Virginia Woolf was born in London, as the daughter of Julia
Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing
family, and Sir Leslie Stephen, a
literary critic, a friend
of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and
George Eliot, and the founder of the Dictionary of National
Biography. Leslie Stephen's first wife had been the
daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His
daughter Laura from the first marriage was
institutionalized because of mental retardation. In a
memoir dated 1907 she
wrote of her parents, "Beautiful
often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances
of pure and unutterable delight in each other.
Woolf,
who was educated at home by her father, grew up at the
family home at Hyde Park Gate. In middle age she described
this period in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: "Think how
I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my
father's books; never any chance to pick up all that goes
on in schools—throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities;
scenes; jealousies!" Woolf's youth was shadowed by series
of emotional shocks. Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother,
sexually abused her. In 'Sketch of the Past' (1939) she
wrote: "I can remember the feel of his hands going under my
clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower, I
remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened
and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But
he did not stop." Julia Jackson Duckworth died when
Virginia was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half
sister, took her mother's place, but died a scant two years
later. Leslie Stephen suffered a slow
death from cancer.
When her brother Toby died in 1906, she had a prolonged
mental breakdown. Vanessa, Virginia's sister, influenced a
number of her characters; in childhood they bathed and
slept together. Later in FLUSH (1933) Woolf parodies her
own devotion to Vanessa.
Following the death of her
father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister and two
brothers to the house in Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter,
agreed to marry the critic of art and literature Clive
Bell. Virginia's economic situation improved when she
inherited £2,500 from an aunt. Their house become central
to activities of the Bloomsbury group. "And part of the
charm of those Thursday evenings was that they were
astonishingly abstract. It was not only that Moore's book
had set us all discussing
philosophy, art, religion; it was that the atmosphere - if
in spite of Hawtrey I may use that word - was abstract in
the extreme. The young men I have named had no 'manners' in
the Hyde Park Gate sense. They criticized our arguments as
severely as their own. They never seemed to notice how we
were dressed or if we were nice looking or not." (from
Moments of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind, 1976)
From
1905 Woolf began to write for the Times Literary
Supplement. In 1912 she married the political theorist
Leonard (Sidney) Woolf (1880-1969), who had returned from
serving as an administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Leonard Woolf was born in London as the son of a barrister.
He studied at Cambridge and in 1904 he went into civil
service to Ceylon. From 1923 to 1930 he was a literary
editor on the Nation. In 1917 he set up a small hand press
at Hogart House, and worked as its director until his
death. Among Leonard Woolf's works are novels, non-fiction,
and his five volume memoirs Sowing (1960), Growing (1961),
Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All the Way (1967), and
The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (1969).
THE VOYAGE
OUT (1915) was Virginia Woolf's first book. In 1919
appeared NIGHT AND DAY, a realistic novel about the lifes
of two friends, Katherine and Mary. JACOB'S ROOM (1922) was
based upon the life and death of her brother Toby.
With
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931)Woolf
established herselfe leading writers of
modernism. On the publication of To the Lighthouse, Lytton
Strachey wrote: "It is really most unfortunate that she
rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so
that her presentation of things becomes little more... than
an arabesque - an exquisite arabesque, of course." The
Waves is perhaps Woolf's most difficult novel. It follows
in soliloquies the lives of six persons from childhood to
old age. Louis Kronenberger noted in The New York Times
that Woolf was not really concerned with people, but "the
poetic symbols, of life--the changing seasons, day and
night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth
and death and change."
In these works Woolf developed
innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women's
experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated
views of reality. In her essay 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown'
Woolf argued that John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and other
realistic English novelist dealt in surfaces but to get
underneath these surfaces one must use less restricted
presentation of life, and such devices as stream of
consciousness and interior monologue and abandon linear
narrative. Marital disappointments and frustrations she
often dealt ironically. In To the Lighthouse Woolf
wrote: "So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a
woman looking at a girl throwing a ball."
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