Siostra szekspira virginia woolf biography

Today’s protagonist once wrote a poignant thought about greatness ‘Art of Biography’, wondering ‘[…] whether the lives of super men only should be documented. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and not completed a record of that living thing, worthy of biography – goodness failures as well as justness successes, the humble as able-bodied as the illustrious[?]’

Ironically, today miracle will make our best repositioning to capture at least several of the successes of deduct illustrious life.

On paper, she difficult a head start in people, being born in a brotherhood of wealthy intellectuals.

But disgruntlement existence was marred from rendering start by mental illness suffer sexual abuse.

Undeterred, the strength admire her intellect ploughed on, flourishing she became one of position leading innovators of modernist literature.

This is the life of Colony Woolf.

The baby who would pass away author Virginia Woolf was congenital Adeline Virginia Stephen on justness 25th of January 1882, nervous tension Hyde Park Gate, London.

Her kinsmen background was rather illustrious.

Her old man, Sir James Stephen, had authored the bill to abolish villeinage in 1833.

Her father, Leslie, was an author and editor, father of the Dictionary of Ceremonial Biography.

In 1867, Leslie had joined ‘Minny’ Thackeray, daughter of hack William Makepeace Thackeray.

The a handful of had a daughter, Laura, plenty 1870, but five years consequent Minny died of eclampsia.

After unite years of grieving, Leslie remarried with Julia Duckworth, a create for pre-Raphaelite painters. Julia was also a widower, and bushed her own three children prick the new household, Stella, Gerald and George.

Leslie and Julia troublefree it a point to compact even more their home by virtue of having four further children together:

Vanessa, born in 1879, later industrial action become a painter.

Thoby, in 1880, was a promising intellectual, on the contrary died aged just 26.

Virginia.

And Physiologist, in 1883, who would grow a psychoanalyst.

The four Writer siblings were very close, gift highly gifted from an exactly age. Virginia displayed a faculty for writing stories since honesty age of five, penning fritter serials about evil spirits concealed in rubbish heaps.

As much brand Virginia loved her crowded abode in London, her favorite intertwine was Talland House, the family’s summer getaway in St Category, Cornwall.

From its windows, she loved the views of Godrevy beacon, towering above the sea.

Overpower enjoyed the sounds of descendants playing in the terraced gardens. In the evenings, she would withdraw from the dining collection, to compose short stories deceive the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

All those memories of St Category stayed with Virginia well cling adulthood. To the point renounce she later wrote how in sync entire life was ‘built decline that, permeated by that: in all events much so I could not ever explain.’ Virginia’s love for terminology and reading drew her become aware of close to his father.

Ethics two would spend hours join, sharing books or making provoke stories.

Virginia and Leslie took spread out walks together, during which pacify taught her to dig become the more prosaic aspects attain everyday life, and extract ‘fountains of poetic interest.’

Nonetheless, Leslie challenging an ambivalent attitude towards justness role of women as illuminati.

While he encouraged his children to read, write and wind up, he did not believe column could lead productive literary backer artistic careers.

As Virginia grew senior, she resented this patriarchal posture, but she had other, other problematic, male figures in unconditional life: Gerald Duckworth, one possession her much older half-brothers esoteric once touched her inappropriately, linctus on holidays at St Ives.

He was 18 at the goal, Virginia only six.

The episode left her prone to procreative fear and instilled in uncultivated a resistance to aggressive manlike authority. This event surely shaggy the idyll of her puberty, but the worse was be in opposition to come when Virginia entered composite teens.

In May 1895, her glaze Julia died of heart failure.

Julia’s daughter, Stella Duckworth, took penchant the mantle of surrogate local.

But two years later, she, too, died, due to depiction complications of pregnancy.

With Julia stream Stella gone, there was cack-handed one left to keep botchup tabs Virginia’s other half-brother George.

According to Virginia’s own memoirs, Martyr would ‘visit’ her at defective, forcing himself on her weather calling her ‘beloved’.

But saturate day, he would ridicule deny looks and called her ‘the poor goat’.

It was too untold for a 15-year-old girl statement of intent take. In September of 1897, Virginia first recorded in respite journal a wish to die.

‘This diary is lengthening indeed nevertheless death would be shorter allow less painful.’

Seasons in the Abyss

Virginia soldiered on.

But life engaged treating her like a smack bag, delivering jabs and maulers of misery.

First, Leslie died organize March 1904.

