...Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen, in 1882. She suffered immensely as a child from a series of emotional shocks (these are included in the biography of Virginia Woolf). However, she overcame these incredible personal damages and became a major British novelist, essayist and critic. Woolf also belonged to an elite group that included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Woolf pioneered in incorporating feminism in her writings. “Virginia Woolf’s journalistic and polemical writings show that she made a significant contribution to the development of feminist thought” (Dalsimer). Despite her tumultuous childhood, she was an original thinker and a revolutionary writer, specifically the way she described depth of characters in her novels. Her novels are distinctively modern and express characters in a way no other writer had done before. One reason it is easy to acknowledge the importance of Virginia Woolf is because she wrote prolifically. Along with many novels, she wrote essays, critiques and many volumes of her personal journals have been published. She is one of the most extraordinary and influential female writers throughout history. Virginia Woolf is an influential author because of her unique style, incorporations of symbolism and use of similes and metaphors in her literature, specifically in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from...
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...BIOGRAPHY Virginia Woolf, an English author, feminist, essayist and critic, was born on January 25th, 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen, the editor of Dictionary of National Biography, and Madam Julia Prinsep Stephen, a nurse who published a book on nursing. Virginia’s maiden name was Adeline Virginia Woolf. She grew up in an atmosphere conducive to her future career as a writer since her father, Leslie Stephen, was a respected and well-known intellectual and writer. Although she was not sent to a university as her brothers, she was able to educate herself thoroughly by delving into the volumes of her father's vast library. Woolf grew up during a period of intense feminist activity in London and was an active member of various women's organizations. By the time she came into her own as a writer, significant advances had been made in women's rights. By 1918, a limited franchise had been granted to women in England. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her mother’s sudden death in 1885 and that of Stella, her sister whom she looked up to as a mother were the catalysts for Virginia’s mental breakdown. Modern scholars have suggested that her mental breakdown and subsequent recurring depression were as a result of the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a journalist, in 1912 and they collaborated...
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...The Case of Virginia Woolf The Case of Virginia Woolf Mood disorders are a disturbance in an individual’s emotions. These disturbances can cause discomfort or hinder function. One mood disorder is bipolar disorder. In bipolar disorder, depression is accompanied by manic episodes. Bipolar has a generally slow onset. However, the onset of manic episodes may be sudden (Meyer, Chapman, & Weaver, 2009). Evidence shows that an individual’s life history may feature symptoms in childhood or adolescence. These symptoms may become more intense during the lifespan. Many creative individuals, such as Virginia Woolf, were believed to have bipolar disorder. The Case of Virginia Woolf demonstrates the severity of bipolar disorder. Virginia Woolf began exhibiting symptoms of bipolar disorder in her early teens. Virginia was very close to her mother and took her death hard. Around this time, Virginia had what was considered her first breakdown (Meyer, Chapman, & Weaver, 2009). After her father’s death, Virginia had a more extreme breakdown. Virginia suffered from breakdowns during adulthood as well. These breakdowns usually occurred during the final stages of her writing projects. Her husband, Leonard, began to detect when episodes were beginning and enforced rest for Virginia. This helped her from having relapses. However in 1941, Virginia suffered from another attack and took her own life. There are several characteristics related...
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...A Room Of One’s Own It has been eighty-three years since Virginia Woolf spoke at Newnham and Girton on the subject of women and fiction A Room of One’s Own, and though the context seems at times irrelevant to the world in which we live today, we must remember our roots in society. In reading the essay, A Room of One’s Own, we are able to better understand the turmoil and frustration of the female artist of the early twentieth century. Woolf’s writing is meant to be understood by all women, in A Room of One’s own the narrator says, “Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please—it is not a matter of importance”(Woolf 5). This quote is an example of Woolf’s attempt to universalize the words in the essay so that they could potentially apply to every woman who read them. I thoroughly enjoyed Ms. Woolf’s use of the English language as an art from, and I believe this style was key to the essay’s success, and one of the reasons A Room of One’s Own is still in print today. Among other reasons we can still understand and find relevance in A Room of Ones Own, is the groundbreaking ideas in the essay. In her own way Virginia Woolf took on the establishment, and tried to give a voice to those who had none. In correspondence between Woolf and her friend G. Lowes Dickinson, she writes that her goal for this essay is to "encourage the young women--they seem to get fearfully depressed." (Woolf xiv) Throughout A Room of One’s Own, a few major ideas really were...
