Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
A Room of One’s Own
British
Modernism
Virginia Woolf was born into the affluent and intellectual family of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen. She was one of eight children; both of her parents had been widowed. Julia Stephen brought three children to her second marriage, Sir Leslie brought one, and they had four children together. Sir Leslie Stephen was a writer, critic, philosopher, and scholar. Virginia and her siblings grew up in an intellectually vibrant atmosphere, with access to their father’s extensive library and frequent visits by many of the most important thinkers and writers of the late Victorian period. Woolf suffered a number of traumas as a child: her mother died when she was thirteen; one of her half-brothers sexually abused her; her half-sister died when she was fifteen. When Woolf was in her twenties, she lost both her father and a brother to illness. Woolf herself began in adolescence to suffer severe bouts of depression; in adulthood, these tended to regularly occur after she had completed a book. She attempted suicide more than once while depressed; sadly, she did finally kill herself in 1941, when she weighted her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river near her home.
Woolf, her siblings, and her husband were extremely influential in the Modernist movement. Together with her sister, Vanessa, and her brother Adrian, Woolf began holding intellectual salons in their home after the death of her father. Their gatherings of writers, intellectuals, and avant garde artists became known as “The Bloomsbury Group.” The group included such notable figures as Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes.
Woolf began publishing novels in 1915 with The Voyage Out, which was followed in 1916 by Night and Day. These two generally realistic novels were followed by her first truly innovative novel Jacob’s Room in 1922 and her masterpieces, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). In these later novels, Woolf found her distinctive voice and style, marked by poetic images and rhythms and extensive use of the stream of consciousness technique.
Woolf was equally influential as a reviewer. In her essay on the fiction of her contemporaries, “Modern Fiction,” she indicts their tendency to ignore the truths about life and humanity and focus instead on the minutiae of everyday life. Additionally, in 1917, Woolf and her husband Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, which published many of the most innovative writers of the period, including Elizabeth Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, and Freud.
“A Room of One’s Own” (1929), a lengthy essay generally now published alone, is actually a compilation of two lectures on “Women and Fiction” that Woolf delivered to women undergraduates at Cambridge. In the essay, Woolf comments on the need for women who aspire to write to have an independent income and a private space in which to be alone. Additionally, Woolf includes a speculative section on “Shakespeare’s Sister” as she laments the absence of a canon of women writers. Woolf emphasizes the need for a truly androgynous voice as the way forward for twentieth century literature.
Consider while reading:
- Who is Woolf addressing, and what is she encouraging the members of her audience to do?
- As Woolf characterizes “Oxbridge,” (her shorthand for the universities at Oxford and Cambridge), how does she distinguish between the experiences of men and women students and faculty?
- Why does Woolf tell the story of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister Judith? What point is she making?
- What, according to Woolf, is the way forward for both male and female writers? Why does she advocate for a more “androgynous” voice in literature?
Written by Anita Turlington