Woolf, Virginia - Life and Style

Indice

1. Virginia Woolf’s life
2. Virginia Woolf’s writing philosophy

Virginia Woolf’s life

Virginia Woolf, whose maiden name was Stephen, was born in 1882 in England and she lived in a wealthy and intellectual family.

She could study from her father’s library but since she showed soon how brilliant her mind was she was educated privately by her family and tutors.

In 1895 Virginia’s mother died and the shock provoked her a psychological instability that would have last for all her life.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf who was a political theorist as well as a writer and the couple became a meeting point for important intellectuals such as T.S. Eliot.

In 1915 she published her fist novel called “The Voyage Out” and in 1917 the Woolfs founded a publishing house known as the Hogarth Press, in honour of the street where their house in which they firstly printed books was.

From 1925, the date of the publication of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf started her route that will lead her to experiment more and more with the language and narrative schemes and genres until 1927 when “To the lighthouse” firstly came out with no traditional plot.

After that period, she struggled a lot with her mental health and she slowed down with her writings but in 1928 "Orlando" was published as the result of her growing intimate experiences with women, especially Vita Sackville-West.

In 1929 “A Room of One’s Own” was reorganized from two lectures given at Cambridge and was published. The focus here is about the importance to give woman writers a room where to concentrate and some money to live independently.

On 28th March 1941 Virginia Woolf committed suicide, letting herself drawn with some stones in her pockets in the river Ouse, because of her fear of other mental crisis and her incapacity to deal again with the horrors of war.

Virginia Woolf’s writing philosophy

The author was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, joint after her father’s death, that was characterized by the rejection of artistic conventions and scandalous ideas about sexuality and the question of gender: for example, Virginia was interested in giving voice to human beings' inner world of feelings and memories, but, differently from James Joyce, Woolf never lets her characters' thoughts flow without control.

Moreover, she maintains her own language, which does not fit in none of the characters and, at the same time, it's the tool thanks to which she can investigate consciences.

In fact her language, for example we can consider "Mrs Dalloway", is full of symbolical meanings, so it's almost more similar to poetry than prose: according to this style, her works are written following a free structure.

Virginia Woolf thinks that impulses come from colours, lights and sounds of the environment and of everything that is around us, then free associations of images and sensations occur in characters' minds, so she's influenced by the recent studies made by Freud. The result is the accumulation of many levels of consciousness, called by Virginia Woolf herself "Moments of Being". She also stated “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself”.