ADELINE VIRGINIA WOOLF, STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She wants to go to the public library to borrow some books about Virginia Woolf, the English writer who is a referent in the Modernist literature in particular and in the world one in general. She was the pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness following the Russian authors and she is one of The Grandma's favourite writers.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882-28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight. Her mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, celebrated as a Pre-Raphaelite artist's model, had three children from her first marriage; her father, Leslie Stephen, a notable man of letters, had one previous daughter; their marriage produced another four children, including the modernist painter Vanessa Bell.

More information: The British Library

While the boys in the family were educated at university, the girls were home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. An important influence in her early life was the summer home the family used in St Ives, Cornwall, where she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, which was to become iconic in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927).

Woolf's childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years later by the death of her stepsister and surrogate mother, Stella Duckworth.

From 1897–1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

Other important influences were her Cambridge-educated brothers and unfettered access to their father's vast library. She began writing professionally in 1900, encouraged by her father, whose death in 1905 was a major turning point in her life and the cause of another breakdown.

Following the death, the family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle; it was there that, in conjunction with their brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group.

 

More information: BBC

In 1912, Woolf married Leonard Woolf and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. The couple rented second homes in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by bouts of mental illness, which included being institutionalised and attempting suicide. Her illness is considered to have been bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention at the time.

She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Virginia Woolf provides insight into her early life in her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908) and 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921).

 

During the interwar period, Woolf was an important part of London's literary and artistic society. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928).

She is also known for her essays, including A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she wrote the much-quoted dictum, A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction", Leslie Stephen (1932) and A Sketch of the Past (1940).

Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism, and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for inspiring feminism, an aspect of her writing that was unheralded earlier. Her works are widely read all over the world and have been translated into more than 50 languages.

A large body of literature is dedicated to her life and work, and she has been the subject of many plays, novels, and films. Some of her writing has been considered offensive and has been criticised for a number of complex and controversial views, including anti-semitism and elitism. Woolf is commemorated today by statues, societies dedicated to her work and a building at the University of London.

In the late nineteenth century, education was sharply divided along gender lines, a tradition that Virginia would note and condemn in her writing. Boys were sent to school, and in upper-middle-class families such as the Stephens, this involved private boys schools, often boarding schools, and university. Girls, if they were afforded the luxury of education, received it from their parents, governesses and tutors. Virginia was educated by her parents who shared the duty. There was a small classroom off the back of the drawing room, with its many windows, which they found perfect for quiet writing and painting.

More information: The Culture Trip

Much examination has been made of Woolf's mental health. From the age of 13, following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement, including psychotic episodes, which the family referred to as her madness.

After completing the manuscript of her last novel, posthumously published, Between the Acts (1941), Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced.

The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened.

On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

Woolf is considered to be one of the greatest twentieth century novelists and short story writers and one of the pioneers, among modernist writers using stream of consciousness as a narrative device, alongside contemporaries such as Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce.

Woolf's reputation was at its greatest during the 1930s, but declined considerably following World War II. The growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s helped re-establish her reputation.

A major influence on Woolf from 1912 onward was Russian literature as Woolf adopted many of its aesthetic conventions. The style of Fyodor Dostoyevsky with his depiction of a fluid mind in operation helped to influence Woolf's writings about a discontinuous writing process, though Woolf objected to Dostoyevsky's obsession with psychological extremity and the tumultuous flux of emotions in his characters together with his right-wing, monarchist politics as Dostoyevsky was an ardent supporter of the autocracy of the Russian Empire.

More information: ThoughtCo

 

 

 Every secret of a writer's soul, 

every experience of his life,

every quality of his mind 

is written large in his works.

Virginia Woolf