Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Biography
Early life
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable author, critic and mountaineer. Her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson) (1846–1895), was born in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson and later moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.<1>. The young Virginia was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Julia had three children from her first husband, Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth (1868–1934), Stella Duckworth (1869–1897), and Gerald Duckworth (1870–1937). Leslie had one daughter from his first wife, Minny Thackeray: Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945), who was declared mentally disabled and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891. Leslie and Julia had four children together: Vanessa Stephen (1879–1961), Thoby Stephen (1880–1906), Virginia, and Adrian Stephen (1883–1948).
Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter), meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from which Virginia and Vanessa (unlike their brothers, who were formally educated) were taught the classics and English literature.
According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of London but of St Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens' summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.
The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.
Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have claimed,<2> were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).
Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though this instability greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her work, relationships, and life, and eventually led to her suicide.
Bloomsbury
After the death of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
Following studies at King's College London,<3> Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the Hoax has recently been discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008).
Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew." The couple shared a close bond; in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "“Love-making — after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”" The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.<4> The ethos of the Bloomsbury group discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Virginia met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s.<5> In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature."<5> After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of an illness at the age of 26.
Death
After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London homes during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.<6>
On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains under a tree in the garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex.
In her last note to her husband she wrote:
“ I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V. <7> ”
Work
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family.<8> Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.
This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.<9>
Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category.
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.
Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes. She was also criticized by some as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."<11>
Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.
The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.
To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind.
The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.
Her last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.
While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.<citation needed>
Her works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers of the calibre of Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.
Modern scholarship and interpretations
Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise A. DeSalvo offers treatment of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf experienced as a young woman in her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.
Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class, and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power, and the future of women in education and society.
Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf takes the position that Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. The position, which is not accepted by Leonard's family, is extensively researched and fills in some of the gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life. In contrast, Victoria Glendinning's book Leonard Woolf: A Biography, which is even more extensively researched and supported by contemporaneous writings, argues that Leonard Woolf was not only very supportive of his wife, but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and write. Accounts of Virginia's supposed anti-semitism (Leonard was a secular Jew) are not only taken out of historical context but greatly exaggerated. Virginia's own diaries support this view of the Woolfs' marriage.<12>
The first biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her nephew, Quentin Bell.
In 1989 Louise DeSalvo published the book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.
In 1992, Thomas Caramagno published the book The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness."
Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.
In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz's book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf (ISBN 0-7658-0321-6) was published in 2006.
Cultural references
Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours uses some of Woolf's characteristic stylistic tools to intertwine a story of the Virginia who is writing Mrs Dalloway with stories of two other women decades apart. The book was adapted into a 2002 film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie.
Susan Sellers' novel "Vanessa and Virginia" explores the intense relation between Woolf and her sister Vanessa, the painter. Two Ravens Press, 2008; Harcourt 2009.
Playwright Edward Albee asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use his wife's name in the title of his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which concerns a clash between a university professor and his wife as they host a younger faculty couple for evening cocktails. The film adaptation of the play is the only film to be nominated in every eligible category at the Academy Awards.
Indiana band Murder by Death have a song entitled "I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" on their first album, Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing.
American folk rock duo Indigo Girls wrote and recorded a song called "Virginia Woolf" for their 1992 album Rites of Passage, and also included it on their live recording 1200 Curfews in 1995.
Sharon Carpenter Rose portrays Woolf in the 2009 feature film Lives and Deaths of the Poets, written and directed by Leland Steigs.
British indie rock band Assembly Now reference Woolf by name in their song "It's Magnetic".
British singer Steve Harley wrote and recorded a song "Riding the Waves (for Virginia Woolf)" for his album Hobo with a grin.
American folk singer Sara Hickman recorded a song "Room Of One's Own" on her album "Necessary Angels."
Laura Veirs references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture".
In The Reptile Room, the second novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, there is mention of a snake called the Virginian Wolfsnake. The only thing said about it is that it should never, ever be allowed near a typewriter.
In The Hostile Hospital the eighth book in by Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events mentions a woman named Clarissa who is looking sadly out of a window.
