Virginia Woolf

( Adeline Virginia
Stephen )

( 25 January 1882
- 28 March 1941 )
- 59 years old -

Her Life
Was born in London into the family of a wealthy Victorian
critic and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen. She never went to school
but was well and privately educated at home. Since she was a
child the classics and English literature were familiar to her. Her
fathers large library, as well as the fact that their home was
frequented by leading late Victorian writers as
e.g. Thomas Hardy, R.L. Stevenson. John Ruskin, George
Meredith
were fundamental for her career as a writer.
In her early twenties she began to contribute to TLS ( Times
Literary Supplement ).
Her fathers death in 1904 marked the appearance of the first of
her several nervous breakdowns which had their strong impact in
her adult life.
With her sister (Vanesa) and her brother(Adrian) she moved to
the Bloomsbury district of London and began to gather about her
the brilliant avant-garde artists ,writers and philosophers who
were later known as the Bloomsbury Group.

It was an avantgarde circle concerned with social issues,

anti-imperialism and feminism.Some of her most notable friends
were Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster.
In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf (a journalist an essayist)and
also member in Bloomsbury Group. In 1917 the Woolfs started
printing their own works, as a hobby, under the label The
Hogarth Press. It was so
successful that they both become strongly commited to
publishing.
Her first two novels including The Voyage Out ,and Night
and Day were fairly conventional but she became increasingly
interested in understanding and describing
characters, in capturing the true nature of human
consciousness, so her later works including Jacobs Room, Mrs.
Dalloway, To the lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and
Between the Acts became increasingly experimental in their
technique.
Her essays and criticism were also very fine, especially as
redagards the art of fiction and her interest in feminist
themes.She was also an entertaining and penetrating letterwriter and diarist.

Virgina Woolfs novels suffer a little from the limited middleclass environment,which was the only one she had experienced,
her perceptive experiments in literary are striking, and her
analysis of them lucid, convincing and logical.
She wanted to revolutionise the sense of plot and criticised
more solid, traditional novelist. She felt that novels should be
based on the writers own feelings,not conventional descriptions.
She paid attention to new developments in painting.( e.g.
the Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910) and the
shifting perspectives in her later novels seems to have
something of the quality of visual art.
Other important influences were the philosopher Bergsons
notion of duration or psychological time and the role of
memory and association in works such as Marcel Prousts cycle
A la recherche du temps perdu(In search of lost time).She
developed a
stream of consciousness technique rather similar to that of
Joyce,but quite independently.

Her Works
a)

Novels
The Voyage Out, 1915
Night and Day, 1919
Jacobs Room, 1922
Mrs.Dalloway, 1925
To the Lighthouse, 1927
Orlando, 1928
The Waves, 1931
The Years, 1937
Between the Acts, 1941

b)Essays
The Common Reader, 1925; A room of Ones Own, 1931; Second Common Reader,
1932; Three Guineas, 1938; The Death of the Moth, 1942; The Captains Deathbed,
1950; Granite and Rainbow, 1958; Collected Essays, 1966.
c)Fictional Biography: Flush, 1925
d)Letters and diaries: Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1957-1980; The Diary of Virginia Woolf,
1977-1984
e)Stories: A Haunted House, 1943

The Voyage Out,

Woolf began work onit
in 1910 and had finished
an early draft by 1912. It
was written during a
period in which Woolf was
especially psychologically
vulnerable. She suffered
from periods of
depression and at one
point attempted suicide.
The resultant work
contained the seeds of all
that would blossom in her
later work. The
innovative narrative
style, the focus on
feminine consciousness,
sexuality and death.

Night and Day ,

is a novel byVirginia
Woolf,first published
on 20 October 1919.
Set
inEdwardianLondon,N
ight and Daycontrasts
the daily lives and
romantic attachments
of two
acquaintances,Kathari
ne Hilbery andMary
Datchet. The novel
examines the
relationships between
love, marriage,
happiness, and
success.

Jacob's Room,
is the third novel byVirginia
Woolf, first published on 26
October 1922.
The novel centres, in a very
ambiguous way, around the
life story of the protagonist
Jacob Flanders and is
presented almost entirely
through the impressions
other characters have of
Jacob. It could be said that
the book is primarily a
character study and has little
in the way of plot or
background, the narrative is
constructed with a void in
place of the central character
if, indeed, the novel can be
said to have a 'protagonist' in
conventional terms.

Mrs.Dalloway,
Published on 14 May
1925 , the novel
addresses Clarissa's
preparations for a party
she will host that
evening. With an
interior perspective, the
story travels forwards
and backwards in time
and in and out of the
characters' minds to
construct an image of
Clarissa's life and of the
inter-war social
structure.

To the Lighthouse,
Written in 1927,The novel
centres on the Ramsays and their
visits to theIsle of Skyein
Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
Following and extending the
tradition ofmodernist
novelistslikeMarcel Proust
andJames Joyce, the plot ofTo the
Lighthouseis secondary to its
philosophical introspection. Cited
as a key example of thestream-ofconsciousness literary technique,
the novel includes littledialogue
and almost no action; most of it is
written as thoughts and
observations. The novel recalls
childhood emotions and highlights
adult relationships. Among the
book's manytropesand themes
are those of loss, subjectivity, and
the problem of perception.

Orlando: A Biography,

Written in 1928
represent a history of
English literature in
satiric form. The book
describes the
adventures of a poet
who changes sex from
man to woman and lives
for centuries, meeting
the key figures of
English literary history.
Considered a feminist
classic, the book has
been written about
extensively by scholars
ofwomen's writing

The Waves,1931
IsVirginia Woolf's most
experimentalnovel .It
consists
ofsoliloquiesspoken by the
book's six characters:
Bernard, Susan, Rhoda,
Neville, Jinny, and Louis.
Also important is Percival,
the seventh character,
though readers never hear
him speak in his own voice.
The soliloquies that span
the characters' lives are
broken up by nine brief
third-person interludes
detailing a coastal scene at
varying stages in a day
from sunrise to sunset.

The Years,1937
It traces the history of
the Pargiter family from
the 1880s to the
"present day" of the
mid-1930s. It focusses
on the small private
details of the
characters' lives.
Except for the first,
each section takes
place on a single day of
its titular year, and
each year is defined by
a particular moment in
the cycle of seasons

Between the Acts,

is the final novel byVirginia
Woolf, published in 1941
shortly after herdeath. This
is a book with hidden
meaning and allusion. It
describes the performance,
and audience of
afestivalplay in a small
English village just before
the outbreak of theSecond
World War. Much of it looks
forward to the war, with
veiled allusions to
connection with the
continent by flight, swallows
representing aircraft, and
plunging into darkness. The
pageant is a play within a
play, representing a rather
cynical view of English
history.

Her Death
After completing the manuscript of her last
novel,Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression
similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The
onset ofWorld War II, the destruction of her London
home duringthe Blitz, and the cool reception given to
herbiographyof her late friendRoger Fryall worsened
her condition until she was unable to work .On 28
March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her
overcoat pockets with stones and walking into
theRiver Ousenear her home. Woolf's body was not
found until 18 April 1941.Her husband buried her
cremated remains under an elm in the garden
ofMonk's House, their home inRodmell, Sussex.

What Virginia Woolf does, is in

fact an attempt to rarify life to
its quintessence and then enrich that
distillation with all the resources of
elaborately intellectual metaphor
(A.H. Baugh,
A Literary History of England)

Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value

life more.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it
about other people.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not
dined well.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which
is most full of poetry.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought
how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known
to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life,
every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they
do.

A portrait of Woolf byRoger Fry