Virginia Woolf
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Chapter 6: Moderns and Contemporaries Virginia Woolf |
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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, one of the leading men of letters of Victorian England, author of History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother was Julia Pattle Stephen, a famous beauty and equally famous hostess to the literary figures who gathered at the Stephen home: George Meredith, Henry James, J.A. Symonds, and most of the other prominent writers of the day. Her father’s learning and industry and her mother’s social and domestic mastery were models Woolf struggled with all her life, until she exorcised them in To the Lighthouse (1927).
Julia Stephen died when Woolf was thirteen. Leslie Stephen reacted by plunging into an exaggerated and melodramatic mourning that was to continue for the rest of his life. Woolf had the first of a series of mental breakdowns that were to recur periodically the rest of her life. A second breakdown, including a suicide attempt, followed the death of her father in 1904, when she was twenty-two. When she recovered, she moved, with her sister Vanessa and her brothers Thoby and Adrian, from the family home in Kensington, London, to 46 Gordon Square in the less fashionable and more bohemian area of Bloomsbury. The Stephen sisters and brothers, in their new Bloomsbury home, formed the initial nucleus of what, within a few years, would be the famous "Bloomsbury group," a circle of artists and intellectuals who would have a major impact upon the culture of England between the wars. The circle, many of whom knew the Stephen sons at Cambridge, eventually included the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist J. M. Keyes, the art critic Roger Fry, the novelist E.M. Forster, and a number of lesser names. Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf, a journalist and writer in 1912; the following year, her first novel, which she had worked on for six years, appeared: The Voyage Out. Publication of the book was followed by a third breakdown, which lasted, with brief respites, for four years. A second novel, Night and Day, appeared in 1919, followed by Monday or Tuesday, a collection of stories, in 1920. Jacob’s Room was published in 1922, and Mrs. Dalloway appeared in 1925. Her finest novel, To the Lighthouse, was published in 1927. A love affair with Vita Sackville-West inspired the amusing but uncharacteristic Orlando (1928), a mock-biography that pursues a single character from Elizabethan times to the present, the protagonist changing sexes to fit each age. More novels followed: The Waves was published in 1931, The Years, six years later, and Between the Acts appeared in 1941. Woolf’s voluminous writing of the 1930s also included several volumes of her collected literary criticism, which had made her one of the most admired critics of her age;. Flush (1933) was a fanciful biography of the Brownings presented as the biography of Mrs. Browning’s dog; She also wrote a long biography of her friend the art critic Roger Fry (1940). In A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), as well as many of her critical essays, she championed the cause of women writers and the emancipation of women. In 1941, sensing the coming of another mental breakdown, Virginia Woolf, then living with her husband in a rural cottage near Rodmell, drowned herself in the nearby river Ouse. Author Links
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Shakespeare's Sister
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