Virginia Woolf

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(1882-1941)

Virginia Stephen (original surname) was born in London, and lived at Hyde Park Gate, in an aristocratic family, as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, who was a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, who worked as a literary critic.
Woolf was taught by her father at home, which she later on disliked. She thought that she missed out on all the important things in school that a young teenager should be allowed to experience.

Her childhood wasn’t so delightful, mostly because she was sexually abused by her half-brother, and the fact that her mother died when she was still very young. Unfortunately more death were to come into the safe home of theirs, when her father became ill, and slowly died from the family in cancer. In 1903 her beloved brother died, and the year after she lost her father to. Naturally enough, Woolf suffered from a mental breakdown after these series of traumatic shocks. After a while Woolf moved to live with her sister and brothers to Bloomsbury, a place that would become a locality of great importance later on.

After the move Woolf’s life started to improve. She inherited a lot of money from her aunt, which helped her a bit on the way. She also started to write for “Times Literary Supplement” in 1905.
She married a political theorist called Leonard Woolf in 1912, who had worked as administrator in Ceylon, today known as Sri Lanka.

Woolf published her first book, “The Voyage out”, in 1915. Four years later the realistic novel “Night and day” which was set in London, where the two main characters Katherine and Mary lived. She also wrote about one of the shocks from her childhood, e.g. “Jacob’s room” (1922) which was based upon the life and death of her brother Toby, to whom she had felt strongly devoted to.

Woolf’s great breakthrough was with the novels “To the Lighthouse” (1927) and “The Waves” (1931). After publishing them she had established herself as one of the leading writer’s of modernism. With her works, Woolf used her newly developed literary techniques to bring out an alternative to the male-dominated view of life. She expressed experience from a woman’s point of view, which wasn’t so common. Woolf critiqued some of the male writers, like John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and other realistic English novelists of this time, and said that in order to get under the surface of life one must use less restricted ways of writing and presenting about life. She had herself found a way to write in that way. She was an innovator, and used techniques like interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness. Her scene of her action was always her mind.

In 1925 she published “Mrs Dalloway” which caused and formed a giant web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. The novel has very little action, instead the reader travel back and forth in time through the character’s memories.
Woolf was at the centre of literary society during the time between the wars both in London and at her home in Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex. She moved to different places during her lifetime, but lived in Bloomsbury from 1924 to 1939. It was here where the Bloomsbury group was formed, in the residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa (Bell). It was a circle of famous and esoteric writers. The group included among others E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive ...