Woolf, Virginia - Vita e Opere

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere and her education consisted of private Greek lessons and above all acess to her father’s library where she read whatever she liked. For Virginia, water represented two things, on the one hand it represented what is harmonious, feminine and on the other hand it stood for the possibilty of the resolution of intolerable conflicts with death. The death of her mother affected her deeply and so she had various nervous breakdown.

She began a revolution against her father’s aggressive character. When her father died in 1904, she began her own life and her literary career. So she went to Bloomsbury with her sister and there she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group.. Here all the members contempted the traditional morality and the disdain for bourgeois sexual codes. They were radical thinkers and they virtually defined the social, political and creative concerns of the coming mid century. When she married in 1912 she published one of her first works, The Voyage Out, a novel which still followed a traditional pattern, but at the same time she attempted suicide.
In 1925 the novel Mrs Dalloway appeared. It was a successfully experiment with a new narrative technique. In 1927 she published The Lighthouse and in 1928 she Published Orlando which was devoted to Viuta Sackwille West, a novelist and biographer with whom she had an intense relationship. She was also a critic essayist. In 1929 she began to work of her novel The Waves in which she seemed to recognize that there was a link between her creative process and her illness in fact the II world war increased her anxiety and fears. When she was 59 she couldn’t stay it longer and drowned herselv in the river. Virginia tried to five voice to the felling and to memory. For Virginia subjective reality came to be identified with the technique of consciousness but she never lets her characters thoughts flow without control and maintains logical and grammatical organisation. Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third person, past tense narrative and she always gave the impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, between the past and the present, between speech and silence. Virginia’s use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional. Her language was ever fluid, which flows following in the most intricate thoughts and stretches to express the most intimate feelings