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Virginia Woolf |
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For the American writer, see .
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 (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". BiographyEarly lifeBorn 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, 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 lifeWoolf 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 , 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. DeathAfter 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:
WorkVirginia 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. Modern scholarship and interpretationsRecently, 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 referencesNicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002).
BibliographyNovels
Short fiction
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":
Non-fiction
Play
Autobiography
Books about the life of Virginia Woolf
Notes1. ^ [1] 2. ^ [2] 3. ^ [3] 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. ^ [4] 8. ^ [5] 9. ^ [6] 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
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..... Click the link for more information. 18th century - 19th century - 20th century 1850s 1860s 1870s - 1880s - 1890s 1900s 1910s 1879 1880 1881 - 1882 - 1883 1884 1885 : Subjects: Archaeology - Architecture - ..... Click the link for more information. March 28 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining. Events..... Click the link for more information. 19th century - 20th century - 21st century 1910s 1920s 1930s - 1940s - 1950s 1960s 1970s 1938 1939 1940 - 1941 - 1942 1943 1944 Year 1941 (MCMXLI ..... Click the link for more information. Motto Dieu et mon droit (French) "God and my right" Anthem No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen". ..... Click the link for more information. worldwide view of the subject. Modernist literature is the literary form of Modernism and especially High modernism; it should not be confused with modern literature, which is the history of thePlease [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page. ..... Click the link for more information. Literature literally "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter) as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary, or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. ..... Click the link for more information. interwar period (also interbellum) is understood within Western culture to be the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, specifically 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939. ..... Click the link for more information. London Canary Wharf is the centre of London's modern office towers London shown within England Coordinates: Sovereign state United Kingdom Constituent country England ..... Click the link for more information. Note: Authority for the statements in this article are to be found in the list of sources at the end. Only the most important links have been indicated. The Bloomsbury Group ..... Click the link for more information. This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details. This article has been tagged since September 2007. ..... Click the link for more information. To the Lighthouse Author Virginia Woolf Country England Language English Genre(s) Novel Publisher Hogarth Press Publication date 5 May 1927 Media type Print (hardbound with cloth) ISBN NA ..... Click the link for more information. A Room of One's Own is an extended essay 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 1928. ..... Click the link for more information. This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia® - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the Wikipedia® encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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| A fascinating read for scholars and lay readers alike, Virginia Woolf seamlessly blends the twin issues of Woolf's literary achievements and the context of their creation. Part II, which spans the first half of the 20th century, contains excerpts from the writings of Keynes, Mead, Merton, Du Bois and Gramsci as well as political and literary figures such as Virginia Woolf, Gandhi and Mao. The playwright, who was living with Terrence McNally at the time he wrote Virginia Woolf, vehemently and rightly denounced this homophobic assertion. |
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