Results for Virginia Woolf
On this page:
 
Who2 Biography:

Virginia Woolf

, Writer
Virginia Woolf
Source

  • Born: 25 January 1882
  • Birthplace: London, England
  • Died: 28 March 1941 (suicide by drowning)
  • Best Known As: Author of A Room Of One's Own

Name at birth: Adeline Virginia Stephen

Virginia Woolf is remembered as both a feminist and a modernist whose novels often ignored traditional plots to follow the inner lives and musings of her characters. As a young woman Woolf moved with her siblings to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The house became a gathering place for writers, artists and intellectuals and this "Bloomsbury Group" is remembered as an incubator of modern artistic thought. She married writer and fellow Bloomsbury member Leonard Woolf in 1912, and they founded the small Hogarth Press. Her first major published work was The Voyage Out (1915); other books included Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). Her 1929 book A Room of One's Own collected her lectures and meditations on the place of women in literature. Her diaries also have been widely reprinted. Woolf suffered from depression and fits of mental illness for much of her life, and finally committed suicide by drowning herself in the river Ouse near Sussex, England.

Woolf was immortalized in the title of Edward Albee's 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf... The heroine of Orlando is loosely based on Woolf's friend (and some say lover) Vita Sackville-West... Her novel Flush (1933) imagines the thoughts of a spaniel owned by Elizabeth Barrett Browning... Other members of the Bloomsbury Group included the novelist E.M. Forster and the historian Lytton Strachey... The Hogarth Press published the first edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land... Orlando was made into a 1992 movie with actress Tilda Swinton in the title role... Woolf was played by Nicole Kidman in the 2002 film The Hours. Kidman won the 2003 Oscar as best actress for the role.

 
 
Biography: Virginia Stephen Woolf

The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Stephen Woolf (1882-1941) ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the period between World War I and World War II. Her novels can perhaps best be described as impressionistic.

Dissatisfied with the novel based on familiar, factual, and external details, Virginia Woolf followed experimental clues to a more internal, subjective, and in a sense more personal rendering of experience than had been provided by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. In the works of these masters the reality of time and experience had formed the stream of consciousness, a concept that probably originated with William James. Virginia Woolf lived in and responded to a world in which certitudes were collapsing under the stresses of changing knowledge, the civilized savagery of war, and new manners and morals. She drew on her personal, sensitive, poetic awareness without rejecting altogether the heritage of literary culture she derived from her family.

Early Years and Marriage

Virginia Stephen was born in London on Jan. 25, 1882. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous scholar and agnostic philosopher who, among many literary occupations, was at one time editor of Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography. James Russell Lowell, the American poet, was her godfather. Virginia's mother died when the child was 12 or 13 years old, and she was educated at home in her father's library, where she also met his famous friends.

In 1912, eight years after her father's death, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a brilliant young writer and critic from Cambridge whose interests in literature as well as in economics and the labor movement were well suited to hers. In 1917, for amusement, they originated the Hogarth Press by setting and handprinting on an old press Two Stories by "L. and V. Woolf." The volume was a success, and over the years they published many important books, including Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, then an unknown writer; Poems by T. S. Eliot; and Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf. The policy of the Hogarth Press was to publish the best and most original work that came to its attention, and the Woolfs as publishers favored young and obscure writers. Virginia's older sister Vanessa, who married the critic Clive Bell, participated in this venture by designing dust jackets for the books issued by the Hogarth Press.

Quite early in her career Virginia Woolf's home in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, became a literary and art center, attracting such diverse intellectuals as E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Arthur Waley, Victoria Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. These artists, critics, and writers became known as the Bloomsbury group. Roger Fry's theory of art may have influenced Virginia's technique as a novelist. Broadly speaking, the Bloomsbury group drew from the philosophic interests of its members (who had been educated at Cambridge) the values of love and beauty as preeminent in life.

As Critic and Essayist

Virginia Woolf began writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement when she was young, and over the years these and other essays were collected in a two-volume series called The Common Reader (1925, 1933). These studies range with affection and understanding through all of English literature. Students of fiction have drawn upon these criticisms as a means of understanding Virginia Woolf's own direction as a novelist. One passage frequently studied occurs in "Modern Fiction" in the First Series: "Life is not a series of … big lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?"

