Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a
prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel.
[1]
Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses
of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical
moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. Without
Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginalWith the death of Virginia
Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.
[2]

Virginia Adeline Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, and Julia
Duckworth. The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class
neighborhood. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia was educated by private
tutors and copiously read from her fathers vast library of literary classics. She later resented the degradation of
women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and
university, while she was never offered a formal education.
[3]
Woolfs Victorian upbringing would later
influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox
relationships. As biographer Hermione Lee argues Woolf was a modern. But she was also a late Victorian.
The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour
of her social group.
[4]

Mental Illness
In May 1895, Virginias mother died from rheumatic fever. Her unexpected and tragic death caused
Virginia to have a mental breakdown at age 13. A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father,
Leslie Stephen, in 1904. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. According
to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, All that summer she was mad.
[5]
The death of her close brother
Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he
would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacobs Room and later as Percival in The
Waves. These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life,
until her suicide in March 1941.
Though Woolfs mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she was a sane woman who
had an illness.
[6]
Her madness was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or
the publication of a novel. According to Lee, Woolfs symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive
illness, or bipolar disorder. Leonard, her dedicated lifelong companion, documented her illness with
scrupulousness. He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages:
In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of
the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voicesshe was violent with her nurses. In her third
attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two
days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been
in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused
to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she
tried to commit suicide.
[7]

During her life, Woolf consulted at least twelve doctors, and consequently experienced, from the
Victorian era to the shell shock of World War I, the emerging medical trends for treating the insane. Woolf
frequently heard the medical jargon used for a nervous breakdown, and incorporated the language of
medicine, degeneracy, and eugenics into her novel Mrs. Dalloway. With the character Septimus Smith, Woolf
combined her doctors terminology with her own unstable states of mind. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs.
Dalloway, she envisioned the novel as a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the
insane side by side. When she was editing the manuscript, she changed her depiction of Septimus from what
read like a record of her own experience as a mental patient into a more abstracted character and narrative.
However, she kept the exasperation, which she noted, should be the dominant theme of Septimuss
encounters with doctors.
[8]

Bloomsbury
Virginia began to teach English literature and history at an adult-education college in London, in
addition to writing articles and reviews for publications, including The Guardian, The Times Literary
Supplement, and The National Review. Woolf continued her journalistic endeavors throughout her life,
reviewing contemporary and classical literature in modernist reviews like the Athenaeum, The Dial and The
Criterion. It was also during this time that Woolf became close friends with young men who shared and
stimulated her intellectual interests. The majority of these friends her brother Thoby met at Trinity College,
Cambridge in 1899, including Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. This group started meeting for
Thursday Evenings at Gordon Square, London in 1906, which was soon followed by Vanessa Bells Friday
Club, to discuss the arts. With the emergence of these two literary and artistic circles, the unofficial
Bloomsbury Group came into existence.
[9]

