WRITERS AND TEXTS
Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf perfectly represents, as a woman and a
writer, the transition between the Victorian and the Modern
Age. She was born into an eminent Victorian family and
‘Modern writer, modern woman.’
brought up in a refined traditional milieu but in the 1910s and 1920s she became part
of a group of intellectuals, known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, who were unconventional
in their ideas about life and social relations. She began by writing novels conventional in
style and content, but she went on to become one of the leading Modernists with novels
such as Mrs Dalloway which through their ‘stream-of-consciousness’ technique explore
‘life within’, as she called it – what goes on in the mind and the psyche during everyday
occurrences. She was also, and especially, the first modern feminist: her lectures and
essays – famously, A Room of One’s Own – on the condition of women in the modern • Watch the video lesson
world and their need of emancipation formed the basis of the Women’s Liberation and find out about
movements of the late 20th century. Her life, though happy and eventful in many ways, Virginia Woolf with the
was beset by long periods of mental illness and tragically ended by suicide. author of your book.
• Listen to the texts.
Did Virginia Woolf come from a typically Victorian background?
Yes, she did. She was born in London in 1882, the third child of Sir Leslie Stephen – a
distinguished Victorian literary critic and philosopher – and of Julia Prinsep Jackson.
With her sister Vanessa (an important modernist painter), her brothers Thoby and
Adrian, and four other brothers and sisters born from her parents’ previous marriages,
Virginia was brought up in a household full of people and devoted to intellectual
activities of all kinds. She was, in her own words, born ‘of well-to-do parents, born
into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth
century world’. Despite the intellectual stimuli she received at home, however,
Virginia was fully aware that a higher education for women was not exactly what
society expected of them: ‘Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly
complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires
– say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously’.
What kind of education did she receive as an upper-class girl?
As was the rule for girls of her social class, while her brothers went to university, ↑ Virginia Woolf on the
front page of what
Virginia was mostly educated at home in English classics and Victorian literature is perhaps the most
but also learning Greek. From 1897 to 1901 she attended the Ladies’ Department of famous magazine in the
world: Time (12 Aprile
King’s College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact 1937). Portrait by Man
with exponents of the women’s rights movement. Other important influences for her Ray. Woolf was the first
woman to achieve fame
intellectual growth came from the Stephen home: the conversation of her Cambridge- not only as a writer but
educated brothers and their friends (among whom her future husband, Leonard also as a central figure in
the culture of the time.
Woolf); the free access she was given to her father’s vast library – quite unusual for a
young girl at the time; and the many men of letters she met there.
What traumatic events occurred in Virginia’s early life?
Virginia’s childhood began as a happy one. Her youthful paradise was her parents’
big house at St Ives, Cornwall, where her family spent the summers – Virginia’s
passion for the sea entered much of her later fiction. Her happy childhood came to
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an abrupt end in 1895: her mother died, and this was followed by a long period of
depression for Virginia, aggravated when in 1897 her half-sister, Stella Duckworth,
who was a mother figure to her, also died. It was the first sign of a nervous fragility
that accompanied Virginia throughout her life, resulting in periodical fits of mental
instability and gloominess. Her father’s death in 1904 produced another period of
deep depression, and her first attempt at suicide: she threw herself out of a window
and was put under the cure of George Savage, an eminent psychiatrist and a friend
↓ British writer Leonard of her father. Typically for the time, Savage blamed her education – supposedly
Woolf (1880-1969), the
husband of Virginia unsuitable for women – for her mental illness.
Woolf, 25th March 1944.
What did the move to the Bloomsbury area mean for Virginia?
After their father’s death in 1904, the Stephens moved from Kensington to
Bloomsbury, an area of London near the British Museum which at that time was
more bohemian and artistically-oriented. Their house became a centre for important
literary, artistic and philosophical meetings and discussions by a group of writers
and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. This included the Stephens themselves
and the art philosopher Clive Bell – who married Vanessa, by now a talented painter;
the novelist and journalist Leonard Woolf, who in 1912 married Virginia; the novelist
E.M. Forster (→ p. 280); the famous economist John Maynard Keynes; and the art
critic and painter Roger Fry. The ‘Bloomsbury apostles’, as they called themselves,
were decidedly anti-Victorian, unconventional in their ideas about life, society and
art, sceptical about religion and moderately left-wing in politics. They were a very
exclusive circle too, only made up of refined and highly cultured men and women.
An occasional guest was T.S. Eliot.
What was Woolf’s married life like?
As she touchingly wrote in her suicide note addressed to her husband, Leonard
Woolf, Virginia had been very happy in her marriage: ‘You have given me the greatest
possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t
think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease [i.e., her mental
illness] came.’ Leonard Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen’s friends at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and first noticed the Stephen sisters when they visited their brother for
the May Ball in 1900. He recalls them in ‘white dresses and large hats, with parasols
in their hands, their beauty literally took one’s breath away’. In 1912, Virginia married
Leonard Woolf, and they began to share a life of common literary interests – by that
time, Virginia had already begun to write for the Times Literary Supplement, though
her novels were still to come. In 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which
became a major force in English publishing in the first half of the century, publishing
not only Virginia’s own works but also T.S. Eliot’s Poems, fiction by E.M. Forster and
the English translations of Freud.
How was Virginia’s mental illness linked to her death and her work?
In her latter years Virginia Woolf was more and more subject to crises caused by
anxiety and insecurity. World War II precipitated the situation. To get away from the
German air raids against London, in 1940 the Woolfs rented a home in Sussex and
moved there but the move did not make things better for Virginia. Unable to face
the terror and destruction that surrounded her, and obsessed by the fear of going
permanently insane, she drowned herself in the River Ouse at Lewes in Sussex on
28 March 1941. She thus went deliberately towards ‘the one experience I shall never
describe’, as she had said. She had just finished her last novel Between the Acts (1941).
