Virginia Woolf

Biographical sketches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1W7wqXD_b0

Virginia Woolf, original name in full Adeline Virginia Stephen, (born

January 25, 1882, London, England—died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell,
Sussex), English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to
narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre.

Stream of consciousness, narrative technique in nondramatic fiction

intended to render the flow of myriad impressions—visual, auditory,
physical, associative, and subliminal—that impinge on the consciousness of
an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his
rational thoughts. The term was first used by the psychologist William
James in The Principles of Psychology  (1890). As the psychological novel
developed in the 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the
total flow of their characters’ consciousness, rather than limit themselves
to rational thoughts. To represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of
the mind at work, the …(100 of 243 words)

Interior monologue
It is in dramatic and nondramatic fiction,a narrative technique that
exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. These
ideas may be either loosely related impressions approaching free
association or more rationally structured sequences of thought and
emotion.

Epiphany

Epiphany is an “Aha!” moment. As a literary device, epiphany (pronounced ih-

pif--uh-nee) is the moment when a character is suddenly struck with a life-
changing realization which changes the rest of the story.
Legacy

Woolf’s experiments with point of view confirm that, as Bernard thinks

in The Waves, “we are not single.” Being neither single nor fixed, perception
in her novels is fluid, as is the world she presents. While Joyce and
Faulkner separate one character’s interior monologues from another’s,
Woolf’s narratives move between inner and outer and between characters
without clear demarcations. Furthermore, she avoids the self-absorption of
many of her contemporaries and implies a brutal society without the
explicit details some of her contemporaries felt obligatory. Her nonlinear
forms invite reading not for neat solutions but for an aesthetic resolution
of “shivering fragments,” as she wrote in 1908. While Woolf’s fragmented
style is distinctly Modernist, her indeterminacy anticipates a postmodern
awareness of the evanescence of boundaries and categories.

Virginia Woolf, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1939. Gisèle Freund