Woolf, Virginia 1882–1941

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Woolf, Virginia
1882–1941

As a writer and publisher, Virginia Woolf was in the forefront of English literary modernism between the two world wars, and her feminist essays and treatises helped set the stage for feminism's second wave in the mid-twentieth century. She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25 in London. Her mother was Julia Duckworth, nee Jackson, the niece of photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and a beauty from a family renowned for its beautiful women. Her father was Leslie Stephen, author, critic, and editor of the venerable Dictionary of National Biography.

EARLY LIFE AND INFLUENCES

Both Virginia's parents had been widowed, and had four children between them from previous marriages. To these were added four new Stephen children: Toby, Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian. Many scholars believe that Virginia and Vanessa suffered sexual abuse when they were young children at the hands of their much older Duckworth half-brothers, George and Gerald. Julia Stephen died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and Virginia became manic-depressive, suffering a nervous breakdown that summer. Sir Leslie, knighted in 1902, died of cancer in 1904, when Virginia was twenty-two, and a second breakdown followed.

Virginia and her sisters were educated at home, as were many upper-middle-class young women of the time. Virginia had the use of Leslie Stephen's substantial library, which substituted for the university she was barred from because she was female. After the death of their father, Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian moved into a house on Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Toby, away at Cambridge University, invited his college friends to Thursday evening gatherings at his siblings' home, and the Bloomsbury circle was born. Among these first members were the biographer Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), the critic Clive Bell (1881–1964), and the writer Leonard Woolf (1880–1969); later they were joined by the artist Roger Fry (1866–1934) and the novelist E. M. Forster (1879–1970), among others. These young men brought radical sexual and social ideas to the Stephen sisters, and treated them as intellectual equals rather than as inferior sexed beings. Virginia later wrote how satisfying and strange it was to have her ideas rigorously criticized by these friends, who seemed not to notice how she was dressed or care about traditional manners and standards of decorum.

NOVELS AND FEMINIST IMPORTANCE

Virginia wrote regularly for the Times Literary Supplement beginning in 1905, and by 1908 had already begun writing her first novel, The Voyage Out. Toby died unexpectedly of typhoid fever in 1906, leaving their circle devastated. Vanessa agreed to marry Bell in 1907, and Virginia married Woolf in 1912. She published The Voyage Out in 1915 and Night and Day in 1919. She and Woolf started the Hogarth Press in 1917, and thereafter she published her own work.

Other notable work published by Hogarth included T. S. Eliot's landmark poem The Waste Land in 1922, and many works of Freud in translation, including The Ego and the Id (1927). In 1922 Virginia published a stream-of-consciousness novel, Jacob's Room, about the psychic impact of Toby's loss, which she extended to encompass the loss of an entire generation in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, one of her most beloved and frequently taught works. Mrs. Dalloway, written as a response to James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), uses a woman narrator relating the experiences of a single day to tell the story of a society struggling to repress the memory of a terrible war and trying go on as if nothing had happened. The novel's heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, finds her consciousness touched, invaded, and transformed by those around her, some of whom are old intimates, some of whom she will never meet, including shell-shocked war veterans, repressed spinsters, pompous courtiers, old friends, and old flames. Central to the narrative is a lost lesbian love that might have changed everything but did not, yet still affects the whole of Clarissa's otherwise conventional bourgeois existence.

To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (19 31) followed, as did one of the most famous feminist essays ever written, A Room of One's Own (1928). Orlando is a playful fantasy loosely based on her friend and lover, the poet Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962). Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicholson, called the novel a charming love letter. Orlando is also a send-up of imperialism and its racial and sexual chauvinisms. Orlando, an Elizabethan aristocrat who wishes never to grow old, has a series of love affairs as both man and woman, eventually marrying a man. His transformation from male to female halfway through the novel, and from English aristocrat to gypsy and back again, allowed Woolf to write about lesbianism, cross-dressing, sexual adventuring, and class and racial fetishism in a breezier way than her contemporary Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), whose earnest lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was also published in 1928 and was immediately banned.

A Room of One's Own deals with feminist issues more directly, attributing the difficulty of finding a women's writing tradition to the lack of educational and professional opportunities historically open to women. Virginia argued that if William Shakespeare had had an equally talented and ambitious sister who tried to make her way in the world as a playwright and actor, her life would have ended in pregnancy and suicide.

Three Guineas (1938) continued Virginia's feminist inquiry into the relationship between nation, imperialism, and gender and sexual oppression, interweaving these more polemical themes with a fictional section she published separately as The Years (1937). A short work published after Virginia's death, Between the Acts (1941), also meditates on connections among gender, history, individual consciousness, class, and political and social forces, and the ability of art to mediate and transform those interrelationships.

In the early twenty-first century Virginia is remembered as one of the great lyrical novelists of the English language and as a groundbreaking feminist theorist and intellectual Orlando is one of the central texts of lesbian modernism, and much of her reputation outside of academia rests on this novel. It was also her best-selling novel to date when it came out, and her first truly popular work.

With the shadow of Nazi Germany creeping toward England, Virginia and Leonard planned how they would kill themselves with cyanide if Hitler invaded. Leonard was Jewish, and as his wife, Virginia knew she would not be spared. She began hearing voices that made her unable to work, and believed she was losing her mind. She took her own life on March 18, 1941, walking into the river with stones in her pockets. The note she left for Leonard ended with her assertion that no two people could have been happier than they had been.