Folk group Two Nice Girls named their album Chloe Liked Olivia after a key phrase in Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
Patrick Wolf's song "To the Lighthouse" was inspired by Woolf's novel.
The character Virginia Wolfe in Rocko's Modern Life is named after Woolf.
Regina Spektor references Virginia Woolf in her song "Paris".
In Scrubs, Elliot cites Virginia Woolf as one of her favourite authors, and mentions that once she considered suicide in the same manner as Virginia Woolf.
Javier Krahe, Spanish songwriter, references Virginia Woolf in the song "Nembutal" from his album Corral de Cuernos
Profesora, Swedish performance artist released a song called Virginia Woolf at her album.
The Murder City Devils, a rock and roll band, reference Virginia Woolf saying, "I think I'll call you Virginia Woolf."
In Destroy All Humans!, when at the Santa Monica level, if you scan a housewife's thought she says "I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf."
Ludovico Einaudi wrote, probably his most famous solo piano piece, "Le Onde" after reading an Italian translation of Woolf's The Waves.
The name of the American band Modest Mouse is derived from a passage from the story "The Mark on the Wall" which reads "...and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people..."
The Celtic rock band GrooveLily mentions Virginia Woolf in a live version of their song, "Screwed-Up People Make Great Art."
The feature film Notes on a Scandal (Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench) mentions Woolf during a scene where Blanchett screams, "It's a flat in the Archway Road and you think you're Virginia friggin' Woolf!"
On her debut album Ballads of Living and Dying, Marissa Nadler chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf in the song "Virginia".
The song "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths is a reference to Virginia Woolf's concept in A Room of One's Own, where she argues that if Shakespeare had a sister with similar talents she would have been denied his opportunities.
The season 13 Simpsons episode "Homer the Moe" has a reference to Virginia Woolf's drowning death when Moe's old teacher at Swigmore University walks into a lake until it's too deep to swim out.
Composer Dominick Argento received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his song cycle, "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf", settings for voice and piano of entries from Woolf's personal diary from 1919 to 1941.
American Metalcore band Starkweather reference Virginia Woolf's death and suicide note in their song "Hushabye: Goodnight" with the lyrics, "Find me the heaviest stones to fill my pockets / I thought it for the best that I should drown..."
Paul Pennyfeather, protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's first novel Decline and Fall, is asked by the prison's librarian whether he would like the 'new Virginia Woolf book'.
In The Princess Diaries, Mia is given a Virginia Woolf book by her grandmother the Queen.
In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, Brain's cloned son Roman complains about Pinky and Brain's fighting, saying "It's like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.'" Pinky responds with "I am. That woman gives me the willies."
<edit> Bibliography
See also: Bibliography of Virginia Woolf
<edit> 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)
<edit> Short story collections
Monday or Tuesday (1921)
A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944)
Mrs. Dalloway's Party (1973)
The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)
<edit> "Biographies"
Virginia Woolf published three books which she gave the subtitle "A Biography":
Orlando: A Biography (1928, usually characterised Novel, inspired by the life of Vita Sackville-West)
Flush: A Biography (1933, more explicitly cross-genre: fiction as "stream of consciousness" tale by Flush, a dog; non-fiction in the sense of telling the story of the owner of the dog, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Roger Fry: A Biography (1940, usually characterised non-fiction, however: "<Woolf's> novelistic skills worked against her talent as a biographer, for her impressionistic observations jostled uncomfortably with the simultaneous need to marshall a multitude of facts."<13>)
<edit> Non-fiction books
Modern Fiction (1919)
The Common Reader (1925)
A Room of One's Own (1929)
On Being Ill (1930)
The London Scene (1931)
The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
Three Guineas (1938)
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)
Granite and Rainbow (1958)
Books and Portraits (1978)
Women And Writing (1979)
Collected Essays (four volumes)
<edit> Drama
Freshwater: A Comedy (performed in 1923, revised in 1935, and published in 1976)
<edit> Autobiographical writings and diaries
A Writer’s Diary (1953) - Extracts from the complete diary
Moments of Being (1976)
A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)
The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) - Diary of Virginia Woolf from 1915 to 1941
Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (1990)
Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) - Greek travel diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris
The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, Expanded Edition, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (London, Hesperus, 2008)
<edit> Letters
Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters (1993)
The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888-1941 (six volumes, 1975-1980)
Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)
Prefaces, contributions
Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing ed. Alfred C. Gissing, with an introduction by Virginia Woolf (London & New York, 1929)
Biographies
Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson. New York, Penguin Group. 2000
Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972
"Vanessa and Virginia" by Susan Sellers (Two Ravens, 2008; Harcourt 2009) <Fictional biography of Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell>
The Unknown Virginia Woolf by Roger Poole. Cambridge UP, 1978.