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... A Y VIRGINIA WOOLF IN IRELAND: A SHORT VOYAGE OUT by Kathryn Laing o, it wouldnt do living in Ireland, in spite of the rocks & the desolate bays. It would lower the pulse of the heart: & all one’s mind wd. run out in talk” (Diary 4: 216)–so Woolf declared in her diary during her one and only journey around Ireland in May 1934. For her descriptions of the landscape and the people she met (mainly the Anglo-Irish gentry) are as ambivalent as her now infamous reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But Woolf’s response to Ireland, and more particularly to Irish writing is only part of the story. As a contemporary, how was Woolf read in Ireland, if she was read at all, and what, if any, impact has she had on Irish writing? For the contemplation of “Virginia Woolf in Ireland,” both as a traveler and a reader of Irish culture, politics and literature, and as someone to be read through her various publications, provokes a proliferation of research possibilities about both writer and country. In this essay I wish to sketch out a preliminary map of these possibilities, showing some of the potentially complex and intriguing routes that require further exploration, in relation to Woolf studies, in particular the European Reception of Woolf, and in relation to Ireland and its own literary history. So the paper is divided into three sections: briefly, Virginia Woolf literally in Ireland, reading Virginia Woolf in Ireland from the 1920s on, and three Irish women reading Woolf–Elizabeth Bowen...
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...Sam Schmidt 10/8/15 A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own is based on a series of lectures she gave to a college audience back in the late 1920’s. The six chapters within the essay focus on three main concepts, women, fiction, and facts. Virginia Woolf argues financial freedom, independence, and original thoughts will not only allow women to write, but to live a lifestyle of their own. In Chapter three, on page 48, Virginia Woolf says, “Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say”. This statement emphasizes the theme that Virginia Woolf references throughout the essay; women were treated unequally in society (during this time in age) and thus didn’t have the freedom, time, or money to compose the type of writings men were capable of. After re-reading the first part of the phrase again, “Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare...
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...two Modern writers depiction of urban life ‘Why do I dramatise London so perpetually’ Woolf wondered in the final months of her life. This essay will seek to examine Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Eliot’s The Waste Land to observe their perpetual fascination with expressing metropolis as a vision of modernity. It will attempt to scrutinize the overwhelming nature of urban life, urban life’s effect on humanity, metropolis being the forefront of society, and also the depiction of a single urban consciousness. Through examining these depictions of urban life, this essay aims to observe the effects rapid urbanisation had on the modern movement and its respective authors. Woolf presents Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness as a vessel to voice the overwhelming nature of urban life and the problem of anxiety experienced in modern metropolis. Immediately in the first paragraph Clarissa’s anxieties are voiced as she embarks to the city to prepare for her party. Clarissa’s consciousness jumps to her memory of a ‘girl of eighteen’ and the solemn and ‘feeling that something awful was about to happen’. The contrast to her feeling of excitement to a feeling of anxiety is stark. The protagonist begins by exclaiming ‘how fresh how calm’ and then to experiencing feeling threatened as her attention reverts from the natural to the ‘uproar of the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans… she loved; life; London’. Woolf plunges the reader into Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, where the protagonist experiences...
