Literature / Writers Datebook: January 25
English Novelist, Critic, Feminist, Socialist
Brief biography of the life and works of influential English
author Virginia Woolf, founder of Bloomsbury Group of Writers and co-founder of
Hogarth Press. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of 'stream of consciousness' as a narrative device in which the reader follows that characters' internal thoughts as the story unfolds.
English novelist, essayist and critic Virginia Woolf was a founder of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. Her famous books include: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. Adeline Virginia Woolf née Stephen was born in London, England, on January 25, 1882 and died in Lewes, England, on March 28, 1941.
Early Years
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen into an affluent, distinguished literary family. Educated at home, she married Leonard Woolf, a social reformer, when she was 30, and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, three years later. By this time she was suffering from occasional mental illness. Woolf and her husband Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, a small company that published new and experimental work, such as the poems of T.S. Eliot.
The Novelist and Her Writing Style
In her third novel, Jacob's Room, published when she was 40, Woolf began experimenting with the stream-of-consciousness method. She continued this style of writing in her novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.
Her book, Jacob's Room, was based on the life and death of her dear brother Thoby. From this book, her style of writing broke away from the realistic early writing mode, and she began the process of the stream of consciousness, as she laid down in her essay "Modern Fiction." Hereon, until The Waves, she clearly established herself as the leading exponent of Modernism.
In Orlando, she wrote about a character who lived through several centuries and changed from male to female and back again several times. It traces the history of its androgynous protagonist through four centuries, much unlike her other novels, considered her greatest commercial success. It was dedicated to fellow-writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had an intimate friendship.
Woolf described the problems of women in a male-dominated world in A Room of One's Own. A more conventional in form is her penultimate work, The Years. However, her last novel, Between the Acts, in which she returned to the experimental. She completed it just before her final mental illness that drove her to commit suicide by drowning herself in a river near her home.
Legacy
Virginia Woolf is a pioneer of feminism. Since her death, she is acknowledged as one of the major novelists of the 20th century, and best known for her Stream of Consciousness method. Her literary essays have been published in several volumes, such as The Common Reader.
Works by Virginia Woolf
The Voyage Out, 1915
Night and Day, 1919
Jacob's Room, 1922
Mrs. Dalloway, 1925
To the Lighthouse, 1927
Orlando, 1928
A Room of One's Own, 1919
The Waves, 1931
The Years, 1937
Between the Acts, 1941
Image Credit:
Virginia Woolf. Public Domain
Resources:
Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by Ian Ousby (1993)
Great British Writers, Colour Library Books (1993)
Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring (1994)
Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. 3rd Ed, ed. by Jennifer Uglow (1999)
(c) January 25, 2010. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.
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