The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work by Louise DeSalvo. Boston: Little Brown, 1989
A Virginia Woolf Chronology by Edward Bishop. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.
A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf by Jane Dunn. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990
Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life by Lyndall Gordon. New York: Norton, 1984; 1991.
The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness by Thomas D. Caramago. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992
Virginia Woolf by James King. NY: W.W. Norton, 1994.
Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf by Mitchell Leaska. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005
My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf by Thomas Szasz, 2006
The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury by Sarah M. Hall, Continuum Publishing, 2007
A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf by Ilana Simons, New York: Penguin Press, 2007
Notes
1. Smith College libraries biography of Julia Prinsep Stephen
2. Bell, Quentin: Virginia Woolf; a Biography, 1972
3. DeSalvo, Louise A.; Fox, Alice; Hill, Katherine C. (1982). "Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen". PMLA (Modern Language Association) 97: p 103.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/462246. Retrieved on 2008-12-06.
4. CLAIRE MESSUD (10 December 2006). "The Husband". New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/bo...ws&oref=slogin. Retrieved on 2008-08-10.
5. "Matt & Andrej Koymasky - Famous GLTB - Virginia Woolf". Andrejkoymasky.com.
http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biow3/wool2.html. Retrieved on 2008-09-08.
6. Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.
7. Rose, Phyllis (1986). Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Routledge. pp. 243. ISBN 0863580661.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Nco...DtSA#PPA243,M1. Retrieved on 2008-09-24.
8. "Virginia Woolf".
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vwoolf.htm. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
9. Haule, J. (1982). Melymbrosia: An Early Version of "The Voyage out". Contemporary Literature, 23, 100-104.
10. Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.
11. ""Mr. Virginia Woolf"". Commentarymagazine.com.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm...d=10801&page=2. Retrieved on 2008-09-08.
12. ""Mr. Virginia Woolf"". Commentarymagazine.com.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm...e.aip?id=10801. Retrieved on 2008-09-08.
13. Frances Spalding (ed.), Viginia Woolf: Paper Darts: the Illustrated Letters, Collins & Brown, 1991, (ISBN 1-85585-046-X) (hb) & (ISBN 1-85585-103-2) (pb), pp. 139-140
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published during 24 October 1929,<1> it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in 1928.
The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional character Judith "Shakespeare's Sister", to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge—Oxbridge—has become a well-known term in English satire, although she was not the first to use it.
The title comes from Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' (page 4). It also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.
Plays, Film and Television adaptations
It was adapted as a play by Patrick Garland who also directed Eileen Atkins in its stage performance. Their television adaptation was broadcast on PBS Masterpiece Theatre in 1991.
Notes
1. FAQ: A Room of One's Own, Publishing History. Retrieved 7 August 2008.
To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration.
To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. One of the book's several themes is the ubiquity of transience.
Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.<1>
Part I: The Window
The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the chapter, especially in the context of Mr and Mrs Ramsay's relationship.
The Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues, one of them being Lily Briscoe who begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. Briscoe finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley, another guest, claiming that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay and his philosophical treatises.
The section closes with a large dinner party. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, when the latter asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs Ramsay, who is striving for the perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has brought together in engagement, arrive late to dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.