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...Virginia’s London Complex in Mrs. Dalloway Fang Yuling Introduction Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an experimental novelist, critic and essayist of the 20th century, has been regarded as a major modernist writer, whose great contribution to the innovative techniques is undeniable. Susan squire once said: “Whether she thought it "the most beautiful place on the face of the earth" or "the very devil," to Virginia Woolf the city of London was the focus for an intense, often ambivalent, lifelong scrutiny.” (488) Ever since Woolf was born in London in 1882, not only did she make her home there for nearly all of her fifty-nine years-first in the narrow streets of Kensington and then in the spacious square of Bloomsbury-but she found it a powerfully evocative figure in the literary tradition within which she wrote. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, we can clearly see that Woolf elaborately arranges Clarissa Dalloway’s one-day life in the City of London. By a simple description of Mrs. Dalloway’s buying flower for an evening party, the reader has been actually taken around London, a city etched in Woolf’s memory. Woolf makes repeated mention of the landmarks or detailed street names in the City of London such as Oxford Street, Bond Street, the Regent’s Park, St. James Street, the Abbey, and the Big Ben, which are all quite familiar to readers. This article is attempting to, under the guidance of the cultural symbol of London itself and several major landmarks in the novel, figure out Woolf's...
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...English 101 April 15, 2014 A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf once spoke of famous words saying that (you cannot find peace by avoiding life) words such on these is what exemplifies the vision Woolf had of A Room of One’s Own. She talks in a great detail about certain topics that she’s most fixated with during the time of the twentieth century, topics such as feminism, inequality, gender, independency, freedom, lack of privacy and money. All things that you would expect to be a giving for women living now in our world. But then women didn’t have as many rights as women do now, making it a lot harder for women to strive and live a prosperous equal life as men did during their time. We are all human beings and I believe even back then, regardless of the circumstances that was giving for women, that we should always have equal rights for everyone including women. To begin with understanding where Virginia Woolf is coming from, it’s important to first look to her most seemingly innocuous statement that comes off deeply radical. Virginia Woolf once said that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she to write fiction” during the time people saw this harmless statement deeply radical to the point that it drew lots controversy and attention to it. Because back then for women writers they were routinely denied the time and space to produce creative works. During the time when women had little rights to work with, they were look down-upon by society as if whatever...
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...-Quentin Bell: Virginia Woolf A Biography, Harcourt Books, 1972, Pp. 314- Virginia Woolf: The Scrutiny of Her Depiction The nephew of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell, does his best to define and reveal whom his aunt was, but I did not get what I wanted from Bell’s book. In my accounts of reading Virginia Woolf’s writings like “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway”, I found myself captivated by Woolf’s observant and insightful mind that seemed to clearly see into itself and the minds of others including those in her family. Many of Woolf’s works alluded to views of distributive justice, socioeconomic processes, social exclusion, and assessments of patriarchy, but what I found in this biography was a person who appeared to be self-centered, and difficult to understand. Although Bell saw her as an elegant women with a brilliant mind that at times sporadically had nervous breakdowns it seemed that too often her brilliance didn’t come through to me because Bell failed to do what Woolf did in her writings, which was to create an image of a character that revealed her [Woolf’s] nature without constantly having to remind me. Both Bell and Woolf had great minds and an excellent sense of artistry, so it is unfair to compare Quentin Bell to Virginia Woolf. So my critique is not of Quentin Bell as a person, but his ideas of who Virginia Woolf was. And in this case Bell has plenty of insight on Woolf but tends to focus on details and journals in her life that do not help to truly resonate...
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...Feminism and Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was an incredible lady, but especially for her time. Her thoughts and ideas were what was important to society in that day. She was in the breaking edge of the feminism movement through Europe and the United States of America. The events that happened in her life are what made her writing so relatable and thought provoking, like the World Wars and different relationships throughout her life. Early in her life, she had some significant struggles like her mother and sister dying within 2 years of each other, being sexually abuse by her half-brothers and her father dying. These events had a large impact on her life and her writings. Some people that have reviewed her life believe that these events could have caused part or most of her mental illnesses throughout life (“Virginia Woolf”- Biography). Today she would have diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Even with mental illness, she continued to write incredible works,...
