“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”
-Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1932-1935
Adeline Virginia Stephen, later to be known as Virginia Woolf, was born into ideal Victorian circumstances – her father being a prominent literary figure and her mother the embodiment of beauty and philanthropy. Born on January 25, 1882, in London, England, Virginia would spend the early years of her life being homeschooled in the mode of a classic English education, but would later attend the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. It was likely her time at King’s that brought her into contact with reformers for women’s education and more broadly the women’s movement. Coming from a mixed family of great intellectual and artistic inheritance, Virginia Woolf and notable relatives and friends would later go on to found the Bloomsbury Group – a collection of artists and intellections firmly rooted in the propagation of the importance of the arts. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group, and together they founded Hogarth Press, a publishing press, that Virginia would use to publish much of her work. Woolf died by suicide on March 28, 1941 – much has been written on Woolf’s mental states at various points in her life which I will not expand upon here, for what Woolf did in life (not death) was so much more interesting.
I cannot write of Woolf without the obligatory nod to A Room of One’s Own, possibly her most well-renowned piece of non-fiction writing. First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay based on lectures that Woolf gave concerning “Women and Fiction.” Now, Woolf’s text is considered one of the first major works of Feminist Thought, tackling women’s socioeconomic disenfranchisement and gender consciousness. Notably, Woolf offers a rather simple solution to the vexing question of why there have historically been so few female writers; women simply require 500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own. Woolf’s standards were rather lower than what contemporary feminism demands. Yet, an important stepping stone for women nonetheless, for as long as women rely upon marriage – and thus the economical advantage of men – a woman is really not allowed to exist or consequentially to express creatively.
Admittedly, I am far more interested in Woolf’s fiction for it is wholly of its own breed. Being a primary figure in the English modernist movement, Woolf was undoubtedly concerned with how life and reality were to be represented in art. If you have ever read Woolf, then you are well acquainted with her various modes of observation and passages of time. Woolf’s work does not confine itself to the conveniences of reality, instead, shying away from realism and morphing the reader’s experience into a masterful collage of consciousness and time. Neither of which adhere to the rules we imagine. Consciousness collapses upon itself and that of others in her work, the inner monologue rules observation, and time is never to be used in that dull linear fashion. Woolf pushed all bounds while simultaneously gifting us with words that ring true. There is a candidness in Woolf’s insightfully surrealist worlds that somehow feels closer to a paint-smeared canvas than ink on paper – capturing something to be intently gazed upon.
None should be afraid of Virginia Woolf.
“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
VAN BIBLIO 