Another essay frequently studied is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," written in 1924, in which Virginia Woolf describes the manner in which the older-generation novelist Arnold Bennett would have portrayed Mrs. Brown, a lady casually met in a railway carriage, by giving her a house and furniture and a position in the world. She then contrasts this method with another: one that exhibits a new interest in the subjective Mrs. Brown, the mysteries of her person, her consciousness, and the consciousness of the observer responding to her.

Achievement as Novelist

Two of Virginia Woolf's novels in particular, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), follow successfully the latter approach. The first novels covers a day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway in postwar London; it achieves its vision of reality through the reception by Mrs. Dalloway's mind of what Virginia Woolf called those 'myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel." To the Lighthouseis, in a sense, a family portrait and history rendered in subjective depth through selected points in time. Part I deals with the time between six o'clock in the evening and dinner. Primarily through the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay, it presents the clash of the male and female sensibilities in the family; Mrs. Ramsay functions as a means of equipoise and reconciliation. Part II: Time Passes, is a moving evocation of loss during the interval between Mrs. Ramsay's death and the family's revisit to the house. Part III moves toward completion of this intricate and subjective portrait through the adding of a last detail to a painting by an artist guest, Lily Briscoe, and through the final completion of a plan, rejected by the father in Part I, for him and the children to sail out to the lighthouse. The novel is impressionistic, subjectively perceptive, and poignant.

Last Years and Other Books

Virginia Woolf was the author of about 15 books, the last, A Writer's Diary, posthumously published in 1953. Her death by drowning in Lewes, Sussex, on March 28, 1941, has often been regarded as a suicide brought on by the unbearable strains of life during World War II. The true explanation seems to be that she had felt symptoms of a recurrence of a mental breakdown and feared that it would be permanent.

Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room (1922) constitute Virginia Woolf's major achievement. The Voyage Out (1915) first brought her critical attention. Night and Day (1919) is traditional in method. The short stories of Monday or Tuesday (1921) brought critical praise. In The Waves (1931) she masterfully employed the stream-of-consciousness technique. Other experimental novels include Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). Virginia Woolf's championship of woman's rights is reflected in the essays in A Room of One's Own (1929) and in Three Guineas (1938).

Further Reading

Virginia Woolf's diary was edited by her husband, Leonard Sidney Woolf, The Dairy of Virginia Woolf (1953). Leonard Woolf's five-volume autobiography not only deals in great detail with his life with Virginia Woolf but reveals much about English social and literary history since 1939: Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1880-1904 (1960), Growing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1904-1911 (1962), Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years, 1911 to 1918 (1964), Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years, 1919-1939 (1967), and The Journey, Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years, 1939-1969 (1970).

Much has been written about Virginia Woolf. Her experimental technique as well as her psychological depth made her, in a sense, a critic's writer. Interesting and helpful studies include David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (1942; rev. ed. 1963); Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist (1945; 2d ed. 1964); Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (1949); James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954); Aileen Pippett, The Moth and the Star: A Biography of Virginia Woolf (1955); Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf (1962); Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works (trans. 1966); Carl Woodring, Virginia Woolf (1966); and Jean O. Love, World of Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (1970).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Adeline Virginia Woolf

(born Jan. 25, 1882, London, Eng. — died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex) British novelist and critic. Daughter of Leslie Stephen, she and her sister became the early nucleus of the Bloomsbury group. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912; in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press. Her best novels — including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) — are experimental; in them she examines the human experience of time, the indefinability of character, and external circumstances as they impinge on consciousness. Orlando (1928) is a historical fantasy about a single character who experiences England from the Elizabethan era to the early 20th century, and The Waves (1931), perhaps her most radically experimental work, uses interior monologue and recurring images to trace the inner lives of six characters. Such works confirmed her place among the major figures of literary modernism. Her best critical studies are collected in The Common Reader (1925, 1932). Her long essay A Room of One's Own (1929) addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. Her other novels include Jacob's Room (1922), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). She also wrote a biography of Roger Fry. Her health and mental stability were delicate throughout her life; in a recurrence of mental illness, she drowned herself. Her diaries and correspondence have been published in several editions.

