Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was a British novelist who

by reputation is regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth
century. Though she is commonly regarded by many as feminist, it should be noted that she
herself deplored the term, as she felt it suggested an obsession with women and women's
concerns. She preferred to be referred to as a humanist (see Three Guineas).

Between the World Wars, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway,
To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and her essay A Room of One's Own.

Early life

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth
(née Jackson) (1846–1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected
household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Virginia's parents had married each other after
being widowed and the household contained the children of three marriages: Julia's children
with her first husband Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth (1868–1934); Stella Duckworth
(1869–1897); and Gerald Duckworth (1870–1937). Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945),
Leslie's daughter with Minny Thackeray, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with
them until she was institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's children:
Vanessa Stephen (1879–1961); Thoby Stephen (1880–1906); Virginia; and Adrian Stephen
(1883–1948).

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William
Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter) meant that Woolf was raised in
an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society.

Henry James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia
Duckworth), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather, were among the
visitors to the house. Julia Duckworth Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an
attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark
on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers.
Supplementing these influences was the immense library at 22 Hyde Park Gate, from which
Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the classics and English
literature.

According to her memoirs her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of London,
but of St Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The family stayed
in their home called the Talland House, which looked out over the Porthminster Bay. Memories
of the family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse,
informed the fiction she wrote in later years, notably To the Lighthouse. She also based the
summer home in Scotland after the Talland House and the Ramsay family after her own family.

The sudden death of her mother from influenza in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her
half sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. The
death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly
institutionalised.

Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed,
were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their half-brothers
George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and
22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these recurring mental
breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact. Modern
diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which
coloured her work and life, and eventually led to her suicide. Following the death of her father in
1904 and her second serious nervous breakdown, Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde
Park Gate, and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. There they came to know
Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who
together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury group.

While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be
understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by
G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.

Personal life

Although she was married to Leonard Woolf from 1912 until her death in 1941, some of
Virginia Woolf's strongest romantic ties were with women. Many members of the Bloomsbury
Group were involved in same-sex relationships: avowedly homosexual figures associated with
Bloomsbury include novelist E. M. Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John
Maynard Keynes, and the painter Duncan Grant. Virginia herself became emotionally - and
perhaps romantically - close with several women during her thirties. Her female intimates
included Madge Vaughn (the daughter of J. A. Symonds, and inspiration for the character of
Mrs. Dalloway), and Violet Dickinson, as well as composer and female activist Ethel Smyth.
Most who knew her described her as occasionally solemn, but often jovial, as well as physically
beautiful and a captivating conversationalist.

Affair with Vita Sackville-West

In 1922, Woolf met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began
an affair that lasted through most of the 1920s.[1] In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with
Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and
both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and
most charming love letter in literature." [2] The details of the relationship and what ended it are
not completely understood, but was possibly due to the loss of infatuation, to infidelities on the
part of Sackville-West, or to the demands of their respective marriages. Although their affair
ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.

Death

At the end of 1940, Woolf suffered another severe bout of depression, from which she felt she
was unable to recover, partly due to the onset of World War II. On March 28, 1941, at the age of
59, Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her Sussex
home. She left two suicide notes; one for her sister Vanessa, the other for her husband, Leonard.

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a
journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. In 1912 she married Leonard
Woolf, a writer, civil servant and political theorist. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was
published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.

This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but due to criticism Virginia Woolf received
about the political nature of the book, she changed the novel and its title. This older version of
The Voyage Out has been compiled and is now available to the public under the intended title.
She went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular
success.

Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard
founded in 1917. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century
and one of the foremost Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category.

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she
experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional
motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and 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 after World War II, but her eminence was re-established
with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based
altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-semitic and a snob, it seems that a
critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.

Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English
intelligentsia, peopled with delicate, but ultimately trivial, self-centred, and overly introspective
individuals. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to
communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader,
weary of the 1920s aesthetes who seemed to belong to an era definitely closed and buried.

