Virginia Woolf
Née Adeline Virginia Stephen. 1882-1941. Writer, journalist, smoker. Married to Leonard Woolf.
Early life
Her father was Leslie Stephen, who was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her sister Vanessa Bell was to become a painter. In 1895 her mother died unexpectedly, and Virginia Stephen suffered her first mental breakdown. After the death of her father in 1904 she had a second nervous breakdown and moved to Bloomsbury Group. Besides her breakdowns Virginia had suffered sexual molestation at the hands of her two-half brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. She and her family often spent their summer holidays at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall. St Ives also serves as the setting for her famous novel To the Lighthouse (1927).
Education
Virginia Stephen was educated at home from the resources of her father's huge library. Later she studied Greek, Latin, German and History at King's College London Ladie's Department from 1897-1901. There she got in contact with reformers of women´s higher education.
Works
Novels:
The Voyage Out (1915)
Night and Day (1919)
Jacob's Room (1922)
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Orlando (1928)
The Waves (1931)
The Years (1937)
Between the Acts (1941).
Countless essays and newspaper articles on literature and culture. Very influential are A Room of One's Own (1929), an extended essay on women and women's writing.
Virginia Woolf´s novels were considered experimental, but, in contrast to James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) more accessible. Although she did not invent the stream of consciousness, she experimented with it and finetuned its form. Her emphasis was not on plot or characterisation but on a character's consciousness (cf. Virginia Woolf "Modern Fiction" (1919), revised as "Modern Novels" in 1925). In this essay Virginia Woolf points out that it is important for modern writers to free oneself from conventions and instead to record impressions in an unordered way to be closer to reality. Woolf is not interested in large plot events, but in smaller things and also wants to look into the working of the mind (character focalisation).
Sources
Bennett, Joan. Virginia Woolf. Her Art as a Novelist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Bloom, Harold. Virginia Woolf. Chelsea: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.
Stape, John Henry. Virginia Woolf. Interviews and recollections. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter13.html