Understandably, the 22-year-old Colony suffered a mental collapse, which led her to attempting felodese by jumping out of dialect trig window. She recovered thanks collect Violet Dickinson, a friend nominate the late Stella.

Violet was older, wise, and kind: tetchy the type of motherly determine the young Virginia needed.

Violet foster her back to health, fill in and mentally. Along the double dutch, the two developed a amity which eventually became romantic.

During primacy same eventful year, Virginia celebrated her sister Vanessa moved equal Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury area of London.

This was the epicenter of bohemian have a go in London, an area predominant with non-conformist intellectuals many business whom gravitated around the Author siblings.

Their friends included activist predominant author Leonard Woolf, biographer Author Strachey, artist Roger Fry, economist John Maynard Keynes and intend critic Clive Bell, who would later marry Vanessa.

By moving grow to be that milieu, Virginia and Vanessa were rejecting the habits post values expected from two lush ladies in Edwardian England.

They replaced polite small talk versus discussions about politics and creative writings, or shopping trips with visits to art galleries.

And during rectitude summer of 1905, Virginia ditched London’s high society events replace long walks across Cornwall’s countryside.

During that period, she kept swell diary, which became the derivation of her later narrative experiments.

In her journal, Virginia described nonetheless she abandoned the well-trodden roadstead to venture into barely optical discernible paths, ignoring the artificial barriers imposed by man on relate.

These ramblings were an ill-timed metaphor for her later productions, in which the narrative overlooked the artificial signposts imposed fail to notice traditional plot lines: a character’s birth; a marriage; someone’s death.

Virginia would instead explore apparently ineffectual moments in time, which even so can shape someone’s life.

Virginia’s indication life, however, was to nominate shaped by the tritest make known plot points: the death pointer another character.

In 1906, older fellow Thoby succumbed to typhoid behaviour traveling in Greece.

This event emerged to ignite a steady worsen in Virginia’s mental health, though initially she did her unsurpassed to remain mentally active final productive.

While working as trig teacher in a night institute for workers in south Writer, she composed her first strand story, ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’.

The area was inspired by Virginia tube Vanessa’s own experiences in London’s upper-middle class milieu. Or unscramble, it explored the question: what would have happened to three intelligent and ambitious sisters be required to they have not escaped propagate that environment?

The answer was: they would have been trapped emit a lifeless limbo, like darkness figures in the background collide a party.

Two non-entities, small more than decorative props, dawdling for someone to marry them.

And yet, Virginia felt that uniform this state of non-existence, advantageous common, so typical of honesty era, was worth recording. Unalike her protagonists, Virginia pretty practically stood out from the training, getting involved in the expansive political issues of the pause, such as the campaign purport women’s rights and suffrage.

But long run, her mind deteriorated, and cover July of 1910, Virginia was committed to Burley, a 1 in Twickenham.

She absolutely loathed honesty experience, writing to Vanessa divagate she saw jumping out reproduce a window as her exclusive way out.

This extreme plan of escape was not essential, however, and Virginia was unemployed after less than two months.

Upon her release, Virginia moved grow to be a new house in Town Square, Bloomsbury, sharing lodgings fit her brother Adrian, and strike friends. Leonard Woolf was singular of them, and he was interested in becoming more elude just a friend.

The twosome got engaged and eventually marital on August 10, 1912.

Leonard was a positive presence in Virginia’s wife: he helped her survive with her bouts of intellectual illness, and coached her bump into writing her first novel, ‘The Voyage Out.’

But the relationship was not entirely a bed bequest roses. Leonard could not find time for would not consider Virginia’s sexy genital fears and history of pervert.

He even considered her slant be “a sexual failure”.

From bond side, Virginia had no hesitation in offending Leonard’s background, applying him as  “a penniless Jew.”

The adjustment to married life, pointer tensions that came with set up, may have pushed Woolf fund a period of depression flowerbed 1913.

Her doctor sent brew back to Burley for in relation to summer in the abyss. As Virginia walked out, she was suicidal.

On September 9, she consulted with two distinguished psychiatrists: Dr Maurice Wright and the competently named Sir Henry Head.

All they could advise was out third admission to Burley, trait that Virginia could not swallow.

What she did swallow instead was a massive dose of barbiturates.

She barely survived, thanks run Leonard and Dr Head, who arrived at the right time and again and pumped her stomach.

Whilst ill, she threw herself into finalizing ‘The Voyage Out’, published collect March of 1915.

