Virginia Woolf

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• Virginia Woolf

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Early life

• born in London 1882
• Father Leslie Stephen. Historian, critic,
  author, mountaineer (from 1st marriage
• Laura)
• Mother Julia Duckworth. A model for
  pre-Raphaelite painters (from 1 marriage
  George, Stella, Gerald)

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• together, four children Vanessa, Thoby,
  Virginia, Adrian
• very stimulating environment, huge library
• girls educated at home (classics, English
  literature)
• boys formally educated, went to university

4

• summers until 1895 St. Ives, Cornwall
• (To the Lighthouse)
• 1895 mothers sudden death (V. was 13)
• first nervous breakdown
• however studied Greek Latin German History at the
  Ladies Department of kings College, london

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• 1904 fathers death. New crisis
• sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46
  Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
• Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell,
  Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant,
  Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger
  Fry nucleus of the intellectual circle of
  writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group

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Bloomsbury Group

• 'one's prime objects in life are love, the
  creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience
  and the pursuit of knowledge (G.E. Moore)
• against social rituals, bourgeois habits,
  conventions of Victorian life, its consideration
  of the public sphere
• in favour of a more informal, private-oriented
  focus upon personal relationships and individual
  pleasure

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• 1910 Dreadnought hoax (Virginia participated
  disguised as a male Abyssinian royal)

?
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• 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell couple's
  interest in avant garde art ? influence on
  Woolf's development as an author
• 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf
• (recurring breakdowns and depression, maybe
  originated from sexual abuse by half-brothers
  George and Gerald Duckworth)
• 1917 founded the Hogarth Press together

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• 1922 met writer Vita Sackville-West, started a
  relationship with her
• 1928 Orlando the protagonist passes from one
  century to the other, also changing sex
• remained friends until Virginias death in 1941

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• began writing for The Times Literary Supplement
• highly experimental novels a lyrical novelist
• 1915 The Voyage Out
• 1922 Jacobs Room
• 1925 Mrs Dalloway
• 1927 To the Lighthouse

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• 1928 Orlando
• 1931 The Waves
• 1941 Between the Acts
• after completing her last book she fell into a
  bad fit of depression and committed suicide by
  drowning herself (28.March, 1941)

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• Dearest,
• I feel certain that I am going mad again.
• I feel we can't go through another of those
  terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I
  begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So
  I am doing what seems the best thing to do.
• You have given me the greatest possible
  happiness.

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• You have been in every way all that anyone could
  be. I don't think two people could have been
  happier 'til this terrible disease came.
• I can't fight any longer. I know that I am
  spoiling your life, that without me you could
  work. And you will I know. You see I can't even
  write this properly. I can't read.
• What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of
  my life to you.

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• You have been entirely patient with me and
  incredibly good. I want to say thateverybody
  knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would
  have been you.
• Everything has gone from me but the certainty of
  your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life
  any longer. I don't think two people could have
  been happier than we have been. V

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Essay Modern Fiction

• The proper stuff of fiction does not exist
  everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every
  feeling, every thought every quality of brain
  and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes
  amiss

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• beyond the limits of traditional fiction
• interested in the area of psychology

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• in her works
• NOT facts events social relations
• BUT feelings thoughts memories
• qualities of the brain, of the
• spirit

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• interest focussed on the person
• like an instrument capable of receiving and
  transmitting perceptions emotions thoughts

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• Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an
  ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad
  impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
  engraved with the sharpness of steel. ()
• The mind object of impressions of different
  quality and intensity

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• Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
  arranged life is a luminous halo, a
  semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the
  beginning of consciousness to the end.
• no logical or chronological organization of the
  data of life, no symmetrical arrangement
  indicating theres a clear pattern below the
  surface
• a halo man is not in a position to observe
  life from the outside, but is immersed in it

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• role of the novelist to render life with as
  little mixture of the alien and the external as
  possible, to render the experience of life as
  faithfully as she can
• the alien, the external the conventions of
  fiction (setting plot characters)

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• a representation of life complicated by the
  simultaneous presence of past and present in the
  mind
• the juxtaposition of different perspectives
  from which reality can be perceived

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TIME

• handled in two ways
• Contrast external subjective time
• (underlined by the reference to actions or events
  treated as counterpoints to the flow of thoughts
  of the characters)

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• present time constantly put in relation with the
  past through the mechanism of memory
• a recollection, sometimes started by an
  insignificant event, becomes a way to understand
  the present more fully interaction of past and
  present (they change each other)

