Virginia Woolf is widely regarded as one of the most important writers of the early 20th century, particularly from the modernist period. She is best known for her writing and contributions to early feminist movements. Today we will be exploring the life, literature, and legacy of Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf was born in London on January 25, 1882, to a family with prominent social and artistic connections. She received an at-home education that prioritized literature. Woolf struggled with her mental health from an early age following the death of both her parents and her brother. These tragedies had a direct influence on her writing.
In 1905, Woolf became an early member of the famed Bloomsbury Group, a group of English writers, philosophers, and artists during the Modernist era. They frequently met in the Bloomsbury district of London to share ideas, discuss philosophy, and support each other’s work. They usually met at the home of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister. Other notable members of the Bloomsbury Group included: Roger Fry, E.M. Forester, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant.
Throughout her life, Virginia Woolf wrote many letters, novels, and even biographical works. Her novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931) are some of the most well-known examples of stream-of-consciousness storytelling. Common themes across Woolf’s writings included feminism, mental health, and the effects of war.
Woolf continued to struggle with mental illness throughout her life and ultimately died from it in 1941. Her legacy lives on today in her novels and hundreds of surviving letters, and she is remembered for being a pioneer and major influence on the nonlinear approaches to narrative.
Check out some of Virginia Woolf’s books from our collection:
Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.
To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There's the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever. But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.
A moving portrait in miniature of family life, To the Lighthouse also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.
Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.
Set on the coast of England against the vivid background of the sea, The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.
Interested in diving into the works of brilliant modernist author Virginia Woolf, but don't know where to start? Try Monday or Tuesday, a collection of eight short stories originally published in 1921. Although the collected stories contain the same keen insight and bold experimentation that made Woolf's reputation, their easy-to-digest size make them a bit easier to tackle than one of Woolf's novels, especially for newcomers to this feminist icon's body of work.
Descriptions adapted from the publisher.