In 1924, during the heyday of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf tried to account for what was new
about modern fiction. She wrote that while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to
describe character in a new way because on or about December, 1910, human character changed. Her main
example of this change in human character was the character of ones cook. Whereas the Victorian cook
lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the
Daily Herald and ask advice about a hat.
Woolfs choice of December, 1910 as a watershed referred above all to the first Post-Impressionist
Exhibition, organized by her friend Roger Fry in collaboration with her brother-in-law Clive Bell. The
exhibition ran from November 8, 1910 to January 15, 1911 and introduced the English public to developments
in the visual arts that had already been taking place in France for a generation. More broadly, however, Woolf
was alluding to social and political changes that overtook England soon after the death of Edward VII in May,
1910, symbolized by the changing patterns of deference and class and gender relations implicit in the
transformation of the Victorian cook. Henry James considered that the death of Edwards mother Victoria
meant the end of one age; Edwards reign was short (1901-1910), but to those who lived through it, it seemed to
stand at the border between the old world and the new. This sense of the radical difference between the
"modern" world and the "Edwardian" one, or more broadly the world before and after the First World War,
became a major theme of Woolf's fiction.
In 1911, the year after human character changed, Virginia decided to live in a house in the Bloomsbury
neighborhood near the British Museum with several men, none of whom was her husband. Some of her
relatives were shocked, and her fathers old friend Henry James found her lifestyle rather too Bohemian. Her
housemates were her brother Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she
married a year later. Grant and Keynes were lovers, and the heterosexual members of the group too were known
for their unconventional relationships. Virginias sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, lived for much of her life with
Grant, who was also her artistic collaborator, and the two had a daughter. Throughout all this, Vanessa
remained married to Clive Bell, who early in marriage had a flirtatious relationship with Virginia, while Duncan
had a series of homosexual love affairs. Most of the men in the Bloomsbury group had gone to Cambridge, and
many had belonged to an intellectual club called the Apostles, which, under the influence of the philosopher G.
E. Moore, emphasized the importance of friendship and aesthetic experience, a more earnest form of Oscar
Wildes aestheticism.
A typical Bloomsbury figure, Lytton Strachey, wrote his best-known book, Eminent Victorians (1918),
in a satirical vein, debunking the myths surrounding such revered figures as Florence Nightingale. Strachey was
the most open homosexual of the group, and Woolf vividly recalled his destruction of all the Victorian
proprieties when he noted a stain on Vanessas dress and remarked, Semen: With that one word all barriers
of reticence and reserve went down."
Feminist Critiques
Woolf wrote extensively on the problem of womens access to the learned professions, such as
academia, the church, the law, and medicine, a problem that was exacerbated by womens exclusion from
Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf herself never went to university, and she resented the fact that her brothers and
male friends had had an opportunity that was denied to her. Even in the realm of literature, Woolf found,
women in literary families like her own were expected to write memoirs of their fathers or to edit their
correspondence. Woolf did in fact write a memoir of her father, Leslie Stephen, after his death, but she later
wrote that if he had not died when she was relatively young (22), she never would have become a writer.
Woolf also concerned herself with the question of womens equality with men in marriage, and she
brilliantly evoked the inequality of her parents marriage in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf based
the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her parents. Vanessa Bell immediately decoded the novel, discovering that Mrs.
Ramsay was based on their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Vanessa felt that it was almost painful to have
her so raised from the dead.
[10]
Woolfs mother was always eager to fulfill the Victorian ideal that Woolf later
described, in a figure borrowed from a pious Victorian poem, as that of the Angel in the House. Woolf spoke
of her partly successful attempts to kill off the Angel in the House, and to describe the possibilities for
emancipated women independently of her mothers sense of the proprieties.
The disparity Woolf saw in her parents marriage made her determined that the man she married would
be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.
[11]
Despite numerous marriage proposals
throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only
hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of
marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership requires. She wrote to Leonard: As I told
you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are momentswhen you kissed me the
other day was onewhen I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms
me. It is so real, and so strange.
[12]
Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard
Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However,
with Virginias unstable mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children.
Related to the unequal status of marriage was the sexual double standard that treated lack of chastity in a
woman as a serious social offense. Woolf herself was almost certainly the victim of some kind of sexual abuse
at the hands of one of her half-brothers, as narrated in her memoir Moments of Being. More broadly, she was
highly conscious of the ways that men had access to and knowledge of sex, whereas women of the middle and
upper classes were expected to remain ignorant of it. She often puzzled about the possibility of a literature that
would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex rather
indirectly.
If much of Woolfs feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have
traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism:
the reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. In A Room of Ones
Own (1929), Woolf imagines the fate of Shakespeares equally brilliant sister Judith (in fact, his sisters name
was Joan). Unable to gain access to the all-male stage of Elizabethan England, or to obtain any formal
education, Judith would have been forced to marry and abandon her literary gifts or, if she had chosen to run
away from home, would have been driven to prostitution. Woolf traces the rise of women writers, emphasizing
in particular Jane Austen, the Bronts, and George Eliot, but alluding too to Sappho, one of the first lyric poets.
Faced with the question of whether womens writing is specifically feminine, she concludes that the great
female authors wrote as women write, not as men write. She thus raises the possibility of a specifically
feminine style, but at the same time she emphasizes (citing the authority of Coleridge) that the greatest writers,
among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust, are androgynous, able to see the world
equally from a mans and a womans perspective.
The Effect of War
The theme of how to make sense of the changes wrought in English society by the war, specifically from the
perspective of a woman who had not seen battle, became central to Woolf's work. In her short story Mrs.
Dalloway in Bond Street (1922), Woolf has her society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, observe that since the war,
there are moments when it seems utterly futilesimply one doesnt believe, thought Clarissa, any more in
God. Although her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her
second, Night and Day (1919), returned to many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine
Mansfield thought that Night and Day contained a lie in the soul because it failed to refer to the war or
recognize what it had meant for fiction. Mansfield, who had written a number of important early modernist
stories, died at the age of 34 in 1923, and Woolf, who had published some of her work at the Hogarth Press,
often measured herself against this friend and rival.
Mansfields criticism of Night and Day as Jane Austen up-to-date stung Woolf, who, in three of her
major modernist novels of the 1920s, grappled with the problem of how to represent the gap in historical
experience presented by the war. The war is a central theme in her three major modernist novels of the 1920s:
Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Over the course of the decade,
these novels trace the experience of incorporating the massive and incomprehensible experience of the war into
a vision of recent history.
Hogarth Press
In 1915, Leonard and Virginia moved to Hogarth House, Richmond, and two years later, brought a
printing press in order to establish a small, independent publishing house. Though the physical machining
required by letterpress exhausted the Woolfs, the Hogarth Press flourished throughout their careers. Hogarth
chiefly printed Bloomsbury authors who had little chance of being accepted at established publishing
companies. The Woolfs were dedicated to publishing the most experimental prose and poetry and the emerging
philosophical, political, and scientific ideas of the day. They published T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry,
Katherine Mansfield, Clive Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and John Middleton Murry, among numerous others.
Though they rejected publishing James Joyces Ulysses, they printed T.S. Eliots The Waste Land and the first
English translations of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth additionally published all of Woolfs novels, providing her the
editorial freedom to do as she wished as a woman writer, free from the criticism of a male editor. J.H. Willis
explains that Woolf could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new
fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisherShe was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, the only
woman in England free to write what I like. The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her
own.
[13]