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength:
Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly
experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes
almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousnesses. Intense lyricism and stylistic
virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings
of most of her novels (with the exception of Orlando and Between the Acts), even as they are
often set in an environment of war. For example, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) centers on the efforts of
Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, 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 (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay
family's anticipation of and reflection upon a holiday visit to a lighthouse and the resultant
resolution of familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the
creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggled to encapsulate the family
drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war,
of the people left behind. The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections,
which are closer to recitatives than to the interior monologues proper, create a wave-like
atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.
Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations:
the transformation of life through the art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of
flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation - all set in a highly
imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work,
such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by
Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise A. DeSalvo offers treatment of the incestuous sexual
abuse Woolf experienced as a young woman in her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of
Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work. Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into
shell shock, war, class, and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A Room
of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and
intellectuals faced in an era when men held disproportionate legal and economic power, and the
future of women in education and society.

Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf
takes the position that Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and
ultimately was responsible for her death. The position, which is not accepted by Leonard's
family, is extensively researched and fills in some of the gaps in the traditional account of
Virginia Woolf's life.

The first biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her favorite nephew, Quentin
Bell.

Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative
examination of Woolf's life and work.

Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination
of Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the
creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The
Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf ISBN 0-7658-0321-6 has been published in 2006.

Cultural references

Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel The Hours uses some of Woolf's
characteristic stylistic tools to intertwine a story of the Virginia who is writing Mrs. Dalloway
with stories of two other women decades apart, each of whom is planning a party. The book was
adapted into a 2002 film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Nicole
Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie.
Playwright Edward Albee asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use his
wife's name in the title of his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which concerns a clash
between a university professor and his wife as they host a younger faculty couple for evening
cocktails.
Indiana band Murder by Death have a song entitled I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? on their first album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing.
American folk rock duo Indigo Girls wrote and recorded a song called "Virginia Woolf" for
their 1992 album Rites of Passage, and also included it on their live recording 1200 Curfews in
1995.
British indie rock band Assembly Now reference Woolf by name in their song "It's Magnetic."
Indie rock band Modest Mouse got their name from a passage from her story "The Mark on the
Wall."
Laura Veirs references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture."
In The Reptile Room, the second novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket,
there is mention of a snake called the Virginian Wolfsnake.
Folk group Two Nice Girls named their album Chloe Liked Olivia after a key phrase in Woolf's
A Room of One's Own.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf detailing one day in protagonist Clarissa
Dalloway's life in post-World War I England.

The novel follows Clarissa Dalloway throughout a single day in post-Great War England in a
stream of consciousness style narrative. Constructed out of two short stories that Woolf had
previously written ("Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and her unfinished "The Prime Minister")
the basic story is that of Clarissa's preparations for a party she is to host that evening. Using the
interior perspective of the novel, Woolf moves back and forth in time, and in and out of the
various characters' minds to construct a complete image, not of just Clarissa's life, but of inter-
war social structure.

Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a

response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is commonly hailed as one of the greatest novels
of the Twentieth Century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's masterpiece, even though Hogarth
Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, initially published the novel in England.
Fundamentally, however, Mrs Dalloway treads new ground and seeks to portray a different
aspect of the human experience.

Mrs Dalloway is possibly Woolf's most well-known novel, owing in part to the recent
popularization by Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours, and Stephen Daldry's movie of the
same name.

A film version of Mrs Dalloway was made in 1997 by Dutch feminist film director Marleen
Gorris. It was adapted from Woolf's novel by British actress Eileen Atkins and starred Vanessa
Redgrave in the title role. The cast included Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves, Michael
Kitchen, Alan Cox, and Sarah Badel.

