Virginia's family history played an important role in her psychological development. It has been said that all her literary work is a product of her memories and an acute sense of the past. Her Victorian childhood, was also responsible.
She was born into the late Victorian aristocracy. Her father was a distinguished Victorian man of letters. He was 50 when Virginia was born. Throughout Virginia's childhood, most of the distinguished men of letters of the time regularly visited the household.
There was a family history of mental illness, predominately mood disorders. On her mother's side, there was a long history of mildly eccentric and active women. And on her father's side, there were writers and generations of quiet and gloomy men. She was one of four children of her father's second marriage; several of them had psychological symptoms. Three of her stepsiblings, from her mother's first marriage, did not suffer from any mental disorders. Her father also had a daughter from his first marriage to Minnie, novelist William Thackeray's daughter. Minnie's mother had puerperal psychosis after the birth of Minnie, and she never fully recovered. Minnie's child, Laura, was abnormal from birth. The family attempted to teach her at home. Her father was reluctant to admit that she was mentally deranged. In childhood, Laura had nervous tics, difficulty in speaking, was violent, had attacks of wild howling, and was sluggish and disobedient. From a very young age, she was secluded from the other kids in the attics. She spent her adult life in mental asylums. She died in York Hospital in 1945, at the age of 75. There is no record of Virginia visiting Laura. The final mention of Laura comes from Virginia, stirred to recall by the death of George Duckworth in 1934. In a letter to her sister, Vanessa, who, like Virginia shared his unwelcome attentions in childhood, she wrote, "Leonard says Laura is the one he could have spared." This confirms that Laura was also molested by Duckworth. The letter also shows that the whole subject was well known to Leonard.
Virginia's brother Thoby, who was a scholar, tried to throw himself from the window of his preparatory school in 1894, while recovering from an attack of influenza. He had a screaming attack at the time and a similar one at home a month later. He died of typhoid in 1906.
Her brother Adrian suffered from many nervous disorders. He also was depressed to the point of committing suicide. He had a tormented preoccupation with the past. He died in 1948.
Her sister, Vanessa Bell, had an episode of depression, which lasted for two years. Vanessa was always nervous, but she controlled her nervousness well. In 1911, Vanessa, aged 32, became depressed following a miscarriage and the beginning of an affair with friend Roger Fry. It was a very serious and significant period of her illness, with symptoms of lassitude, nameless fears and feelings of unreality.
Despite all this, the history of manic illness and depression was on her paternal side. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen was an eccentric man with a gloomy personality. His father, Sir James Stephen had three breakdowns. Virginia's first cousin on her father's side, J K Stephen developed mania and died in an asylum. Sir James Stephen was a lawyer and a civil servant. His first breakdown occurred in 1824, when he tried to combine bar and civil service duties. His second breakdown occurred in 1932, after attempting to get through parliament the bill on the emancipation of slaves. Fourteen years later, after the death of a son from typhoid, he had another breakdown. He was advised to retire prematurely, but he was not ready to accept that he was ill. He felt depressed and gloomy and once wrote that each tick of his clock 'sounds like a knell".
Virginia's cousin, J K Stephen was a brilliant scholar. After an excellent Cambridge undergraduate career, great things were expected of him. For some time, he was a tutor of the Duke of Clarance at Cambridge. In his 20s, Stephen developed fits of wild excitement and depression. The committee of his club had to post a policeman outside the door to prevent him from entering. Sir George Savage, the specialist who was to later treat Virginia, arranged for his confinement to a mental asylum, where he starved himself to death in 1892.
There were other gloomy men further back in the paternal ancestry, but the most important was her father Sir Leslie Stephen. Father and daughter had much in common, and Virginia had powerful feelings of love and hate for him. He was ill in 1888, and again two years later. He suffered from insomnia and wild fits. He was gloomier after his second wife's death. Still, he was enormously productive, despite his gloom and sense of failure. This sense of failure can be seen in Virginia's illness, and could be identified with her father. The conviction, when ill, that she and her work was worthless is identical.
