Considered one of the best of the Modernist writers, Virginia Woolf's
personal life is almost as intriguing as her fiction. Troubled by
mental instability for most of her life, Virginia composed her great
works in bursts of manic energy and with the support of her brilliant
friends and family. However, upon completion of a book, Virginia
fell into a dangerously dark depression in anticipation of the
world's reaction to her work. Despite her personal difficulties, Virginia
Woolf's fiction represented a shift in both structure and style.
The world was changing; literature needed to change too, if it was
to properly and honestly convey the new realities.
Virginia Woolf was born into an intellectually gifted
family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, is the author of the massive Dictionary
of National Biography, a sixty-two volume compilation
of the lives of important British citizens. Virginia's sister Vanessa
was a gifted painter, and her two brothers Thoby and Adrian were
intelligent, dynamic University men. Despite this heady environment-and
having the key to her father's library-Virginia was not afforded
the opportunity to attend school like her brothers. This wasn't
unusual for the time, but it was something Virginia never quite
seemed able to forget. Despite becoming perhaps one of the most
intelligent writers of the Twentieth Century, Virginia Woolf always
thought of herself as ill educated.
After her parents' deaths, Virginia and her siblings moved
out of their family home in Kensington and into a rather shabby
London neighborhood called Bloomsbury, where they enjoyed the intellectual
stimulation of socialists, artists and students. Thoby, who had made
a number of extremely interesting friends while at Cambridge, instituted
Thursday night get togethers with his old college buddies and other
great London minds: Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Leonard
Woolf, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy and John Maynard Keyes.
Virginia and Vanessa sat in on these conversations, which ranged
from Art to philosophy to politics, and soon became a part of the
Bloomsbury Group themselves.
As she came into her own, and comfortable in her new environment,
Virginia began to write. She first produced short articles and reviews
for various London weeklies. She then embarked on her first novel, The
Voyage Out, which would consume nearly five years of her
life and go through seven drafts. When that book came out to good
reviews, she continued producing novels, each one a more daring
experiment in language and structure, it seemed, than the last one.
After a botched marriage proposal from Lytton Strachey, and after
turning down two other proposals in the meantime, Virginia accepted
Leonard Woolf's proposal of marriage, after recovering from a mental
breakdown in a country nursing home.
Although she had affairs of the heart with other women
like Vita Sackville-West and Violet Dickinson, Virginia remained
very much in love with Leonard for her entire life. He was her
greatest supporter, half-nursemaid, half-cheerleader. He was also
a good novelist in his own right, and a publishing entrepreneur,
having founded Hogarth Press with Virginia. Together, they scouted
great unknown talents like T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and
E.M. Forster. Hogarth also began publishing Virginia's novels.
When Virginia published To the Lighthouse and The
Waves in 1927 and 1931 respectively, she had turned a
corner and could now be considered more than simply avant-garde;
she was now, by most critic's accounts, a literary genius. However,
until the end, she remained insecure and fearful of the public's
reaction to her work.
Virginia didn't only publish fiction; she was also an
insightful and, at times, incisive literary and social critic.
She was at her best when she took society to task for limiting
the opportunities of gifted female writers. A Room of One's
Own was a compilation of lectures Virginia gave at Cambridge
on the topic of women and fiction, and in this slender volume she
argues that talented female writers face the two impediments to
fully realizing their potentials: social inferiority and lack of
economic independence. Virginia proposed five hundred pounds a
year and a private room for female writers with talent. She also
published criticism, including two volumes of The Common
Reader.
Despite her success, Virginia battled her own internal
demons, and although she could quiet them through rest, sometimes
she found it impossible to escape the voices in her head. She likely
suffered from manic-depression, though doctors knew little about
that disorder at the time. Leonard tried to monitor his wife's
activities, going so far as to limit the number of visitors she
had and to prescribe different kinds of food for her to eat. His
efforts likely enabled Virginia to achieve as much as she did.
However, he couldn't ultimately save her from herself. On March
twenty-eight, 1941, Virginia wrote her husband two notes, both
of which told him that if anyone could have saved her, it would
have been him. However, she didn't feel she'd be able to come back
from this latest episode of what was then called "madness" so she
thought it best to end it all. She then picked up her walking stick
and headed to the River Ouse. Once on the banks, she filled her
pockets with stones, waded into the water, and drowned herself.
She was fifty-nine years old.