For more information on Adeline Virginia Woolf, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: Virginia Woolf

Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941). The daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the DNB, Virginia Stephen was a sensitive child. Abused at the age of 6, the death of her mother when she was 13 caused a breakdown. She was engaged at one time to Lytton Strachey but in 1912 married Leonard Woolf. The physical side of the marriage was unappealing to her given her preference for lesbian relationships. With her husband she founded the Hogarth Press and their house became a centre for the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers. Despite her delicate health she sustained a large output of essays, reviews, and novels—Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), which experimented with ‘stream of consciousness’ technique and was a great success. In 1929 she published A Room of One's Own, surveying the difficulties confronting women, which became a classic of feminist literature. A protracted bout of depression in 1941 led her to drown herself in the river Ouse in Sussex.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Woolf, Virginia (Stephen),
1882–1941, English novelist and essayist; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction. She was educated at home from the resources of her father's huge library. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, with whom she set up the Hogarth Press in 1917. Their home became a gathering place for a circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. As a novelist Woolf's primary concern was to represent the flow of ordinary experience. Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization but on a character's consciousness, his thoughts and feelings, which she brilliantly illuminated by the stream of consciousness technique. She did not limit herself to one consciousness, however, but slipped from mind to mind, particularly in The Waves, probably her most experimental novel. Her prose style is poetic, heavily symbolic, and filled with superb visual images.

Woolf's early works, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), were traditional in method, but she became increasingly innovative in Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Other experimental novels are Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). She was a master of the critical essay, and some of her finest pieces are included in The Common Reader (1925), The Second Common Reader (1933), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), and The Moment and Other Essays (1948). A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are feminist tracts. Her biography of Roger Fry (1940) is a careful study of a friend. Some of her short stories from Monday or Tuesday (1921) appear with others in A Haunted House (1944). Virginia Woolf suffered mental breakdowns in 1895 and 1915; she drowned herself in 1941 because she feared another breakdown from which she might not recover. Most of her posthumously published works were edited by her husband.

Bibliography

See her Writer's Diary, ed. by L. Woolf (1953) and Correspondence with Lytton Strachey, ed. by L. Woolf and J. Strachey (1956); diary, ed. by A. O. Bell (4 vol., 1979–83); letters ed. by N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (6 vol., 1977–82); biographies by Q. Bell (2 vol., 1972), P. Rose (1978), L. Gordon (1985), M. Rosenthal (1987), J. King (1995), P. Reid (1996), H. Lee (1997), N. Nicolson (2000), and J. Briggs (2005); studies by E. M. Forster (1942), J. Bennett (2d ed. 1964), R. Freedman (1980), and J. Marcus, ed. (1983). See also the autobiography of her husband, Leonard Sidney Woolf (5 vol., 1960–69).

 
Quotes By: Virginia Woolf

Quotes:

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph."

"Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"

"For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?"

"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."

"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."

"Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought."

See more famous quotes by Virginia Woolf

 
Wikipedia: Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf

Born: January 25 1882(1882--)
Flag of England London, England
Died: March 28 1941 (aged 59)
Flag of England near Lewes, East Sussex, England
Occupation: Novelist, Essayist, Publisher, Critic
Influences: George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust
Influenced: Michael Cunningham, Sylvia Plath, Edna O'Brien, Ian McEwan

Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882March 28, 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".

Biography

Early life

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen 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 married each other after being widowed and 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 from influenza 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 institutionalised.

Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed,[citation needed] 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.

Personal life

Woolf married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew." Many biographers have concluded that the marriage was never fully consummated, and that Virginia Woolf's sexuality was primarily directed toward women. However, the couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in her diary "Love-making — after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." They also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's work.[1] The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began a lesbian relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s.[2] 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."[3] After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death.

Other intimate friendships included Madge Vaughn (the daughter of J. A. Symonds, and inspiration for the character of Mrs. Dalloway), and Violet Dickinson, composer, and suffragette Ethel Smyth.

Woolf and her beloved sister Vanessa Bell were also close friends.

Death

After completion of the first manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel Between the Acts Virginia Woolf fell victim to depression similar to previous illness that she had experienced earlier in life. The ongoing war and the destruction of her homes in London during the air raids of the German Airforce, as well as the cool reception of her biography on her late friend Roger Fry worsened her condition, until she was unable to work. [4]

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 remains under a tree in the garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex.

In what is believed by most to be 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.


Work

 Virginia Woolf as she appears in a much larger mural painting in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Enlarge
Virginia Woolf as she appears in a much larger mural painting in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.[5] 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 [6].

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.[7] 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, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. In the words of E. M. Forster, she pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.

