VIRGINIA WOOLF (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) Early Life •Like Mary Shelley, she was born into the privileged Stephen household in 1882. •Her father Sir Leslie Stephen was the exemplary Victorian man: - he was a historian, in fact in the Victorian Age history was very important and had to represent Englishness - he brought on biographies as well (Dictionary of National Biography), which were also very important, bc they were used to promote the images and the values of the Victorian Age, so they would do the biography of the “perfect Victorian person” to set an example. Also V.Woolf wrote her own biography, a “mock” biography, whose subject is Orlando, who was supposedly the ancestor of her lover. She uses this biography to defy the culture of victorian biographies. - he was an author and a mountaineer, which was a manly thing to do and Victorian men had to be physically strong. In her novels we can find his influence and connection with him. He was also the cause of some of her mental breakdowns. •Her mother Julia Prinsep Stephen was born in India and was a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters, bc of her incredible beauty, and a nurse, which was an appropiate job for women at the time. She was the perfect femenine Victorian woman. •She had many siblings: 3 full siblings and 4 half-siblings and had problems with some of them. •As regards the daughters of this family, they were educated at home Only after some years she managed to study outside. • She went to college and studied German, Latin and Greek at the Ladies Department of King's College. • She had a very strong sense of the difference between female colleges and male colleges, so of the difference in the education of men and women, which were clearly different. In female colleges everything was smaller and limited, whereas men had more facilities. This opened her up to feminism. She thought that in order to write women needed money and a private space where no one could disturb you. •She had some traumas and nervous breakdowns during her adolescent years, maybe bc of the abuse of some of her siblings and bc of other events, like her father's and mother's deaths. In fact she was a great artist, but at the same time she had a frail personality. Later life •At a certain point she met and married Leonard Woolf, with whom she had a complicated relationship. He was very intelligent and belonged to Bloomsbury Group, which Virginia joined. • After that, she established and ran Hogarth Press in 1917. • She committed suicide in 1941. Bloombury Group: it is a group, not a school, bc it was never really formalized. They never wrote anything about rules regarding their way to write. It was active in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, but originally formed in Cambridge between 1899 and 1904 and they were first called the “Apostles”, but since they met in Bloomsbury, they took this name. The group was formed by writers, intellectuals, philosophers, who all came from various fields and from different backgrounds, but they were linked by “a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for social conventions and morality of the time, they wanted to free everyone from these. That's why they are an example of Edwardian-Modern literature, so their main values were: experimentation, individualism, questioning of victorian society, highbrow culture, androgynous way of life (for example Virginia Woolf says that you need to find the “androgynous mind”, which is a status in which you don't think about the difference between male and female, on the contrary you go beyond that) •Leonard Woolf, political theorist and author •Virginia Woolf, novelist and essayist •John Maynard Keynes, economist → he was considered as one of the most influential people •Clive Bell, art critique → married to one of Virginia Woolf's sisters. •T. S. Eliot, poet → said a lot about society Woolf and androgyny: She says she is heiress of two different traditions: - her mother's → poetic and high spirited Pattles - her father's → rational and vulnerable Stephens. Therefore she always felt out of place, she appreciates them both, but is torn between them. This is the reason why she had a complicated life: on the one hand she had occasional stages of mental illness, which she related to her mother and the feminine vision of life (she is tortured by the need to be a woman, a mother, selfless, take care of others), on the other hand she also had periods of depression bc of her father and the masculine vision (she has the need of self-realization). So on the one hand she wants to reach the level of her father, but on the other hand she feels that she can't bc she is pulled back by her feminine side. This struggle can be found also in To the Lighthouse, where there is the struggle in Lily Briscott who wants to create a masterpiece, but she has to fight against the Angel in the House. This is basically why she wants to experiment an androgynous way of life, it is important to reach the androgyny, which is a third-state where masculine and femenine are in harmony, there is no difference between the two of them. That's what also women had to do: they shouldn't be angry at men, but they should focus on writing as only women would do and on reaching the androgyny. Main works Some of her works, which are in some ways related to her life, are: → there are not many facts, but more reflections and descriptions. She concentrates on smaller things and on the moment no one ever cares about usually. •Mrs Dalloway (1925): one event and everything circulates around it → it centres on Clarissa Dalloway’s endeavour to organise a party, paralleled with the return of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran, after the First World War. Reflections are what is important. •To the Lighthouse (1927): centres on the Ramsay family's visit to a lighthouse and familial tensions •Essays and non fiction such as Modern Fiction (1919), A Room of One’s Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938), Women And Writing (1979), diaries, short stories, lectures, mock “biographies” (Orlando: a Biography), and letters. Role of the novelist From the essay Modern Fiction(1919): •She says that the mind receives a myriad of impressions and feelings, which can be trivial, fantastic, evanescent.. The novelist needs to focus on these feelings in order to get a work of art that follows his own personal rules and not social conventions.Free to choose the plot, time and identity. •The novelist has to convey an impression of the “luminous halo” of life, which is varying, unknown, uncircumscribed, which basically means that life does not proceed in a systematic way, it is not definite and writers should show it the way it is. Since life is undefined, then it is not the same for everyone and Virginia Woolf wants to show how people see things differently. Finally, according to Woolf, one does not write for people to understand, but to convey an impression. If people don't understand this impression, they don't have the knowledge necessary to understand it. Her point is that only those who are at the same cultural level will understand these impressions, which underlines that she is in favour of an highbrow culture, reserved only to en elite. Main features of her writing: • Freedom of the novel from constraints of plot, time and identity: → There is no linear and defined plot, it is more a sequence of ideas and visions put together. There is one event and everything circulates around it. She uses the technique of the stream-of-consciousness, bc in TTL there are a lot of comings and goings, passages from a character to another, etc, but there is always a flow, some sort of rhythm. → Time is relative, for example describing only one day could take a lot of pages. → Identity is not limited, it has different sides, bc it is both multiple (from the outside and from the inside) and singular, public and private: Mrs Ramsey is seen differently from each character (outside pov) and she thinks of herself differently (inside pov). Characters all see each other very differently. • Reality is not defined, bc it is not the same for everyone and has different forms for each person. • As regards inner reality, it is important bc everything is seen from the inside, and it represents femaleness, bc Virginia Woolf points out that men and women think and write in a different way, and women's writing is more interiorized and intimate. Women have to keep their artistic sincerity and integrity: it is true that they have to go against the society, which imposed silence on them, bc everything written by men was published while what was written by women was considered as unimportant. But they have to go against it whle writing what they feel, without hesitating bc they think it could ruin their work of art. For example in the novel Lily is hesitant, bc she has in her mind words of another character, but in order to create she need to be faithful to her feelings and go beyond that. So women do not have to feel blocked by men or conventions and they do not have to be bitter and angry, they just have to write as only women would write. • Gender, sexuality, and feminism all go beyond the material and seek for the Truth and the spiritual things that matter → you need to look for something spiritual, which is hard, bc there is no clear answer. That's why she creates characters that have aesthetic propensity, especially women artists, bc they have sensibility, they see beyond every day actions, they see things and translate them into art. • On the other hand men are outsiders → men characters are not negative. In Victorian society they had to be strong, but at the same time these characters struggle with their own problems and they are considered as outsiders bc they do not understand completely women's issues and female reality.
