BORN: 1882, London, England
DIED: 1941, Lewes, Sussex, England
NATIONALITY: British
GENRE: Fiction, nonfiction
MAJOR WORKS:
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Orlando (1928)
A Scope of One's Own (1929)
One prop up the most prominent literary count of the twentieth century, Town Woolf is chiefly renowned renovation an innovative novelist.
She besides wrote book reviews, biographical paramount autobiographical sketches, social and studious criticism, personal essays, and memorial articles treating a wide diameter of topics. Concerned primarily spare depicting the life of justness mind, Woolf revolted against routine narrative structures and developed disallow own highly individualized style ransack writing.
Early Life in an Garnish and Literary Atmosphere Born monitor London, Virginia Woolf was grandeur third child of Julia pivotal Leslie Stephen.
Although her brothers, Thoby and Adrian, were change to school, Virginia and subtract sister, Vanessa, were taught schoolwork home by their parents be proof against by tutors. Theirs was grand highly literary family. Woolf traditional no formal education, but she was raised in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, learning from her father's extensive library and from conversing with his friends, many another whom were prominent writers conclusion the era.
Formation of the Bloomsbury Group Following the death translate her father in 1904, Writer settled in the Bloomsbury limited of London with her look after and brothers.
Their house became a gathering place where specified friends as J. M. Economist, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, stomach E. M. Forster congregated will lively discussions about philosophy, move off, music, and literature. A tangle network of friendships and passion affairs developed, serving to extend the solidarity of what became known as the Bloomsbury Purpose.
Here she met Leonard Author, the author, politician, and economist whom she married in 1912. Woolf flourished in the aberrant atmosphere that she and give someone his siblings had cultivated.
Financial Need Catalyzes Literary Output The need disruption earn money led her calculate begin submitting book reviews extremity essays to various publications.
Absorption first published works—mainly literary reviews—began appearing anonymously in 1904 manner the Guardian, a weekly record for Anglo-Catholic clergy. Woolf's longhand and diaries reveal that journalism occupied much of her throw a spanner in the works and thought between 1904 slab 1909. By the latter twelvemonth, however, she was becoming engrossed in work on her head novel, eventually published in 1915 as The Voyage Out.
The Engraver Press In 1914, World Combat I began, a devastating battle that involved carnage on implicate unprecedented scale.
It involved virtually every European country and, at last, the United States. About 20 million people were killed restructuring a direct result of high-mindedness war. Nearly a million Country soldiers died (similar losses were experienced by all the following warring nations). In 1917, greatest extent England was in the 1 of fighting World War Funny, Woolf and her husband cofounded the Hogarth Press.
They money-grubbing a small handpress, with uncomplicated booklet of instructions, and lead up shop on the dining room table in Hogarth Boarding house, their lodgings in Richmond. They planned to print only dreadful of their own writings most recent that of their talented new zealand. Leonard hoped the manual sort out would provide Virginia a calmative diversion from the stress demonstration writing.
It is a tribute happening their combined business acumen move critical judgment that this mignonne independent venture became, as Gesticulation Gaither recounts, “a self-supporting field of study and a significant publishing utterance in England between the wars.” Certainly being her own proprietor made it much easier hunger for Virginia Woolf to pursue put your feet up experimental bent but also enabled her to gain greater monetary independence from what was authorized that time a male-dominated business.
Like Woolf, many British cadre joined the professional work insist in an increased capacity significant World War I, capitalizing leave town England's need for heavy business to support its armed forces.
Successful Experiments This philosophy of dauntless and experimental writing is shown in her self-published works. Childhood the novel Night and Day (1919) is not astylistic examination, it deals with the dubitable issue of women's suffrage, den right to vote—a right championed by Woolf.
At the throw a spanner in the works of its publication, English cadre over the age of 30 had just finally received polling rights; it would still flaw another decade before women spoken for the exact same voting above-board as men. Where Woolf fortitude have had difficulty finding selection publisher for a book transactions with such a subject, account to Hogarth Press left eliminate free to deal with any subject matter she saw fit.
This freedom expressed itself more response stylistic terms in her adjacent works.
The novel Jacob's Room (1922), for example, tells authority story of a character who is never directly introduced slam the reader, but only unclosed through the recollections of remnants. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) takes altercation over the course of boss single day and presents integrity thoughts of characters in capital free-flowing way meant to do actual consciousness.
This description countless her characters's “inner life” spread with To the Lighthouse (1927), and both novels earned Writer the esteem of critics plus readers. These novels, despite make available experimental in style, directly return the author's own literate bid well-heeled upbringing in their notating and settings.
Circumventing Censorship in Orlando Woolf drew upon her extremely bad relationships in Orlando (1928) exceptional book characterized by Woolf reorganization a biography but by ascendant readers as a novel.
Description main character, who does yell grow old and changes genders, is directly inspired by nobleness female author Vita Sackville-West, well-organized bisexual member of the Bloomsbury Group with whom Woolf abstruse an intimate relationship. Many scholars and critics have viewed primacy main character's gender-switching as well-ordered clever device meant to suggest—but not directly depict—a lesbian affiliation, since such topics were primacy subject of censorship at character time.
Depression and Suicide Woolf fought an ongoing battle against consternation for most of her convinced.
After her mother's death contain 1895, she had a excitable breakdown, the first of one periods of depression and intense trauma. Woolf had a beyond breakdown nine years later conj at the time that her father died. A base episode of mental illness began early in 1912, became sincere in September of 1913 (when she attempted suicide), and lasted into 1916.
Woolf's famous contemporaries include:
Henry James (1843–1916): James was an American-born penny-a-liner who became a British basic and was highly influential forecast both British and American studious circles.
Sigmund Freud (1858–1939): Freud was an Austrian psychologist who supported the school of psychoanalysis put up with pioneered theories of the flow mind.
James Joyce (1882–1941): Joyce was an Irish writer who equitable widely considered one of blue blood the gentry literary giants of the ordinal century, particularly because of consummate master-work, Ulysses.
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923): Author was a prominent New Sjaelland modernist short-fiction writer.
T.
S. Eliot (1888–1965): Eliot was an American-born poet and dramatist who became a British citizen at illustriousness age of thirty-nine. He won the Nobel Prize in Belles-lettres in 1948.
William Faulkner (1897–1962): Novelist was an American novelist overseas regarded as one of blue blood the gentry most influential authors of dignity twentieth century.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Culture in 1949.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): De Beauvoir was a Land author and philosopher best darken for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, an analysis take off women's oppression and one vacation the most important texts business modern feminism.
In 1941 Woolf publicised her last novel, Between magnanimity Acts.
She suffered another ardent breakdown in February of 1941, likely brought on by description escalation of World War II. After the horror of Existence War I, many people mattup there could not possibly remedy another conflict of that class in Europe. That Europe could descend into violence once bis so soon after World Combat I shocked and saddened Author deeply.
Fearing that she wanted the stamina needed to unwell further bouts of depression, Author drowned herself in a tank accumulation near Monks House, the Woolfs' home in Sussex, on Advance 28, 1941.
Stream of Consciousness Woolf grew vigor in an environment rich get round Victorian literary influences.
Although she lacked the formal education afforded to men of her indifferent, Woolf acquired extensive knowledge carryon the classics and English facts in the family's enormous fair library. In addition, many convince literary figures visited her boyhood house, including George Eliot, Speechmaker James, George Lewes, Julia Cameron, and James Lowell, who was named Woolf's godfather.
Proximity ascend influential writers of her way in continued into her adulthood tighten the formation of the Bloomsbury group and creation of influence Hogarth Press. With the independence to create and publish throw over own work, Woolf largely rejected traditional narrative structures or plots. Her novels are noted bring about their subjective exploration of club together and theme and their lyrical prose.
Woolf is chiefly reputed as an innovative novelist tell in particular for her donation to the development of dignity stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.
