Woolf, Virginia - Life and works (3)

Indice

1. Virginia Woolf’s biography
2. Why Virginia Woolf was so important?

Virginia Woolf’s biography

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 in London; her father was a Victorian man of letters, so she grew up in a literary atmosphere.

She frequented the King’s College in London, but her education mostly consisted of private Greek lessons; also she has free access to her father’s library, where she read everything that she liked.
The sea is the main symbol of all her works.

For her, water represented two things: it represented the woman, because it was harmonious; it stood also for the death.
Virginia’s mother died in 1895, when she was only 13; in this period, she had her first nervous breakdown.

Her father was aggressive and she started to be in revolt against him.
When her father died in 1904, Woolf began her own life and literary career.

She moved to Bloomsbury and with her sister Vanessa, she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant-garde of early 20th-century London.

For them the common denominators were: a contempt for traditional morality; a rejection for artistic convention; a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes.
They were radical thinkers who used a lot the stream-of-consciousness prose style developed by Woolf.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf.
In 1915 she published The Voyage Out, her first novel, which has still a traditional pattern.
She entered a nursing home and attempted suicide by taking drugs.
In 1925 she published Mrs Dalloway, where Virginia experimented the new narrative techniques.
In 1927 she published her masterpiece, To The Lighthouse.
In 1929 she began to work on her novel The Waves, which came out in 1931, in which she showed the connection that existed between her creative process and her illness.

Her anxiety and her fears increased a lot with the Second World War.
She was haunted by the terror of losing her mind; at the age of 59, she drowned herself in the river Ouse.

Why Virginia Woolf was so important?

Virginia Woolf was a fundamental author both for literary renovation and the development of critical thinking about society and feminism.

She was, in fact, a pivotal writer for the post-modernism because of her elaboration of novels focused on characters’ psychology, their inner thoughts, the use of stream of consciousness, the research of the perfect world and the most powerful and evocative descriptions with an ambiguous and evanescent symbolism that brake reality that only apparently is banal.
Woolf’s aim is to go deeper the traditionaldeeper the traditional way of writing literary works in order to explore the unusual, what is borderline, the creative potentiality of the human being and the intellectual experimentation.

On the other hand, if a novel like A Room of One’s Own comes to mind, it can be said that the Woolf was a pioneer of a new form of feminism. As a matter of fact, she supported suffragettes and she was a teacher for young female workers.
She analysed English language so that it could be more inclusive and she reported the difficulties for women to manage to live with the little finance resources that were allowed to them by their dominant male figure.
She also stated that privacy was not given to women but, at the same time, their presence everywhere could have been led to a sort of sisterhood which could have been useful to contrast egoism and injustice.