Novelist, born in London, UK, the daughter of Leslie Stephen. Educated privately, in 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, with whom she set up the Hogarth Press (1917). A leading member of the Bloomsbury Group, she made a major contribution to the development of the novel, in such works as Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), noted for their impressionistic style, a development of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She also wrote biographies and critical essays. After mental illness, she committed suicide. Publication of her Diary (5 vols, 197784) and Letters (6 vols, 197580) further enhanced her reputation.
Virginia Woolf|
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| Born: |
January 25, 1882 London, England, UK |
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| Died: |
28 March 1941 near Lewes, England, UK |
| Occupation(s): | Novelist, essayist, short story writer |
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) is a British novelist who by reputation is regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
Between the World Wars, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Early life
Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth (née Jackson) (1846–1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
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 Duckworth), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather, were among the visitors to the house.
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.
Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed, 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. There they 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.
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.
Personal life
Although she was married to Leonard Woolf from 1912 until her death in 1941, some of Virginia Woolf's strongest romantic ties were with women.
Affair with Vita Sackville-West
In 1922, Woolf met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. Although their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.
Death
Wikisource has original text related to this article: Virginia Woolf suicide noteAt the end of 1940, Woolf suffered another severe bout of depression, from which she felt she was unable to recover, partly due to the onset of World War II. On March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her Sussex home.
Work
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.
This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but due to criticism Virginia Woolf received about the political nature of the book, she changed the novel and its title.
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language.
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.
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.
The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings of most of her novels (with the exception of Orlando and Between the Acts), even as they are often set in an environment of war.
Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through the 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.
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. 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.
The 2002 film 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 Hours was Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway. Many Virginia Woolf scholars are highly critical of the portrayal of Woolf and her works in the film.
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.
The first biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her favorite nephew, Quentin Bell.
Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.
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.
Cultural references
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. 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." Laura Veirs references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture." 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'Biographies
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 Barret 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.")
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