Summary 

Brief Overview
Considered one of the best of the Modernist
writers, Virginia Woolf's personal life is almost
as intriguing as her fiction. Troubled by mental
instability for most of her life, Virginia
composed her great works in bursts of manic
energy and with the support of her brilliant
friends and family. However, upon completion
of a book, Virginia fell into a dangerously dark
depression in anticipation of the world's reaction
to her work. Despite her personal difficulties,
Virginia Woolf's fiction represented a shift in
both structure and style. The world was
changing; literature needed to change too, if it
was to properly and honestly convey the new
realities.
Virginia Woolf was born into an intellectually
gifted family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, is
the author of the massive Dictionary of
National Biography, a sixty-two volume
compilation of the lives of important British
citizens. Virginia's sister Vanessa was a gifted
painter, and her two brothers Thoby and Adrian
were intelligent, dynamic University men.
Despite this heady environment-and having the
key to her father's library-Virginia was not
afforded the opportunity to attend school like
her brothers. This wasn't unusual for the time,
but it was something Virginia never quite
seemed able to forget. Despite becoming
perhaps one of the most intelligent writers of the
Twentieth Century, Virginia Woolf always
thought of herself as ill educated.
After her parents' deaths, Virginia and her
siblings moved out of their family home in
Kensington and into a rather shabby London
neighborhood called Bloomsbury, where they
enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of socialists,
artists and students. Thoby, who had made a
number of extremely interesting friends while at
Cambridge, instituted Thursday night get
togethers with his old college buddies and other
great London minds: Lytton Strachey, Roger
Fry, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant,
Desmond MacCarthy and John Maynard Keyes.
Virginia and Vanessa sat in on these
conversations, which ranged from Art to
philosophy to politics, and soon became a part
of the Bloomsbury Group themselves.
As she came into her own, and comfortable in
her new environment, Virginia began to write.
She first produced short articles and reviews for
various London weeklies. She then embarked on
her first novel, The Voyage Out, which would
consume nearly five years of her life and go
through seven drafts. When that book came out
to good reviews, she continued producing
novels, each one a more daring experiment in
language and structure, it seemed, than the last
one. After a botched marriage proposal from
Lytton Strachey, and after turning down two
other proposals in the meantime, Virginia
accepted Leonard Woolf's proposal of marriage,
after recovering from a mental breakdown in a
country nursing home.
Although she had affairs of the heart with other
women like Vita Sackville-West and Violet
Dickinson, Virginia remained very much in love
with Leonard for her entire life. He was her
greatest supporter, half-nursemaid, half-
cheerleader. He was also a good novelist in his
own right, and a publishing entrepreneur, having
founded Hogarth Press with Virginia. Together,
they scouted great unknown talents like T.S.
Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster.
Hogarth also began publishing Virginia's
novels.
When Virginia published To the
Lighthouse and The Waves in 1927 and 1931
respectively, she had turned a corner and could
now be considered more than simply avant-
garde; she was now, by most critic's accounts, a
literary genius. However, until the end, she
remained insecure and fearful of the public's
reaction to her work.
Virginia didn't only publish fiction; she was also
an insightful and, at times, incisive literary and
social critic. She was at her best when she took
society to task for limiting the opportunities of
gifted female writers. A Room of One's
Own was a compilation of lectures Virginia
gave at Cambridge on the topic of women and
fiction, and in this slender volume she argues
that talented female writers face the two
impediments to fully realizing their potentials:
social inferiority and lack of economic
independence. Virginia proposed five hundred
pounds a year and a private room for female
writers with talent. She also published criticism,
including two volumes of The Common Reader.
Despite her success, Virginia battled her own
internal demons, and although she could quiet
them through rest, sometimes she found it
impossible to escape the voices in her head. She
likely suffered from manic-depression, though
doctors knew little about that disorder at the
time. Leonard tried to monitor his wife's
activities, going so far as to limit the number of
visitors she had and to prescribe different kinds
of food for her to eat. His efforts likely enabled
Virginia to achieve as much as she did.
However, he couldn't ultimately save her from
herself. On March twenty-eight, 1941, Virginia
wrote her husband two notes, both of which told
him that if anyone could have saved her, it
would have been him. However, she didn't feel
she'd be able to come back from this latest
episode of what was then called "madness" so
she thought it best to end it all. She then picked
up her walking stick and headed to the River
Ouse. Once on the banks, she filled her pockets
with stones, waded into the water, and drowned
herself. She was fifty-nine years old.