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1st passage

• the beginning of the book
• Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers
  herself
• third-person, external narrator, who very soon
  will share the characters different points of
  view

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• Clarissas (Scrope Purviss, Hugh Whitbreads)
• For Lucy had her work cut out for her. And
  then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning
  fresh as if issued to children on a beach
• poetic quality of the language

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• the narrator, however implicit and unobtrusive,
  makes her presence felt by recording the
  characters thoughts in order and often
  providing images rendering the characters
  perceptions and states of mind
• sometimes managing to create intense poetry

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• Clarissa goes out in the morning to buy flowers
  in her house there are preparations (later the
  reader will come to know that theres going to be
  a party in the evening)
• the fresh air reminds her of her youth at Bourton
• remembers a conversation with Peter Walsh (India,
  letters)
• wonders how strange it is that people remember
  apparently insignificant things

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• she goes on walking in London towards the flower
  shop passes an acquaintance, Scrope Purvis, from
  whose point of view we get a glimpse of her
• meditates on the beauty of Westminster and
  describes the atmosphere created by Big Ben (list
  of all the aspects of London life that she likes,
  among which that moment of June)
• underlines its the middle of June, the war is
  over its the season of horse races and cricket

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• thinks briefly about her daughter Elizabeth
• (she seems tempted to buy her a brooch but
  decides not to buy it)
• thinks about the party shes going to have in the
  evening
• enters Green Park, is aware of the silence, the
  slow movements of the animals

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• meets her friend Hugh Whitbread
• they talk about his wifes health problems
• while they speak she feels self-conscious, not as
  elegant as he is
• thinks about the fact that neither Richard (her
  husband) nor Peter Walsh like him

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• typical elements of Woolfs style
• indirect interior monologue
• external third-person narrator adopting the
  perspective of several characters
• shifting point of view
• role of memory (tunnelling process)
• contrast objective-subjective time
• poetic quality of the language (similes,
  metaphors)

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2nd passageA pistol shot

• just before arriving at the flower shop Clarissa
  is following her thoughts
• fights the feeling of annoyance given to her by
  the thought of her daughters teacher
• opens the doors of the flower shop and is
  overwhelmed by the beauty, perfume, colours of
  the flowers

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• point of view constantly shifting from Clarissas
  perspective to Miss Pyms (the shop assistant)
• she is smelling, choosing the flowers for her
  party when a loud noise, like an explosion,
  attracts the attention of the two women and of
  all the people in the street

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• the external narrator takes control of the
  narration and describes the effect of the event
  on Mrs Dalloway, the shop assistant, the crowd
  (rumours described as a cloud, mockery of
  peoples tendency to be affected by the wing of
  mystery)
• the funny remark of a plumber is heard by a man
  in the crowd, Septimus Warren Smith

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• he is described from the outside
• then the point of view shifts into Septimuss
  mind
• signs of a view of reality deviating from what is
  considered normal (logic?)
• he tends to interpret all negative events as his
  own fault, is focused on himself

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• his wife, Lucrezia, tells him to go on the
  reader starts perceiving reality from her point
  of view
• an Italian girl feeling completely isolated and
  lonely now that her husband is mentally disturbed

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3rd passageThe party

• Dr Bradshaw arrives apologizing for being late a
  young man has committed suicide
• Clarissas physical reaction to such news
  metaphors of burning
• reaction of annoyance her party will be spoilt
• gradual identification with the young man
  (physical, then psychological)

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• she wonders HOW he did it
• she describes the mans fall and death from his
  perspective
• then she starts wondering WHY he did it
• to preserve the thing that mattered, his own
  intimate self
• as an extreme attempt to communicate / a sign of
  extreme loneliness

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• If it were now to die, twere now to be most
  happy (Othello, II.i)
• in Cyprus, when he learns that the ship carrying
  Desdemona has not shipwrecked
• Fear no more the heat of the sun (Cymbeline,
  IV.ii)
• a funeral song on Imogens presumed death
  

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• maybe he was a poet, who felt life had been made
  intolerable by doctors forcing your soul
• terror, fear of living ? Clarissas
  identification with Septimus becomes explicit
  (there was in the depths of her heart an awful
  fear)

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• use of metaphorical, poetic language
• describes herself as a small bird crouching at
  the feet of her husband reading the paper, while
  she was trying to revive, to receive warmth and
  strength from him

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• relationship between Mr and Mrs Dalloway ?
  compared and contrasted with that between
  Septimus and Lucrezia (a piece of bone.)

