Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was one of the most innovative novelists of the twentieth century and one of its finest essayists. With Joyce and Proust she transformed the novel, turning from external plot and description to the inner life of consciousness — the flow of perception, memory and feeling through a single day or a lifetime — in Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931). Her long essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), on women and fiction, is a founding text of feminist criticism. She was at the centre of the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of writers, artists and intellectuals who challenged Victorian conventions; with her husband Leonard she ran the Hogarth Press. She suffered recurrent episodes of severe mental illness, and in 1941, fearing another breakdown, drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Life

Hyde Park Gate

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London, into a large, distinguished, intellectual family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an eminent critic, philosopher, mountaineer and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; her mother, Julia, a celebrated beauty, had been a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Both had been widowed; the household included children from three marriages. Virginia was educated at home, reading voraciously in her father’s library, while her brothers went to Cambridge — an injustice she never forgot. Summers were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall, overlooking the bay and the Godrevy lighthouse — the world of To the Lighthouse.

Her mother died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and she suffered her first breakdown; her half-sister Stella, who took the mother’s place, died two years later; her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her; her father died in 1904, and she suffered another breakdown and attempted suicide.

Bloomsbury

After their father’s death, Virginia, her sister Vanessa (later a painter), and her brothers Thoby and Adrian moved to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, then an unfashionable district. Thoby’s Cambridge friends — Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell (who married Vanessa), Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant — came on Thursday evenings to talk about truth, beauty, art and sex with a frankness unheard of in Victorian households. This was the Bloomsbury Group. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906. Virginia wrote reviews for the Times Literary Supplement.

In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a writer and civil servant back from Ceylon, a Jewish socialist without money; their marriage was one of deep companionship. She suffered a severe breakdown in 1913, attempting suicide. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915. In 1917 the Woolfs set up the Hogarth Press on a hand press at their house in Richmond as therapy; it became a major publisher, issuing Woolf’s own books, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude and the complete English translations of Freud.

The great novels

After the more conventional Night and Day (1919), Woolf found her own method with Jacob’s Room (1922), a portrait of a young man killed in the war glimpsed only through others’ impressions. Her essay “Modern Fiction” (1919/1925) set out her aims: she attacked the “materialist” novelists Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy for describing the outside of life, and urged writers to record life as it is experienced:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel… Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

In “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924) she declared that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”

Mrs Dalloway (1925) — see Mrs Dalloway — follows a society hostess and a shell-shocked veteran through a single June day in London. To the Lighthouse (1927), her most autobiographical novel and for many her finest, is set in the Ramsays’ summer house on the Isle of Skye (really St Ives): in the first part, a September day before the war, the beloved, managing Mrs Ramsay knits, dines and draws her family and guests together, while the painter Lily Briscoe struggles to capture her; the middle section, “Time Passes”, compresses ten years — the war, the deaths of Mrs Ramsay and two of her children, the decay of the empty house — into a few pages of lyric prose, with deaths reported in brackets; in the last part, the survivors return, Mr Ramsay finally sails to the lighthouse with his children, and Lily completes her painting: “I have had my vision.” Through it Woolf worked through her feelings for her own parents.

Orlando: A Biography (1928), a fantasy inspired by her love affair with the aristocratic writer Vita Sackville-West, follows a nobleman who lives from Elizabethan times to 1928, changing sex in the eighteenth century, and is a playful exploration of gender, history and biography. The Waves (1931), her most experimental novel, consists of the interior soliloquies of six friends from childhood to middle age, interspersed with descriptions of the sun moving across the sea in a single day. The Years (1937) was her bestselling novel; Between the Acts (1941), set at a village pageant on the eve of war, was her last.

The essays

Woolf was one of the great essayists — The Common Reader (1925, 1932) — and her two feminist books are classics. A Room of One’s Own (1929), based on lectures at the women’s colleges of Cambridge, argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” She imagines being turned off the grass and out of the library at “Oxbridge” because she is a woman, compares the lavish lunch at a men’s college with the meagre dinner at a women’s one, and invents Judith Shakespeare, William’s equally gifted sister, who, denied education and forced towards marriage, runs away to London, is laughed at by the theatre managers, seduced, and kills herself — “who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” She traces the history of women writers — Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot — and calls for an “androgynous” mind. Three Guineas (1938) links patriarchy, militarism and fascism.

Death

In 1940 the Woolfs’ London houses were bombed. At Monk’s House in Rodmell, Sussex, as the war darkened and she finished Between the Acts, Woolf felt the onset of another breakdown — she heard voices and could not work. On 28 March 1941 she wrote to Leonard: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time… I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” She filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later.

Art

Woolf’s novels dissolve conventional plot into consciousness: free indirect discourse that moves fluidly from mind to mind, interior monologue, the play of memory and present perception, “moments of being” — intense flashes of reality — and the passing of time, both the “clock time” of Big Ben and the inner time of memory. Her prose is rhythmic, lyrical, precise and luminous. Her themes are the elusiveness of the self, the difficulty of knowing others, death, art, women’s lives, class, war and the beauty and terror of the passing moment.

Legacy

Woolf’s reputation, which dipped after her death, rose spectacularly with the feminist movement of the 1970s, when A Room of One’s Own became essential reading. Her diaries and letters, published in many volumes, are among the great literary records of the century. Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) made her name a byword; Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998), filmed in 2002 with Nicole Kidman as Woolf, interweaves her life with Mrs Dalloway.

In conversation

• “A room of one’s own” — the material independence needed for creative work.
• Shakespeare’s sister — the lost genius of those denied opportunity.
• “Moments of being” — sudden flashes when life seems fully real.