Home >> Arts >> Literature >> Authors >> W >> Woolf, Virginia


  Adaptations
Bibliography
  Organizations
Works
   


} Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was a British author and feminist, who is considered to exist as one of a first modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Between the world wars, Woolf was the significant digit inside London literary society & a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her best known novels include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and ''Jacob's Room''.

Life

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, Woolf was brought up & educated around the classically Victorian family at 22 Hyde Park Gate. Inside 1895, following a dying of her mother, she experienced a number one of many nervous breakdowns. She later on indicated inside an autobiographical account, "Moments of Being," that she & her sister Vanessa Bell had been sexually abused by their half-brothers, George & Gerald Duckworth. She is currently likewise usually regarded when getting suffered from either bipolar disorder, an illness which was to colour her act & life, & sooner or later lead to her demise.

Ensuing a demise of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen, a easily-known editor and literary critic) in 1904, she and her sister, Vanessa, moved to a zero in Bloomsbury, forming a initial kernel for the rational circle called the Bloomsbury group. When nowhere touching the elementary recapitulation of the inner circle's ideals, Woolf's act may be understood when systematically inside dialogue by owning Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.

She began writing professionally inside 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement. Within 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a civil servant and political theorist. Her 1st novel, A Voyage Out, was published within 1915. This novel was originally highborn "Melymbrosia," however due to criticism Virginia Woolf received just about a political nature & severity of a book, she changed the novel and its title. This older version of a Voyage Out has been compiled & is currently available to the public under the meant title. She went in to publish novels & essays as a public intellect to two critical & popular profits. Lot of her act was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She is hailed when one of a greatest novelists of a twentieth century & one of the first Modernists, though she disdained some creative person in that category, like James Joyce.

In March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, Woolf filled her pockets by owning stones & drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her home in Rodmell. She left the suicide note for her husband: "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 begin to hear voices, and can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness... I can't fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work" (A Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, p. 481).

Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf provides an authoritative examination of Woolf's life, updating a earliest life story by Woolf's have nephew, Quentin Bell.

Work

Woolf is considered one of a greatest groundbreaker in the English language. Within her works she experimented by owning stream-of-consciousness, a underlying psychological besides when emotional motives of characters, & the various possibilities of fractured tale & chronology. In the words of E.M. Forster, she pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.

Woolf's reputation declined sharply fallowing Globe War Both, however her eminence was re-established by having a surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. When two or three supplementary ideologically depending fracas, it seems that a critical consenus has been reached on her stature as a novelist: Virginia Woolf is among the greatest of 20th century writers.

Reaction against her function has experienced great deal to clean sustaining a vary of sensibility & literary modes dominant in the postwar era—Woolf's novels, therein look at, epitomized a narrow globe of the upper-middle class English clerisy peopled using delicate, however at last trivial & self-egocentric, introspection-obsessed people. Her operate was estimated to become lacking around catholicity & depth, forswearing a power to communicate anything of emotional or even honourable relevancy to the enlightened most common reader, aweary of the Twenties esthete world health organization seemed to belong to an era by all odds closed & buried.

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer use tended to obscure her central nature and severity: Woolf is arguably a major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels come extremely experimental: a narration, oftentimes uneventful & commonplace is refracted—and occasionally virtually dissolved—in the characters's open consciousnesses. Vivid lyricism & stylistic virtuosity fuse to produce the globe rife by using audile & ocular impressions.

A intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision of life elevates a ordinary, for instance timeworn settings of virtually all of her novels (by owning a exception of Orlando and Between the Acts), just as it is typically placed inside an environment of war. For instance, Mrs. Dalloway centers around Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged society woman's efforts to organize a party, even as her life is equated with Septimus Warren Smith, a soldier who has returned from the First World War bearing psychological scars. To the Lighthouse is a story on a Ramsay personal holiday & the family members' interlinking tensions resolved within a visit to the beacon light; too, one of the themes is the struggle in the originative run that beset painter Lily Briscoe. & however the novel besides meditates on the endures of a united states's habitant in the middle of war, of the population left behind. The Waves present the class action of sise friends whose reflections (nearer to recitatives than to the interior monologues proper) produce the wave-rather atmosphere that is other akin to the prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.

Her endure & virtually all challenging operate, "Between the Acts," sums higher & magnifies Woolf's primary preoccupations: the transformation of life through the art, intimate ambivalency, & meditation on the themes of flux of instance & life, presented at the same time when corrosion & rejuvenation - 100% placed within a extremely ingenious & symbolical tale encompassing just about completely of English history.

Modern scholarship
Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf own focused in feminist and lesbian themes in her function, like in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise The. DeSalvo offers coarse of action of the incestuous sexual assault Woolf suffered as a fille around her book Virginia Woolf: A Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse in her Life & Globe. Her fiction is likewise exposed for its insight into shell shock, war, class and modern British society. Her right-known nonfictional prose function, ''A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, discusses the largely failed role of women in the literary canon and the future of women in education and society.

Inside 2002, The Hours'', a film loosely according to Woolf's life & her novel Mrs. Dalloway, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It did non win, however Nicole Kidman was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie. A film was adapted from either Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel of the same title. A Hours was Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway. Numerous Virginia Woolf scholars come extremely critical of the portrayal of Woolf & her works in the film.

Theodore Dalrymple's essay, A Rage of Virginia Woolf [http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_oh_to_be.html], will bring an surrogate, & like blackball, assessment of Virginia Woolf. It may be observed within his book, My Culture: What's Left of It (hundred) 2005. Publisher: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN: One-56663-643-Four.

Irene Coates' book ''World health organization's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: The Example for the Saneness of Virginia Woolf'' requires a position that Leonard Woolf's coarse of action of his married woman encouraged her unhealthiness & at long last was responsible her dying. A position, which is non accepted by Leonard's personal, is extensively researched & fills within occasionally of the gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life.

Virginia Woolf Webring
"The Virginia Woolf webring is a ring of sites dedicated to Virginia Woolf or which have Virginia Woolf related content."

Virginia Woolf Web
A valuable resource providing a directory of texts and articles on the web, with collection and multimedia availability information, as well as a searchable archive and links to other Virginia Woolf web sites.

Images of Virginia Woolf
Features portraits and photographs; link to brief audio of a BBC broadcast.

Virginia Woolf Chronology
List of important dates in the authors life with brief descriptions of events.

Virginia Woolf Forum Frigate
Discussion forum and live chat devoted to Virginia Woolf's life and works.

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage In
Claudia Roth Pierpont's discussion of the author as part of the New York Times 'Heroine Worship' section.

Virginia Woolf Quotations
Personal homepage of RavenZscry. Selected quotations. No references given.

Quotez - Woolf, Virginia
Small selection as part of a quotations site. Some references given.

World Wide Woolf
Article by Brenda Silver, author of the book Virginia Woolf Icon. Discusses the construction of Virginia Woolf as a modern cultural icon and argues that, as an icon, she is everywhere.

ClassicNotes: Mrs. Dalloway
Summary and analysis of the work. Includes a biography, quiz, and background information.


Arts: Literature: Periods and Movements: Bloomsbury Group
Arts: Movies: Titles: H: Hours, The
Arts: Movies: Titles: M: Mrs. Dalloway




© 2005 GeneralAnswers.org