Introduction
Virginia Wolf’s essay, "Professions for Women" (1931), promulgates the complex figure of modernist
writer,
professional expert, and feminist intellectual that was subsequently taken up by second-wave feminists. As her essay discloses, Woolf murders the Angel in the House and thereby bids farewell to domestic governance. In her next breath, she urges women to follow her instead into the professions. And this they have done. "Professions for Women" became, in effect, a master narrative of female progress that enabled the institutionalization of feminism in the academy.
Virginia Wolf
Cultural Frame and Life
Virginia Wolf (1882-1941) was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London. Woolf was the daughter of biographer and critic Leslie Stephen (later Sir Leslie) and Julia Jackson Duckworth. She was educated at home by her father. After his death in 1904, she, her sister Vanessa, and her brothers Adrian and Thoby moved to Bloomsbury, then a bohemian section of London. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and
writer on economics and politics. Virginia Woolf, her husband, her siblings, and their friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1917 the Woolf’s founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printed the early works of authors such as Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, and introducing the works of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, to English readers. Except for the first printing of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works. From the time of her mother's death in 1895, Woolf suffered from what is now believed to have been bipolar disorder, which is characterized by alternating moods of mania and depression. In 1941, at the apparent onset of a period of depression, Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse River. She left her husband a note explaining that she feared she was going mad and this time would not recover (Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History).
Works
Woolf's early novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1922)—offer increasing evidence of her determination to expand the scope of the novel beyond mere storytelling. Her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is considered by many to be her first great novel, revealing a mastery of the form and technique for which she would become known. The power of Woolf's fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, lies in its brilliant visual imagery, extensive use of symbolism, and use of the characters' stream of consciousness to evoke feeling and demonstrate the progression of both time and emotion. Orlando, loosely based on Woolf's friend, writer Vita Sackville-West, is a historical fantasy and an analysis of gender, creativity, and identity. The work satirically comments on society's changing ideas and values. The Waves (1931) is Woolf's most experimental and difficult work that is primarily concerned with rendering the quality of characters’
inner life, but here inner life is presented in a highly stylized, unrealistic way.
Besides novels, Woolf also published many works of nonfiction, including two extended essays exploring the roles of women in history and society: A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her works of literary criticism include The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). After her death, Woolf's diaries were edited and published in five volumes between 1977 and 1984 as The Diary of Virginia Woolf. The Letters of Virginia Woolf appeared in six volumes from 1975 to 1980 (The literature Network).
Family Influence
Having an autocratic father (Leslie Stephen was a respected Victorian figure who helped write The Oxford English Dictionary), the loss of her mother and a beloved brother, and the further pain of sexual abuse by her stepbrothers after her father remarried shaped her personality in a profound way. Her already fragile emotional state was exacerbated by battles with mental illness. All thoss served as the foundation of her literary style. Woolf's writings and her characters are almost all members of her own affluent, intellectual, upper-middle class family and friends (Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History).
Style
Virginia Woolf’s writing explores the concepts of time, memory, and people's inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception. Woolf was interested in defining qualities specific to the female mind. She saw female sensibility as intuitive, close to the core of things, and thus able to liberate the masculine intellect from what she viewed as its enslavement to abstract concepts. Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. To this end, she elaborated a technique known as stream of consciousness. Woolf attempted to represent not only the social relationships of her characters but also their solitude, when they were most themselves, forming silent relationships with the things around them.
Even though Virginia Woolf’s essay is based on observation of real situations, she manages to involve just enough “drama” to make her point, and make it interesting. Woolf’s imaginative use of drama and character development to get her point across can be evidenced in numerous areas of this essentially non-fiction work. Few female writers have ever earned neither the praise nor the popularity of male authors such as Shakespeare.