247- ] English Literature
Virginia Woolf
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Work
Woolf
is considered to be one of the most important 20th-century novelists. A
modernist, she was one of the pioneers of 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 the Second World War. The growth of
feminist criticism in the 1970s helped re-establish her reputation.
Virginia
submitted her first article in 1890, to a competition in Tit-Bits. Although it
was rejected, this shipboard romance by the 8-year-old would presage her first
novel 25 years later, as would contributions to the Hyde Park News, such as the
model letter "to show young people the right way to express what is in
their hearts", a subtle commentary on her mother's legendary matchmaking.
She transitioned from juvenilia to professional journalism in 1904 at the age
of 22. Violet Dickinson introduced her to Kathleen Lyttelton, the editor of the
Women's Supplement of The Guardian, a Church of England newspaper. Invited to
submit a 1,500-word article, Virginia sent Lyttelton a review of William Dean Howells'
The Son of Royal Langbirth and an essay about her visit to Haworth that year,
Haworth, November 1904. The review was published anonymously on 4 December, and
the essay on the 21st. In 1905, Woolf began writing for The Times Literary
Supplement.
Woolf
would go on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both
critical and popular acclaim. Much of her work was self-published through the
Hogarth Press. "Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have
tended to obscure her central strength: she is arguably the major lyrical
novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a
narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes
almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism
and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and
visual impressions." "The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision
elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings"—often wartime environments—"of
most of her novels."
Though
at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first
authoritative study of her life was published in 1972 by her nephew Quentin
Bell. Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and
authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work, which she discussed in an
interview in 1997. In 2001, Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The
Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia
Woolf: An Inner Life (2005) focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels
and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. The
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also uses Woolf's literature to understand and
analyse gender domination. Woolf biographer Gillian Gill notes that Woolf's
traumatic experience of sexual abuse by her half-brothers during her childhood
influenced her advocacy for the protection of vulnerable children from similar
experiences. Biljana Dojčinović has discussed the issues surrounding
translations of Woolf to Serbian as a "border-crossing".
Themes
Woolf's
fiction has been studied for its insight into many themes including war, shell
shock, witchcraft, and the role of social class in contemporary modern British
society. In the postwar Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf addresses the moral dilemma
of war and its effects[180][181] and provides an authentic voice for soldiers
returning from the First World War, suffering from shell shock, in the person
of Septimus Smith. In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf equates historical
accusations of witchcraft with creativity and genius among women "When,
however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by
devils...then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed
poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen". Throughout her work Woolf
tried to evaluate the degree to which her privileged background framed the lens
through which she viewed class. She examined her own position as someone who
would be considered an elitist snob but attacked the class structure of Britain
as she found it. In her 1936 essay Am I a Snob? she examined her values and
those of the privileged circle she existed in. She concluded she was, and subsequent
critics and supporters have tried to deal with the dilemma of being both elite
and a social critic.
The
sea is a recurring motif in Woolf's work. Noting Woolf's early memory of
listening to waves break in Cornwall, Katharine Smyth writes in The Paris Review
that "the radiance [of] cresting water would be consecrated again and
again in her writing, saturating not only essays, diaries, and letters but also
Jacob's Room, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse." Patrizia A. Muscogiuri
explains that "seascapes, sailing, diving and the sea itself are aspects
of nature and of human beings' relationship with it which frequently inspired
Virginia Woolf's writing." This trope is deeply embedded in her texts'
structure and grammar; James Antoniou notes in Sydney Morning Herald how
"Woolf made a virtue of the semicolon, the shape and function of which
resembles the wave, her most famous motif."
Despite
the considerable conceptual difficulties, given Woolf's idiosyncratic use of
language, her works have been translated into over 50 languages. Some writers,
such as the Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar, had rather tense encounters with her,
while others, such as the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, produced versions that
were highly controversial.
Drama
Virginia
Woolf researched the life of her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret
Cameron, publishing her findings in an essay titled "Pattledom"
(1925), and later in her introduction to her 1926 edition of Cameron's
photographs. She had begun work on a play based on an episode in Cameron's life
in 1923 but abandoned it. Finally, it was performed on 18 January 1935 at the
studio of her sister, Vanessa Bell on Fitzroy Street in 1935. Woolf directed it
herself, and the cast were mainly members of the Bloomsbury Group, including herself.
Freshwater is a short three act comedy satirising the Victorian era, only
performed once in Woolf's lifetime. Beneath the comedic elements, there is an
exploration of both generational change and artistic freedom. Both Cameron and
Woolf fought against the class and gender dynamics of Victorianism and the play
shows links to both To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own that would
follow.
Non-fiction
Woolf
wrote a body of autobiographical work and more than 500 essays and reviews,
some of which, like A Room of One's Own (1929) were of book-length. Not all
were published in her lifetime. Shortly after her death, Leonard Woolf produced
an edited edition of unpublished essays titled The Moment and other Essays,
published by the Hogarth Press in 1947. Many of these were originally lectures
that she gave,[198] and several more volumes of essays followed, such as The
Captain's Death Bed: and other essays (1950).
A
Room of One's Own
Among
Woolf's non-fiction works, one of the best known is A Room of One's Own (1929),
a book-length essay. Considered a key work of feminist literary criticism, it
was written following two lectures she delivered on "Women and
Fiction" at Cambridge University the previous year. In it, she examines
the historical disempowerment women have faced in many spheres, including
social, educational and financial. One of her more famous dicta is contained
within the book "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is
to write fiction". Much of her argument ("to show you how I arrived
at this opinion about the room and the money") is developed through the
"unsolved problems" of women and fiction writing to arrive at her
conclusion, although she claimed that was only "an opinion upon one minor
point". In doing so, she states a good deal about the nature of women and
fiction, employing a quasi-fictional style as she examines where women writers
failed because of lack of resources and opportunities, examining along the way
the experiences of the Brontës, George Eliot and George Sand, as well as the
fictional character of Shakespeare's sister, equipped with the same genius but
not position. She contrasted these women who accepted a deferential status with
Jane Austen, who wrote entirely as a woman.
