Adeline Virginia Woolf was born in London, England, into a wealthy household. Her father was an important literary figure, and her mother was a socialite and artist who used to model for painters. Woolf and her sisters were home-schooled, and her brothers received formal education. She was an enthusiastic learner reader, and by the age of 7, she could read in both French and Latin. At 9, she started a family newsletter, reporting family events and documenting humorous anecdotes.
Growing up, Woolf experienced a series of losses. When she was 13 years old, her mother had died. Two years later, her half-sister passed away, and in 1904, when she was 22, her father also died, and Woolf had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized, while her big sister Vanessa took charge of the family. During those formative years, dealing with her grief, Woolf had studied at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London, where she was introduced to feminist views. Woolf and her siblings moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury area of London, where they hosted a weekly gathering of artists and intellectuals that later became known as the Bloomsbury group.
In 1905, at the age of 23, Woolf began to write anonymous reviews for The Times Literary Supplement. In the following year, her older brother Thoby had died, and her mother-like sister Vanessa got engaged. To overcome the loss she felt for both her siblings, Woolf turned to her writing and began to work on her first autobiographical essay – Reminiscences. Being influenced by post-Impressionist artists, Woolf began to experiment with her writing, avoiding the norms of Victorian structure and creating a holistic form that embraced all aspects of life.
In 1912, at 30, she married Leonard Woolf, a political theorist and author whom she met a few years earlier. At the time, she worked on her first novel Melymbrosia, though a manic-depressive outburst and a suicide attempt delayed its publication. The book was published in 1915 under the title The Voyage Out. It broke the contemporary realism conventions since the experiences were described within the surrealistic world of dreams, hallucinations, and free association. A narrative method later became known as stream of consciousness.
Woolf wanted to prove that to break the traditional writing form, one needs to master it first. And she did, in her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919. Her unique writing style continued to evolve, and in her 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, she describes the protagonist’s life, from childhood to death, without a plot or character description.
In that same year, 40 years old Woolf befriended Vita Sackville-West, an author and landscape gardener, and over time their friendship grew into a romantic affair. Their affair did not last long, but the two stayed friends, and Sackville-West greatly influenced Woolf’s writings. In the next few years, she published numerous short stories, dramas, and essays, continuing to redefine modern writing while examining her ideas on social issues, such as feminism, homosexuality, mental illness, and the consequences of war. Ideas she expressed in her 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and in one of her most famous works, To the Lighthouse.
Using the stream of consciousness technique, Woolf portrayed the lives of her characters, their thoughts, and feelings as a montage of memories, focusing on language and design rather than notions of reality. In the novel Orlando, published in 1928, Woolf goes even further by creating a paradox chronology, following a man who becomes a woman that lives for more than three centuries.
In 1929, Woolf published her groundbreaking essay A Room of One’s Own, which became a milestone in feminist theories. Based on lectures she gave at women’s colleges, Woolf claimed that women’s absence from history and literature circles is not due to lack of talent or capability but because they don’t have the money and space to execute their ideas. She had spread her feminist ideology in her other works, such as in her speech Professions for Women, in which she stated that unequal opportunities for women are affecting all of society, and in her novel The Years, she followed the decline of the patriarchal systems and the rise of feminism via 50 years in a family’s history.
In WW2, during the bombing of London in 1940, their house was destroyed, and they moved to their cottage in Sussex. At the time, Woolf worked on her next novel, Between the Acts, but the stress has impacted her mental state, and she suffered from depression and severe mood swings. On March 28th, 1941, Woolf filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse behind her house. She drowned. She was 59 years old.
Woolf published dozens of novels, short stories, essays, dramas, memoirs, and autobiographical writing. Thirty years after her death, her work has resonated again, influenced and helped define the feminist movement of the 1970s. She is considered one of the most important authors of all time. Her writings are still being studied in universities and inspiring notable authors such as Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.
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