Plot summary

The novel itself is preoccupied with a number of issues. Foremost are certainly, feminism and
madness, in the paired characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. As a
commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the
proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression. Septimus,
as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of insanity and
depression. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus's decline and ultimate
suicide. Similarities in Septimus's condition to Woolf's own struggles with manic depression
(they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out a
window as Septimus finally does) lead many to read a strongly auto-biographical aspect into
Septimus's character. Ultimately, though, the novel serves as commentary on a wide array of
issues, from colonialism (in Peter Walsh), commercialism, and medicine to feminism, sexuality
(Sally Seton), and politics.
Adopting the plot device used by James Joyce in Ulysses, the narrative present of Mrs Dalloway
is patterned as the sequence of a single day in June. The novel opens conventionally enough
with the sentence, 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself' (3). This is the exterior
event, to borrow Eric Auerbach's terminology in his famous essay on Woolf, 'The Brown
Stocking' (first published in 1946) which presents her as a modernist writer, par excellence, in
that it that mobilises the story to follow. What follows, however, is a plunge into Clarissa
Dalloway's past and into her memories of the open air at Bourton where she spent her
adolescence long before she became Mrs Dalloway. Her recollection of that time leads her to
think of Peter Walsh as he was then: she recalls his words 'Musing among the vegetables?', or
something like that, she can't be exact. But she also thinks of him in the present: 'He would be
back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which' (2-3). A paragraph later, she is
back on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass so that she can cross the road to go and buy
the flowers. It is already apparent from these opening paragraphs that the past is intimately
involved with the present. The past is not just background to the present, it becomes a part of it
by virtue of Clarissa's association of the freshness of the June morning with Bourton and Peter.
The fluidity of movement between past and present, which softens and blurs the lines of their
traditional opposition, is emphasised by the equal vagueness of Clarissa's recall of Peters's words
spoken at Bourton: 'Musing among the vegetables?'--was that it?--I prefer men to cauliflowers'--
was that it?' and her indecision over the month of his return from India, 'June or July, she forgot
which'.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. The freely, multiply discursive tale
centers on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and
1920.

To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust
and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can
be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of
it is written as thoughts and observations of the major characters. Foremost among these
characters are Lily Briscoe, whose observations on the Ramsay family form the backbone of the
book, and Mrs. Ramsay.

The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult
relationships. One of the book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.
Plot summary

Part I: The Window

The novel is set in the Ramsay's summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. The section
begins with Mrs. Ramsay assuring James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the
next day. This prediction is denied by Mr. Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather
will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and
also between Mr. Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to on various occasions
throughout the chapter, especially in the context of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's relationship.

The Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues, one of them
being Lily Briscoe who begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrait of
Mrs. Ramsay. Briscoe however, finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts
largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley, another guest, claiming that women can neither
paint nor write. Tansley, himself, is an admirer of Mr. Ramsay and his philosophical treatises.
The section closes with a large dinner party. Mr. Ramsay snaps at Augustus Carmichael, a
visiting poet, when the latter asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs. Ramsay, who is striving for
the perfect dinner party that no one could achieve, is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and
Minta Doyle, two acquaintances whom she brought together in engagement, arrive late to
dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.

Part II: Time Passes

As the first and third sections are separated by about ten years, the second section is employed
by the author to give a sense of time passing. Woolf explained the purpose of this section,
writing that it was 'an interesting experiment [that gave] the sense of ten years passing.'[1]. This
section's role in linking the two dominant parts of the story was also expressed in Woolf's notes
for the novel, where above a drawing of a "H" shape she wrote 'two blocks joined by a
corridor.'[2] During this period Britain begins and finishes fighting World War I. In addition, the
reader is informed as to the fates of a number of characters introduced in the first part of the
novel: Mrs Ramsay passes away, Prue dies in giving birth to a child, and Andrew is killed in the
war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of
mortal fear and his anguish over doubts regarding his self worth.

Part III: The Lighthouse

In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” some of the remaining Ramsays return to their summer
home ten years after the events of Part I, as Mr. Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed
trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip almost doesn’t happen,
as Mr. Ramsay seems almost intent on finding excuses to delay it, but they eventually take off.
En route, the children give their father the silent treatment in response to his criticism of the son
of the sailor Macalister, both of whom have accompanied them on the trip. James handles the
boat in a difficult spot, but rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his
father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son.