Virginia's mother occupied herself with noble deeds and published a book on the management of sick rooms in 1883. The years of widowhood had left her stern and melancholic. She died of rheumatic fever, aged only 49. Like her husband, she was the most positive of disbelievers, and passed her atheism to her daughter. She also gave her the gift for summing up a person's character. She is faithfully portrayed as Mrs Ramsay in 'To the Lighthouse'.
Roots
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on January 25, 1882 into the late Victorian aristocracy in London. The family belonged to the upper middle-class and to the prestigious London literary community. Her father, Leslie Stephen was a prolific literary critic who held honorary doctorates from numerous universities including Oxford and Cambridge. He was a man of letters and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, a nurse, worked committedly with the sick and the poor throughout her life. Both parents had been married before. Her father to the daughter of the novelist Thackeray, Minnie, by whom he had a daughter Laura. She was mentally ill. Virginia's mother was married to a barrister, Herbert Duckworth, by whom she had three children, George, Stella and Gerald. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children : Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian. All the eight children lived with the parents and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
Growing Up !
Although privileged, Woolf's parents were industrious and prodigious workers. This model of self-discipline greatly influenced her habits of writing. Reading also influenced Woolf's writing. Having grown up in a large literary household, Woolf had an uncensored access to her father's extensive library. She read voluminous amounts of material and always followed an arduous reading schedule. She chronicled her reading as well as her thoughts, by writing diaries from the time she was 15. She believed reading and writing worked together to create an ever evolving art form.
Virginia loved to hunt for butterflies and moths as a child. She used to smear the tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects with her brothers and sisters. Then they used to pin their dead bodies to cork boards with their colorful wings outspread. This interest persisted till her adulthood. It is described by Nigel Nicolson in his book Virginia Woolf. Nigel was accompanied by Virginia on one of his bug-hunting trips. There according to him, Virginia gathered a copy for one of the character James in To the Lighthouse. The reason for this inference being that the character James was almost about Nigel's age. Nigel distinctly remembers and elaborates on her references to her own childhood, from which he gathered (later) that she had a far from happy childhood.
Virginia grew up in Hyde Park Gate, but long summer holidays were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall. St Ives played a large part in enhancing and influencing Virginia's imagination. It was the setting for her novel To the Lighthouse, despite it ostensibly being placed on the Isle of Skye. London or St Ives provided the principal settings of most of her novels, with a few exceptions.
Influences
There is a series of death and depressive stages in Virginia's life, which may have greatly added to her own low confidence and low self-esteem. There was a fierce contradiction in her own personality traits. She immensely adored her family and was very attached to them.
The other major contribution to her vast imagination was books. She read books from her father's vast and rich library. Father and daughter enjoyed lengthy, informative and intellectual discussions on works and great authors of the time. These being the very foundation of the development of Virginia's ability and creativity, she was already taking in a great deal of literary exposure, reading intensively and discussing various works at a tender age of 11. She detailed them and presented her own views about them. The surroundings of Virginia and the various experiences of traveling and settling down with her parents at places of scenic beauty also influenced her. Her education was sketchy and she never went to school. Her education occurred mostly at home. Her father informally guided her intellectual growth through reading. He also provided her with private tutors. She never attended school, a situation she deplores in her feminist tract, A Room of One's Own. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two brothers were sent to preparatory and public schools, and then to Cambridge. There Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. This was the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group.
Eventually
Virginia was a nervous and delicate child. In 1985, her mother died unexpectantly and Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella took over the running of the household as well as coping with Leslie's demands for sympathy and emotional support. Stella married Jack Hills in 1897, but she too died suddenly on her return from her honeymoon. The household burden then fell upon Vanessa. As a child, Virginia was sexually harassed and abused by two of her stepbrothers. Her sisters and stepsisters were also sexually abused. After her first breakdown, she showed signs of mental instability, and her father's death, in 1904, triggered a severe mental breakdown, during which she heard voices and tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out of the window. While she was sick, Vanessa arranged for her siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. At the end of the year, Virginia started reviewing with a clerical paper called The Guardian. In 1905, she started reviewing in The Times Literary Supplement and continued writing for that journal for many years. She also taught at Morley College, Waterloo Road, London from 1907. This was the first time she had ever held intellectual discussions with her social inferiors. In 1906, Thoby died of typhoid. And the following year, Vanessa married Clive Bell. Thoby had started Thursday evenings for his friends to visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued after his death by Vanessa and then by Virginia and brother Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy Square. In 1911, Virginia moved to 38 Brunswick Square.