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• Clarissa moves about the room, looks out, sees
  the old lady opposite
• no pleasure could equal this having done with the
  triumphs of youth
• perhaps she starts accepting her own life and
  choices
• and goes back to her party, finally reconciled
  with life

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Moments of being

• From Nicole L. Urquhart, Moments of Being in
  Virginia Woolfs Fiction
• (http//writing.colostate.edu/gallery/matrix/urquh
  art.htm)
• She first mentions moments of being in her essay,
  "A Sketch of the Past," which was to be the
  beginning of her memoirs. She begins with one of
  her earliest memories a night in the nursery at
  St. Ives. She vividly recalls the way the blinds
  fluttered in the wind, the light coming through
  the window and the sound of the sea. She had a
  feeling of "lying in a grape and seeing through a
  film of semi-transparent yellow" (65). This
  memory is so strong that when she recalls those
  sensations they become more real for her than the
  present moment.
• This observation leads her to wonder why some
  moments are so powerful and memorable--even if
  the events themselves are unimportant--that they
  can be vividly recalled while other events are
  easily forgotten. She concludes that there are
  two kinds of experiences moments of being and
  non-being.

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• Woolf never explicitly defines what she means by
  "moments of being." Instead she provides examples
  of these moments and contrasts them with moments
  of what she calls "non-being." She describes the
  previous day as
• Above the average in 'being.' It was fine I
  enjoyed writing these first pages . . . I walked
  over Mount Misery and along the river and save
  that the tide was out, the country, which I
  notice very closely always, was coloured and
  shaded as I like--there were the willows, I
  remember, all plumy and soft green and purple
  against the blue. I also read Chaucer with
  pleasure and began a book . . . which interested
  me.
• She experiences each of these acts intensely and
  with awareness. But she continues to say that
  these moments were embedded in more numerous
  moments of non-being. For example, she does not
  remember what she discussed with her husband over
  tea.
• Moments of non-being appear to be moments that
  the individual is not consciously aware of events
  as she experiences them. She notes that people
  perform routine tasks such as walking and
  shopping without thinking about them. This part
  of the life is "not lived consciously," but
  instead is embedded in "a kind of nondescript
  cotton wool".

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• It is not the nature of the actions that
  separates moments of being from moments of
  non-being. One activity is not intrinsically more
  mundane or more extraordinary than the other.
  Instead, it is the intensity of feeling, one's
  consciousness of the experience, that separates
  the two moments. A walk in the country can easily
  be hidden behind the cotton wool for one person,
  but for Woolf the experience is very vivid.
• Woolf asserts that these moments of being, these
  flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden
  behind the cotton wool of daily life, and that
  we, "I mean all human beings--are connected with
  this that the whole world is a work of art that
  we are parts of the work of art." But the
  individual artist is not important in this work.
  Instead she says of all people, "We are the
  words we are the music we are the thing itself"
  (72).
• Thus for Woolf a moment of being is a moment when
  an individual is fully conscious of his
  experience, a moment when he is not only aware of
  himself but catches a glimpse of his connection
  to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque
  surface of daily life. Unlike moments of
  non-being, when the individual lives and acts
  without awareness, performing acts as if asleep,
  the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.

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Tunnelling Process

• Virginia Woolf describes her stream-of-consciousne
  ss technique as a 'tunnelling process'. 'I dig
  out beautiful caves behind my charactersI tell
  the past in instalments as I have need of it.'

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• she refers to the way her characters remember
  their pasts
• in experiencing these characters' recollections,
  readers derive for themselves a sense of
  background and history to characters that,
  otherwise, a narrator would have had to provide

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A Room of Ones Own

• January 1928
• Virginia Woolf is asked to give two lectures
  about women and fiction to two female colleges
• she didnt like giving lectures but accepted the
  topic started acting inside her

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• October 7. 1928 in a letter she appears
  annoyed by the engagement
• however, she gives the two lectures at the end of
  the month

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• feels the difference between herself, a woman but
  a privileged person, and those girls, hungry,
  but brave young women. Intelligent, greedy, poor,
  destined to become schoolteachers
• feels the importance for the privileged ones to
  elaborate a common language, to give voice to all
  those dumb women

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• 1929 publication of A Room of Ones Own
  Hogarth Press
• about the steps of the great exclusion of women
  from history and culture
• she offers her listeners, and then her readers,
  not a cultured lecture on literature, but a
  passionate invective against patriarchal culture

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• proclaims womens need for economic independence
  and a space of their own in which creativity may
  find its voice
• urges her listeners to write, literature being a
  way to save themselves from silence

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