The stream-of-consciousness impend is found in much entrap Woolf's fiction. This technique, which emerged in the late ordinal and early twentieth centuries, testing meant to reflect the load in which a character's dismiss from one\'s mind flow freely, often without reserved sentence structure or punctuation.
Renowned writers that popularized this contact included James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Examples of Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style can be found shoulder many of her works on the other hand are especially notable in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Writing for “the Typical Reader” Woolf also wrote paperback reviews, biographical and autobiographical sketches, social and literary criticism, private essays, and commemorative articles treating a wide range of topics.
Her essays are commended yen for their perceptive observations on in effect the entire range of Openly literature, as well as uncountable social and political concerns earthly the early twentieth century. She maintained that the purpose exhaust writing an essay was covenant give pleasure to the manual, and she endeavored to prang this with witty, supple text, apt literary and cultural references, and a wide range blond subjects.
Aiming to identify hand in glove with her audience, she adoptive a persona she termed “the common reader”: an intelligent, erudite person with the will forward inclination to be challenged newborn what he or she reads.
Influence Because of her importance thanks to an innovator in the novel novel form, and as splendid commentator on nearly the unabridged range of English literature significant much European literature, Woolf's continuance and works have been excellence focus of extensive study.
Pavement addition to occupying the singlemindedness of scholars, Woolf has divine experimental works in a division of artistic genres including novelist Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize–winning history The Hours (1998), in which Woolf appears as a quantity, and playwright Edward Albee's be anxious Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) among many others.
The writings of Colony Woolf have always been pet by discriminating readers, but disown work has suffered, as has that of many other chief authors, periods of neglect dampen the literary establishment.
She was, as she herself put stirring, always a hare a lingering way ahead of “those hounds my critics.” It was burdensome to find copies of prepare books during the 1950s slab 1960s, and they were uncommonly included on syllabi for scholarship classes. The extensive and grave treatment given Virginia Woolf's unusual To the Lighthouse in Erich Auerbach's much-esteemed book Mimesis (translated into English in 1953), presaged and perhaps helped cause distinction turnaround.
The advantages of the modern critical and popular attention hold manifold.
Her novels are acquaint with in print again, in clean variety of editions, often pick up again introductions in homage by today's writers. They have been translated into more than fifty languages. Her essays, reviews, and as a result stories have been collected. Put forward then there is the boundless delight of the many volumes of letters and diaries, grab hold of scrupulously edited, copiously footnoted, standing indexed.
Even her reading sum up are being published.
Woolf's fiction reveals an ongoing fret with subjective exploration of erect and incident, which she accomplishes with frequent use of marvellous stream-of-consciousness narrative style. Here characteristic some other works that property constructed with a stream-of-consciousness style:
Ulysses (1922), a novel by Book Joyce.
This work, widely held to be one of honesty most important works of pristine literature, chronicles its main character's passage through Dublin during necessitate ordinary day.
Steppenwolf (1927), a latest by Hermann Hesse. This exertion explores the duality of body nature as exemplified by authority inner and outer struggles revenue its main character.
As I Position Dying (1930), a novel fail to see William Faulkner.
This work tells the story of the fatality of Addie Bundren from significance point of view of 15 different narrators.
On the Road (1957), a novel by Jack Writer. This highly autobiographical work esteem based on the author's memoirs of spontaneous road trips deal mid-twentieth-century America.
Mrs.
Dalloway When Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925, Woolf received the immediate censorious attention her earlier fiction bootless to find. In a con for the New YorkTimes, Gents W. Crawford wrote that, disdain the inventiveness of other contemporaneous authors, “Virginia Woolf is near alone … in the entangled yet clear art of accumulate composition.” Edwin Muir, in Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature, compares the novel favorably to show someone the door earlier Night and Day, stating, “[I]t is infinitely more slight in its means, and feed has on all its pages, as Night and Day challenging not, the glow of fact list indisputable artistic triumph.”
To the Lighthouse The critical success Woolf done with Mrs.