Part II: Time Passes
The second section is employed by the author to give a sense of time passing. Woolf explained the purpose of this section, writing that it was 'an interesting experiment <that gave> the sense of ten years passing.'<2>. This section's role in linking the two dominant parts of the story was also expressed in Woolf's notes for the novel, where above a drawing of an "H" shape she wrote 'two blocks joined by a corridor.'<3> During this period Britain begins and finishes fighting World War I. In addition, the reader is informed as to the fates of a number of characters introduced in the first part of the novel: Mrs Ramsay passes away, Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and his anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work.
Part III: The Lighthouse
In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” some of the remaining Ramsays return to their summer home ten years after the events of Part I, as Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip almost doesn’t happen, as the children hadn't been ready, but they eventually take off. En route, the children give their father the silent treatment for forcing them to come along. James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father has changed as well.
They are being accompanied by the sailor Macalister and his son, who catches fish during the trip. The son cuts a piece of flesh from a fish he has caught to use for bait, throwing the injured fish back into the sea.
While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished painting. She reconsiders Mrs Ramsay’s memory, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to continue with her art, yet at the same time struggling to free herself from the tacit control Mrs Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.
Major themes
Complexity of experience
Large parts of Woolf's novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking.<4> In order to be able to understand thought, Woolf's diaries reveal, the author would spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and emotions arose in her own mind in response to what she saw.<5>
Narration and perspective
The novel lacks an omniscient narrator<citation needed> (except in the second section: Time Passes); instead the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character's stream of consciousness. This lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no clear guide exists for the reader and that only through character development can we formulate our own opinions and views because much is morally ambiguous.
Whereas in Part I the novel is concerned with illustrating the relationship between the character experiencing and the actual experience and surroundings, the second part, 'Time Passes' having no characters to relate to, presents events differently. Instead, Woolf wrote the section from the perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending that events be seen related to time. For that reason the narrating voice is unfocused and distorted, providing an example of what Woolf called 'life as it is when we have no part in it.'<6><7>
Allusions to actual geography
Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father and probably the model for Mr Ramsay, began renting Talland House in St Ives in 1882, shortly after Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the family as a family retreat during the summer for the next ten years. The location of the main story in To the Lighthouse, Hebridean island and the house there, was formed by Woolf in imitation of Talland House. Many actual features from St Ives Bay are carried into the story, including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself, and the lighthouse.<8>
Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house after the war, the Stephens had given up the house by that time. After the war, Virginia Woolf along with her sister Vanessa visited Talland House under its new ownership, and again later, long after her parents were dead, Woolf repeated the journey.<8>
Publishing history
Upon completing the draft of this, her most autobiographical novel, Woolf described it as 'easily the best of my books' and her husband Leonard thought it a masterpiece, 'entirely new...a psychological poem'. They published it together at their Hogarth Press in London in 1927. The first impression of 3000 copies of 320 pages measuring 7.5 inches by 5 inches was bound in blue cloth. The book outsold all Woolf's previous novels, and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to buy a car.
Bibliography
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (London: Hogarth, 1927) First edition; 3000 copies initially with a second impression in June.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927) First US edition; 4000 copies initially with at least five reprints in the same year.
Film, TV, music, or theatrical adaptations
To the Lighthouse (1983), starring Rosemary Harris, Michael Gough, Suzanne Bertish, and Kenneth Branagh.
To the Lighthouse <1> (play) written by Adele Edling Shank, music composed by Paul Dresher. The 2007 world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre was directed by Les Waters.
Song To The Lighthouse by Patrick Wolf.
American singer-songwriter Matt Costa has said that his song Cold December was partly inspired by To the Lighthouse.
Footnotes
1.
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100boo...lete_list.html 2. Dick p2
3. Dick p11
4. Davies p13
5. Davies p40
6. Woolf, V. 'The Cinema"
7. Raitt pp88-90, quote referencing Woolf, Virginia (1966). "The Cinema". Collected Essays II. London: Hogarth. pp. 267–272.
8. Davies p1
References
Davies, Stevie (1989). Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse. Great Britain: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-077177-8.
Raitt, Suzanne (1990). Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 0-7450-0823-2.
Dick, Susan; Virginia Woolf (1983). "Appendix A". To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft. Toronto, Londo: University of Toronto Press.
