Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist and critic, whose stream-of-consciousness technique and poetic prose are among the most important contributions to the modern novel.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, the daughter of the biographer and philosopher Sir Leslie Stephen, who educated her at home and gave her the run of his library. In 1895 her mother died, and Woolf was looked after by her elder half-sister, Stella Duckworth (who died two years later), and her half-brother, George. By the age of 19, Woolf was contributing articles to the Times Literary Supplement. Her father died in 1904, and she had the first of what were to become frequent nervous collapses.

In 1905, after George Duckworth’s unsuccessful attempts to launch her into conventional society, she and her sister Vanessa—an artist who later married the critic Clive Bell—and their two brothers established a household in the Bloomsbury district of London; it became a gathering place for freethinkers and former university colleagues of their elder brother Thoby. Thoby died suddenly in 1906, leaving Woolf unstable for the next four years. The circle, known as the Bloomsbury Group, included, in addition to Bell and other members of the London intelligentsia, the writer Leonard Woolf, whom Woolf married in 1912. Leonard Woolf was to prove a patient and devoted husband who did his best to keep Woolf’s life quiet and calm. After Virginia suffered a serious breakdown in 1914, the couple founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, as a kind of therapy for her. Its first publication was Two Stories (1917), one by each of them. The couple divided their time between a house in London and one in Rodmell, Sussex.

Virginia Woolf’s first novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), conformed to the Realist conventions of story-telling that had developed in the 19th century. The Voyage Out tells the story of Rachel Vinrace’s journey to South America, her engagement there to Terence Hewet, and her subsequent fever and death. Night and Day contrasts the lifestyles of two women: Katherine Hilbery, said to be based on Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa, and Mary, who is involved with the women’s suffrage movement. Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, is the novel in which Woolf’s departure from realism into a new style of her own first becomes apparent. She starts to use the “stream-of-consciousness” technique, a form of writing that attempts to minutely evoke the experience of living by describing sense perceptions, broken thoughts, and sensations in a fluid and continuous narrative:

Woolf’s use of prose is evocative and sensuous in a way more often associated with poetic writing: “The feathery white Moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow parsley in the meadows.” In Jacob’s Room, Woolf uses this poetic prose to evoke a sense of loss and grief, describing Jacob’s room after Jacob has been killed in the war: “Listless is the air in the empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.” T.S. Eliot loved the novel—others criticized it for its lack of plot.

The novels following Jacob’s Room are generally considered the finest examples of her distinctive narrative style. Mrs Dalloway (1925), like another great Modernist classic, Ulysses by James Joyce, is set all on one day, and follows the activities, thoughts, and feelings of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party. The “plot” or “action” is generated through a loose series of associations and chance meetings between characters. Climactic moments or revelations often take place only within one character’s consciousness, as when Mrs Dalloway observes a minute but significant detail at her party: “The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And Clarissa saw—she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn’t a failure after all! it was going to be alright now—her party. It had begun.” Within this interior monologue, Woolf is able to treat many subjects, and, as is typical of much Modernist writing, she jumbles the everyday and the transcendent, the mundane and the revelatory. So, not long after she has noticed the curtain blowing, Clarissa is thinking: “Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

To the Lighthouse (1927) continues this experiment with narrative form and is one of Woolf’s most assured pieces of work. Psychological effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Woolf, like the French writer Marcel Proust, also used her novels to engage with the concept of time. To the Lighthouse starts with Mrs Ramsay’s promise to her son that he can visit the lighthouse (“Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow, ... But you’ll have to be up with the lark”), a visit which is deferred throughout the book and only finally achieved after Mrs Ramsay’s death, which is reported unemotionally in the middle section of the book called “Time Passes”. Mrs Ramsay thinks that “something ... is immune from changes, and shines out ... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby”, but the book, with its insistence on loss, resentment, regret, and grief, seems as much concerned by the changes that time does make, as with attempts at transcendent truth—represented by the artist Lily Briscoe’s struggles to reproduce the shape-in-chaos that is the essence of Mrs Ramsay.

In addition to her novels, Woolf produced short stories and literary essays, and was a critic of considerable influence; her important critique of Victorian Realism, the essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, was published in 1923, and many of her other essays are collected in The Common Reader: First Series (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). In 1929 she published her influential essay A Room of One’s Own, based on two lectures she had given at the two women’s colleges in Cambridge. She compares staying in a women’s college with staying in one of the men’s colleges: “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?”. The essay is an early feminist classic in which Woolf maintains that financial independence and privacy, “five hundred a year” and “a room of one’s own”, are prerequisite for female literary achievement. She famously uses the example of Shakespeare’s (hypothetical) sister, who, denied any outlet for her talent, finally “killed herself one winter’s night”.

In 1928 Orlando: A Biography was published. Woolf wrote of it: “How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right ... Orlando was! as if it had shoved everything aside to come into existence.” She added elsewhere, “For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels and be off.” Loosely based on the character of her friend Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West, Orlando skips through the centuries, “First masculine then feminine, first in love, and then loved; first jilting and then jilted; a man of action, a poet, a woman of fashion and a Victorian lady”, as Bernard Blackstone has described her. Refreshed by her “escapade” with Orlando, Woolf published The Waves (1931), which was her most experimental novel and is regarded by many critics as her masterpiece. Using six named characters, whom the text follows from youth to middle age, Woolf orchestrates out of their separate inner voices what is perhaps more easily understood as a prose poem, rather than a novel. The characters’ speeches are not to each other, but are solitary musings, and Woolf differentiates them from one another by attributing certain syntactical habits, or favourite vocabulary, to each, thus questioning radically how identity is constructed. Perhaps the greatest achievement of The Waves is in its courageous representation of the very instability of the concept of individuality.

Flush, Woolf’s “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, was published in 1933. In one of her lectures to the women students of Cambridge, Woolf had predicted that women writers would eventually “look beyond the personal and political relationships to the wider questions which the poet tries to solve—of our destiny and the meaning of life”, and this seems to be what she herself was attempting in her mature work. Her last two novels are certainly concerned with “wider questions”. In The Years, published in 1937, she returned to a conventional, Realist style of writing. The novel traces the history of the Pargiter family from 1880 to “the present day” (1936). It is Woolf’s longest book and its composition cost her much agonizing anxiety; one characteristic diary entry runs: “A good day—a bad day—so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am.” Between the Acts, written under the shadow of World War II, was Woolf’s last novel, published posthumously in 1941. When it was more or less complete, she walked down to the River Ouse and drowned herself. Yet Between the Acts is not a desolate book—it uses the device of a pageant of English history in the grounds of Pointz Hall to examine the meaning of Englishness, and to attempt to construct some essence of English identity that the coming war cannot destroy.

Despite her bouts of severe depression, which usually coincided with her finishing a book, and which culminated in her suicide, Woolf produced nine major novels and had a far-reaching and hugely important impact both on the development of the Modernist novel, and on feminist criticism (see Criticism, Literary). She published a book of essays, Three Guineas, in 1938, and various collections of her short stories were published after her death: The Death of the Moth (1942), A Haunted House (1943), The Moment (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958). A Writer’s Diary, published in 1953, is a collection of extracts from Woolf’s diary, and Moments of Being, a collection of previously unpublished autobiographical material, was published in 1976.