Marriage
Leonard Woolf was born in London. His father was a barrister. He studied at Cambridge and in 1904, he went into civil service to Ceylon. He returned in 1912, on leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia. He proposed to her on January 11. After this, for many weeks, she was unwell and was strictly confined to bed. She was admitted to a hospital for many weeks. On May 29, 1912, she agreed to marry Leonard. Some symptoms still persisted and the whole of June was spent in bed. On August 10, she was married to Leonard in St. Pancras Registry Office.
The Soul Mate
Leonard was a wonderful companion and a proper husband for Virginia. Though Virginia's early sexual abuse in the formative young years rendered her a sexual failure in her marriage to Leonard, they were happy. Leonard took a great care of Virginia and strived to help her cope with her frequent fits of depression. It was a task that can be considered Herculean in its own right. Leonard was a constant support, a pillar on which Virginia leaned on, struggling with her own personality disorder. Leonard was the only strand of stability in the deprived, unstable, unhappy and confused life of Virginia. It was evident that Leonard was a man of utter devotion and love from the way he handled his wife's mental and physical condition. He thwarted the progress of his own career as a professor in Ceylon for the sake of his wife who would never leave England.
Leonard was an equal partner in Virginia's progress. The steep rise to fame as an imminent novelist was possible by providing her a platform to write and publish her works at the Hogarth Press, which they jointly owned. Virginia excelled as a writer because of her ability to eulogize her passions and base them as inspirations in her work. Her inner emotions, turmoils, struggles with her own mind and feelings, paradoxically proved a needed impetus for her success.
He observed carefully, that the majority of her inspirations were her relationships and affairs with various friends and relatives. It seemed as if Virginia was trying to voice her experiences and justifying the same. There was a feeling of guilt, shame, embarrassment, confusion and hatred towards her self, lurking at the back of her mind somewhere. The characters in her novels revealed the passions, her own secret dreams, hopes and feelings, and provided life to her lifeless, yet omnipresent cravings for stability and clarity.
The Stepsister - Laura
Leslie and Julia Stephen and their backgrounds were very different from one another. Two contrary bloodstream clashed in Virginia's veins. Her father felt a special affection for Virginia and doted on her more than the other children. The case of Laura Stephen, Leslie's child from his first marriage to Minnie Thackeray has vividly illustrated the lack of understanding and mismanagement of disturbed children in the family. Laura was a source of misery and sadness to Leslie, and an additional work and concern for Julia. It was a disturbing and a frightening specter to the other children of the household. Laura caused some of Virginia's fears about herself. Laura was later send to an asylum, where she died in 1945 at the age of 75.
The 'Incestuous' Stepbrother
The unwelcome sexual advances by Virginia's stepbrothers, George and Gerad Duckworth were also a very contributing factor in Virginia's psyche. After the death of her mother in 1895, George became a mother, a father and a caring elder brother to Virginia and her sister Vanessa. It was then that she suffered her first mental breakdown. She went through a period of morbid self-criticism, blamed herself for being vain and egotistical. She constantly compared herself unfavorably to Vanessa, and was greatly irritable. At first George's affection did not evoke any ill feeling because Virginia thought them to be totally that of a brother. But later she began to understand that he was crossing the demarcation line between a sister-brother relationship. In her memoirs, she has called him 'incestuous'. At the time of her mother's death, Virginia was 13 and George was 27. George's unwelcome attentions consisted of sexual groping and fondling, which emerged from his attempts to comfort her after her mother's death. But Virginia could not always distinguish them from his innocent expressions of affection and solicitude. Apart from these advances, George attempted to turn his shy and resistant half-sisters into his social assets. However, Virginia found his attempts to bring her out socially extraordinarily painful. She experienced them as an outrage, for her shyness and social ineptitude were not the usual ones of young girls. Instead, they were indications of her deep, pathological fear. His pompous officiousness and insensitivity in pushing her into social situations she couldn't manage, terrified her and exacerbated both her outward insecurities and her underlying fears. Another brother, Gerald, also 'sexually explored' her. But it was George who made the difference, who left in her coldness for sex, which later had its repercussions in her marriage. In one of her letters, she said that George had spoilt her life before it had begun, and that she had no enjoyment of her body. George dominated their lives for years.
