Virginia Woolf is a writer, novelist, essayist, and literary critic of the twentieth century. She is considered one of the most significant modernist authors. She is a pioneer of the use of the narrative technique of Stream of consciousness. Woolf was also an important member of the artistic and literary society of London.
She published her first novel, The Voyage, in 1915 in the publishing house of her half-brother. The best and celebrated works she wrote include novels such as To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway. She is also well-known for her critical essays A Room of One’s Own in which she advocates the female writers saying, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf also gained a central position in the feminist movement of 1970. She inspired feminism through her works and gathered much attention and pervasive admiration for her works supporting feminist criticism.
Her works are not only read by English people but also by people with different languages as her works have been translated into more than fifty languages. She has been the focus of many novels, films, and plays, and a lot of literature is dedicated to her. In today’s world, people honored her with statues and dedicating different societies. At the University of London, there is a building dedicated to her.
A Short Biography of Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on 25 January 1882 in South Kensington. She was born to Julia Prinsep and Leslie Stephen. She belonged to a rich family and was a seventh child of the eight siblings. She had a mixed family: her mother was a celebrated artist’s model of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and had three children from her first husband, whereas her father was a man of letters, and had one daughter from his first marriage.
Including the famous painter of modernist movement Vanessa Bell, her parents gave birth to four more children. The brothers received their education from colleges, whereas the girls were given home-tuition in Victorian literature and English Classics. Her family would visit St Ives, Cornwall in summer, which had been a significant influence in the early life of Virginia Woolf. There she, for the first time, saw the Godrevy Lighthouse. This lighthouse became the main subject of her most celebrated novel, To the Lighthouse, published in 1927.
In 1895, Woolf’s mother died, and her childhood ended abruptly. The death of her mother gave her a first mental breakdown. After two years of her mother’s death, her half-sister and a motherly figure, Stella Duckworth, died, giving her a second mental breakdown.
Virginia Woolf got admission in the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London from 1897 to 1901. Over there, she studied history and classics and became associated with the early campaigners of higher education for women and movements for Women’s rights. Other important influences in her life that inspired her works were the unrestrained access to the vast library of her father and her Cambridge-educated brothers.
In 1900, Virginia was encouraged by her father and started writing professionally. In 1905, her father died that gave her another mental breakdown. After the death of her father, the Stephen family shifted to Bohemian Bloomsbury. Over there, they adopted a free lifestyle. In Bloomsbury, the Stephens family in aggregation, the intellectual friends of Woolf’s brothers, they initiated the Bloomsbury Group of art and literature.
Woolf married in 1912 to Leonard Woolf. The couple established a Hogarth Press in 1917. Much of Woolf’s works were published in her own publishing house. In Sussex, they rented a home and then, in 1940, permanently shifted there. Her mental illness troubled her throughout her life. She was admitted to the mental hospitals for a long time and tried to kill herself at least twice. Her actual disease could not be diagnosed during her lifetime, but it is assumed that she might have bipolar disorder. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put rocks in her coat pockets and drowned herself in River Ouse at Lewes.
Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style
Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the best novelists and short story writers of the twentieth century. She pioneered modernist writing in the use of the narrative device of Stream of consciousness.
The distinctive features of Woolf’s fiction have tended to obscure her essential strength: after Elizabeth Browning is another lyrical novelist in English Literature. She wrote a tentative novel: sometimes, a narrative is commonplace and uneventful, while sometimes it is dissolved in the receptive consciousness of the characters.
In her writings, visual and auditory impressions are created by the fusion of stylistic virtuosity and intense lyricism. The poetic vision of Virginia Woolf’s novels is so intense that it elevates the ordinary and commonplace settings, even the war-time setting in most of her novels.
She was highly aware of the mental and material realm of “reality.” The material realm is the present outside in the shape of Nature and Society, whereas the mental realm is inside the consciousness that shores the impressions, and significant instances of existence.
In her writings, the two realms have meeting points. She captured the meeting or converging points in time in her narrative technique. She uses this technique in her novels To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The waves. She started the novels from the convergence or meeting point and then hinted at the diverging points besides spatial planes.
Stream of Consciousness Technique
The narrative device of Stream of Consciousness echoes the amplification of methodical events. The narrative technique is developed from subjectivism. This technique exploits the elements of confusion in our conscious minds. A story novel written in the narrative of Stream of Consciousness is not set in chronological series. Along with Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf uses this technique in her novels.
In her Stream of Consciousness novel, the writer describes the character’s inner life by combining memories, sensations, emotional condition, and feelings. In her essay, Modern Fiction Woolf detailed the double quality of life and argues that the job of modern writers is to talk about the “essential thing” in their works. For her, the essential thing is “an unknown and un-circumscribed spirit.”