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 is also criticized 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." [8]

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 of most of her novels, even as they are often set in an environment of war. 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]

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, argues that Leonard Woolf was very supportive of his wife, remarkably so in view of her "corrosive contempt" for his Jewish origins.[9]

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.

Cultural references

Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002).
Enlarge
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002).
  • 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.
  • 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 Virgina 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 indie rock 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."

Bibliography

Novels

Short fiction

  • Monday or Tuesday (1921 edition) (collection)
    • "A Haunted House"
    • "A Society"
    • "Monday or Tuesday"
    • "An Unwritten Novel"
    • "The String Quartet"
    • "Blue & Green"
    • "Kew Gardens"
    • "The Mark on the Wall"
  • A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944 edition) (collection)
    • "A Haunted House"
    • "Monday or Tuesday"
    • "An Unwritten Novel"
    • "The String Quartet"
    • "Kew Gardens"
    • "The Mark on the Wall"
    • "The New Dress"
    • "The Shooting Party"
    • "Lappin and Lappinova"
    • "Solid Objects"
    • "The Lady in the Looking-Glass"
    • "The Duchess and the Jeweller"
    • "Moments of Being: Slater's Pins have no Points"
    • "The Man who Loved his Kind"
    • "The Searchlight"
    • "The Legacy"
    • "Together and Apart"
    • "A Summing Up"
  • The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985 edition) (collection)
    • "Phyllis and Rosamond"
    • "The Mysterious Case of Miss V."
    • "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn"
    • "A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus"
    • "Memoirs of a Novelist"
    • "The Mark on the Wall"
    • "Kew Gardens"
    • "The Evening Party"
    • "Solid Objects"
    • "Sympathy"
    • "An Unwritten Novel"
    • "A Haunted House"
    • "A Society"
    • "Monday or Tuesday"
    • "The String Quartet"
    • "Blue & Green"
    • "A Woman's College from Outside"
    • "In the Orchard"
    • "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street"
    • "Nurse Lugton's Curtain"
    • "The Widow and the Parrot: A True Story"
    • "The New Dress"
    • "Happiness"
    • "Ancestors"
    • "The Introduction"
    • "Together and Apart"
    • "The Man who Loved his Kind"
    • "A Simple Melody"
    • "A Summing Up"
    • "Moments of Being: Slater's Pins have no Points"
    • "The Lady in the Looking-Glass"
    • "The Fascination of the Pool"
    • "Three Pictures"
    • "Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer"
    • "Miss Pryme"
    • "Ode Written Partly in Prose"
    • "Portraits"
    • "Uncle Vanya"
    • "The Duchess and the Jeweller"
    • "The Shooting Party"
    • "Lappin and Lappinova"
    • "The Searchlight"
    • "Gypsy, the Mongrel"
    • "The Legacy"
    • "The Symbol"
    • "The Watering Place"

Books sub-titled as "A Biography"

Apart from several essays containing biographical descriptions, 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."[10])