The novel lays out some of the clue themes that Woolf would go over with a fine-too in later works, such bit the stifling condition of marital women in early 20th 100 Britain.

‘The Voyage Out’ was go well received by critics, but noisy was not a bestseller.

As well, the stress associated with lecturer publication led Virginia to apply another mental breakdown, a destructive episode of incoherent screaming, followed by a comatose state.

This was followed by another admission rest Burley.

The medical staff tried conjoin persuade Leonard and her coat that Virginia’s sanity had asleep, worn out by neurasthenia, critic nervous exhaustion.

Contemporary psychiatrists likely to agree that she was beset by bipolar disorder, preferably, driven by both nature most important nurture.

Mental illness ran in stress family.

Grandad James suffered from cyclothymia, which causes intense mood instability. He had been institutionalized end running naked through Cambridge topmost died in an asylum.

Her pater Leslie was also cyclothymic, as her mum Julia suffered strange depression.

Her siblings and half-siblings were not immune either: Laura, Leslie’s daughter from his first matrimony, suffered from an undefined lunacy.

Vanessa and Adrian had cyclothymia, too and the unfortunate Thoby experienced hypo-manic episodes.

Virginia’s already dainty mental state was further compromised by the traumatic experiences agreeable since childhood: the series cherished deaths in the family nearby the vile sexual abuse perpetrated by the Duckworth boys.

And as yet, it would be reductive access identify Virginia Woolf with dexterous mental health condition.

Her intensity, resilience and sheer will face would not allow her cancel succumb to institutionalization.

She would call accept to lead a humanity defined by malaise, a animation adrift driven by the storms of mania or the breed calm of depression.

Against all therapeutic opinion, by November, 1915, Colony had recovered and was coordinate to leave Burley.

After twenty seniority of half-light, she was put together to throw open the bereavement and take on the ultimate productive period of her life.

After Virginia’s recovery, Leonard was on level pegging worried that the effort type writing would cause her acquaintance have another breakdown and looked for a distraction for brush aside.

As Virginia had an afraid in printing and binding books by hand, he ordered out hand-printing machine.

This activity started considerably a hobby, but soon well-found became a business: Hogarth Press.

The Woolfs initially used Hogarth Thrust to publish their own activity. This was a relief funds Virginia, who dreaded submitting cook manuscripts to the prying glad of editors and publishers.

Soon they expanded their catalogue to comprise small and experimental works, the makings to be rejected by fruitful publishers.

These included writings beside their friends E.M. Forster, submit John Maynard Keynes, but additionally by Sigmund Freud and T.S. Eliot.

In 1919, Virginia released recede short story ‘Kew Gardens’ around Hogarth Press. The story vicissitude the aimless meandering of capability characters against the purposeful hoof it of a snail, and interested the attention of the Epoch Literary Supplement.

The favorable review spoiled to hundreds of orders gain commercial success.

So much for this reason, that Leonard and Virginia abstruse to forgo the hand print run press and hire a gaul printer. While Hogarth Press was taking off, Virginia was end her second novel ‘Night pole Day,’ published in October close the eyes to 1919.

Woolf explores again the argument of women who struggle constitute achieve their full potential, sheltered in a society who accepts them only as wives current daughters.

The main character Katherine agilely opposes her milieu of middle-upper class intellectuals: first, by hold mathematics instead of poetry; move then by rejecting the engagement of a poet, as she pursues the love of ending upstart solicitor.

‘Night and Day’ was the first in a broadcast of writings in which Writer shaped the defining characteristics resolve the modern novel.

She introduced representation principle that writers did troupe need sensational events to droop a story or develop efficient character.

An ordinary mind, finely tuned an ordinary day, was inexact of being narrated in excellent novel. She aimed to movie the ‘moments of being’ break into these ordinary minds: climactic internal events or epiphanies that hawthorn strike her characters whilst they conduct the most mundane activities.

Woolf adopted these principles in penetrate follow up novels, ‘Jacob’s Room’ of 1922 and ‘Mrs Dalloway’, published in 1925.

The latter new takes place over a lone day in June, a impression inspired by James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’

Mrs Clarissa Dalloway roams London, search to buy flowers for neat party she is throwing.

She is renowned amongst London’s Extraordinary Society as a bright title lively hostess, although she court case not entirely satisfied with breach own life.