Female Relations
Woolfs liberated writing parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm companionship
and literary stimulus. In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; in her thirties, Katherine Mansfield; and in
her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally aroused Virginia as did Vita Sackville-
West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside
her family.
[14]
Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual
orientation, and politics, were all were part of the attraction. Vita was an outsider to Bloomsbury and
disapproved of their literary gatherings. Though the two had different intellectual backgrounds, Virginia found
Vita irresistible with her glamorous and aristocratic demeanor. Virginia felt that Vita was a real woman. Then
there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as
highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for
some reason, is what I have always wished from everyone.
[15]
Though Vita and Virginia shared intimate
relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita rejected the lesbian political identity
and even Woolfs feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social circles as a Sapphist. Virginia, on the
other hand, did not define herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, particular those that categorized her
in a group defined by sexual behavior.
[16]

Woolfs relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography Orlando, a narrative that spans
from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on Vita; only with a
change about from one sex to another.
[17]
For Virginia, Vitas physical appearance embodied both the
masculine and the feminine, and she wrote to Vita that Orlando is all about you and the lusts of your flesh and
the lure of your mind. Though Virginia and Vitas love affair only lasted intermittently for about three years,
Woolf wrote Orlando as an elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her
story into a myth.
[18]
Indeed, Woolfs ideal of the androgynous mind is extended in Orlando to an androgynous
body.
When it was published in October 1928, Orlando immediately became a bestseller and the novels
success made Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two
lectures at Cambridge, later published as A Room of Ones Own (1929), and actively participated in the legal
battles that censored Radclyffe Halls lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Despite this concentrated period of
reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish Three Guineas, a text that
expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism.
Suicide
The Bloomsbury Group gradually dispersed, beginning with the death of Lytton Strachey in 1932 and
the suicide of his long-time partner Dora Carrington shortly thereafter. Virginia felt the loss of Lytton acutely in
her life and her writing; years later she still thought as she wrote, Oh but he wont read this! Roger Frys death
in 1934 also affected Woolf, to such a degree that she would later write his biography (1940). As her friends
died, she felt her own life begin to crumble. In January 1941, Woolf became severely depressed, partly due to
the strain of completing her novel Between the Acts. She distrusted her publishers praise of the novel; she felt it
was too slight and sketchy. She instead wanted to delay publication, deciding that it required extensive
revision. Yet during this time, Woolf began feeling that she had lost her art; she felt if she could no longer write,
she could no longer fully exist. It was a conviction that her whole purpose in life had gone. What was the point
in living if she was never again to understand the shape of the world around or, or be able to describe it?
[19]

Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: I
feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant
recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.
[20]
On March 18, she may have attempted to
drown herself. Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the
half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water.
[21]

Virginia's body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April
18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was "Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed." Her
body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a great elm tree just
outside the garden at Monk's House, with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph, "Against you I
will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"
[22]

The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were Will you destroy all my papers.
[23]
Written in the margin of
her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is unclear what papers he was supposed to destroythe typescript of
her latest novel Between the Acts; the first chapter of Anon, a project on the history of English literature; or her
prolific diaries and letters. If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard disregarded her
instructions. He published her novel, compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writers Diary, and
carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving Woolfs unique voice and personality
captured in each line.