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...11th April, 2013 The Truth Behind The Fiction; Virginia Woolf’s Thoughts The strive for gender equality did not just begin when women decided to take up their pitchforks and sticks in contest at some town square somewhere in an European village; the expression of desire for a society of androgynous minds began in much subtler forms such as writing. Simply putting down in ink how one felt or perceived the world in the old days was all a woman could do, at least, without prosecution, if she had any “money and a room of her own” (Woolf 21). Perhaps that was what Virginia Woolf had been thinking whilst writing her book, A Room of One’s Own (1929). Woolf wrote her books in a time where only men deserved to be scholars, have respectable jobs, titles and earn reasonable amounts of money, whereas women would take up meager jobs and earn little or no money; thus limiting the public voice they had to express themselves. She therefore tried to leave a legacy or sort of encouragement for women who despite these unfortunate circumstances, wished to express themselves in a scholarly manner such as writing. By stating that a woman needed money, “five hundred a year”, and a room of her own (Woolf 21&40), Woolf simply implied empowerment and privacy; as the former was that which women greatly lacked and the latter was an abode in which one could peacefully, without restrictions or disturbances, express the mind as well as the soul. Woolf kept from making a definite conclusion that would...
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...depends on private experience of an individual. They claimed that time, like human consciousness, cannot be seen as linear, moving from one moment to the next, because time in human mind changes constatntly. It moves without any logic or reason from present to past and future. Simply, in our mind past, present and future can be experienced at the same moment. In his theory of duration, Henri Bergson explains that there are two times: private, or internal time, which is the real authentic time, and standard, public or clock time, which is, in fact, a mere social, artificial construct.[1] Modernist writers, such as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf were fascinated by the theories of time, which influenced greatly their works. In Mrs Dalloway, (1925), which may be considered 'the first important work of the literary period initiated by Ulysses'[2], Woolf is concerned with both, public and private time. In Mrs Dalloway, the public, or the clock time, is represented by the striking of Big Ben, the symbol of England and the precise time. The striking of the hours is repeated throughout the novel as a reminder of time, which restricts the lives of the characters, reminding them constantly of the time and their life passing, of their mortality. Clarsissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh are in their middle ages, period of lives, when they tend to think about their past and contemplate if they had made the right decisions. The constant presence of the hours striking interrupts their thoughts...
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...CONTENT: * Abstract……………………………………………………pg 2 * Introduction……………………………………………..pg 3 * Feminism in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE…………….pg 4 * Conclusion………………………………………………..pg 11 * Bibliography……………………………………………..pg 12 ABSTRACT: Virginia Woolf is a feminist pioneer and is also a modern socialist master. In her masterpiece To the Lighthouse she uses large number of images to convey her feminist ideas. This Research paper focuses on To the Lighthouse with feminist perspective. How ‘To the Lighthouse’ projects its challenges or realization of productive and creative possibilities of female characters like Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, Nancy Ramsay, and other characters who move around these central characters and how these characters are to be studied with the feministic point of view and built as a portrait of real woman in the Victorian England as well as its relevance in the present scenario. Our efforts are to bring out the voice of female characters’ echo in the novel considering these various roles in the novel. INTRODUCTION In the Post-Modern period, the feministic perspective has been much travelled especially in the writing of female authors or poets. The word ‘servitude’ (Fanon) in the feministic reading has been much taken in to consideration. To the Lighthouse, much discussed, debated and criticized like its length of writing in the panorama of Feminism. The writers’ efforts to portray the real woman as far as milieu and moment are concerned, is...
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...Virginia Woolf Final Essay The modern society established today has improved upon the topic of human freedom and rights. In our country, United States of America, has eliminated segregation among black and white and has giving women civil rights within the last century. In the excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s, “Shakespeare’s Sister,” from the novel A Room of One’s Own, emphasizes the double standards for men and women. The essay explains a woman’s job to be at home and the man to be work and create. Professor B, makes the strongest interpretation because he uses external sources, points out women and man double standards, and makes analytical interpretations based upon the essay. Virginia Woolf essay gathers information about the never heard sister of Shakespeare. It establishes may analytical points, which explain the main reason Shakespeare’s sister was and is not heard of often. This Professor A, gives dates throughout his interpretation but does not provide a source to give credibility to them. Professor C, uses many direct quotes from the quotation, which give credibility to his points. . Professor B, through his short essay interpretation clearly brings outside sources to give the reader a better understanding of the Virginias overall message. He uses the, “the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, where the main character, a distressed woman, is held captive in a summer home on a “rest cure” prescribed by her doctor/husband, who believes her...
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