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Why do we love Virginia?
Born into a large literary family, Virginia Woolf was educated at home, by her father, English author and critic Sir Leslie
Stephen. Her mother's death when Virginia was 13 caused the first of many emotional breakdowns. Despite her difficulties,
Virginia grew to become an accomplished writer, critic, and literary figure of the early 20th century. She and her sister, the
painter Vanessa Bell, along with their husbands, began the Bloomsbury Group, a London creative circle dedicated to
advancing modernism in the arts. Virginia believed that literature should follow people's inner lives, and was a pioneer in the
use of "stream-of-consciousness" to represent this. While her novels were successful, she is perhaps best known for her
essays, collected in A Room of One's Own, on women's exclusion from literary history. The book and its sequel, Three
Guineas, have sparked countless young women to take up the pen and no longer hide their talents under a bushel. Despite her success, Virginia continued to be plagued by bouts of depression, breakdowns, and suicide attempts, often following the deaths of friends and
family members. After her home was damaged in the London Blitz, she and her husband fled to their countryside retreat.
The change of scenery didn't help, and unwilling to endure another breakdown, Virginia filled her pockets with stones and
waded into the river in front of her house, drowning herself. Fortunately, her inspirational words and works live on.
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Biography:
Born - January 25, 1882
London, England
Died - March 28, 1941
Sussex, England
Achievements:
- 1915—The Voyage Out published and well received
- 1917—Virginia and her husband buy a hand-printing machine and establish the Hogarth Press.
First publication: The Mark on the Wall. They later publish works by T.S. Eliot and Freud,
as well as her own books
- 1919—Night and Day published
- 1922—Jacob's Room published. Meets Vita-Sackville West with whom she has a brief love affair
- 1925—The Common Reader [essays] and Mrs. Dallowayy published. These works represent major break with the traditional novel
- 1927—To the Lighthouse published
- 1928—Orlando published
- 1929—A Room of One's Own published
- 1931—The Waves – an experimental novel published
- 1938—Three Guineas extends the feminist critique of patriarchy, militarism, and privilege started in A Room of One's Own
- 1940—London homes damaged/destroyed in blitz
- 1941—Completes Between the Acts, her last novel
- 1941—Drowns herself in the River Ouse
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In her own words -- On what it takes:
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
"I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here I am asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare." —Excerpt from the essay "Shakespeare's Sister" in A Room of One's Own. |
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