Art of the essay'

Discuss Virginia Woolf as a modern

essayist with special reference to the Art
of the essay.
Or, Offer your perspective on the essay
as a literary form on the basis of Woolf’s
analysis in “Art of the Essay.’
Or, what are the main characteristics
and objectives of an essay discussed by
Virginia.
Answer:
           Widely considered one of the finest
essayist of the twentieth century, Virginia
Woolf composed “Art of the Essay” as a
review of Earnest Rhy’s five volume of
anthology of “Modern Essay”(1870-1920).
The review is originally appeared in Times
Literary Supplement, Nov 30, 1922 and
Woolf included the essay with a slightly
revised version in her first collection of
Essays “The Common Reader”.
                   “A good essay must draw its
curtain around us but it must be a curtain
that shuts us in, not out.” According to
Virginia Woolf the goal of the essay is
simply that it should give us pleasure. It
should lay us under a spell with its first
word and we should only wake refresh with
its last word. Virginia Woolf initiates the
discussion on the subject of the essay as a
literary genre by referring to the wide extent
to the form, to the variety and diversity of its
examples, suggesting that it is the richness
of the present state of things in the form
that makes it an interesting style. There is
an important point emphasized by Woolf at
the beginning of the discussion that
‘Present’ state of the form and its practice is
of greater than a historical survey of how
the essay develops over the period.
One of the best practitioners of the art of
writing essay, Virginia Woolf analyzed
perfectly the art that involved composing an
essay and she displayed her essay writing
skills across a wide range of subjects with
all the craftsmanship, substances and rich
allure like of her novels. Her emphasis on
the poem that the essay is written during a
particular period can provide enough
resource for the growing of the dominant
features associated with the genre. In other
words she argues that the essay is a
literary form and its character can be
examine on the basis of the study of its
practice in a particular time, for example in
her case the immediate present in which
she was writing, that is the last phase of
nineteenth and early part of twentieth
century. So, the contemporary projection is
a prominent characteristic of an essay.
                The primary objective to an essay
as a literary form is to provide pleasure.
The term pleasure can have different
suggestion depending on the context in
which it is placed. Here Woolf draws
attention to the way it impacts and it’s
received by the reader. The distinction
made by Woolf is significant and she
considers it to be a special figure of the
essay form. She does not often nor
perspective on the role of pleasure that
plays to create on attention as a literary
type. As her essay deals primarily with the
form and its practice of her own time, he
focus is on the modern examples of the
essay. Though she referred to in her initial
phase about Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb
and Mark Pattison each one separated by
time, style and orientation but the common
thing is that they all give pleasure to their
readers by their essays and this pleasures
are also of different types.
             According to Woolf the nature of
the subject may be varied and completely
different from one another but the essay as
a literary form thrives by generating an
ambiance which draws the reader within its
frame. It may be hard to find the perfect
essay but a skillful essayist will always be
able to the reader’s interest by the magic of
the writing. This magic is not something that
can be pinned down easily but it is that
special quality of the essay which makes it
possible for the writer to transfer the
knowledge through its various knowledge.
            Virginia Woolf provides the
examples of Macaulay Froude, who
excelled in making use of the essay to
communicate to their subjects with
remarkable clearity.
             Unlike novels or poems which one
aided by story and rhyme respectively, the
essay wins the reader by the power of the
craft. The importance of discipline in an
essay cannot be undermined. So, the essay
must be tight, precise and properly
organized. In this matter Woolf use the
word ‘Pure’ to indicate how important it is
for the essayist to take proper care in
writing an essay which will not make a
mess of it. Woolf considers adherence to a
strict discipline to be one of the major
features of the essay form. That is why she
puts so much emphasis on the condition of
purity implying that it is the responsibility of
the essays to ensure that the subject is
transformed with expertise and craft.
            When Woolf refers to knowledge as
one of the conditions that constitute the
essay objectives, she is not focusing on
providing information through the essay. It
should be the representation of a particular
vision should contain the stamp of the
author’s way of looking on the issue. In this
respect she gives the examples of Walter
Peter’s essay on Leonordo Da Vince, which
transforms the limits of the medium to
present the subject with intensity and
conviction. An essayist must be alert to the
conditions of his style while writing an
essay, otherwise even a good subject fall
fled and m0000ay appear to be a collection
of facts and figures unnecessarily
ornamented.
          So, Virginia Woolf concluded her
essay by saying that all essays irrespective
of the age in which they appear, they must
contain the permanent quality which will
stand at the taste of time. The essay must
draw the reader into it and hold him in its
gripe. Only then the reading experience of
an essay will be worthwhile and rewarding.