During this trip, Macalister’s son catches a fish and cuts a piece of its flesh to use for bait,
throwing the injured fish back into the sea. This serves as a metaphor for Woolf’s view of the
world as a cruel, unfeeling environment where one must overcome one’s trials to survive.

While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished portrait of
Mrs. Ramsay. She reconsiders Mrs. Ramsay’s memory, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to
continue with her art, yet at the same time struggling to free herself from the tacit control Mrs.
Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies
her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving
some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr. Ramsay has yet to learn. Lily states aloud to the
poet Carmichael (and to herself), “It is finished,” a phrase uttered by Jesus in the Gospel of John
during the moments immediately before his death.

Major themes
Complexity of experience

Large parts of Woolf's novel don't concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather
investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking.[3] In
order to be able to understand thought, Woolf's diaries reveal, the author would spend
considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and emotions arose
in her own mind in response to what she saw.[4]
Spoilers end here.

Narration and perspective

The bulk of the story is seen through the perspective of an omniscient narrator.

Whereas in Part I the novel is concerned with illustrating the relationship between the character
experiencing and the actual experience and surroudings, the second part, 'Time Passing' having
no characters to relate to, presents events differently. Instead, Woolf wrote the section from the
perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending that events be seen related
to time. For that reason the narrating voice is unfocused and distorted, providing and example of
what Woolf called 'life as it is when we have no part in it.'[5][6]

Allusions to actual geography

Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father, began renting Talland House in St Ives in 1882, shortly after
Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the family as a family retreat during the summer for
the next ten years. The location of the main story in To the Lighthouse, Hebridean island and the
house there, was formed by Woolf in imitation of Talland House. Many actual features from St
Ives Bay are carried into the story, including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself,
and the lighthouse.[7]

Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house after the war, the Stephans had
given up the house by that time. After the war, Viginia Woolf along with her sister Vanessa
visited Talland House under its new ownership, and again later, long after her parents were
dead, Woolf repeated the journey.[7]

Publishing history

Upon completing the draft of this, her most autobiographical novel, Woolf described it as 'easily
the best of my books' and her husband Leonard thought it a masterpiece, 'entirely new...a
psychological poem'. They published it together at their Hogarth Press in London in 1927. The
first impression of 3000 copies of 320 pages measuring 7.5 inches by 5 imches was bound in
blue cloth. The book outsold all Woolf's previous novels and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to
buy a car.

The Waves, first published in 1931 is the most experimental novel of Virginia Woolf. Its form
consists of six monologues for each of the six characters in the novel: Bernard, Louis, Neville,
Jinny, Susan and Rhoda. These monologues are broken up by nine sections of short prose poetry
detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day.

The six characters alternately deliver their "dramatic soliloquies," by which Woolf explores
concepts of individuality, self, and the body. Each character is distinct, yet together they
compose a gestalt about a silent central consciousness (represented by Percival, who is
considered by each character but does not speak himself). Bernard is a story-teller, always
seeking some elusive and apt phrase; Louis is an outsider, who seeks acceptance and success
(some critics see aspects of T.S. Eliot, whom Woolf knew well, in Louis); Neville (who may be
partially based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey) desires love, seeking out a series
of men, each of whom become the present object of his transcendent love; Jinny is a socialite,
whose weltanschauung corresponds to her physical, corporeal beauty; Susan flees the city, in
preference for the countryside, where she grapples with the thrills and doubts of motherhood;
and Rhoda is riddled with self-doubt and anxiety, always rejecting and indicting human
compromise, always seeking out solitude (as such, Rhoda echoes Shelley's poem "The
Question": "I shall gather my flowers and present them--Oh! to whom?").

Probably influenced by James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel follows
its six narrators from childhood through adulthood, a bildungsroman. The Waves obliterates the
traditional distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not
dissimilar streams of consciousnesses.