Adeline Virginia Woolf was a novelist, essayist, publisher, and critic. She is especially famous for her novels and her feminist writings. She is better known as Virginia Woolf and she was born in London the 25th January in 1882. She lived a hard life marked by her parents’ dead and her mental illness. Nevertheless, this was not an impediment to have a wide bibliography, she wrote not only novels, but also essays and articles in newspapers.
Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a biographer and mountaineer. Julia, her mother, was renowned for her beauty and she modeled for many painters including Edward Burne-Jones. Both of them were widows and, for this reason the house was full of children (eight in total) both from previous marriages and from this one as well. Leslie and Julia had four children together: Virginia was the third one. Thanks to his father’s career, Virginia had access to an extensive library, and from an early age she was determined to be a writer. She never went to school; thanks to her family’s wealth she was educated at home.
In May 1895, Julia died from rheumatic fever. Virginia was very close to her mother and this caused her to have a mental breakdown at the age of thirteen. She suffered another breakdown when he father died in 1904. During this time, she will try to kill herself for the first time.
Without her parents giving economic support to the family, Virginia began to teach English literature and history at an adult-education college in London. At the same time, she wrote articles and reviews for several publications including The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. In 1908 Virginia started to write her first novel Melymbrosia. She finished it in 1913, and renamed it as The Voyage Out. However, she suffered a severe mental breakdown after her marriage, and for this reason the novel was not published until 1915.
Virginia was part of the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual circle of artists and writers. There, she met her future husband, Leonard Woolf, and they got married in 1912. The couple had a happy married life and they also collaborated professionally. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, where they published works by Woolf and T. S. Eliot, among others as well as commissioned contemporary artworks. The Bloomsbury Group had a liberal approach to sexuality and Virginia Woolf started a relationship with Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson’s wife. From this relationship Woolf wrote Orlando, a literary love letter. Both of them remained as good friends until Woolf’s death.
Hogarth Press became a business around 1922. From 1921 onwards Virginia always published with the Press. She published a collection of experimental short stories Monday or Tuesday. In 1922 she wrote her first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room. The three novels that are generally considered to be her greatest claim as a Modernist writer are Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse ( 1927), and The Waves (1931).
After moving out from London due to the destruction of her home by the German army, Virginia committed suicide the 28th March in 1941, when she pulled on her overcoat, walked out into the River Ouse and filled her pockets with stones. The stream took her with it and her body was found three weeks later. Her last work was Between the Acts, published posthumously by his husband.
She left a suicide note for her husband, you can read it below.
Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Here you can find the references used to write this post:
A&E Television Networks. “Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.biography.com/people/virginia-woolf-9536773#death>
Clarke, S. N. “Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography”. Virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. < http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/vw_res.biography.htm>
The European Graduate School. “Virginia Woolf – American Writer – Biography”. Egs.edu. 2015. Web. 10 Mar.
2015. <http://www.egs.edu/library/virginia-woolf/biography/>
“The Principal Works Of Virginia Woolf”. Virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk/vw_res.principal.htm>
Scutts, Joanna. “Virginia Woolf | The Core Curriculum”. College.columbia.edu. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/virginia-woolf>
Svendsen, Jessica, and Pericles Lewis. “Virginia Woolf”. Modernism.research.yale.edu. 2015. Print.
<http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Virginia_Woolf>
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