Life and Career
Virginia Woolf, essayist, novelist, critic, short story writer, diarist, and biographer, proved to be one of the most prominent literary figures of the 20th century, chiefly renowned as an innovative novelist, and in particular for her employment and refinement of the stream of consciousness narrative technique in characterization. Her main works include The Voyage Out(1915), Night and Day(1919), Jacob’s Room(1922), Mrs. Dalloway(1925), To the Lighthouse(1927), Orlando(1928), The Waves(1931), Flush(1933), The Hours(1937), Between the Acts(1941). Her essays, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), are regarded as classics of the Feminist Movement; Modern Fiction (1925), an essay showing her philosophy of creative writing; she also wrote works of literary criticism: The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1937).
Woolf was born into well-educated family with mother, Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, acquaintance of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Accessible to a vast collection of books in family library, Woolf was educated at home by her father and grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate. Miserably, she suffered many mental breakdowns in her early years. Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, sexually abused her. When she was just thirteen years old, her mother died. The following death of Stella, who had become like a mother to Woolf and the death her father in 1904, finally caused a long period of depression. Vanessa, her sister, then moved Woolf and brothers to the house in London, Bloomsbury, base of Bloomsbury group which made great contribution to the spread of Modernism in English culture. Woolf, a member of this group, actively joined their discussion and slowly recovered from low spirits. Since that, she was writing in earnest articles and essays, and became a book reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1912, Woolf married Leonard Woolf, an intelligent writer, who accompanied her constantly and brought fresh air for her writing career with objective comments. In 1941, Woolf fell ill; triggered by her illness and the grievous memory of World WarⅠ, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home.
Woolf was labeled as an innovative writer of the 20th century. She made great attempts to break down the stereotype of plot and portray the real life. Throughout her writing career, Woolf was trying her best to explore proper approaches to unfold the psychological aspects of characters. Themes in her works encompass gender relations, class hierarchy and the consequences of war. In that way, Woolf was among the founders of the Modernist movement which also includes T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.
Woolf’s first novel is The Voyage Out, with fine qualities of her mature work, like exotic locale, large cast of minor characters and excessive length. Yet, some problems led to its premature death. After that, Woolf brought a traditional novel Night and Day in experimentation with a new style in Jacob’s Room, in which she characterized the hero from different people perspectives. Her first successful novel in the new style is Mrs. Dalloway. It employed the technique of stream of consciousness, conveying the heroine’s interior mind through innovative combination of inside monologue and the sights and sounds of the urban scene. Then, a great change was marked by the novel To the Lighthouse. In this novel, Woolf laid emphasis on people’s consciousness, trying to clarify all the chaotic thoughts and find order, which were considered as her pursuits by some scholars.
As a literary critic, Woolf had made appreciative and impressionistic works. Her critical commentaries on the literary contemporaries, like Henry James, and on the great Victorian and Romantic Poets and novelists, major figures of the 18th century and the Elizabethan Age just embody these fine qualities. The literary essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)”wins best reputation for her literary criticism.
Virginia Woolf, a talented and productive writer, a gloomy and life-tortured woman, is remembered by many people. She reminds me of Echo Chan, suffering tricks of life and committing a suicide. Both of their spiritual worlds are in full bloom with large number of works depicted interior minds. Though they underwent life breakdowns and held a pessimistic attitude towards life, they still focused much attention to social states and bore good wishes, caught in Woolf’s pursuit of order in conflicting age and in Echo Chan’s letters in reply to others’ depressed questions. It dawns on me that deep thoughts and provocative works are incubated from great mental scope. Thus, it is an essential to embrace reading and to be concerned with the society. |
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