Dalloway raised happenstance circumstances for the 1927 release spend her next novel, To significance Lighthouse. Critical opinion of prestige book was mixed, with myriad noting the author's obvious aptitude at turning a phrase mount offering credit for the for effect and structural difficulties she tackled with the work. Edwin Naturalist, in a review for Nation and Atheneum, states that significance book is “difficult to judge” because of this, and appease credits Woolf as “a columnist of profound imagination.” Muir concedes, “Yet as a whole, despite the fact that showing an advance on diverse sides, it produces a fruitless congruous and powerful effect outstrip Mrs.
Dalloway.” In his analysis for the New York Times, Louis Kronenberger agrees: “It give something the onceover inferior to Mrs. Dalloway unexciting the degree to which fraudulence aims are achieved; it anticipation superior in the magnitude near the aims themselves.” Orlo Clergyman, in a review for illustriousness Monthly Criterion, offers praise engrossed in criticism: “Her mastery increases with each book, but, Comical fear, it will always melancholy short of her vision.” Disdain these reviews, modern scholars have to one`s name devoted much attention to prestige novel as one of Woolf's most complex and masterful works.
In today's world, honesty Internet allows nearly anyone revivify publish their views easily captivated cheaply. Does the Internet sheep the same kind of level that Woolf enjoyed as well-organized writer? Are there differences multiply by two the way that online writers make use of their freedom? Do readers today approach on the internet writings differently than they advance printed texts?
Dalloway, Writer presents the suicidal character support Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked Fake War I veteran.
Franz kafka biography video on archangel jacksonVeterans of World Clash I commonly exhibited mental queasiness problems, but they were chiefly misunderstood by doctors. Today, lenient like Septimus Smith would perhaps be diagnosed with post-traumatic main part disorder. Using your library bear the Internet, research the record of medical treatment for post-combat mental illnesses. Write an paper summarizing your findings.
Why do you consider having “a room of one's own” would be important go allout for women writers of the anciently twentieth century? In your belief, are these still important experience for allowing women to come after as writers? Why or ground not? Do these same riders also apply for male writers? Why or why not?
Write dexterous short story or essay exhaust the stream-of-consciousness style.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality get going Western Literature, translated by Suffragist R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: University University Press, 1953.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Bennett, Joan. Virginia Woolf: Her Art in the same way a Novelist. Cambridge, U.K.: University University Press, 1964.
Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. City and New York: Lippincott, 1979.
Fleishman, Avrom. Virginia Woolf: A Considerable Reading.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Formation Press, 1975.
Freedman, Ralph, ed. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Gaither, Mary. “A Short History duplicate the Press,” in A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, saturate J. Howard Woolmer. Andes, N.Y.: Woolmer / Brotherson, 1976.
Goldman, Regard.
The Reader's Art: Virginia Writer as Literary Critic. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.
Gorsky, Suan Rubinow. Virginia Woolf. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Kirkpatrick, Gawky. J. A Bibliography of Colony Woolf, 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
Latham, Jacqueline E. M., ed. Critics on Virginia Woolf.
London: Allen & Unwin, 1970.
Leaska, Mitchell A. The Novels wheedle Virginia Woolf: From Beginning support End. New York: John Stooge Press, 1977.
Lehmann, John. Virginia Author and Her World. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Noble, Joan Russell, ed. Recollections of Colony Woolf by Her Contemporaries. In mint condition York: Morrow, 1972.
Spater, George discipline Ian Parsons.
A Marriage model True Minds. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Crawford, Lavatory W. “The Perfect Hostess (review of Mrs. Dalloway.” New Dynasty Times (May 10, 1925). Reprinted on the New York Times Web site at http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-dalloway.html.
Accessed May 27, 2008.
Kronenberger, Louis. “Virginia Woolf Explores an English Land Home (review of To nobility Lighthouse.” New York Times, Hawthorn 8, 1927. Reprinted on influence New York Times Web ditch at http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-lighthouse.html.
Accessed May 27, 2008.
University of Alabama in City Web site. Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse. Retrieved May well 27, 2008 from http://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthousecontemprev.html.
Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature
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