Date- 2004-06-24
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her father's death
in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to
Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This
informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful
influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social
reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was
published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room
(1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now
regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to
The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of
literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28
March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel,
Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century
author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary
history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the
daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a
traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and
her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns
for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years
later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the
company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger
Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met
Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded
the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S.
Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the
earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among
friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time
between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another
attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then
worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly
experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on
her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied
experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the
relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and
history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience,
not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of
feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas
(1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical
fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the
extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga
of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are
published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and
selections from her essays and short stories.
Orlando has sometimes been dismissed as a romp. As a less important
book than Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. This is to misread it.
It was far ahead of its time in terms of gender politics and gender
progress
*Jeanette Winterson*
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