A Loss
Leslie Stephen's health began to fail in 1899, and in 1902, he developed cancer. He died on February 22, 1904. Her father's slow dying was emotionally very difficult for her. It was very traumatic for Virginia who had not learned how to deal with the fact of death. Despite the terrible strain, Virginia was able to maintain control her emotions until her father's death and several months thereafter.
On the Threshold of Insanity
Consequently, Virginia suffered a second breakdown. She often thought about death and suicide. The symptoms of her second breakdown were more extreme than those of her first. She had lost the ability to distinguish inner and outer realities. She started having hallucinations. She also attempted suicide by throwing herself from a window. Headaches, sleeplessness, and other physical symptoms were once again present. These continued after the worst of the breakdown was over and returned at intervals for the rest of Virginia's life as danger signals.
In the fall of 1904, Virginia began to recover. She made a poor and tenuous recovery from her breakdown after her father's death, as she had from earlier period of madness.
Virginia had undergone a lot till now. Added to this was Thoby's death in 1906, at the age of 26. His death was so horrifying that she could not face the reality of it. She loved him. Also, as was true of her mother, she had lost someone she believed she had not really known. When she wrote Jacob's Room (1922) and The Waves (1931), she tried to rediscover, eulogize, and memorialize him, but could not approach his memory directly. Thoby's death represented to Virginia the tragic theme of the Stephen family, the betrayal of life. He was young and promising. Virginia called on her fantasy solution to the problem of death. Virginia kept her bother 'alive'. She described in her letters how he looked each day. Virginia gave a brilliant, though macabre performance, and it apparently served to prevent an immediate emotional and mental collapse. Since about 1908, Virginia had been writing her first novel, The Voyage Out. It was finished by 1913 but, owing to a severe mental breakdown after her marriage, it was not published until 1915. The novel was fairly conventional in form. She then began writing her second novel Night and Day, which was published in 1919.
The Woolfs bought Monks House in the village of Rodmell. In 1917, the Woolfs bought a small hand-printing press in order to take up printing as a hobby and therapy for Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond (Surrey) and the Hogarth Press was named after their house. The Woolfs continued hand-printing until 1932. Soon they increasingly became publishers rather than printers. By about 1922, the Hogarth Press had become a business.
The year 1921 saw Virginia's first collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday. In 1922, her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room appeared. In 1925, Mrs. Dalloway was published, followed by To the Lighthouse in 1927, and The Waves in 1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to fame as a modernist writer.
The 1930s was a unhappy time for the Woolfs as the death of friends and the prospect of war increasingly overshadowed the decade. Virginia produced Flush (1933), The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and in 1940, a biography of her friend Roger Fry who had died in 1934. She had practically completed her final novel Between the Acts when she committed suicide fearing the madness, which she felt engulfing her again. She filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the Ouse, near her home in Rodmell, Sussex on March 28, 1941.
"There is or should be, an existence of yours beyond you."
Virginia's life was paradoxical. She was exceptionally astute and in many respects wise. She was resilient, though one can conclude that she was often frightened, depressed and fragile. Her fascination with life as well as a preoccupation with death was intense and lifelong. The various significant aspects of Virginia Woolf's life were its variability, discrepancies, ambivalences, vacillations and contradictions, hence its paradoxicality.
She knew it, often referring to them in her journals and letters. She structured many of her novels around dialectical themes and universalized her experiences. Her novels make it evident that the world was mediated to her and she interpreted it as a place quite insane. In it dissolution, chaos, meaninglessness, nothingness and death were constant threats. She created sense and sanity and reconciled some of the contradictions.
