Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Virginia Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. She represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal … With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” Read here.
Virginia Woolf was a well-known English writer in the 20th century. She was best-known for her novels, but she was also a writer of essays, biographies, letters, and diaries. Her writing fell into the Modernist Movement, which was a literary movement that took place between World War I and World War II.
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
Virginia Woolf is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. Perhaps best known as the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies. Both in style and subject matter, her work captures the fast-changing world in which she was working.
As Virginia Woolf commented, "In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Furthermore, she hoped to respond to the stagnant state of the novel, with a consciously "modern" novel. Many critics believe she succeeded. The novel was published in 1925, and received much acclaim.
Here and here you can revise Virginia Woolf and her novel.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dallowaywas published on 14 May 1925.
It examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner married to a member of Parliament. Mrs. Dalloway is essentially plotless; the action takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple interwoven stories, particularly that of Clarissa as she prepares for and hosts a party and that of the mentally damaged war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. The two characters can be seen as foils for each other (= they contrast with each other and gowell together). Read here.
The Hours was the working title Virginia Woolf gave
the novel that became Mrs. Dalloway. This novel chronicles the hours
that make up one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, who prepares to
host a party. Mrs. Dalloway inspired Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours (1998). In both the
earlier and later books, the title refers to the events and thoughts characters
experience during the hours in an ordinary day. In a larger sense, the
characters are preoccupied by mortality and suicide becomes the ultimate rejection of a meaningless or too-painful life.
The Hoursis a 2002 psychologicaldrama film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman.
Virginia Woolf often questioned why men had always had
power, influence, wealth, and reputation, while women had nothing but children.
She believed that there would be female Shakespeare in the future only if women
found the first two keys to freedom: independent incomes (=money) and “rooms of their
own” (=privacy), a metaphor for women having access to their own private space. When A Room of One's Own was first published in 1929, it was considered
revolutionary. Most people considered
women less intelligent than men, they did not think about women's
freedom and certainly no one was writing about it, let alone as convincingly as
Virginia Woolf. Her essay became a classic in the movement toward equality.
Even today it is hardly dated, for the reason that there are still some men
(and women) who suppose that men are “the superior sex”.
If women were equal to men, people asked, why had none
of them produced great literature like Shakespeare's? Virginia Woolf
replied that this lack of achievement had nothing to with innate ability and
everything to do with women's lack of opportunity.
To illustrate
this, Virginia Woolf imagined a Judith Shakespeare,
William's sister, going to London to make her fortune as a playwright.
Unfortunately, she was regarded as a sex object, so rather than being taken
seriously as a writer, she was lied to and seduced, she became pregnant and
eventually committed suicide.
This website is a resource for Virginia Woolf fans all over the world.
The goal of the Virginia Woolf Blog is to
celebrate her life and work and give readers a clearer understanding of
what she was really like. Using passages from her diaries, letters and
various biographies, the blog aims to show readers the real Virginia Woolf, not
the tragic figure many people see her as.
On 28 March 1941
Virginia Woolf died. She went with her pockets full of stones into the River
Ouse.
"To look life in the face always, and to know it for what it is. At
last to love it for what it is and then to put it away. Always the years
between us. Always the love. Always the hours."
Embracing
formal innovations like stream-of-consciousness and narrative fragmentation, Virginia Woolf’s writing expanded the boundaries of modern
fiction, reshaping our ideas about the ability of the novel to represent
ordinary life and record swift, historical change. “Let us record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” she advised,
referring to her experimental prose capable of linking the apparently insignificant
and immediate facts of daily life (shifts in mood, quotidian interactions,
sensations, and judgements) to broader social events (war, patriarchy,
technological developments, environmental transformations, and artistic
renovations).
"Clarissa had a theory in those days . . . that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps—perhaps."
A Room of One's Own is a long essay about society and art and sexism written by Virginia Woolf. First published
in 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham
College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in
October 1928.
"Fiction is like a spider's
web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four
corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."
Today
is Virginia Woolf's birthday! She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen at 22 Hyde
Park Gate in London on 25 January 1882.
Clickhereto discover everything about the life and legacy of Virginia Woolf whose works are of great importance in the history of the novel because of her experiments with narration, characterisation and style which classify her among the great modernists.
Here is the beginning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs
Dalloway, together with a text analysis activity.
The novel starts with one of Clarissa's monologues;
nothing really happens in this passage, but much is revealed about
the central character's thoughts and feelings. In fact, it
introduces the reader to the stream-of-consciousness technique, characterized by a
flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent
structure or cohesion.
It is a style of writing evolved by authors at the
beginning of the 20th century
to express in words the flow of a character's thoughts and feelings. The
technique aims to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the
character - an internal view that illuminates plot and motivation in the novel.
Thoughts spoken aloud are not always the same as those "on the floor of
the mind", as Virginia Woolf put it.
"Stream of consciousness" has its origins in the late
19th century with the birth
of psychology. An American psychologist, William James (brother of novelist
Henry), first used the phrase in his Principles of Psychology of
1890 to describe the flow of conscious experience in the brain.
The term was first used in a literary sense by May
Sinclair in her 1918 review of a novel by Dorothy Richardson. Other authors
well known for this style include Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner and,
most remarkably, James Joyce.
Virginia Woolf’sMrs.
Dalloway, published in 1925, was a bestseller both in Britain and the
United States despite its rejection of typical novelistic style.
The action ofMrs. Dallowaytakes place during a single day in June 1923 in
London, England. This unusual organizational strategy creates a special problem
for the novelist, that is to say how to create characters deep enough to
be realistic while treating only one day in their lives. Virginia Woolf solved
this problem with what she called a “tunneling” technique, referring to the way
her characters remember their pasts. In experiencing these characters’
recollections, readers derive for themselves a sense of background and history
to characters that, otherwise, a narrator would have had to provide.
In a sense, Mrs.
Dalloway is a novel without a plot. Instead of creating major situations
between characters to push the story forward, Virginia Woolf moved her
narrative by following the passing hours of a day. The book is composed of
movements from one character to another, or of movements from the internal
thoughts of one character to the internal thoughts of another.
Mrs. Dallowaydepicts people
walking about a city. The book makes the city, its parks, and its streets
as interesting as the characters who inhabit them.
Clarissa
Dalloway’s party, which is the culminating event of the book, ties the
narrative together by gathering the group of friends Clarissa thinks about
throughout her day. It also concludes the secondary story of the book, the
story of Septimus Warren Smith, by having Dr. Bradshaw arrive at the party and
reveal that one of his patients committed suicide that day.
The book’s major
themes are sanity and insanity, isolation and community, or the
possibilities and limits of communicativeness, as evidenced by Clarissa’s
permanent sense of being alone and by her social skills, which bring people
together at her parties.
Virginia
Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of the
Victorian literary critic Leslie Stephen. She
lived and was educated in a highly intellectual atmosphere at home,
as her father was friendly with many of the main literary figures of
the period, among them Henry James. Her mother died when
she was 13 and the loss influenced her profoundly. It was
soon after her mother’s death that she had the
first of a series of nervous breakdowns which affected
her all her life. When her father died in 1904, she moved to a new area of
London, Bloomsbury, where she founded a close circle of
intellectuals, who became known as the “Bloomsbury Group”.
Among them there was Leonard Woolf, who later became her husband, and the
novelist E.M. Forster, besides painters and art critics.
The Bloomsberries
shared the desire to challenge the strict Victorian social norms, and
demonstrated a sexual freedom that was ahead of their time. They were
rather elitist and exclusive. They were highly criticized for their snobbishness
and selfishness. The group was also reproached with its pacifism during the
First World War.
