Virginia Woolf Summer Term 2019

Dr. Stefanie Caeners

1. Life (1882-1941)

Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen was an eminent Victorian man of letters.

She grew up in a literary and

intellectual atmosphere with free

access to her father’s library

(something not self-evident at the time)

Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression and suicide attempts

the death of her mother

when she was 13; later the death of her

brother (1906) and her father (1904)

her stepbrothers

Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.

born on 25th January, 1882

1. Life (1882-1941)

The Second World War increased her

anxiety and fears. After rewriting drafts

of her suicide note, she put rocks into

her pockets and drowned herself in the

River Ouse.

Suicide

Virginia Woolf.

2. Literary career The Bloomsbury Group In 1904

she moved to Bloomsbury and became a

member of the Bloomsbury Group. This

meant the rejection of traditional morality

and artistic convention.

Experimentation as a core principle

Virginia Woolf is known as one of the great

experimental novelists during the modernist

period.

The Bloomsbury Group

Ten core members, among them Virginia

and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster,

Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, etc.

2. Literary career Evolution of her style in her main novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)

• Night and Day (1917)

• Jacob’s room (1922)

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• To the Lighthouse (1927)

A more completely developed “stream-of-consciousness technique”

Narrative experimentation with the novel form

Traditional narratives

2. Literary career

A feminist writer the themes of androgyny, women and writing

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Orlando (1928)

• A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Describes Clarissa Dalloway and

Sally Seton’s relationship as young

women

Deals with androgyny

Shows Woolf’s concern with the

questions of women’s subjugation

and the relationship between women

and writing

• 15 books published in her lifetime (10 of them novels)

• Dozens (maybe hundreds) of book reviews and essays

• The earliest modern feminist criticism, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

• 6 volumes of letters, 5 volumes of diaries (posthumously published in the 1970s-80s)

2. Literary career

3. Woolf and Bloomsbury

• Anti-traditional, breaking with the past – focus on shedding the Victorian culture in which they were raised.

• Artistic experimentation – Woolf’s experiments with narrative begin with Jacob’s Room (1922, same year as Ulysses), and are evident in all of her work.

• Bloomsbury appreciation for post-impressionist art and Vanessa Bell’s paintings

• The name given to a group of friends who lived in the Bloomsbury district of central London and became associated with an artistic and intellectual aesthetic.

• Woolf describes its origins in “Old Bloomsbury,” associating it with the move from her family home in staid Hyde Park Gate to 62 Gordon Square, a house her sister Vanessa Bell found for the four Stephen children (all in their early 20s) , after their father died in 1904. Her older brother Thoby’s Cambridge friends made the house a centre of lively conversation about the arts, politics, even economics.

3. Woolf and Bloomsbury

• Main aim to give voice to the complex

inner world of feeling and memory; finding

ways to deal with trauma, alienation and a

world in constant flux

• The human personality a continuous

shift of impressions and emotions.

• Narrator disappearance of the

omniscient narrator.

• Point of view shifted inside the

characters’ minds through flashbacks,

associations of ideas, momentary

impressions presented as a continuous

flux.

4. A Modernist novelist

Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,

Tate Gallery, London

5. Woolf vs Joyce

Woolf’s stream of

consciousness Joyce’s stream of

consciousness

never lets her characters’

thoughts flow without control,

maintains logical and

grammatical organisation

characters show their

thoughts directly through

interior monologue,

sometimes in an incoherent

and syntactically

unorthodox way

Moments of being Epiphanies

Rare moments of insight

during the characters’ daily

life when they can see

reality behind appearances

The sudden spiritual

manifestation caused by a

trivial gesture, an external

object the character is

led to a self-realization

about himself/herself

5. Woolf vs Joyce

A Room of One’s Own (1929)

• Woolf had been invited to give a lecture

on the topic of Women and Fiction. She

advanced the thesis that “a woman must

have money and a room of her own if

she is to write fiction”.

• Her essay is constructed as a partly-

fictionalized narrative of the steps that

led her to adopt this thesis.

6. Selected Works

A contemporary edition of A Room

of One’s Own.

6. Selected Works Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Takes place on a single ordinary day in

June 1923.

• Follows the protagonist through a very

small area of London, from the morning

to evening of the day on which she

gives a large formal party.

• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax

of the novel and unifies the narrative by

gathering all the people she thinks

about during the day in one place.

Cover for the first edition of Mrs.

Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,

1925.

6. Selected Works

To The Lighthouse (1927)

• divided into three chapters

• follows the Ramsay family on their

holiday in Scotland

• highly autobiographical

• deals with time, perspective, etc.

The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John Smeaton in

1830.

6. Selected Works Orlando (1928)

• deals with time and gender

• mock biography as an homage to

Vita Sackville-West

• raises questions about androgyny

• also a literary history of sort

• very experimental and almost

postmodern in style and topic

7. Summary - Woolf argues that for Modernist

writers "the point of interest lies...in

the dark places of psychology."

- statement is partly rooted in her own

history of mental illness but also in

general Modernist views

- writing as a form of exorcism, in

which the writer taps into the dark

and primal parts of their

subconscious