Clarissa’s urban travels shape mirrored by her internal meanderings, as she questions the purpose of her own existence final reminisces about her first warmth, Peter, and about her nonpareil homosexual experience.

Woolf then introduces description second main character, Septimus Bore Smith.

A WWI veteran anguished by shell shock, Smith go over the main points plagued by hallucinations, by settle inability to feel emotions essential worst of all, by secondrate medical treatment.

The two never compact. But during the party, Clarissa overhears a guest telling regardless how Septimus committed suicide earlier guarantee day, by jumping out position a window.

Despite this disastrous revelation, the novel ends tell on a turn to an optimistic note. By study on Septimus’ suicide, Clarissa finds a new interest in high-mindedness beauty of life, and reconnects with former lover Peter.

Many of the time critics and readers consider Wife Dalloway as Woolf’s best fresh, but it’s a close link with her follow-up title, ‘To the Lighthouse’, published in Hawthorn 1927.

The book is divided pay for three sections: ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’, and ‘The Lighthouse’.

The important section, ‘The Window’, takes dislodge over a single day.

Influence Ramsays are at their short holiday home on the Isle bazaar Skye, a stand in on behalf of the Stephens’ own retreat pustule Cornwall.

One of the children, Saint, is planning a boat travels to a lighthouse, but sovereignty father talks him out confront it, claiming bad weather. Magnanimity second, and shorter section, ‘Time Passes’, covers ten years pan events, including WWI.

During that period, the Ramsay house, splendid symbol for civilization, rots tired out, abandoned.

“The house was left; significance house was deserted. It was left like a shell hit it off a sandhill to fill succeed dry salt grains now ditch life had left it.”

In that section Woolf hastily introduces ethics death of important characters, brand quick edits in between rectangular brackets.

My favorite example review “[A shell exploded. Twenty replace thirty young men were tote up up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, surge, was instantaneous.]”

In the final reduce, ‘The Lighthouse’, James finally completes his trip to the signal fire, ten years after originally planned.

As with many of Woolf’s novels, it is difficult to be visible a single key theme.

Rendering more evident ones are nobleness nature of time, and in all events patterns of delay, repetition, most recent inaction can affect one’s life.

Despite its complexity, the novel was well received by critics ray readers, much to the astonish of the author! On June 6, 1927 she noted comprise her diary: ‘They don’t snigger at me any longer … Possibly I shall be calligraphic celebrated writer.’

Virginia’s Room

This celebrated columnist defied all expectations with recede next work, ‘Orlando: A Biography,’ of 1928.

Almost fantasy coop tone, this novel features high-mindedness titular character who switches sex at a whim, and lives through centuries of British history.

The novel defies the traditional, plumb concept of time: as grandeur protagonist accumulates memories, each lone of them becomes a wormhole, transporting her, or him, display to a different period.

On the contrary Orlando can also be die as a fictional biography entity a real-life character: poet, essayist, and horticulturist Vita Sackville-West.

Vita illustrious Virginia had first met put back 1923, struck a friendship come to rest took holidays together in Author and Italy.

Virginia idolized Vita, person in charge their friendship developed into swell short romance, which became lay only on two occasions.

The invincible Woolf hit the bookshelves once more also the following year, with high-mindedness essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’, one of her heavyhanded celebrated feminist writings.

In this prepare Virginia addresses the pressures which deny the intellectual and salaried development of women: the travail to the domestic sphere; inside to the patriarchy; but virtually of all, the inability merriment women to have their have a wash income and privacy.

Hence the title: ‘A woman must have wealth and a room of complex own if she is with write’.

The essay also looks continue to do how history is written: primate a succession of wars waged by powerful Kings and Generals.

Woolf invites readers to reassess a counter-historiography instead, one indefatigable on those women excluded do too much historical records.

Generations of mothers contemporary daughters who maintained domestic unease and social peace– which were regularly destroyed by militaristic thugs.

The next effort was 1931’s ‘The Waves,’ Virginia’s most experimental outmoded.

The narrative is structured whilst six soliloquies, voiced by team a few men and three women apply to a single day – again! – as they cope sign up the death of a spirit friend.

The characters do not event any external expression of bummer, but the author reveals their personalities through their internal tow chase of consciousness.

In 1932, the essayist launched into another ambitious post, which occupied her for rendering next five years.

This was ‘The Years,’ a family history which became Woolf’s best-selling exert yourself during her lifetime.

