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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) - in full Adeline Virginia Woolf, original surname
Stephen |
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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 Hogarth
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. "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 was born in
London, as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth
publishing family, and Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, a friend of
Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and the
founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen's
first wife had been the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.
His daughter Laura from the first marriage was institutionalized because of
mental retardation. In a memoir dated 1907 she wrote of her parents,
"Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances
of pure and unutterable delight in each other." Woolf, who was educated at
home by her father, grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate. In middle
age she described this period in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: "Think
how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father's books;
never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools—throwing balls;
ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!" Woolf's youth was
shadowed by series of emotional shocks. Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother,
sexually abused her. In 'Sketch of the Past' (1939) she wrote: "I can
remember the feel of his hands going under my clothes; going firmly and
steadily lower and lower, I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I
stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But he did
not stop." Julia Jackson Duckworth died when Virginia was in her early
teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took her mother's place, but died a
scant two years later. Leslie Stephen suffered a slow death from stomach
cancer, he died in 1904. When Virginia's brother Thoby
died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown. Vanessa, Virginia's sister, influenced a number of her characters; in
childhood they bathed and slept together. Later in FLUSH (1933) Woolf
parodies her own devotion to Vanessa. Following the death of her
father, Woolf moved with her sister and two brothers to the house in
Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter, agreed to marry the critic of art and
literature Clive Bell. He was the only person, whom she trusted sufficiently
to show her unfinished work. Virginia's economic situation improved when she
inherited £2,500 from an aunt. Their house became central to activities of
the Bloomsbury group. "And part of the charm of those Thursday evenings
was that they were astonishingly abstract. It was not only that Moore's book
[Principia Ethica, 1903] had set us all discussing
philosophy, art, religion; it was that the atmosphere – if in spite of Hawtrey I may use that word – was abstract in the
extreme. The young men I have named had no 'manners' in the Hyde Park Gate
sense. They criticized our arguments as severely as their own. They never
seemed to notice how we were dressed or if we were nice looking or not."
(from Moments of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind,
1976) From 1905 Woolf began to
write for the Times Literary Supplement. With Vanessa and Violet
Dickinson she traveled in 1906 to Greece, where she carried Homer's Odyssey
in her handbag. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard (Sidney)
Woolf (1880-1969), who had returned from serving as an administrator in
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Leonard Woolf was of
Jewish descent, the son of a barrister. Woolf had anti-Jewish attitudes, but
she loved her husband. Leonard Woolf had studied at Cambridge and from 1923
to 1930 he was a literary editor on the Nation. During WW I he was not
called for military service, most likely due to his constantly trembling
hands; and most of the Bloomsburies were
conscientious objectors. In 1917 he set up a small hand press at Hogarth
House, and worked as its director until his death. Leonard Woolf's works
include novels, non-fiction, and his five volume memoirs Sowing (1960),
Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All the Way
(1967), and The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (1969). THE VOYAGE OUT (1915) was
Virginia Woolf's first book. In 1919 appeared NIGHT AND DAY, a realistic
novel about the lifes of two friends, Katherine and
Mary. JACOB'S ROOM (1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother Thoby. 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." 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. Marital disappointments and frustrations she often
dealt ironically. In To the Lighthouse Woolf wrote: "So that is
marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at
a girl throwing a ball." 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. 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. During the inter-war period,
Woolf was a central character of the literary scene both in London and at her
home in Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex. She lived in
Richmond from 1915 to 1924, in Bloomsbury from 1924 to 1939, and maintained
the house in Rodmell from 1919-41. Their Hogarth
Press had operated from the basement room in Tavistock
Square. The Bloomsbury group was initially based at the Gordon Square
residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa (Bell). Its other members
included among others E.M.
Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant,
and Leonard Woolf. The consolidation of the group's beliefs in unifying
aesthetic concerns occurred under the influence of the philosopher G.E. Moore
(1873-1958). By the early 1930s, the group ceased to exist in its original
form. Since 1924, the Hogarth
Press had published works by Sigmund Freud. Woolf met him in 1939, and later
wrote in her diary: "A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s
light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert…" 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, like Sylvia Plath's, have
much colored the interpretation of both of their work. Virginia Woolf's concern with feminist thematics are
dominant in A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929). In it she made her famous statement:
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction." The book originated from two expanded and revised
lectures the author presented at Cambridge University's Newnham
and Girton Colleges in October 1928. Woolf examined
the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers. She separated
women as objects of representation and women as authors of
representation, and argued that a change in the forms of literature was
necessary because most literature had been "made by men out of their own
needs for their own uses." In the last chapter Woolf touched the
possibility of an androgynous mind. Woolf refers to Coleridge who said that a
great mind is androgynous and states that when this fusion takes place the
mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. "Perhaps a mind
that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely
feminine..." THREE GUINEAS (1938) urged women to make a claim for their
own history and literature. ORLANDO (1928), a fantasy
novel, traced the career of the androgynous protagonist, Orlando, from a
masculine identity within the Elisabethan court to
a feminine identity in 1928. Chief model for the character was writer Vita Sackville-West, with
whom Woolf had a lesbian relationship. The book was illustrated with pictures
of Vita Sackville-West, dressed as Orlando. According to Nigel Nicolson, the
initiative to start the affair came as much on Virginia's side as on the more
experienced Vita's. Their relationship coincided with a period of great
creative productivity in Woolf's career. In 1994 Eileen Atkins dramatized
their letters in her play Vita and Virginia, starring Atkins and
Vanessa Redgrave. As an essayist Woolf was
prolific. She published some 500 essays in periodicals and collections,
beginning 1905. Characteristic for Woolf's essays are dialogic nature of
style – her reader is often directly addressed, in a conversational tone. A
number of her writings are autobiographical. In the essay on the art of Walter Sickert, which was inspired by her visit in his retrospective show, Woolf asked
how words can express colour, and answered that all
great writers are great colorists: "Each of Shakespeare's plays has its
dominant colour. And each writers
differs of course as a colourist..." (Walter
Sickert: A Conversation, 1934). Woolf rejection
of an authoritative voice links her essays to the tradition of Montaigne. |