Virginia Woolf

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(Adeline) Virginia Stephen Woolf

Born 25 January 1882(1882-01-25)
London, England
Died 28 March 1941 (aged 59)
near Lewes, East Sussex, England
Occupation Novelist, Essayist, Publisher, Critic
Notable work(s) To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway
Spouse(s) Leonard Woolf (1880-1969)
Influences
Influenced

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf (née 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."

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen 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, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's 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, George 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 have claimed,[1] 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 royalty.

[edit] Personal life

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.[2] The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began a relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s.[3] 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."[4] After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death.

[edit] Death

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.[5]

On 28 March 1941, rather than having another nervous breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until April 18. 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. ”

[edit] Work

 This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007)

Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.[6] 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 [7].

Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf at Garsington, 1923.
Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf at Garsington, 1923[8].

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.[9] 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." [10]

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]

[edit] 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. [11]

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. Thomas Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (ISBN 0-7658-0321-6) was published in 2006.

[edit] Cultural references

  • Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours uses some of Woolf's characteristic stylistic tools to intertwine a story of the Virginia who is writing Mrs Dalloway with stories of two other women decades apart, each of whom is planning a party. The book was adapted into a 2002 film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie.
  • Playwright Edward Albee asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use his wife's name in the title of his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which concerns a clash between a university professor and his wife as they host a younger faculty couple for evening cocktails. The film adaptation of the play is the only film to be nominated in every eligible category at the Academy Awards.
  • Indiana band Murder by Death have a song entitled "I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" on their first album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing.
  • American folk rock duo Indigo Girls wrote and recorded a song called "Virginia Woolf" for their 1992 album Rites of Passage, and also included it on their live recording 1200 Curfews in 1995.
  • British indie rock band Assembly Now reference Woolf by name in their song "It's Magnetic".
  • British singer Steve Harley wrote and recorded a song "Riding the Waves (for Virginia Woolf)" for his album Hobo with a grin.
  • American folk singer Sara Hickman recorded a song "Room Of One's Own" on her album "Necessary Angels."
  • Laura Veirs references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture".
  • In The Reptile Room, the second novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, there is mention of a snake called the Virginian Wolfsnake. The only thing said about it is that it should never, ever be allowed near a typewriter.
  • In The Hostile Hospital the eighth book in by Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events mentions a woman named Clarissa who is looking sadly out of a window.
  • Folk group Two Nice Girls named their album Chloe Liked Olivia after a key phrase in Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
  • Patrick Wolf's song "To the Lighthouse" was inspired by Woolf's novel.
  • The character Virginia Wolfe in Rocko's Modern Life is named after Woolf.
  • Regina Spektor references Virginia Woolf in her song "Paris".
  • In Scrubs, Elliot cites Virginia Woolf as one of her favorite authors.
  • Javier Krahe, Spanish songwriter, references Virginia Woolf in the song "Nembutal" from his album Corral de Cuernos
  • Profesora, Swedish performance artist released a song called Virginia Woolf at her album.
  • The Murder City Devils, a rock and roll band, reference Virginia Woolf saying, "I think I'll call you Virginia Woolf."
  • In Destroy All Humans!, when at the Santa Monica level, if you scan a housewife's thought she says "I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf."
  • Ludovico Einaudi wrote, probably his most famous solo piano piece, "Le Onde" after reading an Italian translation of Woolf's The Waves.
  • The name of the American band Modest Mouse is derived from a passage from the story "The Mark on the Wall" which reads "...and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people..."
  • The Celtic rock band GrooveLily mentions Virginia Woolf in a live version of their song, "Screwed-Up People Make Great Art."
  • The feature film Notes on a Scandal (Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench) mentions Woolf during a scene where Blanchett screams, "It's a flat in the archway road and you think of friggin' Virginia Woolf!"
  • On her debut album Ballads of Living and Dying, Marissa Nadler chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf in the song "Virginia".
  • The song "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths is a reference to Virginia Woolf's concept in A Room of One's Own, where she argues that if Shakespeare had a sister with similar talents she would have been denied his opportunities.
  • The season 13 Simpsons episode "Homer the Moe" has a reference to Virginia Woolf's drowning death when Moe's old teacher at Swigmore University walks into a lake until it's too deep to swim out.
  • Composer Dominick Argento received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his song cycle, "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf", settings for voice and piano of entries from Woolf's personal diary from 1919 to 1941.
  • American Metalcore band Starkweather reference Virginia Woolf's death and suicide note in their song "Hushabye: Goodnight" with the lyrics, "Find me the heaviest stones to fill my pockets / I thought it for the best that I should drown..."

