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 British
author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel
- also distinguished feminist essayist, critic for The Times
Literary Supplement, and a central figure in the Bloomsbury
group. Woolf's books were published by Hogart Press, which she founded
with her husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf.
"Have you any notion how many books are written about women
in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written
by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed
animal in the universe?"
Virginia Woolf was born in London, the daughter of Julia Jackson
Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie
Stephen, literary critic, friend of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson,
Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, and the founder of the Dictionary
of National Biography. In a memoir dated 1907 she wrote of her
parents, "Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures,
their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other."
Woolf was educated at home by her father, and grew up at the family
home at Hyde Park Gate. In middle age she described this period
in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: "Think how I was brought
up! No school; mooning about alone among my father's books; never
any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools-throwing balls;
ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!" Woolf's youth
was shadowed by a series of emotional shocks - her half-brother
Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her and her mother died when she
was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took
her mother's place, but died a scant two years later. Leslie Stephen,
her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. When her brother
Toby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown.
Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her
sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which
would become central to the activities of the Bloomsbury group.
"And part of the charm of those Thursday evenings was that they
were astonishingly abstract. It was not only that Moore's book [Principia
Ethica, 1903] had set us all discussing philosophy, art, religion;
it was that the atmosphere - if in spite of Hawtrey I may use that
word - was abstract in the extreme. The young men I have named had
no 'manners' in the Hyde Park Gate sense. They criticized our arguments
as severely as their own. They never seemed to notice how we were
dressed or if we were nice looking or not." (from Moments
of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind, 1976)
From 1905 Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement.
In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard Woolf and published
her first book, THE VOYAGE OUT, in 1915. In 1919 appeared NIGHT
AND DAY, a realistic novel set in London that contrasts the lives
of two friends, Katherine and Mary. This was followed by JACOB'S
ROOM, published in 1922 and based upon the life and death of her
brother Toby.
 With
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931) Woolf established
herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. On the publication
of To the Lighthouse, Lytton Strachey wrote: "It is really
most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of
it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more...
than an arabesque - an exquisite arabesque, of course." The Waves
is perhaps Woolf's most difficult novel. It follows in soliloquies
the lives of six persons from childhood to old age. Louis Kronenberger
noted in The New York Times that Woolf was not really concerned
with people, but "the poetic symbols, of life--the changing seasons,
day and night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth
and death and change."
In these works Woolf develops innovative literary techniques in
order to reveal women's experience and thus provide an alternative
to the male-dominated views of reality. In her essay 'Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown' Woolf argues that John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and
other realistic English novelist deal in surfaces but in order to
delve underneath these surfaces one must use a less restricted presentation
of life, combined with such literary devices as stream of consciousness
and interior monologue and the abandonment of linear narrative.
MRS DALLOWAY (1925) reveals the giant web of thoughts produced
by several groups of people during the course of a single day. The
central figure, Clarissa Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess.
At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran Septimus
Smith, who commits suicide, but their lives are connected by external
events. To the Lighthouse has a tripartite structure: part
1 presents Victorian family life, the second part covers a ten-year
period, and the third part is a long account of a morning in which
ghosts are laid to rest. The central figure in the novel, Mrs. Ramsay,
is based on Woolf's mother. Other characters in the book were drawn
from Woolf's family memories.
"So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking
at a girl throwing a ball."
(from To the Lighthouse)
During the inter-war period Woolf was at the centre of literary
society both in London and at her home in Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex.
She lived in Richmond from 1915 to 1924, in Bloomsbury from 1924
to 1939, and maintained the house in Romdell from 1919-41. The Bloomsbury
group was initially based at the Gordon Square residence of Virginia
and her sister Vanessa (Bell). The consolidation of the group's
beliefs in unifying aesthetic concerns occurred under the influence
of the philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958). The group included among
others E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell,
Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. By the early 1930s, the group ceased
to exist in its original form.
After a final attack of mental illness Woolf loaded her pockets
with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex
home on March 28, 1941. On the note to her husband she wrote: "I
have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible
times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought
against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to
you but cannot go on and spoil your life." Her suicide has coloured
interpretations of her works, which have been read as explorations
of her own traumas.
 Virginia
Woolf's concern with feminist themes are dominant in A ROOM OF ONE'S
OWN (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have
hindered women writers, and explores in the last chapter the possibility
of an androgynous mind. In the book she made her famous statement:
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction." Woolf argued that a change in the forms of literature
was necessary because most literature had been "made by men out
of their own needs for their own uses." THREE GUINEAS (1938) examines
the necessity for women to make a claim for their own history and
literature. ORLANDO (1928), a fantasy novel, traces the career of
the androgynous protagonist from a masculine identity within the
Elizabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928. The original edition
was illustrated with pictures of Woolf's lover, Vita Sackville-West,
dressed as Orlando.
As an essayist Woolf was prolific, publishing some 500 essays in
periodicals and collections, beginning in 1905. Characteristic for
Woolf's essays are dialogic nature of style and a continual questioning
of opinion - her reader is often directly addressed, in a conversational
tone, and her rejection of an authoritative voice links her essays
to the tradition of Montaigne.
Leonard (Sidney) Woolf (1880-1969) - Born in London the
son of a barrister. Woolf studied at Cambridge and in 1904 he
went into civil service to Ceylon. His first book, The Village
in the Jungle, appeared in 1913. Woolf joined the Fabian Society
and wrote for The New Statesman. From 1923 to 1930 he was
a literary editor on the Nation. In 1917 he set up a small hand
press at Hogart House, and worked as the director of the Hogarth
Press until his death. Among Woolf's works are novels, non-fiction
and his five volume memoirs Sowing (1960), Growing
(1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All the Way
(1967) and The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (1969).
- For further information: Leonard Woolf by S.S. Myerowitz
(1982); A Marriage of True Minds by G. Spater and I.M.
Parsons (1977)
For further reading: Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell (1972,
2 vols.); Moments of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (1976); The
Novels of Virginia Woolf from Beninning to End by M.A. Leaska
(1977); Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant by by J. Marcus (1983);
Woman of Letters by Rose Phyllis (1978); Virginia Woolf: a Winter's
Life by Lyndall Gordon (1984); Virginia Woolf by Rachel Bowlby
(1988); Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis by Elizabeth
Abel (1989); Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse
on Her Life and Work by Louise DeSalvo (1989); Virginia Woolf:
A Literary Life by John Mepham (1991); Virginia Woolf: A Collection
of Critical Essays by M. Homans (1993); Virginia Woolf by Quentin
Bell (1996); Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson (2000) - Note:
Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993,
wrote her thesis at Cornell University on Faulkner and Virginia
Woolf - See also: Katherine Mansfield, Marcel Proust
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