Virginia Woolf

Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941), English novelist and critic, whose stream-of-consciousness technique and poetic style are among the most important contributions to the modern novel.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, the daughter of the biographer and philosopher Sir Leslie Stephen, who educated her at home. About 1905, after her father's death, she and her sister Vanessa and their two brothers established a literary circle, known as the Bloomsbury group, that included the writer Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912. With her husband she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.

Virginia Woolf's early novels— The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922)—prove her determination to expand the borders of the novel beyond mere storytelling. She wanted to stress the continuous flow of experience, the indefinability of character and external circumstances as they strike consciousness. She was also interested in the way time is experienced both as a sequence of moments and as the flow of years and of centuries. She tried to convey the impression of time present and of time passing in individual experience and also of the characters' awareness of historic time.

In her next novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters. Psychological effects are achieved through the use of `imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Character reveals by means of the ebb and flow (приливы и отливы) of personal impressions, feelings, and thoughts—a stream-of-consciousness technique. Thus, the inner lives of human beings and their otherwise average circumstances seem extraordinary. Although the events in Mrs. Dalloway take place within a fixed 12-hour span, both books convey the passage of time through the moment-to-moment changes within the characters—their appreciation of themselves, others, and their kaleidoscopic worlds. 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 of the major characters. 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.

Of her remaining fiction, the novel The Waves (1931) is the most evasive and stylized; In the novel she restricts herself to recording the stream of consciousness. The reader lives within the minds of one or the other of six characters from their childhood to their old age. Human experience of the “seven ages of man,” rather than character or event, is most important.

On March 28, 1941, depressed by the attack of one of her recurrent periods of mental illness, she committed suicide by drowning.

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