) are not only taken out of historical
context but greatly exaggerated. Virginia's own diaries support this view of
the Woolfs' marriage.
The first
biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her nephew, Quentin Bell.
In 1989
Louise Desalvo published the book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood
Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.
In 1992,
Thomas Caramagno published the book The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's
Art and Manic-Depressive Illness."
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.
Short story
collections
Virginia Woolf
published three books which she gave the subtitle "A Biography":
Autobiographical writings and diaries
Notes
Novels
Letters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf