Plan: General background

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf was born in a large and talented family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished literary critic and historian. She was educated at home by her father . After his death she moved to London with her brother and sister. Their homes in the Bloomsbury district, near the British Museum, be­came the meeting places of the so-called "Bloomsbury Group", a famous group of intellectuals. One of the members of the group was the writer Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her books as well as those of a number of other important modern writers, like T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster.

Virginia Woolf began her writing career as a literary critic. She used her reviews and essays to promote her opinions about what fiction should be. She thought that writers could get close to real life only by basing their work on their own feelings. In 1915 she began to put her theories into practice in her first novel "The Voyage Out". This novel reveals signs of its author's search and experience to find new forms of expression. During the 1920s her work became increasingly experimental. Her stories and sketches "Monday or Tuesday" (1921) show her developing an impressionistic style and bringing some of the techniques of lyrical poetry into prose. In novels like "Mrs. Dalloway"(]925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), and "The Waves" (1931), she rebels against the social fiction of the prewar period with its emphasis on de­tailed descriptions of character and setting. Instead she attempted to express the timeless inner consciousness of her characters. Influenced by James Joyce's "Ulysses" she used the techniques of "stream of consciousness" and "inner monologue" moving from one character to another to variety of mental responses to the same event.

Thus, Woolf's work was a deliberate attempt to break conventions of fiction. She saw life not in neatly arranged series of major events, but in a process people lived every day. That's why her fiction avoids plot and instead deals with the consciousness of characters and reveals the essence of their lives.

The outbreak of World War II was a shattering event for Woolf. Nevertheless, she managed to complete a brief, enigmatic final novel "Between the Acts" (1941). The book is about the eternal

England, the beautiful threatened civilization which she had always loved. On March 28, 1941 Virginia Woolf, acutely depressed by the constant German bombing of England, committed suicide (drowned herself).