Virginia Woolf was born on
January 25, 1882, a descendant of one of
Victorian England’s most prestigious literary families. Her father,
Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of
National Biography and was married to the daughter of the
writer William Thackeray. Woolf grew up among the most important
and influential British intellectuals of her time, and received
free rein to explore her father’s library. Her personal connections
and abundant talent soon opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that
she found herself in “a position where it was easier on the whole
to be eminent than obscure.” Almost from the beginning, her life
was a precarious balance of extraordinary success and mental instability.
As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious Times
Literary Supplement, and as an adult she quickly found
herself at the center of England’s most important literary community.
Known as the “Bloomsbury Group” after the section of London in which
its members lived, this group of writers, artists, and philosophers
emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure, and intellectual freedom, and
included such luminaries as the painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist
E. M. Forster, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the economist
John Maynard Keynes. Working among such an inspirational group of
peers and possessing an incredible talent in her own right, Woolf
published her most famous novels by the mid-1920s,
including The Voyage Out,Mrs. Dalloway,Orlando, and To
the Lighthouse. With these works she reached the pinnacle
of her profession.
Woolf’s life was equally dominated by mental illness.
Her parents died when she was young—her mother in 1895 and
her father in 1904—and she was prone to intense,
terrible headaches and emotional breakdowns. After her father’s
death, she attempted suicide, throwing herself out a window. Though
she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved
him deeply, she was not entirely satisfied romantically or sexually.
For years she sustained an intimate relationship with the novelist
Vita Sackville-West. Late in life, Woolf became terrified by the
idea that another nervous breakdown was close at hand, one from
which she would not recover. On March 28, 1941, she
wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to spoil his
life by going mad. She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.
Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree
as well as her struggle to find meaning in her own unsteady existence.
Written in a poised, understated, and elegant style, her work examines
the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to
the experience of time. Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant
to her era and literary circle. Throughout her work she celebrates
and analyzes the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence.
Moreover, her stream-of-consciousness style was influenced by, and
responded to, the work of the French thinker Henri Bergson and the
novelists Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
This style allows the subjective mental processes of
Woolf’s characters to determine the objective content of her narrative.
In To the Lighthouse (1927),
one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for example,
is modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than
by the clock. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half
the book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed
into a few dozen pages. Many readers of To the Lighthouse, especially
those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction,
find the novel strange and difficult. Its language is dense and
the structure amorphous. Compared with the plot-driven Victorian
novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems
to have little in the way of action. Indeed, almost all of the events
take place in the characters’ minds.
Although To the Lighthouse is a radical
departure from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like its more
traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing characters
and advancing both plot and themes. Woolf’s experimentation has
much to do with the time in which she lived: the turn of the century
was marked by bold scientific developments. Charles Darwin’s theory
of evolution undermined an unquestioned faith in God that was, until
that point, nearly universal, while the rise of psychoanalysis,
a movement led by Sigmund Freud, introduced the idea of an unconscious
mind. Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence
on the styles and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those
in the Bloomsbury Group. To the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s
style and many of her concerns as a novelist. With its characters
based on her own parents and siblings, it is certainly her most autobiographical
fictional statement, and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay,
and Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations
of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and analyzes,
feels and interacts.