January 25, 1882
Birth of Adeline Virginia Stephen.
1895
Her mother's death.
Virginia suffered her first psychological breakdown.
1902
Began private lessons in Greek.
1904
Sir Leslie Stephen died.
Virginia's second serious breakdown.
1905
Virginia was 'discharged cured' by her doctor.
1906
Thoby died.
1912
Married Leonard Woolf.
1913
Attempted suicide.
1914
Recovered from her depression.
1917
Publication of Virginia : The Mark on the Wall and Three Jews.
1919
Night and Day published.
1925
The Common Reader published on April 23.
Mrs Dalloway published in May.
1928
Virginia received the Femina Vie Heureuse prize.
Orlando is published.
1931
The Waves published in October.
1937 Publication of The Years.
July 1940 Roger Fry : A Biography published.
March 28, 1941 Committed suicide by drowning herself.
Characters like Jacob in Jacob's Room were experiments with modern attributes of writing as fragmentations, internal monologue and centering of multiple 'main' characters. She took great care to explore the necessity of precisely formed characters in the flow of a novel.
The Hogarth Press, owned and managed by Virginia and her husband, Leonard Woolf, published all her books except her first novel The Voyage Out (1915). Jacob's Room was published in 1922. This novel, although received in a lukewarm fashion by critics, brought Virginia Woolf in contact with the literary circle of Lady Colefax, Lady Londonderry, Lord David Cecil, Vita-Sackville West, and H G Wells. This later became very important to her intellectual, social and emotional life. Night and Day, published in 1919 offered increasing evidence of her determination to expand the scope of the novel beyond mere storytelling.
Her next novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), is considered by many to be her first great novel, displaying a mastery of the form and technique for which she later became known. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf takes the reader on a single day's journey through perceptions of various characters. Mrs Dalloway interrogates many significant Modernist issues. The impact of technology on daily life, the impact of World War I on the collective psyche, the value of institutions such as marriage, the intricacies of emotional commitments, and the anxiety produced by alienation of people from one another are the facets of modernism. Woolf's most acclaimed writing technique - her 'tunneling process,' which allows her to portray the exterior of a character and then to move inside the character's mind and emotions is distinctly evident in Mrs Dalloway. This type of narrative force brought psychological depth to each character.
By February 1926, Woolf had a new novel underway. To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel written in three parts, which explores the idea of a 'coherent center' made so infamous by Modernist writers. The power of this novel lies in its brilliant visual imagery, extensive use of symbolism, and use of the character's stream of consciousness to evoke feeling and demonstrate the progression of both time and emotion. Behind the backdrop of ordinary domestic events, the novel's real concern is with the impact of the radiant Mrs Ramsay who represents the female sensibility.
The story of To the Lighthouse draws on Woolf's childhood experiences at a summer home by the sea. The novel investigates the contrasts in the behavior and thinking of the Ramsays. The couple is often considered loose portraits of Woolf's own parents. Orlando, her next novel, was published in 1928. It is loosely based on Woolf's friend, writer Vita-Sackville West. It is a historical fantasy and an analysis of gender, creativity and identity. It satirically comments on society's changing ideas and values. The story traces the life of Orlando, who is both a boy in the 16th century Elizabeth England and a 38-year-old woman four centuries later.
Her next novel, The Waves (1931), is Woolf's most experimental and difficult work. It is organized into nine units, each of which records a series of 'stream-of-consciousness' monologues given entirely in the present tense by six characters, one after another. The monologues reveal the personalities of each character in their inner experiences of external events. As in her other novels, Woolf is primarily concerned with rendering the quality of 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). In A Room of One's Own Woolf argues that women need education, a private room to work in, and enough money to live independently to write fiction. Perhaps because A Room of One's Own dares to depict the relationship between man and woman and between woman and woman, its representations, and the creation of women's art, the text has sparked debate from a range of literary scholars. It has become famous in feminist literary circles for its ability to name women's treatment regarding education and financial support.
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.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death others through sheer inability to cross the street.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
To enjoy freedom, we have to control ourselves.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey !
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and elicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