Non-fiction

  • Modern Fiction (1919)
  • The Common Reader (1925)
    • 'The Common Reader'
    • 'The Pastors and Chaucer'
    • 'On not knowing Greek'
    • 'The Elizabethan Lumber Room'
    • 'Notes on an Elizabethan Play'
    • 'Montaigne'
    • 'The Duchess of Newcastle'
    • 'Rambling round Evelyn'
    • 'Defoe'
    • 'Addison'
    • 'Lives of the Obscure - Taylors and Edgeworths'
    • 'Lives of the Obscure - Laetitia Pilkington'
    • 'Jane Austen'
    • 'Modern Fiction'
    • 'Jayne Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights'
    • 'George Eliot'
    • 'The Russian Point of View'
    • 'Outlines - Miss Mitford'
    • 'Outlines - Bentley'
    • 'Outlines - Lady Dorothy Nevill'
    • 'Outlines - Archbishop Thomson'
    • 'The Patron and the Crocus'
    • 'The Modern Essay'
    • 'Joseph Conrad'
    • 'How it strikes a Contemporary'
  • A Room of One's Own (1929)
  • On Being Ill (1930)
  • The London Scene (1931)
  • The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
    • 'The Strange Elizabethans'
    • 'Donne After Three Centuries'
    • '"The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia"'
    • '"Robinson Crusoe"'
    • 'Dorothy Osborne's "Letters"'
    • 'Swift's "Journal of Stella"'
    • 'The "Sentimental Journey"'
    • 'Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son'
    • 'Two Parsons: James Woodforde, John Skinner'
    • 'Dr. Burney's Evening Party'
    • 'Jack Mytton'
    • 'De Quincey's Autobiography'
    • 'Four Figures: Cowper and Lady Austen, Beau Brummell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth'
    • 'William Hazlitt'
    • 'Geraldine and Jane'
    • '"Aurora Leigh"'
    • 'The Niece of an Earl'
    • 'George Gissing'
    • 'The Novels of George Meredith'
    • '"I am Christina Rossetti"'
    • 'The Novels of Thomas Hardy'
    • 'How Should One Read a Book?'
  • Three Guineas (1938)
  • The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
    • 'The Death Of The Moth'
    • 'Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car'
    • 'Three Pictures'
    • 'Old Mrs. Grey'
    • 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure'
    • '"Twelfth Night" at the Old Vic'
    • 'Madame de Sévigné'
    • 'The Humane Art'
    • 'Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole'
    • 'The Rev. William Cole: A Letter'
    • 'The Historian and "The Gibbon"'
    • 'Reflections at Sheffield Place'
    • 'The Man at the Gate'
    • 'Sara Coleridge'
    • '"Not One Of Us"'
    • 'Henry James'
      • '1. Within the Rim'
      • '2. The Old Order'
      • '3. The Letters of Henry James'
    • 'George Moore'
    • 'The Novels of E. M. Forster'
    • 'Middlebrow'
    • 'The Art of Biography'
    • 'Craftsmanship'
    • 'A Letter to a Young Poet'
    • 'Why?'
    • 'Professions for Women'
    • 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid'
  • The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
  • The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)
    • 'Oliver Goldsmith'
    • 'White's Selborne'
    • 'Life Itself'
    • 'Crabbe'
    • 'Selina Trimmer'
    • 'The Captain's Death Bed'
    • 'Ruskin'
    • 'The Novels Of Turgenev'
    • 'Half Of Thomas Hardy'
    • 'Leslie Stephen'
    • 'Mr. Conrad: A Conversation'
    • 'The Cosmos'
    • 'Walter Raleigh'
    • 'Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown' (1924)
    • 'All About Books'
    • 'Reviewing'
    • 'Modern Letters'
    • 'Reading'
    • 'The Cinema'
    • 'Walter Sickert'
    • 'Flying Over London'
    • 'The Sun And The Fish'
    • 'Gas'
    • 'Thunder At Wembley'
    • 'Memories Of A Working Women's Guild'
  • Women And Writing (1979)

Play

  • Freshwater: A Comedy - Play originally performed in 1923, revised in 1935, published in 1976 and then in 1985 (edited by Lucio P. Ruotolo, drawings by Edward Gorey)

Autobiography

  • A Writer’s Diary (1953) - Extracts from the complete diary
  • Moments of Being (1976)
  • A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
  • A Passionate Apprentice: the early journals (1990)
  • Congenial Spirits: the selected letters (1993)
  • The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) - Diary of Virginia Woolf from 1915 to 1941
  • The Flight of the Mind: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 1 1888 - 1912 (1975)
  • The Question of Things Happening: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 2 1913 - 1922 (1976)
  • A Change of Perspective: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 3 1923 - 1928 (1977)
  • A Reflection of the Other Person: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 4 1929 - 1931 (1978)
  • The Sickle Side of the Moon: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 5 1932 - 1935 (1979)
  • Leave the Letters Till We're Dead: Letters of Virginia Woolf vol 6 1936 - 1941 (1980)
  • Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (1990)
  • Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)
  • Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) - Greek travel diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris
  • The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (London, Hesperus, 2007)

Books about the life 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

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Messud.t.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews&oref=slogin
  2. ^ http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biow3/wool2.html
  3. ^ http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biow3/wool2.html
  4. ^ Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.
  5. ^ Virginia Woolf. Retrieved on 2007-10-5.
  6. ^ Haule, J. (1982). Melymbrosia: An Early Version of "The Voyage out". Contemporary Literature, 23, 100-104.
  7. ^ [1]
  8. ^ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10801&page=2
  9. ^ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10801
  10. ^ 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

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:


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

 
 

Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "Virginia Woolf" at WikiAnswers.

 

Copyrights:

Who2 Biography. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the Virginia Woolf biography from Who2.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Virginia Woolf" Read more

On this page:   E-mail   print Print  Link