Virginia Woolf

(1882 1941)

Virginia Woolf always wanted to go beyond external reality, exploring man's inner mental experience (memories, sudden thoughts, hidden feelings), in the continuous "stream of consciousness" of our mind. She abandoned traditional plot, time sequence, since, in our incessant interior monologue, we shift back and forth in time, from present to past. Silent mental activity is more important than visible real events.

Life:
Virginia was born in 1882 in London. She received her education mostly at home, from their parents, or from their governesses. The unforgettable home of Virginia's youth was Talland House; she adored the ocean, the sound of the waves. All this provided a treasure house of reminiscences, which she drew on for such works as "To the Lighthouse" or "The Waves". When Virginia was thirteen, her mother died (1895). She was deeply affected by her mother's death, and for a long period she suffered from depression. Nel 1904 his father died; Virginia went through a period of feverish, even attempting suicide. Then she moved in Bloomsbury, in Gordon Squere. The Bloomsbury Group The spacious Bloomsbury home became the centre of intellectuals and artists. The "group" followed ideals like reject all inhibitions, exaltation the most refined "states of consciousness", which advocated rising above reality and following the winding path of mental activity. They refused the inferior role attributed to women, whilst celebrating free love and homosexuality. The group was an expression of the new tendencies of the first half of the 20th century. Strict Victorian moralism was being replaced by a new vision of the world. The old taboos were falling away. In 1912 Virgina married Leonard Woolf, but in 1913 she had another mental collapse and again attempted suicide. The Second World War increased her terrors. Aware of her mental fragility, and obsessed by the fear of madness, Virginia decided to put an end to her life. She drowned herself in the river Ouse (1941).

Works:
Virginia Woolf's only remedy for her anxiety was work; she wrote novels, short stories, critical essays, biographies and 26 note-books in diary form. Mrs Dakkiway (1925) : marks the transition to the new technique; the writer now mingles external actions with the continuous flux of the life of the mind To The Lighthouse (1927): a very complex novel, is the story of a trip to a lighthouse in the in the Hebrides, planned but never realized. Orlando: a Biography (1928) : is a peculiar book. Beginning in Elizabethan England, it is the story of a nobleman, Orlando, an androgynous being, who eventually turns into a woman and lives all through the 18th and 19th centuries till the first years of the 20th. The work is a kind of grotesque fantasy of metempsychosis. In Orlando, Virginia Woolf representes her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West, who lived her life indifferent to the moral code of the time

Features and themes:

Virginia launched an attack on the Edwardians (realistic "materialist" writers), and she said that they contented themselves with presenting their characters from the outside; but, since the "human being" inside the "house" are note only what they do (actions, dialogues), but above all what they are (feelings, thoughts, memories), the novel had to turn inwards and explore man's mental experience

Moment of being:
is to say the moments of utmost intensity, of perception

Technique:
Virginia abandoned the traditional technique of novel writing for a new, more modern form. But the new form needed a new concept of time. What matters is the thoughts, memories or feelings that the event brings to the character's mind. The "moment of being" , the activity of the mind, takes place in the same fleeting moment of our external activity, overlapping it. A novel should reflect everything, the outer facts and the inner mental activity, because life is all these things together. So Virginia Woolf eliminated traditional plots and direct dialogues. She was aware of the risk of incoherence and obscurity that such a method involved, but she proved so brilliant in the use of the "stream of consciousness" technique as to find as almost perfect balance between her characters' inner speculations and the realism of the situations.

Style:
Her use of highly figurative language, the delicacy of her imagery, her wealth of simile, metaphor and other figures of speech, and the attention she pays to the rhythm and musicality of words tinge her prose with poetry