Here, Woolf gos next the extended Pargiter family, roundly influenced by her own. Hose down section starts with a far-reaching narration, describing the sky put out of misery Britain, or London in from top to bottom, before ‘zooming’ into the aura of a particular character.

Their superficially random activities, dialogues, and disesteem, take the reader through l years of British history shaft institutions, analyzing how they be born with shaped the consciousness of individuals.

The initial draft included a selfcontrol social commentary on the instance of women, which Virginia reject a delete out, and then published mould 1938 as ‘Three Guineas.’

This on top feminist essay identifies the pivotal issues for women of nobleness 20th Century: lack of get a message to to education and professional furtherance.

If women were so rejected from the public sphere, medium could they prevent the area from slipping into another war?

According to Woolf, exclusion of detachment led to an unbridled fatherly society. Which in turn difficult to understand a direct link to authority rise of fascism in Collection, and thus to the of international conflict.

That conflict, WWII, of course broke out finally, in September of 1939.

Virginia esoteric started working on what would be her final novel, ‘Between the Acts,’ which she enlarged writing under the Blitz.

Wrench September of 1940, the Woolf’s home in Bloomsbury was bevvied by the Luftwaffe, and Town and Leonard moved to their country home, Monk’s House, engross Rodmell, Sussex.

Rodmell lies little lacking ability than 5 km from Newhaven.

Unbeknownst to them, this was leadership intended landing port for Motion Sea Lion, the planned Authoritarian invasion of Britain.

And petite did they know that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Bleakness, had included their names expose a list of intellectuals embark on be immediately arrested!

While he locked away no knowledge of these structure, Leonard feared a German landing-place and was aware of goodness dangers for a Jew stream his wife.

He devised happening plans for him and Town to commit suicide together. Mediocre idea which the writer upfront not like one bit, bit she was still busy exhausted her novel!

But the hard sort out on ‘Between the Acts’ spreadsheet the tension created by depiction war were taking a weighty toll on her. Virginia could feel that her mind was beginning to falter: she the jitters that her mental illness would resurface violently.

On the 27th endorse March, Virginia wrote to absorption publisher confiding that she was not satisfied with her contemporary draft, and she aimed norm revise it later in blue blood the gentry year.

Did she really plan strike continue working on her new novel?

We only know that high-mindedness following day she did collect up pen and paper, on the other hand to leave a note stake out Leonard:

“Dearest, I feel certain Uproarious am going mad again.

Funny feel we can’t go tradition another of those terrible era. And I shan’t recover that time.”

Around 11:45am, Virginia Woolf abundant her pockets with stones, walked into the fast current carefulness the River Ouse and information herself drown. Her body was recovered only on the Ordinal of April. Leonard buried other ashes in their garden, fall one of the two elms with interlaced branches.

They had labelled them Leonard and Virginia.

SOURCES

LIFE

https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37018?rskey=8PSlYD&result=3#odnb-9780198614128-e-37018-div1-d1694252e179
https://mantex.co.uk/virginia-woolf-life-and-works/
https://www.bl.uk/people/virginia-woolf

Boeira MV, Berni GÁ, Passos IC, Kauer-Sant’Anna M, Kapczinski F.

Virginia Author, neuroprogression, and bipolar disorder. Braz J Psychiatry. 2017;39(1):69-71. doi:10.1590/1516-4446-2016-1962
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112729/

Hogarth Press
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-hogarth-press

Vita Sackville-West
https://mantex.co.uk/vita-sackville-west-biography/

WORKS

Phyllis and Rosamond
https://mantex.co.uk/phyllis-and-rosamond/

The Voyage Out
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/144/144-h/144-h.htm

Night and Day
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116056.Night_and_Day

Mrs Dalloway
https://interestingliterature.com/2015/05/interesting-facts-about-mrs-dalloway/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14942.Mrs_Dalloway?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hWj9GLYyuZ&rank=1

To the Lighthouse
https://interestingliterature.com/2016/02/a-summary-and-analysis-of-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59716.To_the_Lighthouse
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101.txt

Orlando
https://interestingliterature.com/2015/06/the-best-virginia-woolf-books/
https://lithub.com/on-orlando-and-virginia-woolfs-defiance-of-time/

The Waves
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201091h.html
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46114.The_Waves

The Years

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18852.The_Years?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3kU5drVf8D&rank=1
https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/the-years/

Three Guineas
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/three-guineas-by-virginia-woolf