[edit] Bibliography

See also: Bibliography of Virginia Woolf

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short story collections

[edit] "Biographies"

Virginia Woolf published three books which she gave the subtitle "A Biography":

  • Orlando: A Biography (1928, usually characterised Novel, inspired by the life of Vita Sackville-West)
  • Flush: A Biography (1933, more explicitly cross-genre: fiction as "stream of consciousness" tale by Flush, a dog; non-fiction in the sense of telling the story of the owner of the dog, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
  • Roger Fry: A Biography (1940, usually characterised non-fiction, however: "[Woolf's] novelistic skills worked against her talent as a biographer, for her impressionistic observations jostled uncomfortably with the simultaneous need to marshall a multitude of facts."[12])

[edit] Non-fiction books

  • Modern Fiction (1919)
  • The Common Reader (1925)
  • A Room of One's Own (1929)
  • On Being Ill (1930)
  • The London Scene (1931)
  • The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
  • Three Guineas (1938)
  • The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
  • The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
  • The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)
  • Books and Portraits (1978)
  • Women And Writing (1979)
  • Collected Essays (four volumes)

[edit] Drama

  • Freshwater: A Comedy (performed in 1923, revised in 1935, and published in 1976)

[edit] Autobiographical writings and diaries

  • A Writer’s Diary (1953) - Extracts from the complete diary
  • Moments of Being (1976)
  • A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
  • The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) - Diary of Virginia Woolf from 1915 to 1941
  • Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (1990)
  • Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) - Greek travel diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris
  • The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, Expanded Edition including Dreadnought Hoax talk, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (London, Hesperus, 2008)

[edit] Letters

  • Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters (1993)
  • The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888-1941 (six volumes, 1975-1980)
  • Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)

[edit] Prefaces, contributions

  • Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing ed. Alfred C. Gissing, with an introduction by Virginia Woolf (London & New York, 1929)

[edit] Biographies of Virginia Woolf

  • Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson. New York, Penguin Group. 2000
  • Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972
  • The Unknown Virginia Woolf by Roger Poole. Cambridge UP, 1978.
  • The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
  • Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work by Louise DeSalvo. Boston: Little Brown, 1989
  • A Virginia Woolf Chronology by Edward Bishop. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.
  • A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf by Jane Dunn. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990
  • Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life by Lyndall Gordon. New York: Norton, 1984; 1991.
  • The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness by Thomas D. Caramago. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992
  • Virginia Woolf by James King. NY: W.W. Norton, 1994.
  • Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
  • Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee. New York: Knopf, 1997.
  • Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf by Mitchell Leaska. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
  • Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005
  • My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf by Thomas Szasz, 2006
  • The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury by Sarah M. Hall, New York: Continuum Publishing, 2007
  • A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf by Ilana Simons, New York: Penguin Press, 2007

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Bell, Quentin: Virginia Woolf; a Biography, 1972
  2. ^ Leonard Woolf: A Biography By Victoria Glendinning - Books - Review - New York Times
  3. ^ Matt & Andrej Koymasky - Famous GLTB - Virginia Woolf
  4. ^ Matt & Andrej Koymasky - Famous GLTB - Virginia Woolf
  5. ^ Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.
  6. ^ Virginia Woolf. Retrieved on 2007-10-5.
  7. ^ Haule, J. (1982). Melymbrosia: An Early Version of "The Voyage out". Contemporary Literature, 23, 100-104.
  8. ^ Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.
  9. ^ [1]
  10. ^ "Mr. Virginia Woolf"
  11. ^ "Mr. Virginia Woolf"
  12. ^ Frances Spalding (ed.), Viginia Woolf: Paper Darts: the Illustrated Letters, Collins & Brown, 1991, (ISBN 1-85585-046-X) (hb) & (ISBN 1-85585-103-2) (pb), pp. 139-140

[edit] External links

Literature Portal
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Mrs Dalloway E-Text

v • d • e
Works by Virginia Woolf
Novels:
Short stories:
A Haunted House · A Society · Monday or Tuesday · An Unwritten Novel · The String Quartet · Blue & Green · Kew Gardens · The Mark on the Wall · The New Dress · The Duchess and the Jeweller
Biographies:
Non-fiction:
Modern Fiction · The Common Reader · A Room of One's Own · On Being Ill · The London Scene · The Second Common Reader · Three Guineas · The Death of the Moth and Other Essays · The Moment and Other Essays


Persondata
NAME Woolf, Virginia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stephen, Virginia
SHORT DESCRIPTION English novelist, essayist
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH London, England, UK
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 1941
PLACE OF DEATH near Lewes, England, UK