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Virginia Woolf
Psychiatrists today believe that Woolf was affected by bipolar disorder (manic-
depressive illness), for which there was no actual treatment at that time – her periods
of depression and attempts at suicide (at least two) were referred to simply as
‘madness’. They had an obvious relevance not only to Woolf’s health but also to her
writing. The Stephens’ family doctor, Dr. Seton, early prescribed rest, regular walks,
and stopping writing as a cure. Medical advice thus reinforced the age’s belief – rather,
a commonplace – that education and writing were bad for women’s nerves. On the
other hand, Virginia’s great friend, Vita Sackville-West (herself a writer, whose figure
and family history Woolf put at the centre of her novel Orlando, 1928) persuaded her
that the best way for her to keep insanity at bay was to write.
Woolf herself was (painfully) aware that from her ‘lava of madness’, as she called it,
emerged much of her inspiration and knowledge of herself, as she wrote in a letter to
a friend in 1930: ‘As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be
sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of
one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months
– not three – that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.’
How do Woolf’s novels place her among the leading Modernist writers?
Virginia Woolf is central to the development of Modernist fiction in the twentieth
century. Her famous attack on Arnold Bennet’s conventional realism in her essay
Modern Fiction (1919, revised 1925) (Bennet was a famous novelist of the time),
which she calls ‘materialism’, is the result of a general perception of the collapse of
conventional social, moral and religious values during and after the First World War.
This increasingly made writers turn to their own individual views of life instead of
accepted social values. As for all Modernist writers, this was combined with a growing
interest in psychology (Freud, Jung) that resulted in an exploration of how human
consciousness makes sense of the world.
Woolf’s progress as a novelist is exemplary of the development from realistic to
Modernist fiction. The plot and style of her first novel, The Voyage Out, which appeared
in 1915, were still fairly conventional. Her second novel too, Night and Day (1919),
was conventionally realistic. Woolf’s mature work as a novelist begins with Jacob’s
Room (1922), which describes the life of a young man, Jacob Flanders, and his death
in World War I. It was written using the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ technique, with
indirect narration and impressionistic poetic flow. Woolf’s subsequent novels,
Mrs Dalloway (1925, → p. 261), To the Lighthouse (1927, → p. 268), Orlando (1928), and
The Waves (1931) all followed this model, which implied that a novel could not make
sense of life simply in terms of realistic description and a conventional plot with a
clear beginning, middle and ending.
What does Woolf’s celebrated use of time in her novels consist in?
Woolf’s use of time in her novels especially reflects her Modernist ideas of plot,
character and language. Like Joyce, she prefers short meaningful time units: one day
in Mrs Dalloway; two different days in To the Lighthouse, ten years apart but linked
through the characters’ consciousness; a few hours in Between the Acts. These short
time units that relate to external events are, however, expanded almost beyond limits
by what goes on within the characters’ minds, which can cover years and range from
past, present to future. This was described by Woolf in Modern Fiction (1919): ‘Look
within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. 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. From all sides they
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come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old;
the moment of importance came not here but there.’ In Orlando, Woolf later gave her
most famous definition of the difference between ‘time on the clock’ (measurable
time) and ‘time in the mind’ (the way the mind is affected by it). Orlando also shows
a significantly different use of time, in covering a time span of nearly four centuries
through which the main character changes sex from a man into a woman – thus also
changing from a male to a female psychological perspective.
What was Woolf’s role in ‘the Woman Question’?
Throughout her life Virginia Woolf was interested in problems concerning the role of
women in society (→ Topic, p. 277). As early as 1910 she was working as a volunteer
in the movement of women’s suffrage and later she wrote some of her most inspired
essays on the subject of female emancipation, A Room of One’s Own (1929, → p. 274)
and Three Guineas (1938). The latter is particularly significant: written the year before
World War II broke out, it is Woolf’s condemnation of war not only as a committed
pacifist but also as a woman who refuses to be involved in a men’s war. Her opening
statement is justly famous: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no
country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.’ Virginia Woolf’s ideas about
women’s emancipation are scattered through her vast literary output: short stories,
critical essays – the most famous are collected in The Common Reader, published in
1925 and 1932 – biographies, and several volumes of notebooks forming her diary.
Of great interest is also A Writer’s Diary (1915-41, → p. 273), which reads as a novel
and collects her vivid memories of books and people.
↑ Suffragettes walk
along a London street
wearing sandwich boards
demanding the vote for
women, 1912.
1 Say whether these works by Virginia Woolf are 3 SPEAKING Read the following article about
novels (N) or essays (E). For each of them write the Virginia Woolf and London (tiny.cc/0pc7tz) then
year of publication. prepare a presentation about her relationship with
• A Room of One’s Own the city; which places are particularly significant in
• Mrs Dalloway her life? Why? Work in small groups.
• Between the Acts
4 PROJECT Take a virtual tour of Virginia Woolf’s
• To the Lighthouse
London (tiny.cc/2pc7tz). Using Street View, explore
• Three Guineas
the different neighbourhoods, then answer the
• Orlando
following questions.
• Jacob’s Room
• Modern Fiction • What do you see?
• Which street / neighbourhood is your favourite?
2 Answer the questions. Why?
1 What was Virginia Woolf’s cultural background?
Work in small groups, then share your answers.
2 How did her mother’s death affect her life?
3 What qualifies Wolf as a leading Modernist writer?
4 Define Virginia Woolf’s use of time.
5 Where did Woolf stand in ‘the Woman Question’
issue?
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