" Time to take a pause from our usual poetry post to anticipate the birth date of Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941), English writer considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight. An important influence in her early life was the summer home the family used in St Ives, Cornwall, where she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, which was to become iconic in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927).
Woolf's childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years later by the death of her stepsister and surrogate mother, Stella Duckworth.
She began writing professionally in 1900, encouraged by her father, whose death in 1905 was a major turning point in her life and the cause of another breakdown.
Following the death, the family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle; it was there that, in conjunction with their brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group.
In 1912, Woolf married Leonard Woolf and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. Between 1924 and 1940 the Woolfs lived in Bloomsbury, where they ran the Hogarth Press from their basement, where Virginia also had her writing room.
The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and on December 14, 1922 Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson, while dining with Clive Bell. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which reached its peak between 1925 and 1928, evolving into more of a friendship through the 1930s.
This period of intimacy was to prove fruitful for both authors, Woolf producing three novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931) as well as a number of essays, including Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) and A Letter to a Young Poet (1932).
Woolf is considered to be one of the greatest twentieth century novelists and short story writers and one of the pioneers, among modernist writers using stream of consciousness as a narrative device, alongside contemporaries such as Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce.
Her reputation was at its greatest during the 1930s, but declined considerably following World War II. The growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s helped re-establish her reputation.
Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 at the age of 33. The novel is set on a ship bound for South America, with a group of young Edwardians onboard with their various mismatched yearnings and misunderstandings.
Mrs. Dalloway centers 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 on 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. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.
Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without aging much past thirty, but who does abruptly turn into a woman.
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.
Woolf is also known for her essays, including A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she wrote the much-quoted dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In her work Woolf tried to evaluate the degree to which her privileged background framed the lens through which she viewed class.
Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by bouts of mental illness, which included being institutionalized and attempting suicide. Her illness is considered to have been bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention at the time.
After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened.
On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until April 18. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
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Quotes and Literary Excerpts by Virginia Woolf
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf
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"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf
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“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf
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“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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“...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark?
One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it?
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Chapter One
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“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
-- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
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“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
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“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
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“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
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When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
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“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...”
― Virginia Woolf
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All content of this post is for educational purposes only.
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