Virginia Woolf Presentation
Virginia Woolf Presentation
Virginia Woolf Presentation
( Adeline Virginia
Stephen )
( 25 January 1882
- 28 March 1941 )
- 59 years old -
Her Life
Was born in London into the family of a wealthy Victorian
critic and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen. She never went to school
but was well and privately educated at home. Since she was a
child the classics and English literature were familiar to her. Her
fathers large library, as well as the fact that their home was
frequented by leading late Victorian writers as
e.g. Thomas Hardy, R.L. Stevenson. John Ruskin, George
Meredith
were fundamental for her career as a writer.
In her early twenties she began to contribute to TLS ( Times
Literary Supplement ).
Her fathers death in 1904 marked the appearance of the first of
her several nervous breakdowns which had their strong impact in
her adult life.
With her sister (Vanesa) and her brother(Adrian) she moved to
the Bloomsbury district of London and began to gather about her
the brilliant avant-garde artists ,writers and philosophers who
were later known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Virgina Woolfs novels suffer a little from the limited middleclass environment,which was the only one she had experienced,
her perceptive experiments in literary are striking, and her
analysis of them lucid, convincing and logical.
She wanted to revolutionise the sense of plot and criticised
more solid, traditional novelist. She felt that novels should be
based on the writers own feelings,not conventional descriptions.
She paid attention to new developments in painting.( e.g.
the Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910) and the
shifting perspectives in her later novels seems to have
something of the quality of visual art.
Other important influences were the philosopher Bergsons
notion of duration or psychological time and the role of
memory and association in works such as Marcel Prousts cycle
A la recherche du temps perdu(In search of lost time).She
developed a
stream of consciousness technique rather similar to that of
Joyce,but quite independently.
Her Works
a)
Novels
The Voyage Out, 1915
Night and Day, 1919
Jacobs Room, 1922
Mrs.Dalloway, 1925
To the Lighthouse, 1927
Orlando, 1928
The Waves, 1931
The Years, 1937
Between the Acts, 1941
b)Essays
The Common Reader, 1925; A room of Ones Own, 1931; Second Common Reader,
1932; Three Guineas, 1938; The Death of the Moth, 1942; The Captains Deathbed,
1950; Granite and Rainbow, 1958; Collected Essays, 1966.
c)Fictional Biography: Flush, 1925
d)Letters and diaries: Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1957-1980; The Diary of Virginia Woolf,
1977-1984
e)Stories: A Haunted House, 1943
Jacob's Room,
is the third novel byVirginia
Woolf, first published on 26
October 1922.
The novel centres, in a very
ambiguous way, around the
life story of the protagonist
Jacob Flanders and is
presented almost entirely
through the impressions
other characters have of
Jacob. It could be said that
the book is primarily a
character study and has little
in the way of plot or
background, the narrative is
constructed with a void in
place of the central character
if, indeed, the novel can be
said to have a 'protagonist' in
conventional terms.
Mrs.Dalloway,
Published on 14 May
1925 , the novel
addresses Clarissa's
preparations for a party
she will host that
evening. With an
interior perspective, the
story travels forwards
and backwards in time
and in and out of the
characters' minds to
construct an image of
Clarissa's life and of the
inter-war social
structure.
To the Lighthouse,
Written in 1927,The novel
centres on the Ramsays and their
visits to theIsle of Skyein
Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
Following and extending the
tradition ofmodernist
novelistslikeMarcel Proust
andJames Joyce, the plot ofTo the
Lighthouseis secondary to its
philosophical introspection. Cited
as a key example of thestream-ofconsciousness literary technique,
the novel includes littledialogue
and almost no action; most of it is
written as thoughts and
observations. The novel recalls
childhood emotions and highlights
adult relationships. Among the
book's manytropesand themes
are those of loss, subjectivity, and
the problem of perception.
Orlando: A Biography,
Written in 1928
represent a history of
English literature in
satiric form. The book
describes the
adventures of a poet
who changes sex from
man to woman and lives
for centuries, meeting
the key figures of
English literary history.
Considered a feminist
classic, the book has
been written about
extensively by scholars
ofwomen's writing
The Waves,1931
IsVirginia Woolf's most
experimentalnovel .It
consists
ofsoliloquiesspoken by the
book's six characters:
Bernard, Susan, Rhoda,
Neville, Jinny, and Louis.
Also important is Percival,
the seventh character,
though readers never hear
him speak in his own voice.
The soliloquies that span
the characters' lives are
broken up by nine brief
third-person interludes
detailing a coastal scene at
varying stages in a day
from sunrise to sunset.
The Years,1937
It traces the history of
the Pargiter family from
the 1880s to the
"present day" of the
mid-1930s. It focusses
on the small private
details of the
characters' lives.
Except for the first,
each section takes
place on a single day of
its titular year, and
each year is defined by
a particular moment in
the cycle of seasons
Her Death
After completing the manuscript of her last
novel,Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression
similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The
onset ofWorld War II, the destruction of her London
home duringthe Blitz, and the cool reception given to
herbiographyof her late friendRoger Fryall worsened
her condition until she was unable to work .On 28
March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her
overcoat pockets with stones and walking into
theRiver Ousenear her home. Woolf's body was not
found until 18 April 1941.Her husband buried her
cremated remains under an elm in the garden
ofMonk's House, their home inRodmell, Sussex.