In her novels, Virginia employed her thoughts about life, reality, and truth and made them synonyms with “spirit.” According to her, a writer must suggest mental impressions and external reality simultaneously. True reality can only be captured when both sides are well captured by the writer. She focuses on the fluidity of the personality of the individual than on its fixity. The subjective elements, for her, were more important than the objective one. The incoherent and confused soliloquies of characters mirror their Stream of Consciousness.
The novel Mrs. Dalloway is the best example of Stream of consciousness. The novel opens with a middle-aged woman who is walking in the street of London and having an interior monologue. She admires the pleasant morning and thinks about the party in the afternoon and its preparation; in a flashback, she starts thinking about her life twenty years ago in Dalton. Her consciousness is determined by the medley of time and the free association of images and ideas. In her self-centered consciousness, the past, present, and future astonishingly amalgamate.
Symbolism
The lighthouse, the voyage, and the seacoast are the favorite symbols, Virginia Woolf. In her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, she also uses these symbols. When Peter recalls his past time in the company of Clarrisa in Bourton, he remembers the old aunt of Clarrisa as:
“She belonged to a different age, but being so entire,
So complete would always stand up on the horizon,
Stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some
Past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, …”
There is another symbol of flower in the novel Mrs. Dalloway. When the middle-aged woman is leisurely walking around the streets, she has to buy flowers for the party in the evening. On the way back to his home from the lady Bruton’s lunch, Richard Dalloway thinks of many types of gifts to buy for Clarrisa and finally bought a bouquet of red roses. Moreover, in the novel, Walsh compared Elizabeth with the hyacinth flower, which is the symbol of youth.
The novel, like The Waves, Virginia Woolf, uses the symbols that are derived from nature. For example, the sun rises slowly higher and higher until it is evening and it starts setting down. Moreover, there are “waves” whose rhythms change after every hour of the day. The waves transform from the slow and gentle in the morning to the fury and roar in the evening.
Similarly, in the novel To the Lighthouse, there is a tall dominating lighthouse which is standing on the submerged rock in the sea. For years and years, the waves are striking it days and nights. In the trip to the lighthouse by Prof. Ramsay, the family has lost Andrew, Mrs. Ramsay, and Prue. The narrator describes the fall of waves, just like the waves of the novel The waves:
“the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you –I am your support.”
The narrator continues to say that:
“like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow…”
An interesting point to observe in the novels of Virginia Woolf is the difference between the rhythmic devices and the symbolic objects. For example, in the novel, To the Lighthouse, there is an extraordinary evocative meaning behind its literal appearance. A relationship between the Ramsay family and the material construction on the stony cliff beside the coast is drawn.
In the novel The Waves, there is the special significance of the birds flying over the sea like gulls and herons. In both novels, the sea is a common symbol and is present eternally to keep the rhythm in nature. Similarly N.S. Subramanyam points out that in Virginia Woolf’s novels, “the apparent ‘movements’ of the sun in the firmament has the most basic of all rhythms to a terrestrial existence.”
Poetic Style of Virginia Woolf
The style of Virginia Woolf is poetic. The experiences of characters are thawed into momentary glimpses, and these are so structured that they take the form of poetry. Virginia uses the words in a way that is considered poetic. She uses the metaphors once, and then it vanishes in the novel. The way she uses metaphors, such metaphors are more found in poetry than in the prose. For example, in the novel, Virginia Woolf writes:
“a great brush swept across through his mind like the pulse of a perfect heart of life struck straight through the street; then for that moment, she had illumination: a match burning in a crocus, an inner meaning almost expressed.”
Such types of metaphors are found in the poetry of John Donne and T.S. Eliot and are uncommon in prose. She drew her images and metaphors from the real world. These images, illusions, refrains, and metaphors join together to make her prose style poetic.
Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s Writings
Virginia Woolf also gained a central position in the feminist movement of 1970. She inspired feminism through her works and gathered much attention and pervasive admiration for her works supporting feminist criticism. Her works are not only read by English people but also by people with different languages as her works have been translated into more than fifty languages.
Woolf is observed as one of the leading feminist writers. She has been admired for her theoretical works and fictional works on feminism. It was her essays, including the most celebrated essay, A Room of One’s Own, that she was regarded as a feminist; however, her feminist perspectives can also be observed in her fiction. There is a symbiotic relationship between feminism and Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s works center around the lives and histories of women; nonetheless, our perception and reception about Virginia Woolf are also shaped by feminist criticism. When the field of Feminist criticism began, it was soon blasted by the works of Virginia Woolf.