Hogarth
Press
Virginia
had taken up book-binding as a pastime in October 1901, at the age of 19. The
Woolfs had been discussing setting up a publishing house for some time –
Leonard intended for it to give Virginia a rest from the strain of writing, and
therefore help her fragile mental health. Additionally, publishing her works
under their own outfit would save her from the stress of submitting her work to
an external company, which contributed to her breakdown during the process of
publishing her first novel The Voyage Out. The Woolfs obtained their own
hand-printing press in April 1917 and set it up on their dining room table at
Hogarth House, thus beginning the Hogarth Press.
The
first publication was Two Stories in July 1917, consisting of "The Mark on
the Wall" by Virginia Woolf (which has been described as "Woolf's
first foray into modernism" and "Three Jews" by Leonard Woolf.
The accompanying illustrations by Dora Carrington were a success, leading
Virginia to remark that the press was "specially good at printing pictures,
and we see that we must make a practice of always having pictures." The
process took two and a half months with a production run of 150 copies. Other
short stories followed, including Kew Gardens (1919) with a woodblock by
Vanessa Bell as frontispiece. Subsequently Bell added further illustrations,
adorning each page of the text.
Unlike
its contemporary small printers, who specialised in expensive artisanal
reprints, the Woolfs concentrated on living avant-garde authors, and over the
subsequent five years printed works by a number of authors including Katherine
Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell and Roger Fry. They also
produced translations of Russian works with S. S. Koteliansky, and the first
translation of the complete works of Sigmund Freud. They acquired a larger
press in 1921 and began to sell directly to booksellers. In 1938 Virginia sold
her share of the company to John Lehmann, who had started working for Hogarth
Press seven years previously. The Press eventually became Leonard's only source
of income, but his association with it ended in 1946, after publishing 527
titles, and Hogarth is now an imprint of Penguin Random House.
The
Press also produced explicitly political works. Pamphlets had fallen out of
fashion due to the high production costs and low revenue, but the Hogarth Press
produced several series on contemporary issues of international politics,
challenging colonialism and critiquing Soviet Russia and Italian fascism. The
Woolfs also published political fiction, including Turbott Wolfe (1926) by William
Plomer and In a Province (1934) by Laurens van der Post, which concern South
African racial policies and revolutionary movements respectively. Virginia
Woolf saw a link between international politics and feminism, publishing a
biography of Indian feminist activist Saroj Nalini Dutt and the memoirs of
suffragette Elizabeth Robins. Scholar Ursula McTaggart argues that the Hogarth
Press shaped and represented Woolf's later concept of an "Outsiders'
Society", a non-organised group of women who would resist "the
patriarchal fascism of war and nationalism" by exerting influence through
private actions, as described in Three Guineas. In this view, the readers and
authors form a loose network, with the Press providing the means to exchange
ideas.
Influences
Sybil
Oldfield examines Woolf's convinced pacifism, its sources and its expression in
her life and works.
Michel
Lackey argues that a major influence on Woolf, from 1912 onward, was Russian
literature and 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. In contrast to her
objections to Dostoyevsky's "exaggerated emotional pitch", Woolf
found much to admire in the work of Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Woolf
admired Chekhov for his stories of ordinary people living their lives, doing
banal things and plots that had no neat endings. From Tolstoy, Woolf drew
lessons about how a novelist should depict a character's psychological state
and the interior tension within. Lackey notes that, from Ivan Turgenev, Woolf
drew the lessons that there are multiple "I's" when writing a novel,
and the novelist needed to balance those multiple versions of him- or herself
to balance the "mundane facts" of a story vs. the writer's
overarching vision, which required a "total passion" for art.
The
American writer Henry David Thoreau also influenced Woolf. In a 1917 essay, she
praised Thoreau for his statement "The millions are awake enough for
physical labor, but only one in hundreds of millions is awake enough to a
poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive." They both aimed to
capture 'the moment'––as Walter Pater says, "to burn always with this hard,
gem-like flame." Woolf praised Thoreau for his "simplicity" in
finding "a way for setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of
the soul". Like Thoreau, Woolf believed that it was silence that set the
mind free to really contemplate and understand the world. Both authors believed
in a certain transcendental, mystical approach to life and writing, where even
banal things could be capable of generating deep emotions if one had enough
silence and the presence of mind to appreciate them. Woolf and Thoreau were both
concerned with the difficulty of human relationships in the modern age.
Woolf's
preface to Orlando credits Daniel Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Laurence Sterne,
Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, Thomas de Quincey, and Walter
Pater as influences. Among her contemporaries, Woolf was influenced by Marcel
Proust, writing to Roger Fry, "Oh if I could write like that!"
Virginia Woolf and her mother
The
intense scrutiny of Virginia Woolf's literary output has led to speculation as
to her mother's influence, including psychoanalytic studies of mother and
daughter. Her memories of her mother are memories of an obsession, starting
with her first major breakdown on her mother's death in 1895, the loss having a
profound lifelong effect. In many ways, her mother's profound influence on
Virginia Woolf is conveyed in the latter's recollections, "there she is;
beautiful, emphatic ... closer than any of the living are, lighting our random
lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children".
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