Woolf, Virginia - life, literary career and style

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. Her father Leslie Stephen was a man of letters, so she grew up in an intellectual world. Her childhood was unhappy because of the death of her mother when she was 13 and because of sexual abuses. She had a homosexual affair with Vita Sackville-West. The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. She was obsessed by the terror of losing her mind, so she drowned herself in the river Ouse at the age of 59 by putting rocks in her pockets.

In 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury and founded the Bloomsbury group, which included the avant-garde writers. They rejected traditional morality and artistic conventions. Virginia Woolf is known as one of the greatest experimental novelists during the Modernist period.

She wrote Voyage Out, Night and Day who were still trill traditional in narrative. Then she wrote To the lighthouse in which she used the stream of consciousness technique.
She is a feminist writer and her themes were androgyny, women and writing. She wrote Mrs Dalloway that describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton’s relationship; Orlando deals with androgyny and is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West; A Room of One’s Own explores many issues connected to women and writing, it had great impact in the feminist movement.

Her main aim was to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and sees the human personality as a continuous flux of impressions and emotions. In her work the omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view shifts inside the character’s mind through flashbacks, associations of ideas presented as a continuous flux.